It Could Happen Here Weekly 250

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It's, uh, in the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports. Listen to the Dan Levitard Show. The Dan Levitard Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to the show. It's It Could Happen Here today. I am James, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Margaret Killjoy. Hi, Margaret. Hello. What a good day to talk about good stuff. It's good stuff, right? Unfortunately, Margaret, I hate to break it to you. It's the government declaring left groups terrorists again. Oh, that seems bad. Yeah, it does seem bad. Especially in this case, like it's an attempt to drive autonomous left organizing off the internet. And so if people are not familiar, we are talking today about Autistici Inventati. There's a forward slash in between those two groups because on the 26th of August, the Office of Foreign Assets Control added them to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups. Because it alleged that A-slash-I services were designed to facilitate violent attacks. I think I'm going to refer to them as A-slash-I just for brevity and also because I don't want to use AI because sadly, that's already taken. That's what I was thinking, too, is I'm either going to call them Autistici or A-slash-I. Yeah, so we can go through a little bit of blow by blow of what's happened since then in a minute. But I first thought, Margaret, perhaps you could explain a little bit about the role this organization played. Why does it have a forward slash in its name? And when did it come about and where's it from? Yeah, so there is a group that is made up of two groups. And the name of the single group is Autistici-slash-Inventati. And you might be able to guess that the two groups that make it up are Autistici and Inventati. They've been around since 2001. I want to say March 2001. If I was at the right place in my own script, I would be able to tell you that for certain. And they came about during the. Globalization movement, which is something that I've talked about a bit on my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And it is one of the things that, I mean, if you were there, you know what I'm talking about. But basically, there was a massive movement against the stripping of resources from the developing world by the developed world. There was basically a massive attempt by people all over the world, kind of spurred on by the Zapatistas and Chiapas, to get everyone together to say, stop using free trade agreements. Stop using free trade agreements to take all of the wealth of the global south and give it to the global north. It's a really important idea to wrap your head around, but complicated right now in this era where tariffs are the bad thing. And free trade is the lesser evil, right? We weren't fighting against. This is the movement that I came up in. We weren't fighting specifically against free trade, although we were fighting against the free trade agreements. So much as specifically that we were fighting for fair trade and we were fighting for people getting paid decently. And yeah, stopping the economic extraction of the world. Fair trade's a proper noun, right? But it's also a concept and they differ and that's all I think I need to say about it. Yeah. And so during this period, activists from all over the world created all of these massive protests, bringing people all together and creating horizontal decision-making structures and doing all this important work. And one of the things that came of that, for better and for worse, is the concept of social media. We can trace it directly back to the hacking group. Of this era. Community journalists, citizen journalists would go out and work with, especially something called Indymedia. Yeah. And they would go out and they would film what was happening. And so there was this international network of people who created a structure called Indymedia, where Indy has like I-N-D-Y media. Yeah. Right? And be able to report on what was happening in their regions, but have it all networked together. And it kind of created microblogging, which is what created. Twitter. And there's actually like direct lineages with some of the people. So sorry about that, that we did that. I was a part of Indymedia for a long time. And a group in Italy, two groups in Italy, among many others, came together to do Indymedia work in Italy. Italy was an important part of the ultra-globalization movement. Unfortunately, it's where we first saw police kill a protester, RIP Carlo Giuliani. I was like, oh, I'm going to really quick read their own history that they said. But what they did is that 10 years, like 2011 or so, they put out a 140-page book that describes the like oral history of the creation of their project. And so I have not fully read everything in this yet. But in general, Autostici is from Milan. And it was started by basically like cyberpunks, although one of the people was like, I'm not a cyberpunk, you know? Of course. But literally, like it was coming out of groups that would use concepts from William Gibson's books, like intentionally. Like it was a consciously cyberpunk movement. And then you also had. And in Florence, or in Firenze, if you're wanting to pretend like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati. Now, Autostici, you're like, that sounds like the word autistic. It means autistic. It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was, I don't know, I'm not holding this up to today's lens of how we want to talk about this neurodivergence. What they were saying is, we're all interacting with computers instead of each other. So that's what we're going to call ourselves, are the autistics. And what they were saying was, the self-invented, and these were the citizen journalists, and they came out of a group of basically protest journalists that were mostly students in Firenze, in Florence. So they came together and they formed a thing. Why does this matter 25 years later? Well, on some level, that's a good question. It kind of shouldn't. Right. The thing is that these groups, when we call them hackers and hacktivists, actually, one of the things. One of the things that they talk about is that they basically do reproductive labor of social movements. They're not out there hacking places. They are creating infrastructure for people to talk to each other in non-corporate ways. Because the corporate environment owns so much of the internet and they have from the beginning, they are so much older than all of their enemies, right? 2001 is ancient in internet terms. And they created ways to have websites called NoBlogs, which is a WordPress platform. They created email servers and they created listservs, right? And they kept doing it. And every now and then, the government would fight them. They'd say, someone that you are giving a blog to has done something bad. And every single time, they would take it to court. They're not underground people. This isn't a shadowy organization. They have names and legal, like this is a legal thing that they pay for internet services and host website servers. So they are trying to have a free internet. And that is what the government is coming for. So when they are being designated this way, they hosted approximately 10,000 blogs on the NoBlogs platform. And that is from people all over the world. So they are basically stripping away the platform by which 10,000 people or groups do their communication and do their publication. That's what I got. Yeah, I think that's really good. I'll just give some example. There were groups in Myanmar who used NoBlogs, for instance, right? It's very easy to, to see this from an American lens because it's the American government doing it or the United States government, I should say, right? America, two continents, United States, one country. Yeah. Like America, not a thing. But let's look at it a bit more broadly, right? Because like you and I can remember this era of the internet because we're old now. The free internet, when the internet was cool and we were really hoping that it would be a liberatory force for humanity, right? Yeah. We gave it a good shot. We gave it a fucking try. Like people may, not remember the Arab Spring, right? But like there was this idea that like Twitter, I think it's rather myopic to say that Twitter gave us the Arab Spring, right? Like decades of oppression and people wanting to live free and bravely standing up against state violence gave us the Arab Spring. But Twitter played a part in people communicating. But like before we had that, we had things like Hushmail is another example, right? But like, yeah, there was an independent internet structure that wasn't always explicitly anything politically apart from anti-corporate. Yeah. Let's take a break here and come back after we've heard some advertisers. All right, we are back. The internet is dead. Let's talk about what an SDGTO is, Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization. These come from an executive order. I think it's 13324. I've written down here that was signed by George W. Bush in the wake of September the 11th, right? September the 11th, 2001. If you're wondering if I'm talking about the Catalan National Day, no, I'm not. I'm talking about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Oh, OK. OK. Yeah. Have you heard that Trump is claiming that he was at ground zero and got dragged away by firemen? No, that's a new one for me. It's a complete lie. He was, further away from ground zero than I was. Yeah. I looked it up before we started recording. I was much closer to ground zero than he was. Perfect. Anyway, whatever. Great. OK. Yeah. Well, what a guy. Yeah. Again, like, I don't want to harp on like being old or whatever, but the world changed after September the 11th, 2001 in so many ways. One of them was that the United States pursuit of these new anti-terrorism laws, right? And these new anti-terrorism sanctions, right? And an SDGTO is a sanction, right? There were a series of executive orders from between 2001 and 2003, which kind of amended how they did this. I guess the first example of how the SDGTO sanction was supposed to work would be the Holy Land Foundation, right? Yeah, it's the largest Muslim charity in the United States. It was at one point, yeah, a huge Palestinian American charity. Its offices were raided. Its assets were seized and it was closed. Previously, like it collected, like we're talking tens of millions of dollars here, like more than $10 million, I can pretty confidently say. This is a big organization, right? And what the SDGTO sanction does is it can list individuals or organizations, but it effectively makes them sanctioned so that people cannot transfer assets to them, right? So that makes them more or less unbankable. And that is what, as we'll see, has happened to A slash I, right? It is a different, different designation. This is important from an FTO. FTO is a foreign terrorist organization, right? The difference there is that this is an economic sanction, whereas an FTO also contains the State Department itself, as well as the Treasury. Right, like they're probably not going to drone strike people over this. Yeah, exactly. An FTO designation does a couple of things, but one of them, as you say, is it gives them that like pretext for more like physical, kinetic, if you want to use the term, people. And the industry use violence, right? As opposed to like economic attacks, like we're seeing here. And the FTO is kind of the highest level of designation, right? And with it comes a series of things that become illegal for any U.S. individual, U.S. person who is, or indeed anyone globally, who is involved with that organization. In practice, what this does is it removes their ability to interact with the global banking system, right? And being an FTO, does too, right? That's the FTO designations that we saw earlier in the Trump administration that impacted Greek, German, was there also an Italian organization in those? And I don't think so. I don't know. Certainly, it has made it very hard for a number of organizations in Germany to have bank accounts, period. Yeah. And what happened was no one tells you, apparently, that no one like gives you a call to be like, hey, just so you know, like you're a specially designated global terrorist now. They learned that this was coming because of Marco Ruzzi, Rubio tweets. It already happened. And then immediately, their PayPal gets shut down. There's some irony to this because theoretically, PayPal was created in order to kind of be a like libertarian way of getting past government interference with money or whatever. But that's probably long gone and probably was never good in the first place. Their PayPal got shut down immediately. There's no reason why their PayPal had to be shut down immediately because in this designation, there was a specific exemption given for a month. There was a 30-day or, one month to September 25th. Hey, if you have business dealings with this group, you have until September 25th to stop. Now, theoretically, this only applies to United States people, right? There is no method. Well, there is a method. There's no legal method by which this necessarily applies more broadly. But pretty much immediately, Banca Etica, which I am not certain, I believe means ethical bank, is a specific, cooperative bank. It is an independent, cooperative bank working for the highest interest, that of everybody, including yours, according to their website. And the bank that is like basically meant to be the less evil bank of Italy, shut them down pretty much immediately. And they released, as of this morning, as of recording, Tuesday, September 8th, Autostici slash Inventati released a statement saying like, this is what happened. They shut down our bank. Because, after they received this order, after they got told that they are this, this designation, and they had to tell they're more than 10,000, not customers, because they're all volunteers and no one had to pay to use their services, they had to tell all those people like, hey, this is what's happening. And when it first happened, they came out and they were like, look, we're going to fight this. Because they have fought in court all the time, right? But the thing that is important and different in this particular situation, they have to fight this. They have to fight this. They have no legal recourse. They've been accused of kind of similar things. Like, hey, you hosted a website that included a manifesto about some people who did some crimes, right? It's a thing that gets used against them a lot. Yeah. And they go to court and they're like, this is who we are, this is what we do. We don't have fucking anything to do with the people who we publish or whatever. That is not an option in this situation. And so they were waiting for their bank to give them a chance to fight, to argue. And their bank just didn't because of, basically, a fear of secondary sanctions. So, no EU court, no Italian court has accused them of any wrongdoing. The intention is not to pin a crime on them so much as it is to remove this infrastructure from the internet, right? Yes. So, like, what the State Department is alleging in its press release here is that, I'm quoting here, it provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent, far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. And then they say that groups have relied on the collective's digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiques by US-designated FTOs and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure. They go on for the other stuff, right? But, like, they are not alleging, the State Department itself is not alleging that A-slash-I themselves did anything. It's that they hosted a platform where people who they are saying did terrorist things could either recruit to do those or talk about them or claim credibility for them. In amongst the examples it gives, sabotage the transalpine pipeline that's in europe they talk about jane's revenge in the united states which it calls a violent far-left extremists it talks about stop cop city they list a number of like listed ftos right but they're saying a far-left extremist group claiming to be a tool for global militants relies on ai so they're not saying the ftos do directly they're saying a group claiming to be a tool for those people relies on the a slash i infrastructure so it's it's always i guess like one tier removed from them right but i think that that in a sense is what the point is here right back in the day they used to smash printing presses right the state yeah the state would smash printing presses the cops would smash printing presses so would bosses right yeah when i look at my own research right when i'm doing archival research and i'm writing about specifically about spanish anarchism about union organizing my first research project was on like the the catalan builders union you see this right like they're putting out publications and their means of communication is being destroyed by the state and it's it's one of the most essential parts of any resistance movement right is the ability to communicate i remember reading a biography an autobiography by someone who survived the warsaw ghetto right and the warsaw ghetto uprising and there were three things that the warsaw ghetto fighters were smuggling in from outside the three things that mattered yeah food small arms and printing presses like the ability to have printing presses we see it over and over again as an essential part and not just of resistance movements but also social movements and also just free exchange of cultural ideas yeah like i'm reading a lot about the mexican revolution right now i'm thinking about like magazines like vespa right which was an anarcho-feminist magazine even flores magon was a journalist right like he came to st louis uh to try and continue writing safely you can specifically look at porfirio diaz if you want to look at like the state attacking people's ability in that instance right to communicate freely with each other the reason like this is important is because it's it's one of the last parts of that old internet yeah right like i'll give the example of like and i know it's uh there are no blogs pages uh about kurdistan as well but like if i if i give the example of myanmar right like everybody in myanmar to talk to them apart from people who are really you know part of the spring revolution who will talk to me on signal i have to use facebook right because facebook is the internet there yeah because in some cases you don't pay for data if that data is going through the facebook app but you do pay for data if you're using it through a browser or an email client right so if you're using it through a browser or an email client right so so facebook is synonymous with the internet therefore facebook controls the internet and so we get to this situation with the beginning of the genocide against the rohingya people where the military is running a massive bot network and we have nld government officials trying to call facebook being like yo like a genocide is actively beginning and you are complicit in it and facebook not responding until they shut it down they shut down facebook entirely right yeah and then in doing so basically disconnect a large portion of their population from the world and like the people who had the tools to stop that genocide were in offices in california and i think they had one burmese language content moderator yeah what i'm getting at here is that like the corporate internet is not equipped it just doesn't care about the consequences of lots of things including misinformation right and at least the autonomous internet people could speak freely right they weren't controlled by the policies of facebook they weren't controlled by the policies of google yes what the government is alleging is part of the consequences of that free speech where that they are saying that people who were doing violence were organizing on it free speech is also like a to just go like super liberal american right like it is a very first amendment that they made to the constitution the printing press and pamphlets were integral to the revolution and the revolution and the revolution and the revolution here right like if you just want to be super fucking patriotic yeah yeah yeah like it's a betrayal of the concepts that like this country many other of those concepts are bad things like slavery well but do you know what else is a foundational concept of the american economy oh is it the sale of products and services that's true and the advertisement of products right yeah of which we are proud um continuing that tradition that's true all right we're back so as we discussed before we started recording neither of us are total internet understanders i read a blow by blow noblogs.org etc have gone down if you want to keep up inventati.org is still up as of this recording yeah and keepitfree.ai which is probably the only good.ai in existence yeah is where you can find press releases and things like that right and they did as of a couple days ago as of two days ago a a slash i was like all right we're done we don't exist anymore yeah you beat us and a lot of that has to do with the taking down of all of their infrastructure and it's interesting and part of the reason it's so chilling is that back in the day when we thought of the internet as a very resilient thing it's very decentralized it's very resilient if you own your own server unless it gets seized in a raid by the police like a physical computer as a server right yeah and these days it's even hard to imagine that like a lot of people used to just have servers like under their desk you know or in their closet right they were like i run an extra cooling fan in there and i have a website in there yeah you know my first website was on uh my boss's server living at his house you know yeah and so you would defend the physical server and fairly regularly the police would raid and capture physical servers in various places around the world you know and it was usually seen as an overreach and often found later in court to be an overreach but what's happening here is they got censored off of the internet in a different way in a way that's a little bit frightening and again i read all of the data about this and i even have some technical background and i don't fully understand all of it but even if you have your physical computer and you own your.org right you own noblogs.org the client is going to be like oh my god i don't know what to do with this concept of.org is owned in america yeah i know this isn't totally what you asked me to do but i think this is what's really important for everyone to understand even if you don't care about any of this stuff tyranny in america can fundamentally gut the internet yeah because there are american parts on a lot of this stuff you know it's kind of like how the un is everywhere but it's also in new york city yeah like i think it is really important to reinforce that right like because there's somebody who's been doing this for a long time who's been doing this for a long time who's been sitting in the mountains of myanmar right now who can't communicate to the world anymore yeah who probably doesn't know what a slash i are right let's go through like exactly what happened margaret and i've spoken about this a couple times now there are some internet understanders i'm sure some of you listening to this have a better grasp on the nuts and bolts of this than we do but essentially on the 28th of august so that's two days after they were declared by the office of foreign assets for all to be especially designated global terrorist organization there was a d.a. dns level issue with their website from what i understand the domain status was on something called server hold the level at which this happened i guess is attributable they believe to the public internet registry yeah so like your website's address isn't coolzone lover.org right right your website address is i'm making this number up don't put it in your computer 148.2.994.255.0 0.1 right yeah that's your actual address that's your ip address of the server right and that is what goes to that but no one wants to walk around remembering whatever number i just made up i don't remember it anymore even though it's my website even as cool coolzone lover.org and so what we have is we have domain name registries which is basically uh an agreed upon list of well this point's here yeah right and so there used to be only be a couple of this tl these top level domains they used to only be.com.net.org.edu.gov.mil i'm probably missing a couple and then there's like all the nation ones.us.whatever.co.uk yeah but like those are not centrally owned right those are not coming from one place but so if you take down someone's dns i believe that this is the same thing as saying like you're disconnecting from the registry where coolzone lover.org is and you're disconnecting from the registry where coolzone lover.org goes to that string of numbers but yeah i'm actually a little confused about what's happening in this particular case um because i and i some of the stuff i read says like it's actually kind of not known and maybe by the time this comes out it'll be a little bit clearer because there's also discussion that they have probably been hacked at some point and also very importantly there was no official declaration that everyone had to stop if nothing else they had a month to comply right so it's seems like there's been some compliance in advance and i know that they were in the process of basically trying to DUS themselves, right? When it first came out, they said, all right, we're going to fight this. And they planned on fighting it. And they started doing the work of fighting it. And they started looking to say, where else can we host our, you know, domain names and stuff like that, right? Because the physical servers aren't in America. And they're like, all right, how do we get clear of this? But they were not given the chance because of the advanced compliance of organizations like their bank, right? Because you can't run an above ground organization where you all say, hey, this is my name, and you pay for internet services if you can't give those people money. And that is very often the choke point. That is like why sex workers are so fucked in America, is that all of the payment process, it's not illegal to sell nudie pics on the internet. Everyone knows that. But you can't do it. You can't do it. But you have to put a lot of work into it because- Even if it's not against the site's like content moderation, the payment processors won't let you do it because they're afraid of getting anywhere near anything that could possibly be a crime. So they're going to destroy people's way of life and cut them off from the banking institutions. And so it's just more of a problem about how all of these centralized infrastructure can be seized by fascists. Again, that only partly answers it. So by what was it, September 6th, they threw in the towel, essentially. And they said like, we've been talking to everyone and this just- Isn't working. We can't do this. And I actually think that's a way of being responsible to the people who rely on them instead of trying to pretend like they're going to soldier on. If I sound defensive, it's because I think some people are kind of curious about why they gave up, but they write very eloquently about why they stopped. And on September 8th, they wrote a statement about the banking situation. Quote, we are undergoing US sanctions without any kind of hearing in a court of law, without any possibility to defend ourselves, and without ever receiving a request to take down specific contents or abide by laws that we may have been deemed to infringe upon. Yeah. I think that's a very good summary of like where we're at with this. I'll just say like a couple of things. One, if we want to look for places where violence is coordinated and organized, x.com, the Everything website. Yeah, totally. Everything including organized violence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's where the violent right has organized for years, right? Yeah. And then increasingly since Elon Musk purchased it. Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to say is that these are WordPress sites, right? WordPress, to be clear, if you're not familiar, is not owned by A slash I. It's a software that can be used on other blog hosting platforms, right? So some of these people will be able to host their blog somewhere else. I imagine that given what has just happened, it will be hard for them, right? To include groups that have nothing to do with those mentioned in this executive order. But like, the fact that it is WordPress makes that movement to another platform a little bit easier for them. Yeah. If they were able to download their data. Yes. There's been a lot of complicated things about whether or not data has been accessible. Okay. Yeah, that sucks. I don't have the current blow by blow of that. Yeah. That's really difficult. But yeah, because the entire banking system runs through America, no one will want to bank with A slash I. And I imagine because of, what has just happened, other places where they might otherwise put their blogs will be concerned. So we will see how this plays out for those groups, right? Like, we'll see like what happens to them. Again, people were not paying for this. So they weren't like transferring money to an organization. And again, there was a time period in which these would be implemented. So these people are not directly impacted by the sanctions, because A slash I, stopped existing before those sanctions would have come into play. Right. Which is one of the things that they are doing by throwing in the towel is they're not letting people make a specific dangerous decision or even more so accidentally by not having not paid attention to the news, right? You set up a blog like this 18 years ago and you forgot about it. And you're suddenly like, you know, being called a terrorist by the US government. I think that they're saving a lot of people a lot of trouble. I hate saying that I think they made the right call. But I do. Yeah, like, I don't quite know how because I know transferring money, but I'm not an expert in these things. But it does seem like a risk. That's what's messy about it, right? Yeah, yeah. And the whole point, I think, is that you don't quite know how. This is one of the many things that the US began doing after 911, which were fundamentally betrayals of the Bill of Rights. Yeah. And we live with the consequences of them everywhere. Every day now. Like DHS. DHS is a post 911 thing. This country did just fine without it for a very long while. Was doing just fine. Still lots of fucked up shit going down. But yeah, didn't need DHS. But you know, even if your goal is to be like a fucked up kind of center right guy, America was doing just fine. Didn't need all that shit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the poor part about the open internet stuff is so essential because it's like, everyone was starting to say with the rise of fascism. People were starting to say like, Hey, we should probably get off Meta, right? And I'm not telling people what to do. I have an Instagram still. I hate it. But people are starting to say like, how do we organize outside of this? And in ways that have been perfectly legal since the internet existed, right? It's just like the kind of thing that seems like such a non-issue, you know? Yeah. And it's a way of keeping all of us trapped on platforms. Yeah. Where we have to abide by their moderation standards, which of course change all the time and become never in positive ways, you know? And it's a real, they come for them in the morning, they come for you at night kind of thing. I think that this is a pretty serious statement by the federal government that they are interested in attacking autonomous infrastructure and not just structure for autonomous markets. But I mean, infrastructure that is autonomous from the corporate world that everyone is aware of being pretty dystopian. Yeah. And again, this will have global implications, right? Just real quick to sum up the other stuff that they talked about in that sanctioned document, talk about how like violent acts and acts dangerous to human life are exempt from the first amendment. Again, we've been over how like AI was not doing violent acts, right? A slash I, yeah. A slash I, sorry. AI itself actually is doing violent things by proxy. And that's sad. They also mentioned in this sanctioned document, Palestine Action, they referred to it as a foreign terrorist organization. I think what is important is that if you're hearing this, not reading it, those letters are used in lowercase. So it is an organization which the United Kingdom has prescribed as a terrorist group, as opposed to a listed FTO. There is a list of foreign terrorist organizations. We talked about that before, right? That's kind of the highest level. That's, to my knowledge, not what they're saying here, because it's not on the FTO list. And because the use of lowercase text, I am taking to mean that it's, and also because it is factually true that it's prescribed by the United Kingdom. And then they also sanctioned a group which they claim acts as a front for the PFLP, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine during that time, all of which they bundled together under far left extremists and violent far left terrorist networks. The internet continues to get more dystopian every day. Yep. But learning some of the hacker type stuff. And again, I don't mean breaking into computers when I say hacking. I'm talking about like, although, you know, do whatever you want. But the way that they built this kind of infrastructure was that they got together and they said, we want to build this kind of infrastructure. What does that look like? And people did it all over the world. One advantage of being not a very centralized movement. This is a big blow and it sucks. But like, if you want to, fight back, one of the ways you can do it is get together with your friends and learn about how to use the internet at a pretty fundamental level to put up websites and things like that, host servers, you know, a bunch of people who weren't even necessarily technically savvy when they started, just started teaching themselves, especially the inventati seems like they just were like, we're gonna teach ourselves how to do this. And they did it. And it sucks when we have to fight the same battles over and over again. But that's life. Baby that imagined Sisyphus happy. Perfect. Margaret, you have another podcast if people want to hear about life and some of the nice things that have happened during people's lives. I have a show called Cool People Who Do Cool Stuff. James is often a guest on that. Sometimes I think even a host teaches me the thing. And it is a radical history podcast. And I did a long series on the ultra globalization movement somewhat recently. You can look in the archives for that. And I'll probably be talking more about this issue on there. I just, I just finished a four parter on flock and the fight against flock and the popular revolt that is currently winning against flock. Yeah. So that's up your alley. Cool people who did cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. If people want to understand anti-globe, a relatively short summary, if you like reading more than listening, get you've made it 40 minutes into a podcast is the new anarchist by David Graeber. Yeah. Graeber writes accessibly. I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. That's all I got. Thank you, Margaret. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target or Walmart. Moving days going great. Until the couch won't fit through the door. Tilt it. It is tilted. So I post a task on AirTasker, set my budget, and choose a local tasker to help. 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Find rollback deals at Walmart today on Vizio 55-inch and 65-inch Mini LED TVs. It's, uh. Holy! In the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart, to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone. Listen to the Dan Levitard Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about everything being totally fine and great. Always, right now. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by. by Dr. Kaveh Oda. Everything is great! You're doing great. I'm doing great. Things are fantastic. Oh, ketamine. It's good to see you again, Kaveh. Last time we spoke was on your podcast, House of Pod. Yes, about looks maxing. Yeah, thank you for having me. First of all, it's just nice to see you. And it's nice to see your face. And it's nice to hear your voice. And I know we're going to be talking about some stuff. That I actually am very curious to hear your thoughts on. I exist very much in the doctor, science, public health world online. And I hear a lot of those voices. I have a good sense of the variety of voices coming out of those spaces on the topics we're going to touch on today. But yeah, I mean, I really want to hear your thoughts about it. Oh, I want to hear your thoughts on it. Not just because you're a doctor, but because you have also done a decent bit of research or have spent some time in the digital, Maha universe. Yeah, I have. As an outsider. Yeah. We talked about Maha not too long ago on your show as well. And we kind of talked about some of like the class dynamics of Maha, how the sort of healthier lifestyles that some of these influencers push for is unaffordable to a lot of working class people. Right. And we're going to talk about Maha once again today. And because of how much time you've spent watching those horrible Maha, podcasts. Too much. I listen to a lot of RFK Jr.'s podcasts. I think it might have hurt my brain. I think I did things to myself that I have not fully recovered from. But because of your experience, I want to briefly ask you what Maha is. Like, what do you understand Maha being? But before we talk about this whole idea, which this episode is about, it's in the title about if you should do outreach to these people, what are the risks of that? What are the benefits of that potentially? Yeah. Who actually are these people? Like, what is Maha? That's a really great question and something I have been trying to figure out myself. I largely, like a lot of people when I first heard of it, was kind of hoping it would go away. It wasn't. It didn't. And it is a actual factor now that we have to take into account and discuss. It's real and it's very important. And what I have learned from going into these Maha spaces, which I tragically have done, and also not, not just Maha spaces, but sort of the Maha adjacent spaces. Yes. Things like the Andrew Huberman podcast and the Peter Attia stuff. I've done a lot of work into that for episodes. And that has given me, I think, a pretty broad sense of what's going on. Now, I think the easy thing for most people when they hear Maha, they think anti-vaxxer because, you know, RFK Jr. RFK Jr. Anti-vaxxer. That's like the first two associations. But it is important to know that they are not monolithic. There's a lot of variation there. And actually, if you poll them, if you ask them, which I think we're going to get into, Maha supporters, of which there are varieties of from mild to severe supporters, they will actually not say that vaccines are their top issue. Now, I don't believe that. If I'm being totally honest, I just don't believe that. I mean, there are Maha people who vaccines are their top issue. Absolutely. Right. And they are very vocal online. I think what we'll kind of get to in a bit, is that there's other Maha people or people in like, as you see, this kind of Maha extended universe who maybe do not list vaccines as their top issue. Yes. But obviously this is like culturally like a big part of the Maha association. That's right. And when you ask them, what is their top priority? The thing that comes up the most is actually the cost of health care. And then that's sort of followed by other things like, you know, chemicals and foods. Yes. Restricting environmental pollutants, limiting corporate infrastructure, influence in food policy and limiting, you know, malfeasance by health care institutions and insurance, which, you know, when you say that it all sounds actually pretty reasonable and pretty, if you take it out of its current context, left coded, these are all sort of, you know, relatively traditionally left coded things. Yeah. This idea is now that being said, you know, aside from ushering in the golden age of diarrhea, undermining vaccines has really been at the core of Kennedy's HHS. Yeah. And one of the few things he's actually successfully accomplished is dismantling that. And so even I, we're going to talk about it. And I see the polling that says, no, it's not only about 4% of Maha really care about vaccines. I've definitely seen other polling, which. Yeah. And I would say from my personal experience online again, and I am, I am an old, as you are very well aware, Garrison, you have helped me out in the ways, young people do with old people online in the ways of looks back. Yeah. You helped me out a lot of this stuff, but I have, when I am online or even IRL, as I hear the kids say, if you push them on vaccines, it becomes pretty clear that there are really only very few pro vaccine Maha folks. And even then, sure. It's usually like, Oh, well, the polio vaccine was fine. And, and they don't even think that's necessary anymore. So Maha is a big, diverse group of people. It is. And the, the movement itself, is really powerful and has done a lot in two years. And if nothing else, they have done an amazing thing with their branding and being able to draw in people to this big tent. So that's the best I can do to explain Maha, I think. Yeah. I really understand why this question of, should you do outreach to these people is, is so charged because this really is a life and death issue, like in like a literal sense, right? This, this sort of like movement that's come up, like up and around RFK jr has, has caused a lot of deadly harm in the world, right? In the name of make America healthy again. Yeah. RFK jr has rolled back childhood vaccine recommendations has overseen massive budget and staffing cuts at HHS, CDC, and the FDA. The administration has cut snap food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and the anti-vax movement more broadly has contributed to measles outbreaks in multiple states, right? This is real, real harms, that have been done in the name of health. Yeah, that's the first. part about that's that's the great part about all this and as something that we'll kind of get to in a bit any sort of potential outreach and i'm not even i'm not recommending my listeners to do this outreach like at all that's that's not what this episode is for but because all of these things that rfk and trump has done in the name of health because of how bad they are that does also open up a lot of opportunity for people to attack rfk jr on this this massive level of failure including failing on a lot of things that maha people largely believe in and i think something that's really unique and interesting about maha compared to other aspects of like the trump world is that like maha doesn't have the exact same kind of like cult of personality around rfk jr the way mega does around trump yeah and maha is also just not nearly as loyal to like trump himself well actually let me ask you that because that is the narrative now is that maha and maga are headed for a divorce and that they are diverging but i don't really see the evidence of that i i what you say i think is really interesting though in that even though maha is a pretty popular movement we'll talk about the numbers of people that support it at least in some way yeah rfk jr is not viewed like largely by the american population as trustworthy and like someone that they they rely on no maha is more popular than rfk jr is yeah right and i i think it is really important in this discussion to understand that like maha isn't even uniformly republican right and the movement and its goals are actually much more diffuse according to a politico poll from june of 2026 so fairly recently just under one-third of u.s adults identify as a part of maha 31 and 20 percent of respondents said that they support the movement but don't identify as a part of it so that's 50 of americans who say they at least support the movement only 30 of which wants to actually openly identify right with the movement and of the people who politico polled 20 of those who identified as maha also voted for kamala harris that's interesting it's actually more than expected and 17 of respondents who support the movement but don't identify as a part of it in name also voted for harris and you can compare these results to a poll from the kff that formerly the kaiser family foundation their poll was from may 2026 they found that 41 of u.s adults are maha supporters half of which identify as republicans 30 independent and 15 democrat there's a lot of interesting things about this polling one that it's more common commonly you'll see online people refer to the four and ten american support maha but there is a variation of how much support that means and if you're going to ask somebody yeah do you want uh chemicals in your food most people will say no not really or they'll say do you want stricter food monitoring yeah i mean most people are going to say yes unless you're some weird libertarian that's just like the marketplace of diarrhea will solve those problems so it's understandable again the branding is really good and it works for a lot of people it is interesting that so many people who may believe in at least some degree of it don't want to be labeled as maha i think yeah they realize how it looks largely there is a stink to it yeah and there is a very strong kind of anti-science component to maha like in name proper most of which but not exclusively most of which revolves around vaccines yeah and like you said there actually is broad support for many components of maha things that maha you know influencers talk about pretty often regardless of whether people actually identify with or agree with the movement as a whole there's broad support for improving our diets and increasing fitness yeah for reducing exposure to harmful chemicals and limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies there is general broad support for all of those issues in this political poll regardless of whether the respondents were maha or not so there is this broad support with the exception for vaccines and that is where all of these kind of polls and stats take a really big divergence yeah in this political poll 65 percent of maha said that they support reducing how many vaccines americans receive compared to 23 percent of non-maha and those who support the movement but don't identify it in name are kind of in the middle at 45 percent yeah so that is like the clearest split in all of this in all this polling but what's interesting is this vaccine question also has in terms of all of the maha priorities that you people in maha support themselves this has the least amount of support among their own movement this is 65 percent as opposed to limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies which had 80 percent support so that is an interesting peak into like the fractures within this maha brand itself yeah it is it is interesting as it's becoming bigger and becoming more like code they're trying to codify it a little bit yeah and i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point does this mean that we should be reaching out to these people because there is this variation in beliefs and that we have the opportunity as people who i don't know believe in vaccines to talk to these people and bring them back is it politically something that's worthwhile to bring those people into the margins that last part i don't know because i don't i don't really have a great sense of you know how politically this group will function in the next coming elections i don't really know if aoc has to do the outreach that she's been doing and that's been getting a lot of press i do think the question from just the public health standpoint is a really interesting one it's one i'm really grappling with what do you think is the most important thing for the do we do do we in this country need maha does public health need maha that's a that's a literal question that has been asked by some very smart public health people online some of which are i know very well have been on the podcast like craig spencer and got a lot of grief for it it's a tough question and honestly i may have a different answer in in a month my belief is we don't need maha but we do need the people in maha to reconsider some of their voting patterns and their vaccine choices and it's a tough call for me i'm really of two minds about it like one hand i do believe it's important to reach out and convince as many people as we can that maha is making people less healthy overall while all the things that have been enacted in the name of maha even despite all these things that they seem to be interested in haven't really done that yeah and on the other hand yeah historically we've probably done a poor job of explaining the point and the safety of vaccines you know to be fair it didn't always used to be the issue that it currently is there's always been this anti-vaccine sense but public health officials and doctors were not really trained in political persuasion the way a lawyer is and i understand i might be a little condescending when i say all this stuff and i don't mean to be but two things i refuse to believe that we're in the situation that we're in now because we somehow messed up and we weren't nice enough to like the jim carrey's and the jenny mccarthy's of the world and and yeah maybe that your doctor was a jim carrey's and you're not a jim carrey's and you're not a jim carrey's at some point and made you feel bad about knocking a vaccine but that's not the reason we have the situation we're in and even if it was it doesn't mean that everything that we have to do in terms of maha is changed our outreach does not need to change because of that we we should i do think that i think we need to be talking about these people we need to be connecting on the things that we can totally connect on and these polls show us that there are a lot of varieties of what we can connect with we can connect with the cost of health care we could talk about improving public health infrastructure and we our politicians who are aligning with these things they should make it clear that president trump not only didn't run on it him and rfk jr haven't advanced any credible benefit to lowering health care costs in fact the big beautiful bill is only going to make things worse and going to destroy rural hospitals i think there are things in these polls that show us we can address some of those points with people without having to capitulate and that's key that's that is the key aspect right because and i know people are worried about that that this could be like the trojan horse if we try to embrace these maha people then it'll shift aoc or all other politicians or even public health officials sort of to be more uh you know open to the anti-vax perspective i don't think that's the right attitude i mean as distasteful as it may be and again i'm probably not the right person for this because i don't have the sophistication but as distasteful as it might be this movement is just two years old and it draws some level of support from four and ten americans and it's something that we have to take seriously and we have to try and connect where we can try to be empathetic when we can try to understand we can but we cannot and i think this is super duper important we cannot give an inch on our scientific principles and i think those two things are manageable i think we can do those two things at the same time one hundred percent and i honestly think that's i don't see anyone arguing the alternative to that that we should compromise those things and the type of outreach the rest of this episode will focus on and what prompted so much debate and discussion online last week has not been based on appealing to or validating pseudoscientific beliefs or conspiracy theories on vaccines, but rather focused on some of those other Maha priorities that may overlap with some concerns that you, the listener, may have too. And if left-wing politicians actually address those concerns, how that could perhaps undermine the monopoly Maha currently has on those issues in our attention economy. And so next, we will discuss and debate AOC's approach to this outreach and the pros or cons that may have. But first, here's some ads. Now, I do want to go a little bit more into AOC's kind of version of this outreach, which has kind of sparked a lot of debate online regarding this topic, is how she has approached this problem. Because she has, you know, seen the same things that I've been kind of talking about, and she has decided to act on it. About like a week ago, Politico ran this story about AOC's outreach to Maha, both like, you know, influential figures within the movement, but then also trying to put out content to appeal to normies. Who see themselves as Maha. Right. This reporting from Politico seemed to be prompted by an interview on the Majority Report, left is best, between Emma Vigeland and AOC last July, where she talked about environmental policy. AOC had recently been to Tennessee to help campaign for Justin Pearson. And she said that people there in Tennessee are, quote unquote, pissed off about data centers. And she talked about how her constituents in the Bronx are a less ideologically driven electorate. They're very working class and racially diverse. But they might not have all the same concerns as a tree-hugging activist. And so when she was first elected, she did a, quote unquote, deep canvas of the community to learn how to talk about climate issues in a way that isn't just academic and theoretical. Right. That actually points to day-to-day issues in people's lives. So eight years ago, it was me doing teachings in public housing, saying the lead in our water, the sky-high, asthma rates that we deal with, that is environmental. And this is directly contributed to with the gas infrastructure that we have in our public housing that is leaching into our air and all of the other environmental issues that are going on. And so with the data center fight, I think that this is it's it's the similar analog. People are seeing how all of this is wrecking their health, wrecking their communities. And it makes environmental issues not academic, but very real in people's everyday lives. She later said, quote, We always have to be making three arguments at the same time for any issue, a moral argument, an economic argument, and also a political argument. And when we're able to argue for something in a chorus of all those three, then we're able to build a majoritarian coalition to actually win on them, unquote. And this is something she's been she's been animated about for the past two years. Yeah. Is building these sorts of majoritarian coalitions to actually win the things we believe in, not just endlessly scream about them online. Yeah. One thing in there that I think is really astute is and this goes for us in public health as well, is that we need to show people that we are fighting for them, even for the people in the Maha movement, because we do still, no matter what, they are our responsibility to take care of. And their public health is also our responsibility. But something in there that's interesting is we have to also show them that we're not just fighting to preserve our precious institutions. It's not just that we're fighting for the CDC and FDA to retain some sense of normalcy, which, you know, we are. But we need to show them that we're fighting for them. And I think that's a really important thing that if she can do that, I honestly don't follow her career well enough to know her as a politician, but she seems very smart, very savvy. So I don't see why she couldn't. I feel like that is not that. But really reasonable approach, I think, to doing this is to try to connect with them on those levels. And one thing she's she's talked about trying to appeal to Maha supporters through is not by, you know, capitulating to their crazy stuff, but by pointing out to them how the administration has completely turned their back on a whole bunch of like very base, like popular policies that Maha also supports. Yeah. I mean, but but here OK, here's also where I get cynical because there is a part of me that sort of like, yes, we need to be doing this and we absolutely need to be showing people that not only are other people that you're not voting for, apparently fighting for these exact principles you care about. But the people that you're now aligned with are actively doing things to dismantle the regulations that are the things you care about. And there's a part of me that's just like, how can you not know already? And that's that. That is something I have to deal with. I have to sort of get past because we have to. We I mean, we just sort of have to get grow past that point. But I also don't see how it's not apparently obvious to everyone at this point that these people are doing all the things you don't want. You think the environment has gotten any better? Do you think that there's been any meaningful like food safety or improvements? Yeah. A couple of red dyes. Now you can get like very pale Cheetos. But like people have to see past that, I think. And I don't think they are. I think in order to see past it, they have to be presented with that argument. Yes. And if no one in their media orbit is doing that or if they don't, if they don't, if they feel like anyone who would make that argument is like, you know, actually against them is hostile, then they're not going to listen to that person. And I think that's the needle that she's trying to thread. Something she's talked about specifically in this majority report interview is that if Dems end up taking back the House in the midterms, they have to go after, quote, not just corruption generally. But corruption in the ways that undermine their base. Right. And a big factor that contributed to Trump's win in 2024, which was a blind spot to the Democrats and the media analyzing the election results, was the Maha movement. I actually think a lot of it was Maha. I think that there was very little political analysis done on how they really focused on women, on moms, on. Radicalizing and doing a lot of persuasion in an electorate that was much more swingy than than, you know, to be frank, white male voters. Those are generally broken more strongly towards Republicans, but they really focused a lot on women and they have had probably the biggest betrayals with the glyphosate rulings. With their complete throwing in with Big Ag and Monsanto and Bayer, including coordinating with the Supreme Court and all of that. And so I think their political vulnerabilities are in. We want to focus on corruption in the ways that undermine their promises. And we want to go after investigations that cut off the supply of their illicit money flows. Adding on to. That like the food safety cuts at the FDA, right. Leading to this massive food safety crisis that people in like half the country are dealing with. Yeah. It's a very easy thing to point to. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that's it's great. We should. You're right. You're right. It is easy these days to be in a echo chamber where all the people who are getting this information are getting it solely from like wellness influencers on Instagram or TikTok. They're solely getting it from. Like their news station that they listen to Fox or one news or wherever they're getting that stuff from. I think it's great. And I do appreciate when someone tries to get out into that and break through that that bubble. I actually did watch a clip of Fox talking about AOC in this interview and the outreach. And there is a little truth to it. You can kind of tell that they are taking it seriously because I think they know on some level that it is a smart strategy. Yeah. These are like easy. Touch points. I will say, though, I do see a little danger in it. And again, this doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but we have to discuss it. And there is a little bit of a real danger to doing this. And you're right. Very few people are saying, hey, we need to capitulate totally on science. But it doesn't require that much. What I see, what really bothers me is that we just aren't fighting and pushing back on all this COVID revisionism that's been happening. And it's because. It's easier. But like, that's part of what I think we need to be doing is while we are making these outrows, while someone like AOC is focusing on those exact issues, cost of health care. They also need to be very clear that the science and the vaccines works and it's sound. And this COVID revisionism is hard because I think a lot of people, doctors, I'm talking about public health professionals. They just don't push back on it. because it's too hard to do. The people that have come out with like, oh, we're all lied to, Fauci lied to us, it's all lies. And it's just this narrative that is so strong out there that people just kind of step away from it. And now they're like, so hey, well, let's focus on things we can focus on. I say, no, let's do that. But let's also be very clear that those were not all problems. Sure, there wasn't completely perfect practice with Fauci and with the rolling out of vaccines and talking about mass mistakes were made as oftentimes there is in a novel disease crisis. People were moving as fast as they could with what information they could and things weren't perfect. But there is this real asymmetry to what people will tolerate with Maha versus what they tolerate from someone like Fauci. Maha makes mistakes all the time, proven wrong all the time, and people forgive them because, oh, they take big swings. They're at least trying to help the American healthcare system. But then if Fauci made a mistake talking about masks, then he, he is the literal devil, you know? So there is this asymmetry. We have to be very vocal about that. We have to push back on COVID revisionism the same exact time we are doing this outreach. And I think that, I think it's great. Agreed. There are young people in politics like Mamdani and what I see with her that are getting really good about staying on target with the messaging. I think that is. Message discipline. Yeah, message discipline. Yeah. I think we're seeing more of it these days, which is nice. No, I agree. I agree with everything you say there. And I think that all has to be done like in conjunction with addressing the base problems that cause people to be compelled by the crazier parts of Maha in the first place. And this is something that Vigeland and AOC talked about, how like Maha charlatans have been able to like tap into some issues and then manipulate people based on their like anxieties around our, totally broken healthcare system, right? That they're able to tap into this notion that everyone has that we're all being fucked over and our healthcare system is broken. Yes. And so if it's broken, maybe I'll look for solutions outside the healthcare system. Maybe I'll listen to what people outside of this industry are saying. And that can lead you down some very dangerous roads as we've been talking about. Yeah. And this part specifically is why AOC mentioned that she's actually been meeting with some Maha advocates and activists. It's to understand the issues that they're tapping into. And this is like the clip that has, you know, sparked this whole discourse. And I'll play it here for you in case you haven't actually heard the whole thing. A lot of them really don't believe that their fight is partisan. And it's not in many ways. We do have extraordinary corruption in our agricultural system, in our big corporate system as well. You know, and this is an area where both parties in our entire political system has been compromised. Like one of the first things I did was be part, when I first got to the House, was be part of these congressional investigations on PFAS dumping. Right. And you have companies like 3M and others that, you know, and this goes back decades where you have a big company that is doing manufacturing of some kind. And they just dump whatever cancerous byproduct that they have and poison communities around them. And then they just pay off our political class to ignore it and to let it continue to happen or to shield them legally, like with glyphosate, from everyday people trying to get that back. So like, that's an example of one of these like very real issues that then has been used to like, you know, on-ramp people into these much more like cultic milieu, kind of like dangerous information spaces. Yeah. But it is, it is based on like a real material issue. You know, same thing with like cost of healthcare, right? If you, if you look at that KFF poll that like breaks down, you know, what does Maha people, whether they're Republican or Democrats, what do they rank as their top issue? Among Republican Maha voters, the most frequently cited top issue was lowering the cost of healthcare, including prescription drugs. Yeah. The second top issue for, again, Republicans, not just Democrats, but for Republican Maha voters was restricting the use of certain, chemical additives in the food supply. Right. I mean, the PFAS thing is a very interesting discussion, these forever chemicals. I've actually done two episodes on it with authors of these really well-researched books on the matter. And I still left that with more questions than I had answers. And that requires a bit of a nuanced conversation on what the real risks are to the general population. But I will say this, the more you learn about those companies, 3M, and she didn't mention it, but DuPont, is the other big one. There's a number of them. The more you learn about them, the more you just realize the real villain is, I mean, if anything was going to radicalize me, it's that sort of stuff. You learn about these corporations. They're truly awful. Yeah. Truly awful. As a quick aside, you've got to watch the show, The Boys. I love it so much. And the major reason is, it's like a superhero movie. It's a superhero show. But really, the villains are the corporations. And that's really, I think more Americans should watch that show. I think it's super important. Anyways, so you will learn about those things, but you learn about the people behind those companies. And it's not the people that Maha is fighting against right now. It's the people they're currently aligned with are the people that are behind these corporations. That's the part that gets me. And I don't know how to educate them, but that is going to be the important thing. If the cost of healthcare and those regulations are important to them, then I think we, we need to hammer that as much as possible. And get on those points. And people like, I hate to say this, but people like me and other healthcare peoples, we need to get into those spaces to have those conversations. But we're also not trained to do so because we don't have like, if I go on like a talk show with RFK Jr. and he gish gallops me, I'm going to get pissed and I'm going to like say something mean about his voice. And then I'll feel like a jerk. Like, you know, like we're not trained. Totally. And like, to be completely clear, when I ask, should we do outreach? I'm using we in this royal we sense. I am not proposing that you or any of the listeners actually need to go out and do this stuff yourself. And I'm certainly not proposing that guesting on Maha podcasts or debating on Jubilee to find your common ground is the way that we should do outreach at all. Public outreach can be done completely on your own terms, either through your own social media accounts or your own health podcast where you can talk about these issues that Maha adjacent people claim to care about, but in an actually scientifically backed way. According to KFF, more Maha voters say that healthcare costs and food safety will have a major impact on their vote than vaccine policy, which is, I think, not something your average blue sky user would be aware of. Like, there is this sort of like idea of like the average Maha person who's this like, you know, eugenics crazed anti-vaxxer. And some of them are that, yes. But there's also a lot of like normie moms who, for whatever reason, have had a bad experience with the medical system, or maybe they have too much time on their hands and they're going into crazy, you know, internet rabbit holes. Both are. Things that happen. But there is a lot of like kind of normal moms who will fall into this stuff because they do care about their children's health and they feel like the world that their kids are being raised in is not one that's actually set up to prioritize the health of their kids. And without people, including, you know, politicians, speaking to that, you know, accurately and like backed by like real science, it opens the door to people who will speak to them about these concerns. Yes. But without that scientific background and it can funnel them into, into these places that are like not actually going to benefit the health of anyone as we've, as we're now living in the national consequence of. You're absolutely right. And I recognize that. And it is something that I think is important. And that's, you know, a big part of why I, a simple country doctor decided to become, you know, active online and have a podcast and do this sort of stuff. Because I felt it was a good way to fight misinformation and to connect with people. And it is, it is very important that we do that. I do think that's, that's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. I mean, it is, it is hard. It's a challenge, a real challenge. But we, we all can find our own ways to do it. And God, I really, I hope that these outreaches have some benefit, some positive benefit. I become a little bit, and this is not mean by my nature, I'm an optimist, but I become a little bit pessimistic about the ability to win back some of these people with at least the current democratic leadership. Oh, I mean, certainly, yes. I'm much more hopeful that with the younger people that are much more savvy or net savvy and know how to speak to people, I'm much more hopeful that they will be able to connect broadly on some major level in a way that, you know, Chuck Schumer never could or care to. I should also say something else. I also recognize fully that there are real problems with our healthcare system. I am not here to say, hey, our medical healthcare system is awesome in this country. Why would people be dissatisfied? No, people, you're totally right. is real dissatisfaction with our health care, the cost of it, the delivery of it, the access of it. All these things are real. And there are issues that, you know, we have to show people that we're championing or we're trying to champion because there are real problems. And that's why it's working. It's people are easy. I mean, you're right. There's some degree of just bored people like getting down internet, like conspiracy theories about this stuff. But there's real issues that are plaguing our public health care that we need to address. And we need to show that I mean, it's so funny, like I get accused of being like a pharma shill all the time because I'm like for vaccines. And I'm like, I hate pharma companies more than you. I guarantee it. And I have good reason to. Yeah, because I see what they do to patients. I see what they do to to the cost of health care. So I have we we have to show people that we are on their side. And this is the right place to start. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's also something AOC talked about on the majority report as a reason why people are getting pulled into Maha. My mom's side of the family is evangelical. Right. And I see how all of these issues that have been at their surface level expressed as right wing are actually very much just the anxieties that we have as working people, not being able to. And so it's also like, how do I stop being sick? How do I prevent being sick by limiting my exposure to things that I think are toxic? Yeah. And then which there are things that are actually toxic and things that aren't actually toxic that get taken advantage of. And then also when I do get sick and I can't afford medicine, what are the holistic and low cost alternatives that I can turn to? Because I know that I can't afford medicine. I can't afford medicine. I can't afford a doctor. So, yeah, those were AOC's comments on the majority report, which then served as the basis for a political piece earlier this month, digging into her, quote unquote, Maha outreach and the varieties of issues that she was discussing with Maha advocates. This newsletter also clarified the sequence of events in terms of why she started this outreach when she did. Yeah. And she started this effort, last spring, ahead of some hearings with the EPA head, Lee Zeldin. And the political reporting does know that AOC, quote, still has significant differences with the broader Maha movement, including its vaccine skepticism. But she sees overlap on things like pesticides, corporate power and access to safe food, according to a person close to AOC, unquote. So in spring, her office began specifically working with the AOC. And she said, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't around the issue of glyphosate and pesticides and ended up contacting some Maha organizers who together helped FOIA some emails and correspondence, which then influenced how AOC addressed and questioned EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. And this produced a lot of viral clips. In fact, tens of thousands of lawsuits in the United States, many issued by farmers with high exposure. They have been filed against Bayer for failing to warn them about the cancer risk of exposure. Now, interestingly, Administrator Zeldin, on February 18th of this year, President Trump released an executive order to increase the production of glyphosate in the United States, correct? Yes. And not only did that executive order call to increase the production of glyphosate, it also called for legal immunity for Bayer from the tens of thousands of Americans who are seeking justice in court for their toxic exposure. So a lot of people in the Maha world saw clips from this hearing and found them compelling and then thought, maybe AOC isn't all that bad. Maybe I could listen to some of the stuff that she's talking about. I think that is the crux of why she is doing this. Yeah, she can address some of these issues around glyphosate around, you know, specifically these internal EPA emails showing that the pharmaceutical company Bayer was in communication with the EPA about the then upcoming Supreme Court case regarding the carcinogenic weed killer Roundup. Yeah. And that Bayer sought information regarding EPA's regulatory review of Roundup. And to quote this internal email, quote, Bayer will provide a small thanks for updating the glyphosate web page from the EPA and work on Maha, unquote. Insane, an insane thing. This glyphosate update that they're referring to seems to be correlated to the EPA agency withdrawing its support for California's cancer warning on glyphosate. Now, this is important because five days after the EPO this year, Bayer filed their opening brief to the Supreme Court executive order and hinging their case on the EPA's warnings or lack thereof of glyphosate. So we have internal emails from your agency saying that Bayer wanted to thank you and your agency for removing support for California's warning because their case before the Supreme Court right now hinges on you not warning the American people and withdrawing your support on glyphosate. Do you understand the case? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The conflict of interest that is before the American people right now, Mr. Secretary. I understand. The gentlelady's time has. You might have a response. Thank you. So after this sort of viral moment, a few other people in the Maha world started to get into communication with AOC to address issues around pesticides and chemicals, which someone close to this situation told Politico were the issues that, quote, the traditional left has cared about for decades, unquote. Well, I mean, for your listeners also, I should probably mention. So in case you're wondering, glyphosate is the weed killer in Roundup. And there is this big question about whether or not it can cause cancer. And this is something that I'm glad that she's addressing this. I think this is low hanging fruit and she should. And this is the kind of thing we can all agree on. Like if there's a chance of it, why not try to get rid of it? But it also I think we should be careful because these can be just like PFAS, these gateways to greater conspiracy theories. And we should be careful about what we do. And do not know. We should say that like the honest answer is, you know, we don't know how much of a risk it is for for cancer, probably a very small risk for people who use it rarely. And then a more moderate risk of developing non Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is the thing that seems to be connected to it. Yeah. And people who use it a lot. So, yeah, it's bad. You know, if there's any way we can make sure it's not around and we need to follow it and find out how it slipped through the cracks of testing. And those are all questions that we need to address. But I also would say let's also caution making that our new boogeyman. I would love for the people in charge to be adults about the stuff and to talk about these things like what we do actually know and don't know and not to score points based on just the fact that we want it gone. We should it should be gone. But I mean, like it's again, it's one of these like we have a lot of fish to fry. And if this is what it takes to get Maha thinking that she's cool, great. But I also have much bigger health related issues that I would love for her to be focused on. Yeah, it's like kind of one kernel at a time. And this became an issue because of Trump's executive orders trying to give companies, you know, complete immunity. Yeah. For any any possible health risks as a result of people using these products. And so, you know, a part of politics is both being proactive, but then it's also responding to things happening in the world. So I think that's one of the things that I would love for the people in charge to be able to I'm just saying it's good to score some easy points. These are layups talking about stuff like this. We should take care of it. But I also don't want it to stop there. Sure. I don't want this to be like we're the limit of where our public health discussion ends, you know. Something else we learned in this Politico newsletter is exactly who some of these Maha advocates are that AOC has been meeting with. According to Politico, in late July, AOC met with Zen Honeycott of Moms Across America, Joe Maxwell of Farm Action and government consultant Emily Steinbridge. Moms Across America is a very influential kind of Maha adjacent organization, especially on Facebook. The main four petitions hosted on the Moms Across America website currently relate to data centers, glyphosate and pesticide manufacturers. There's also pages on independent food testing, tox screenings. A whole section of the website is actually on data centers. But there are also web pages on things like genetically engineered food, EMF wireless radiation, and a page promoting vaccine skepticism. The founder, Zen Honeycott, believes that autism can be partially caused by childhood valence. vaccines, and claims that an organic diet helped her son's autism symptoms. Honeycutt told Politico that her meeting with AOC was a quote-unquote thorough conversation, touching on pesticides, PFAS, and environmental health. She's quoted in the newsletter saying, quote, I don't agree with socialism, and most moms across America also don't, but we do believe in corporate responsibility. Even if someone isn't a socialism or a conservative, I think we should agree that everyone should have access to non-toxic food, unquote. There has also been some recognition among certain MAHA figures that a connection with AOC could hurt their own access to the Trump administration. Vani Hari, the food babe influencer, had quote-unquote trepidations about meeting with AOC. Because she, quote, wants access to the administration still, according to someone familiar with the matter. Considering the variety of beliefs, many harmful, that some of these MAHA influencers have, I do want to mention a variety of the risks of talking to these people. And again, to reiterate, I am not arguing that you, the listener, do this. I'm not calling on you to debate this. Your unpleasant family member about vaccines at Thanksgiving. I'm not saying that you have to go on MAHA podcasts to argue these things, but there are people in positions of power whose job it is to navigate politics in this way. And there are some real risks from doing that. The main one being capitulating on your values and beliefs for political benefit, right? Compromising with people. Compromising with, in some cases, like, you know, eugenics. In MAHA, in hopes of winning some votes. And I don't believe that's what AOC is doing. But for people who are extremely skeptical of, like, AOC's political motivations, I can see how that would be a concern. Another risk factor is that in your communications with these people, you end up platforming people with genuinely harmful beliefs, right? Stuff that causes active harm to the public health through kids not being vaccinated. And by extension, if you end up promoting some of the justifications for those anti-vax beliefs, which are very dehumanizing against people with autism, sometimes with this, like, soft eugenics component, right? That is a real, you know, possible danger of talking with influential people in this world. There's also this factor that just by talking with them, you might end up, like, legitimizing some of their crazy beliefs, right? This is an idea that people have. My counter to that is that, they don't need to be further legitimized. Donald Trump is the president. The Republicans control the whole of the federal government. RFK Jr. runs HHS. They have received institutional legitimation, like, already. Yeah, right. You're right. It's not about you can't platform these people. These people are the platform at this point. And AOC's not platforming these people. She isn't telling her followers or supporters to seek out these MAHA activists. She isn't live streaming with them. She's doing outreach in private to pull people from their side, maybe back towards reality. And I think it's working. I think it's actually working for her, at least. I mean, assuming that this is going to be for a potential presidential run, or at least for some sort of political maneuvering, for whatever reason she's doing it, I think as long as she's able to collaborate with clear boundaries, addressing the legitimate concerns like the PFAS pesticide exposures, cost of health care, while really clearly addressing the scientifically unsupported claims like these chronic disease things, the soft eugenics, the vaccine narratives, I think that's important. But what's important to me, though, those have to be vocally addressed because, like I was saying before, with all these people that have been pushing these COVID revisionist thoughts, just letting those people say those things without responding, it does build this. this narrative overall that COVID vaccines were a mistake and that they're dangerous, etc. We have to not just, you know, focus on things that we agree on, but she has to clearly set boundaries and say that the things we did were really good. The one good thing that Trump ever is connected to, really, in my perspective, is Operation Warp Speed, the worst. Operation Warp Speed. The worst name for a vaccine project that you could have made. But still, you know, that's like the. that's the. that we have to be really clear about those two things. And I think if she can do that, that's. that's great. And people should take the lead. And I'm going to get. I'm going to get hurt for saying some of this because I know a lot of my, you know, doctor friends, public health friends who have a much different perspective about MAHA and don't feel there's really any benefit to talking with them for all the reasons that you mentioned. Maybe I'll get there. I'm not there right now. I'm just not. I feel like we need to be able to connect. I mean, I would. yeah, I would like to kind of. touch on that for a sec because, like, there is this idea that you can maybe ignore the problem away. That instead of. instead of trying to talk to these people, we just want them to go away. So you should not acknowledge them. You should not. you should just pretend they aren't there until they go away. How well has that strategy worked for us thus far? Hasn't. hasn't worked that well. It hasn't. And to me, this idea that you can just not acknowledge the problem, it's not a problem. This whole problem is just, like, a rejection of politics to me. Like, that is just rejecting what politics is. And again, I'm not saying that you have to do this. But to. to. to say that our solution is going to be just making fun of them until they go away, to me, that feels like a kind of liberal bourgeois position from someone with enough privilege to just reject real politics through pretending that a very big group of people simply do not exist. Yeah. And I. I don't think that's how we're going to get ourselves out of this problem. And when I said this online, someone said, well, yeah, but, I mean, if you're going to talk about real politics, real politics is when I asked my dad to see a doctor about his stomach problems, and he said he's not going to, and he's just going to use cod liver oil. Yeah, the one trick that I don't want you to know, I personally don't want you to know that, folks. It's going to put me out of business. And, like, that's a huge problem. Like, that is a huge problem. It is a huge problem that someone's dad said that, but that problem won't be solved by ignoring the problem. Correct. Right? This is the end point of what we're trying to do is reach people who have this reaction, and that's going to require massive healthcare reforms and building public trust in state capacity and in our ability to actually help people. And this is going to be a long-term project. I'm not saying this is going to be fixed by 2028, but towards the end of this political article, there's a really interesting quote. Quote, AOC's outreach comes at a moment when the Maha vote itself appears to be up for grabs ahead of the 28th presidential election amid ongoing frustrations with the Trump administration. Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA personality and the host of the Health and Wellness podcast, Culture Apothecary, told Politico she's, quote, certainly concerned about the possibility of the influential bloc of voters slipping away. Clark said she's already seeing interest in AOC, and she's already seeing interest in AOC, and she's already seeing interest in AOC, and she's among her own viewers. After AOC began publicly talking about pesticides, Clark said audience members sent her clips with reactions along the lines of, wow, this is crazy. Agree with AOC? To quote Clark, Maha voters are not Republican. They're so focused on health issues, they don't care who it is that's saying they're going to get it done, unquote. And this sort of movement points to why I think it might be a good idea to for someone like AOC to talk to some of these people and disrupt the pipeline from the alternative health industry. Give them an off-ramp. Give them an off-ramp because the alternative is that they're just going to get even more insular into this world of conspiracism and eventually like eugenic style fascism. So for someone who's doing outreach, you have to first like figure out what the variety of concerns are that are held by these big groups, right? Where do these concerns come from? Yeah. And if there's any overlap between some of the material concerns that they actually have with, you know, scientifically based environmental issues or left-wing critiques of corporate interests. And this might lead someone to kind of question, okay, but then why would you do outreach to influencers and leaders of Maha rather than just regular normie moms? Well, AOC is also doing that through her own, you know, social media channels. But how do you think she can reach normie moms in the first place who are very bubbled, right? Who are in their own silos? It is through, you know, talking with some of these movement leaders in private that can help you learn about their political operation, about how their ideas are disseminated, what their leaders believe, what their followers believe, the range of their politics and like what's exactly being sold. And also you can learn things that they might only say in private. All of that information can help inform how to target regular people, which AOC does from time to time on Instagram and also through, you know, visits to data centers, which get picked up on local news coverage. And like these Maha influencers command very large audiences that ordinarily would not be exposed to the substance of what AOC's politics actually are, but now they might be. And if AOC can position herself as a figure that someone in the Maha world can go to for takes outside their regular bubble, ideally over time she might be able to off-road them away from the crazy stuff towards health policies that actually make us healthier. And I think there really is value in attempting to pull these followers away from the Maha side and educate them on real harms being perpetuated by profit-seeking industries. And part of a politician's job is learning how to talk to people, right? Talking to these politically lost parents who have concerns about the health of their kids might mean different things than talking to a leftist, right? AOC has to learn, or anyone has to learn how to talk to different types of people. And building a base that's capable, a coalition, a majoritarian coalition that's capable of challenging capital, challenging these big corporations, will mean talking to people that you disagree with, or might even have some harmful beliefs. This happens in unions all the time, right? There's people in working class unions who might believe some things that are bad. But if you're going to build worker power, you're going to have to talk with them. And maybe then through the process of building solidarity, you can address some of those harmful beliefs that they have. Once you have that solidarity kind of built, what will happen? Once you realize you actually do have shared interests, and these sorts of harmful beliefs are actually working against those shared interests. Agreed. We need a bigger tent. I mean, people who want to make these fights, we need as big a tent as we can. I agree with that. This is the same thing with the data center battle, right? Yeah. Like that has a lot of conservatives supporting it. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. And it's a very interesting topic to bring up along with the same thing, you know, with the same people whose perspectives on this, how it aligns with MAHA and how that aligns. With the greater MAGA picture is really interesting. And you're exactly right. It's about listening, about being empathetic for what it's worth. There are studies that show if you want to change public opinion on healthcare and the healthcare infrastructure, that's what is required. And what does seem to work is, you know, listening, showing empathy. It is difficult to scale is really the issue, you know, that that's the kind of thing that is a challenge to scale. But it is exactly what you're talking about. It's coalition building whenever you can. And we're at a crisis moment where I think that's necessary. And when we talk about, I talk about, you know, building a bigger tent. For me, that means we bring in these people, but it doesn't mean abandoning the other things. The same way. Our tent does have rules. Our tent has rules for its continued operation. And if you're going to come in here and start assaulting people in our tent, if you're going to start, you know, hitting down the stick. Throwing trans kids under the bus for it. Yeah, then that, our tent should not be for those people. I agree. No. But there is legitimate problems that if the left doesn't address in, you know, actually substantive ways, which the right can never do because the right's whole ideology is very contradictory. They have these kind of populist maha things that they can never actually fulfill, as you see with the Trump administration. But there is some legitimate issues or anxieties that motivate issues, both legitimate and not. And if the left doesn't address those, then we give. The opening to the right to sell crazy bullshit. Yes. And like, that is the thing that that needs to be disrupted. Yes. To kind of show my cards at the end here. The reason why I kind of like care about this is because like I grew up with like a crunchy mom. I'll use that kind of terminology. And I have seen her shift politically to the left over over the years. Right. Like if maha was a thing 20 years ago, she would have been like a maha person. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's all. It's all the same types of stuff around like some legitimate issues, some kind of borderline issues like is organic food necessarily better than non-organic tomato? Maybe, maybe not. And then also vaccine hesitancy. That's that was that was a big thing in my family. And I saw my mom change her opinions as I grew up. And for me, it can be really sad to see so many so many people assume that like large swaths. Of just regular people must like have to be these like completely unreachable lunatics. Yeah. Not all maha sympathetic people are crazy anti-vaxxers, but there are some there are some. And even those people, I think, are still people that that should be reached. I'm not saying that you have to do that. I'm not saying that AOC doing a congressional hearing is going to do that immediately. Yeah. But but when you start writing off so many people as just like beyond saving. Then again, you have kind of given up on politics. Yeah. We are still responsible for those people. Yeah. We are still responsible for those people's public health. Even the people who don't believe in vaccines, I feel responsible for their health. So it's really well said. And it gives you an interesting perspective on it. And it's good. And I think if most of us are, you know, really think about it, we probably have someone in our lives like that as well. A lot of your listeners probably are people who grew up with parents who have pretty different ideas. Some of them are like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't probably haven't shifted that much, but a lot of them probably have. There's someone in your life that probably has shifted over time. I think I think it's important that we keep trying to. I mean, these are people that we have to to some degree. I think the bottom line is we have to keep communicating with Maha and we have to show that we're listening. And it doesn't matter how much we know if it doesn't show that we care. And that's super cheesy, but it is true. And I think that's at the core of what AOC is doing. And again, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know her politics that well. I haven't followed her that closely, but she seems pretty savvy. And I feel like that empathy thing she nails. And I think that's great. And I think that's probably something more of us need to do. More politicians should be doing. The empathy aspect is really important. And of course, something that just doesn't get encouraged on social media because of the way those platforms are structured and the way the algorithms work. But in trying to answer this question of should we, the royal we, do outreach to Maha people, I think we first really need to ask ourselves, do we actually want to understand this problem or do we just want to feel superior to anti-vaxxers? Because if we just want to feel better than other people, then yeah, ignoring the issue and just making fun of these people online, that's enough to fulfill your goal. But if your goal is to actually address these problems and their root causes, you're going to actually have to try to understand the diffuse nature of Maha, the variety of issues it tries to address, and the anxieties it feeds on. Because if you don't, your understanding of the people in Maha will not just be incomplete, but politically useless. A lot of regular people in the world don't vote or shape their beliefs based on deeply held ideological or partisan conviction, but through trying to respond to the material conditions in their lives. Now, sometimes that means, they may get tricked by a con man. And it's really easy to just laugh and shame those people as gullible fools. But like, how is that useful? Or is it just a way to make yourself feel superior amidst a public crisis? It's worth remembering that one out of 10 Mamdani voters voted for Trump in 2024. And Mamdani started his campaign by talking with Trump voters in the Bronx on Fordham Road. That was like his first campaign. And he was like, I'm going to vote for Trump. I'm going to campaign video in November of 2024 after the presidential election. Rebuilding faith in public health will take a long time. Oh boy. I think passing universal health care would be a huge step towards that. Having people occupying the government that is actually transparent, doesn't just lie about being transparent, will be steps towards that goal. And I guess I hope to see that goal one day, even if it is not right now. But do you know what you can do right now? Is listen to House of Pod if you want some real information about public health. You sure can. As soon as you're done, listen to this. And I mean, including the ads that come at the end of this podcast. Once you're done, listen to all of those. Then go listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, where we talk about a lot of these same issues. I bring on experts from all kinds of different fields because I don't know everything about medicine, although I am pretty smart. I don't know everything. So I bring on people smarter than me whenever I can. And we'll cover things that I don't know about medicine. I bring on people smarter than me whenever I can. We'll cover things from wellness grifters, Dr. Oz, Peter Attia, more obscure people that you probably haven't heard of to what RFK Jr. is currently doing to our health care infrastructure. And it's a pretty fun show. It's not too science-y. So I think if you like this podcast, there's a very good chance you're going to like The House of Pod. Also, if I may plug, I have a new podcast coming out that I'm very excited about. It's a little different. It is called Persian of Interest. It's a Persian history podcast. It's going to take a look at stories of Persian contributions to the arts, to music, to philosophy. It's going to look at stories that Persians have largely been written out of or minimized in where the role is more prominent. And I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. So stay tuned for Persian of Interest as well, which should be coming out at the end of this month. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about a very, very challenging topic for an hour. Bring me back in like a month and let me see if I'm still feeling as open to talking to Maha. Will do. Thank you. Skypop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and real delicious soda taste. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Cleaning starts with one small task and suddenly it's the whole house. Luckily, there's AirTasker. Post your task, set your budget, and choose a tasker to help. From carpet cleaning to finally tackling the junk drawer. AirTasker. Get anything done. Are your kids bored with the same old sports? Fencing is one of the fastest growing, NCAA sports with new colleges adding programs every year. Many clubs have loaner gear. Not like this. No let-up. Ride for Texas. Pick a side. Live the showdown. Rattler Days. Presented by Germania Insurance at Dickies Arena October 2nd through the 4th. Be honest. Did stuff? For seven scrawny bucks a month, you get at least one ticket. And you get an awesome pair of tickets to something great. 'Cause your first month's free at DoMoreStuff.com/free. It's football season and Vizio Mini-LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life in breathtaking realism on a 55-inch or 65-inch Mini-LED TV. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the iHeartRadio app. Built right into your game day. Vizio TV, big screens, big picture, and a totally immersive experience. Find rollback deals at Walmart today on Vizio 55-inch and 65-inch Mini-LED TVs. This is Dan Levitard and I've been doing this for more than two decades. It's in the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly. And it's got a journalistic backbone. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Elkurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today's episode is going to be about the role of the U.S. in the Middle East and the debate around that that's happening in the Middle East. in the Middle East and the debate around that that's happening in D.C. and policy circles at the moment. Very smart people are debating, because of the Trump administration's disastrous policies, including the war on Iran, whether Washington's decades-long position as essentially top dog in the Middle East just died or is dying or was never quite what everybody said it was. So here it is. I'm going to give you the definitive answer. I'm going to give you the definitive answer on what the role of the U.S. in the Middle East is and is going to be. Okay, just kidding. Obviously, what I would want might piss a lot of people off, but I'm going to summarize for you what the debate is. So the different arguments that capture this debate can be encapsulated in the next three sentences. They were published within a few weeks of each other by three, you know, serious, well-credentialed people who studied the Middle East for a living. So the first sentence is, quote, Overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before. The second sentence is, quote, And the third sentence is, quote, These are all from articles published in Foreign Affairs or directly on the Council on Foreign Relations website by Greg Goss, Mark Lynch, and Stephen Cook. They're all looking at the same set of facts and arriving at, some opposed conclusions about whether something around the U.S. role has actually ended. I think there's a lot here that is accurate and, like, worthy of engagement, but the focus for me is a little off. Not because they're wrong about the facts. The facts are mostly right. It's because the question of, is the order over, misses how the order functioned to some degree, and that its functioning was predicated not just on a tolerance of repression, but the generation of authority. So, these scholars and analysts do acknowledge the impact on people in the Middle East to some degree. They reference what happened in Gaza and Lebanon and other places. But I think the scope of the American impact on the region isn't necessarily emphasized enough. Just in the last year, hundreds of Iranians have been killed in the war. The Lebanese have been displaced for, like, the third or fourth time. In 20 years, by a war they didn't start, and they can't seem to end. And Palestinians continue to die, even during a so-called ceasefire. And these scholars and analysts do acknowledge the impact on people in the Middle East to some degree. And these are referenced sometimes in the discussions, so they do talk about that in these articles. But when policy people reference these things, they reference them as kind of casualty figures on the way to maybe a bigger argument about primacy. And I think this captures kind of what's off about the discussion, and encapsulates maybe how the American order works. As I've argued endlessly before, talking about this American order ending misses the point. For the people who actually live in the region, For the people who actually live in the region, there's a legitimate order there to lose in the first place. And U.S. hegemony, key to the quote-unquote liberal order that people are now talking about saving, was established on the Middle East being the way it was, and sustaining American hegemony all these years. Okay, so let's start with the article by Greg Goss, titled The New Old Middle East, and subtitled Wars of Sound and Fury. His argument is essentially, yes, the last three years have been transformative-looking. The U.S. and Israel fought an actual direct war against Iran. Iran's supreme leader of 36 years is dead. Bashar al-Assad in Syria is gone. Hezbollah has been decimated. Gaza has been flattened. These are all real, all enormous impacts. But, and this is his real point, none of it changed the underlying structure. So outside powers are still playing a balance of power game inside weak Arab states. The Iranian-Israeli conflict is still unresolved, and the Palestinian question is still unresolved. And the U.S. is still stuck in the position it's occupied for years now, which is characterized as unable to actually order the region the way it wants, but too enmeshed to leave. So his evidence is strong. You know, Iran, despite losing its senior leadership, despite watching their, you know, infrastructure get pounded, despite Israel and the U.S. going after it directly, Iran came out the other side still standing. It's still running its, you know, quote-unquote resistance foreign policy. It's still engaged in Iraq and Lebanon through its allies, and now has a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, that it's used extensively. Ghaz's phrase for it is, it's still got it. And it's a good phrase. The regime that the war was supposedly going to topple is, by his account, arguably more entrenched afterward. Because it can now tell its own public that, you know, we took a direct hit from the two most powerful militaries aligned against us, and we're still here. Now Ghaz talks about the Iranians killed. He says this, according to the human rights activist news agency, Iranian security forces killed at least 7,000 protesters during a wave of unrest in December of last year. Other organizations put the number in the tens of thousands. The fact that the regime killed that many and got away with it essentially functions as evidence for a claim about regime durability. So it's there to explain why Trump thought Iran looked weak enough to bomb. And that's the through line of the whole kind of continuity thesis. Ghaz, of course, mentions the human cost. He does so repeatedly. I would say more than a lot of his peers in these circles. So he talks about Lebanon over, you know, 4,200 people killed, a million displaced, the West Bank. But the analytical weight of the piece sits somewhere else on whether weak states can produce durable peace and whether Iran retains regional influence on whether the U.S. can restore a more, quote, stable region. So it's all about stability, order, primacy. These are the units of account. And this isn't a problem with this particular author. I think this is what the genre requires. Foreign Affairs is a publication. It's, you know, asking what should Washington do, which means its whole vocabulary is built around a subject, the U.S. government, or occasionally Israel or Iran as fellow state actors. And everyone else becomes the terrain that that subject acts on. Palestinians, Lebanese civilians, Iranian protesters, Yemenis, they appear as like populations, undifferentiated, something that gets caused to suffer by the real actors doing the actual politics. In the end, Ghaz concludes that the region, quote, looks a lot like, it did before the war. I'd actually push on that a different way than he does. What he means is the balance of power hasn't shifted. The conflicts, are the same conflicts. But I'd say the region also looks a lot like it did before in this other sense that the people living in it are still structurally objects of a debate about state power rather than participants in it. And that continuity is real too. Okay, now we move on to Mark Lynch's quote, the end of the American Middle East. It's also in Foreign Affairs. Lynch's argument is the opposite of Gaza's. He says, no, something did actually end. The regional order that's existed since the first Gulf War in 1991, built by George H.W. Bush, sustained through five presidencies, organized around Israeli security and the flow of oil and American hegemony, that order is dead. And the Iran war is what killed it alongside the destruction of Gaza. And it's not because Washington lost. The battle, it's because the bargain at the core of this order stopped functioning. So the bargain, you know, in Lynch's estimation was align with us. Basically, the United States saying this to other Arab and non-Arab state actors, align with us and we'll protect you. And then when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz and bombarded the Gulf states that had both signed the Abraham Accords and didn't. So they've been attacking many of their neighbors. And the United States and Israel quote, with all their military might simply failed to dislodge the Iranian regime. That bargain kind of broke in front of everyone. So Gulf leaders watched that bargain break and made that assessment that it was broken. I want to be clear about what I really appreciate in this piece, because there's a lot and it's rare to see it in this venue. Lynch writes, and I'm just going to read this directly because I don't want to paraphrase it into something softer. Quote, for Washington, the strategic benefits, accrued from this order, seem to justify the costs of the war required to sustain it. But the price was much higher for those who live in the region. For most people, the U.S. order meant only violence, hopelessness, and deprivation. By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other region, end quote. So for this publication, it's a genuinely, you know, bold, radical sentence. He's naming the thing plainly, that this wasn't a stabilizing project that had some unfortunate, externalities, and that it was predicated on violence for the people who live inside it. And he goes farther than that, too. He talks about, quote, the moral hazard built into American security guarantees, how they let autocratic allies disregard Washington's stated interests because they knew they were untouchable, and how U.S. support for neoliberal economic reforms essentially let regimes loot their own populations under the cover of privatization, and how the war on terror gave Washington's allies a permission structure to build surveillance states. If you listened to me talk before, you know that's basically very close to the argument I've spent my career making about U.S. backed regimes in the Arab world, that Washington's security relationships didn't just fail to prevent repression, they were often the delivery mechanism for it. But of course, and understandably for this publication, the fix on offer is still a fix for Washington. Lynch's closing argument is that the next American president has a, quote, real chance to build something better. Renounce military intervention as a first resort, pressure Israel on settlements pushing Iraq and Lebanon to disarm the militias before they're ready, recommit to international human rights norms, et cetera. But essentially everything on this list is the U.S. as a subject. I don't say that to be glib. A U.S. government that actually did those things would matter enormously. And domestic U.S. politics is showing a shift. You know, it's showing that two-thirds of Democrats now think Washington is too supportive of Israel, and there was a house vote to cut military aid to them. So in this context, he's right that there's more room now than there's ever been. For a shift. But again, the theory of change, it still runs entirely through whether an American administration decides to be different. It's not, for example, Palestinians get self-determination because Palestinians have built the power to demand and win it. It's that, you know, they might get relief from Washington if Washington decides it's in its interest to provide relief. It's not nothing, but it's not the same thing as, like, agency. Additionally, Lynch's frame as, like, order versus disorder, or, old order versus new order, reaches for the Suez analogy, for example, in 1956, the last kind of gasp of British and French imperial power. But his argument is essentially the American empire in the Middle East is following the same arc that the European ones did, decaying kind of for structural reasons, and eventually that would recede too. Now, I'm sympathetic to this historical analogy, but I want to flag something about it, which is that it's still a story about the transition between an empire and a vacuum, or between an empire and some future multipolar agreement. It's not on its own a story of what the people of the region actually want, which, and this is the part that's, you know, available if you go looking in a lot of different types of surveys, is it's not usually, please replace American hegemony with a different hegemony. You know, it's just people in the region want very basic things. They want accountability from their own governments. They want an end to being treated as a security theater for other people's conflicts. They want actual sovereignty over the decisions that get made about their countries in Washington or Riyadh or Tehran without them in the room. So Lynch is closer to writing about this than anyone in this genre. But again, he is focused on what Washington should do next. And I'm wondering if we should start also asking what it would take for the people living in this region to be the ones deciding. And finally, the third piece by Stephen Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations, published just this past week. I'm recording on August 21st. So it's about something that I think a lot of people outside the region or those who study the region haven't fully clocked yet, which is the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement. So here's the quick version. On August 7th, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed a mutual defense pact they called the Mecca Agreement. The full text hasn't been released, but reporting indicates it functions like kind of a NATO Article 5 clause, which is an attack on one is treated as an attack on all. On paper, it obligates Saudi Arabia and Turkey to come to Pakistan's defense in a war with India or Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back Turkey if it comes to blows with Israel over Syria or any other adversary. 48 hours after the signing ceremony, the Houthis hit a Saudi Aramco refinery. Now, Saudi Arabia didn't invoke the pact. And Cook reads that correctly, I think, as less about whether the treaty's security guarantee is credible and more about what its existence signals, which is that, Saudi Arabia is building an alternative to relying on Washington full stop. Cook's argument is very similar to Lynch's, that the U.S.-led order is over, but he gets there kind of in a different way. For him, he's not emphasizing like the moral bankruptcy or the violence against ordinary people. It's, you know, straightforward, realist account. After the U.S. failed to defend Saudi Arabia directly when Iran hit its oil facilities in 2019, and after kind of the whiplash of Obama signing the Iran deal and then Trump tearing it up, and all of the disasters of the Biden administration pushing the Abraham Accords, even as Gaza was being erased, after Trump's own kind of Iran war, the Saudis simply stopped believing that Washington's guarantees were reliable. And so they went and built their own. And the part I find most striking about Cook's argument is the picture he draws in the end, which is a Middle East splitting into two competing blocks, the Abraham Accords block versus the Mecca Agreement. So the Emirati is staying tight with Israel and the United States, and then the Saudis, Turks, and Pakistanis building something that explicitly competes with them. And he calls it, quote, a major change and says it's hard to overstate its significance. And honestly, structurally, I think he's right that something has shifted. But here's where maybe I would slow down a little because I think the piece has a missing question. Cook frames the whole thing as a story about whose order it's going to be. So American order, giving way to kind of regional multipolarity, and Riyadh and Ankara shaping the region instead of Washington. And okay, sure, but shaping it how? And for whom? The three signatories to the Mecca Agreement are, and I just want to say this plainly, all authoritarian. One is an absolute monarchy. Another is a rapidly authoritarian, an increasingly authoritarian state run by a man who jailed his last serious electoral rival. And then a military dominated national security state that's multiple wars against its own populations. So this is not a coalition of the region's publics asserting themselves against outside domination. This is three governments, each of which has spent considerable energy over the past decade, surveilling and jailing, and in some cases, killing its own dissidents. They're deciding they'd rather coordinate their security agreements with each other than depend on Washington's. And that might genuinely be bad news for American hegemony. I just don't think it's automatically good news for anyone living under these three governments or anyone in the region. Multipolarity is not a synonym for liberation. Sometimes it's just another table with more authoritarians on it, none of whom actually answer to the people they govern any more than, you know, American hegemon did. Now, Cook's piece to its credit doesn't claim otherwise. He's writing a narrow, careful analysis of this, like, security architecture shift, and he says so. But it's worth noting that, you know, quote, the U.S.-led order is over and something better is emerging are two completely different claims. And only one of those three pieces that I talked about today even gestures at the second one. And even that piece, which is Lynch's, gestures at mostly by asking Washington to be nicer. So here's my synthesis. Goss says nothing structural has changed. The game is the same game. Weak states are still weak. Iran and Israel are still locked in. The Palestinian question is still open and the U.S. is still stuck playing a role it can't fully commit to or walk away from. And Lynch says something did change. The moral and material bankruptcy of the American security bargain has been fully exposed. And now there's a narrow window for Washington to build something less violent in its place. And then Cook says something has changed, but it's not about morality or bankruptcy. It's about credibility. American guarantees stop being trusted. So regional powers built their own. And now we're watching this kind of bipolar regional order emerge that doesn't run through Washington at all. And all three, I think, have a real and important argument. I don't want to flatten that. The difference between nothing changed and the empire. Is ending or something more competitive is taking its place. That's not a trivial disagreement. It has real implications for what happens next in Gaza and Lebanon and in the Gulf. But again, notice what all three arguments hold in common underneath that disagreement is they're all arguing about whether an order existed and whether it's ending. And maybe we don't emphasize enough existed for who and ending for who and according to whose clock. So I want to back up a little bit further from the three essays we just walked. All three of them write as though the story starts with the Iran war or with Gaza's destruction or with the Mecca agreement. So a story that begins in the last two, three years. But let me go back to December 2023, just a few weeks after October 7th, the Hamas attacks in Israel and then the start of the war on Gaza. Back then, the working assumption in a lot of Washington rooms was that this could still be contained. I wrote a piece about that in December of 2023. For the Foreign Policy Research Institute. And I called it the reemergence of the Palestine question in world politics. The argument had three parts. Part one was that Palestine functions for Arab publics as what I call a gateway to dissent. Not because everyone in the region is single-mindedly obsessed with Palestine at the expense of their own politics. It's because organizing around Palestine is one of the few forms of political mobilization that Arab authoritarian regimes like historically had a hard time fully criminalizing. Because the regimes themselves had claimed to support the cause. Even if they worked with Washington or maybe sometimes Israel behind the scenes. And there's all sorts of examples about this. Like Egyptian revolutionaries in 2011 during the Arab Spring. They pointed directly to their earlier organizing around Palestine as kind of the training ground for their work. In 2023, after October 7th, the same dynamic reappeared. There was protest that Arab governments, several of them, you know, allied with Washington that they struggled to contain around Palestine. Because for once, you know, the people's anger and. The regime's professed position were pointed in the same direction, which made it very hard to police. Now, part two of my argument was Palestine and violence. This is the part I think is particularly useful now. I argued then that Israeli military conduct, plus very visible American acquiescence to it, was functionally handing the Palestinian cause over to the actors most willing to escalate around it. So Iran and its proxies who explicitly positioned themselves as the keepers of the Palestinian cause. At the time, the Iranian officials and others used the term unifying the fields, meaning they coordinated the attacks with Hezbollah and the Houthis and the militias in Iraq and Hamas. So I cited an Arab barometer polling at that time that was already showing growing public traction for, you know, quote unquote, the resistance access. And I flagged that shift in how Israel was fighting itself. There was reporting at that time that was coming out of 972 Mag on the use of AI technology. That basically were enabling, in their words, these wars of, quote, massive scale rather than precision. So my worry was that when extremist actors and militias are the only actors that are left actually representing the Palestinian cause by force, you get a zero-sum dynamic that produces exactly the kind of mass multi-front violence that becomes very hard to deescalate. That was the argument I made in December 2023. And it's, I think, more or less a summary. The 2026 Iran war, the Houthis re-engaging, Iran's whole regional strategy still oriented around this kind of unifying the field logic I was describing before. Now, part three of my argument was Palestine and the world order. I argued that Washington's simultaneous position, the kind of full-throated backing at the time for Ukrainian sovereignty against occupation, paired with material and diplomatic cover for Israel's actions in Gaza, was doing serious work. This isn't a story about people giving up on democratic values or self-determination. or accountability or rule of law. It's a story about people concluding, based on 15 years of consistent data, that the American-led vehicle claiming to deliver those values was never actually built to deliver them in the Middle East. And then, of course, there's the Trump administration's contribution to all of this, which I've been fairly blunt about in previous episodes. Previous administrations at least maintained the pretense. There were the summits and they gave lip service to the rules-based order and they performed that they cared about democracy sometimes. But stripping away this performative rhetoric doesn't just look bad, it removes a tool. As long as Washington claimed to believe in a rules-based order, Arab reformers and Democrats had something to point at, like there's a gap between your stated standard and the actual conduct. And so maybe we can name and shame you and you'll change your opinions or change your policies. Once the U.S. stops even claiming that standard, you know, that lever disappears. There's nothing left to leverage. So what's the prescription? I don't think the prescription can anymore be wait for a better administration. Maybe we need to stop centering Washington as the mechanism of repair at all. Instead, maybe we need to support international accountability mechanisms that Washington is currently trying to defund and sanction into irrelevance, like the ICC, or build multilateral efforts to uphold something like a rules-based order without waiting for the American establishment, and develop civil society strategies that don't depend on the outcome of U.S. domestic politics. Because any order that eventually replaces this one has to actually reckon with the injustices that this one spent decades systematically ignoring. There's a really interesting article in The Guardian titled, What Should Replace the American-Led Order? by Asli Bali and Samuel Moyn. I'll put them in the show notes. And I think it's an interesting argument about how to stop mourning what they call the old order and build the foundations of a new world. But. When we go back to kind of the D.C. policymaking space, the honest throughline of all the articles I engage with today is that the system is failing. But it's been failing. It's been happening for a very long time. The debate in Washington is just finally, grudgingly catching up to admitting it. And even now, it's mostly catching up on Washington's terms, asking what Washington should do about it, rather than asking, you know, who's been trying to tell it this entire time. Thanks for listening to another episode of It Could Happen Here. Stay safe. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. If it wasn't for Air Tasker, I wouldn't even be having this barbecue tomorrow. Grill still in the box, TV's not mounted for the game, and apparently, half my friends are vegan now. So I hopped on Air Tasker, posted my tasks, set my budget, and bam, my Tasker assembled the grill, mounted the TV, and even potty trained my dog before guests arrive. It looks like a plan this week's ago. Air Tasker. Get anything done. Quick feet, quick decisions, and a satisfying beat when you score a point. Fencing is one of the fastest-growing NCAA sports, with new colleges adding programs every year. Coaches teach fundamentals. And safety from day one. Not like this. No let-up. Ride for Texas. Pick a side. Live the showdown. Rattler Days. Presented by Germania Insurance at Dickey's Arena, October 2nd through the 4th. Be honest. Did stuff? Discover new bands. Laugh. Learn. Do more. And right now, Do More makes. interesting and adventurous, simple and easy. Because your first month's free at do-more-stuff.com-slash-free. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the iHeartRadio app built right into your Vizio TV. On Vizio 55-inch and 65-inch Mini-LED TVs. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly and it's got a journalistic backbone. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mio Wong. For a decade now, I've been seeking the answer to a single question. How does history move? It is not as it first appears. An abstract question. In it is the answer to a more immediate query. How did we get here? To a decade defined by war, by dictatorship, and by genocide. How did we live to see a world where India, China, and the United States, the three largest countries that have ever existed, ruling over three of the world's eight billion people, are ruled by different forms of fascist government? And is there any way out of the endless nightmare that every summer sets the world on fire, only to leave it the same, but somehow worse? To understand this, to understand how we live to see these days of horror, we must understand why history moves at all. What is it that drives history forward? Is it great men -- and they always seem to be men, in such formulations -- seizing the stage of history and driving it according to their great will? Is it a moral arc of progress, forever bending and forever pushing the world, however slowly, towards a kinder, gentler form of liberal democracy? Is it the inexorable unfolding of the internal conflict? Is it the internal dynamics of capital, acting, depending on your position and political faction, as either the material basis of history or a kind of god in potentia, leading inexorably to either communism or something worse? Is it the movement of the working class, storming onto the historical stage? Are all of these simply a series of irrelevant metanarratives? My answer is this. The great Marxist historian C.L.R. James, a man as intimately involved in the process of revolution as any of the men he spent his life depicting, once wrote in Black Jacobins, his magisterial account of the Haitian Revolution, that "the rich are only defeated when they are running for their lives." And even in this darkest hour of the working class, with fascism ascendant and a movement to break its power failing to materialize every day, I have lived to see them run. I have lived to see their shield walls break, their armies falling backstreet by liberated street, seen those streets turn to cities and those cities turn to whole provinces. I have lived to see ancient and terrible ruling classes reduced to huddling like rats besieged in their own capitals. I have lived to see a commune that outlasted the Commune of Paris. I have lived to see the President of the United States hide in a bunker where protestors fought the Secret Service outside the gates of the White House. I have lived to see history come not on horseback, but to the sound of an upturned bucket beaten as a drum, and the thunder of a million voices of a thousand peoples who could not live to see another moment of a world like this one. And whether you realize it or not, you have lived to see it too, and just to show you Surely, I have lived to see what came after. I have lived to see the firebombs, the machine guns, the all-night courts filling the prison cells just as surely as the army filled the abattoirs. I have lived to see them build the wall and fill the camps and attempt to wipe whole peoples from existence. And this, too, is history. But the trick, the secret, the pattern so obvious that it cannot be named, is that these are the same history. History moves in and is driven by cycles of uprising and repression, cycles of revolution and counter-revolution. It is an insight so obvious that it does not seem profound. The implications are huge. But if what drives history is cycles of our uprisings and their repression, it means that history is not driven purely by cyclopean forces outside of even the possibility of our imagination, much less our control. It means that those forces, those impossible abstractions, capitalism and the state and the white supremacy, are not driven purely by cyclopean forces outside of even the possibility of our imagination, much less our control. The systems and institutions that rule the world are reacting to us. Capital is forced to maneuver around our advances, just as we are forced to maneuver around its development. The state builds its own capacity against our movements, not from their own desire, but from their own necessity. The ruling class, for all its power, does not simply rule. It is forced to react to us. The material reality of a world of uprisings is that we are a force of history. This is a dangerous idea to even express, much less to analyze. For if you take the idea seriously that history is not driven by the pure will of great men or the inexorable movement of capital, then history is not driven by the pure will of great men or the inexorable movement of capital. Then history is not driven by the pure will of great men or the inexorable movement of capital. Just to start, elites are not, as they would have you believe, the only people who matter. It means that history is driven by ordinary people who, in an hour of crisis like their mothers before them, pick up a brick and throw it at the nearest symbols or personages of the ruling class. It is of such struggles, from the gates of Versailles to the gates of the White House, that history is made. Regular people, individuals like you and me and your neighbor across the street with the cute cat you see sometimes, change the course of human history. It seems almost impossible. And yet, I know it's true, because I've met them. The ordinary people thrust into the fulcrum of history. There was David Graeber, the late anthropologist, who helped steal a crowd from an otherwise. largely pointless protest in a park in New York. There was Vicki Osterweil, a writer who many of you have heard on this show, who facilitated the first meeting of a movement called Occupy Wall Street. These were people, just like you and me, who showed up to a meeting. And after that meeting, the whole world was different. This is the reality of history. It is driven by ordinary people who, in retrospect, are remembered as something greater. As a movement, or a class, or a world historical force, who, at the beginning of the day, rolled out of bed as nothing of the sort. And yet, we are a historical force, and we belong on the stage of history just as much as the rulers and oppressors. It is, in fact, the great task. Of the political order, the state, the politician, the social media company, the fascist, to convince us that we can only be observers to history. That the best we can aspire to is, as Walter Benjamin described, to have a fascist dictator represent and act out our feelings. Thus, the task of counter-revolution is to clear us from the stage of history that we have seized in the streets. And it is here, perhaps, at the beginning of history, that we can only be observers to history. At the kind of revolutionaries who rule the world have had the greatest success. They have crushed the idea that we can shape history so thoroughly that the very idea of us changing the world seems like a joke. In order to wrestle back that place in history, in order to take back our autonomy and our ability to change the horror that is the present world, We must come to understand what it looks like to be a fascist dictator. When we take the historical stage, how we have failed and how we succeeded. We must know, at the most basic level, that it is even possible at all. And so in this series, we turn to the last three cycles of uprisings. An old man with a beard once said, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Marx, of course, was writing of the 18th Brumaire, of an earlier set of revolutions and counter-revolutions, different in many ways than our own. Each uprising cycle is shaped by its material conditions, the social and economic structures of the age. We are to examine the last three cycles of uprisings in an age defined not, as Marx spoke of, by the triumphant rise of the industrial proletariat, but by the death of that very working class. I have spoken elsewhere about the death of the old working class at Tiananmen. And I will leave those details to that previous work. We are going to be looking here, in the episodes to come, at the cycles of uprising that came next, beginning, roughly, with the cycle known as ultra-globalization and the Zapatista uprising. Now, periodization, or the task of putting these cycles firmly into lists of dates in which they begin and end, is almost impossible. It is never quite historically precise. Movements persist and die in a hundred forms in a hundred places. And the waves of global uprising and global suppression that we are tracking are more complicated than can be fully captured by start date here, end date here. But for our purposes, roughly, this initial periodization, the first we will examine, begins roughly with the Zapatista uprising in 1994, but really kicks off with the battle of Seattle in 1999, through Argentina in 2001, through the water and gas wars in Bolivia, and travels, I think, to unexpected places, like post-Katrina New Orleans, before eventually ending with the Oaxaca commune in 2006. The second wave, the so-called movement of the squares that starts in 2011 with the Arab Spring, continues with Occupy Wall Street and its myriad successive movements across the world, and ends, I think thematically, with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015 with the crushing of Ferguson and the uprising in Baltimore, and finally will turn to the more recent wave of uprisings, best-reported, best-remembered for Hong Kong and George Floyd that stretched from Lebanon to Ecuador, and roughly from late 2017, early 2018 to probably about 2021. The periodization here is obviously more difficult, because unlike with the movements of the previous two cycles, we do not have the luxury of seeing where they led. We are, you know, still living through them. In a number of ways, we are still living in the sort of counter-revolution from that cycle in ways that make periodization difficult. It's possible the cycle of uprisings after that has begun already. I simply cannot say we will not be able to periodize it until after the period has sort of ended. Now, these uprisings, save for the special case of Argentina 2001, which we will talk about at length, since it is, I guess, the origin of the conception of Occupy that would become the core, if in extremely different forms, of the 2011 uprisings. These uprisings do not look like the uprisings of the past. The working class has stubbornly refused to cohere into its old fighting forms because those forms, the mass party, the workers' council, the mass syndicalist union, were born of structures and conditions of production that no longer exist as they once did. The old identity of the working class, that of a class that was building the future with its own hands and will one day inherit its own creations, is dead. In its wake, workers have tried over and over and over again to forge a new identity. In some cases, they found limited success. Mostly, they have failed. But in the successes and in those failures, they have defined the modern world. And that is the story we tell in this series. It is the story of Oaxaca and Argentina, of Boston and Bosnia, of 30 years of uprisings and the worlds we built and lost together. It is the story of how the old working class died and how a new class struggles to be born in its wake. It is the story of how conflict with the state came to be the sole force that could put us back into the streets. Once we had abandoned the occupation of the factories that had been our domain for almost a century. And it is a story that, even though many of us live through most or even all of its components, is already being forgotten. So that today, when I speak of the time that workers took a major North American city and held it for several years, it is a story of how conflict with the state changed the world. And it is a story of how conflict with the state changed the world. People simply don't know that I'm talking about Oaxaca. And that those events happened this century, in 2006, a time almost all of you listening to this were alive. And the economic and social fuels that built these last three cycles of uprisings have not gone away. In fact, the repression has only grown worse. And whether we like it or not, there will be another cycle of uprisings. The question, the question that we all face is this. What are you going to do about it? Skypop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target or Kroger. Tilted. It is tilted. So I post a task on AirTag. Set my budget and choose a local tasker to help. Suddenly the couch is inside the new place, the TV's mounted, and my drone has been retrieved from my neighbor's tree. AirTasker. Get anything done. Try fencing. It's fast, competitive, and even offered at the NCAA. Totally normal. And right now, Do More makes interesting and adventurous easy. 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 am joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Kim Kelly. Hello. That's right. For me. Oh, wait, no, sorry. You're Kim Kelly. I forgot for a second. Yeah, that's not, no, you're not Kim Kelly, Robert. Yeah. This episode, we are covering the week of September 9th to September 16th. Big news week. Oh, dear. Where do we even begin? Where, indeed. Let's start with a quick update on mail-in voting, because we've been covering this story the past few weeks. And on Sunday night, a second federal judge blocked the Postal Service's. It wasn't newly appointed. It wasn't, it wasn't actually on 9-11. I'm sorry. Yeah, I thought you were going to do a 9-11 joke. It was, it happened like two days after 9-11. So that wouldn't have been cool. Damn it. The Justice Department never gives us what we deserve. That's certainly true. But this second federal judge blocked the newly adopted final rule designed to be in compliance with Trump's executive order to restrict mail-in voting. This rule laid out new requirements for mail-in voting, including standardized envelopes and voter verification. Through a newly created online federal ballot mail portal. And if these new requirements, which were announced just a few months before the midterms, were not met, the Postal Service said that they would not accept or mail out ballots. But on Sunday, Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols found USPS lacked the authority to require states to submit a list of eligible voters to this online portal and only transport ballots to voters verified via this portal. Nichols wrote that if the rule was implemented, there would be a, quote, increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections. And this was kind of a double whammy for the Trump administration, because then the next day on Monday, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling, which is usually means bad news. But in this case, they denied the Trump administration's request to lift the first injunction. Blocking the implementation of the Postal Service's final rule. Finding that the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge. And this appears to be a 7-2 ruling with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting. Though Justice Kavanaugh wrote a one paragraph concurring opinion, which states, quote, There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections. Would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections, unquote. So that kind of goes against what Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols found in his, you know, other separate injunction. But this rule will not be implemented, at least for the upcoming midterm elections. Okay, do we want to move on to some of the small things? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, let's do all the small things. Yep. We found out this week that some of the drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline had come from inside Iraq, as opposed to coming from Yemen, right? Which is where many of the other attacks on Saudi Arabia that we're going to cover later have come from. Today, I heard these weren't coming from like the large militia groups that you would expect, but from allegedly smaller IRGC aligned groups. And a regional operations chief in Iraq has been fired as a result of this, right? Like as a result. As a result of the, I guess, the failure to address this. Secondly, the Yebeche, that's Yekine Mbeshwadane Sengale, the Sinjar resistance. units, have agreed to hand over their weapons to the Baghdad government and be integrated into the security forces. We'll find out if it's kind of a similar thing to when the SDF, as the SDF are now integrating into the Syrian military. If you're not familiar with the Yerushalayim, they are a Yazidi armed group with close ties to the YPG-YPJ, so the SDF in Syria or the Kurdish elements of the SDF specifically, I guess. The YPG grew significantly during the battle against the Islamic State and, of course, the Islamic State's genocide of the Yazidi people. Since then, it's been a pretty complicated security situation in the part of Iraq where they reside in their homeland. Yeah, especially since, as a result of what happened in the early stages of the Sinjar campaign, they have no reason to trust either the Peshmerga in Kurdistan or the government in Baghdad. Because both of them left them more or less on their own, right? Yeah, to die. Yeah. Left to die is what people told me when I was in the camps they fled to. Yeah, left to die is what they told me as well. And, of course, this is one of the moments when the SDF kind of, I guess, really entered the global. Yep. No, they weren't the SDF then, right? They were the YPG. No. Everyone called them just the PKK, right? Like, that's what all the Yazidis I talked to said. Well, some of the people who were those initial guerrillas who entered onto the mountain there probably had come from. From the HPG and the PKK, right? We can argue that at length, but it doesn't matter. It was not the Iraqi government nor the KRG, the Baghdad government nor the KRG. This is something that I'm going to keep following. Moving to Iran, the DOD this week declassified footage of the rescue of the weapons safety officer from Iran. This is the backseater in the plane that got shot down, right? The guy who was in Iran for a couple of days there where they did this crazy search. Rescue mission. Interestingly, they didn't blur out. Well, the people rescuing him were just visible as human shapes on a thermal. They did blur out the helicopter. We know they have several secret helicopters, but I found that kind of interesting. He did an interview where he claimed he hit the ground, or they claimed he hit the ground between 70 and 100 miles an hour. He's looking pretty good for hitting the ground that hard. He had a parachute malfunction, apparently. I don't know how we could ever confirm any of that's true. A FPV. A FPV drone from NATOGPDFs. They have a gender integrated drone unit, right? People have been saying it's an all women's drone unit. That's not true, but there are certainly women in the drone unit. There's many gender integrated drone units across various militaries. Drones love gender. You've heard it here, folks. Yes. The drone doesn't know gender. It struck a Burmese military yacht aircraft on the ground this week. This is a significant turning point for the spring revolution. They've been trying to do this for years. Following the fact that the drone was shot down, they've been trying to do Obama flotilla's demise and the captures of positions the junta has held since the 1990s by Karen forces this week the fighting season has really begun in Myanmar and it's not starting that well for the junta right they're also having pretty mixed success in attempting a offensive and recantate against the Arakan army there in Syria protests have begun all over the country as fuel and bread prices have risen this week so previously and certainly in the parts of Syria where Robert and I have been these were subsidized the government has hiked prices because fuel prices are more expensive everywhere right because of the war in Iran but nonetheless this is making things very hard for people the price of petrol went up about 29 percent cooking gas went up at 9 percent diesel went up more like 40 percent I think and people have been leading with like 40 percent fuel hike but we've got a lot of people who have been leading with like 40 percent fuel fuel hike but we've got a lot of people who have been leading with like 40 percent fuel hike we should be honest and like talk about the fuel that most people are using right nonetheless this is making things very difficult for people which is why they're in the streets and this is one of the first big protest movements that this new protest movements I should say in places that it considers to be part of its constituency that this new government has had to deal with obviously it's dealt with protests and has had armed conflict with other people within Syria since the transitional government came to power finally in the US a Massachusetts district court judge has blocked the Trump's administration's attempt to reduce student visas to four years previously they were trying to it seemed that they were trying to restrict f1 visas period to four years from what I read in this judgment and then you'd have to apply for an extension like if you're doing a PhD or if you're undergraduate just takes more than four years right the court went on a great length about like how this was a bad idea and then went we can't actually rule on whether it's a bad idea or not but we can say it violates the administrative procedure act which it does so that was the grounds on which they blocked it all right and now it's time for undeniably our biggest story of the week Kim Kelly please uh what do you have for us so in pop culture news everyone's talking about the Ed Sheeran Macklemore controversy earlier this week Sheeran who comedian Zach Woods accurately described on Instagram as an internationally tolerated I wouldn't put it quite that far what a big precision hit I love Zach Woods so much he man if I was single daddy call me that's all I'm gonna say but okay also British so first problem there honestly but like rude okay same with Ed Sheeran no not Zach Woods Ed Sheeran is British I would never lust after an Englishman wow geez ouch James taking strays left and right my god Kim entering the chat hard look brutal my first husband was from Wigan so I know a lot about what y'all get up to I want you to understand that you have not picked a representative sample Mack the bomb Pee-Wa I know what y'all get up to that accent does not fool me but anyway hard-hitting political news James this this ginger man made made headlines uh early this week when he said I don't know what to do I don't know what to do I don't know what to do I don't know what to do and he announced that Seattle rapper Macklemore was out as the supporting act on Sheeran's current loop world tour and the reason apparently Macklemore's vocal support for Palestine and refusal to stay silent about a genocide was just a bridge too far for the self-identified non-political pop star as well as the consortium of wealthy venue owners who are backing his tour so here's what happened during the tour's first two shows which took place at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium on September 4th and 5th Macklemore said the words free Palestine on stage first problem and performed his pro-Palestine song Heinz Hall which he released in 2024 in memory of Heinz Rajab and in support of the Gaza Solidarity encampment that was then active at Columbia University as you'll remember Rajab a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was brutally killed by the Israeli military along with six of her family members in January of that year has become one of the many symbols of the ongoing genocide in Gaza about which Macklemore has been extremely vocal not a big secret there and at the second MetLife show he used his platform to directly address his Jewish brothers and sisters as he said in the audience saying I quote criticism of Israel criticism of apartheid being against genocide is in no way a criticism of you this message is for peace love for all human beings to be treated with dignity respect and equality so the Israeli-American council did not agree we're like no absolutely not and publicly called on Sheeran to drop Macklemore from the tour and then Robert Kraft who owns the New England Patriots boo go birds as well as Gillette Stadium a venue which the tour was scheduled to stop later this week informed Sheeran that Macklemore had to go the rapper noted in his public Instagram statement about the matter that Sheeran had told him that Kraft called on his other stadium owner pals to increase the pressure to get Macklemore out of there and it worked according to Rolling Stone the tour promoter Messina Touring Group was informed by the owners of these venues that quote they will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup which would result in the cancellation of the tour and impact hundreds of thousands of fans so Macklemore got dropped and he released a very good statement about it in which he was really generous to his old buddy Sheeran like this was not just overly appearing like they're they're homies yeah as hard hard as that is to imagine although I guess I can't imagine Macklemore and Ed Sheeran getting along I just don't like to yeah there's some overlap there the Seattle the Seattle vibes are very strong yeah like just having a shitty tattoo off like it it makes sense yeah get Ben Affleck in there Kim has shared a picture of Ed Sheeran's tattoos it is rendered me speechless for the entire time I had not seen these oh dude unreal man like I'm going to put them in the zoom chat like is there a fucking Ghana flag on this guy there's so many things he's got Irish stuff it's a big lion he has a ketchup bottle lads on tour fuck off as a tattoo American I am just so mad when I see this stuff because like this man has more money than God a pokeball also he is so bad at finding people to do good line work that pokeball looks like shit pizza the proportions are fucked everything's like bled like fucking blown out on those uh those weird pizza picture frame pieces on the back like it's just bad ink look like there's a difference between a dumb tattoo and a shitty tattoo and this man because i had dumb tattoos yeah but like the lines work i've gotten tattooed in war zones but like at least they're competent i've watched you with a guy with a car battery yeah yeah like the lip tattoo i got in a west philly kitchen when i was 19 looks better than this man the stick and poke my buddy gave me some of these are watercolor guys as well so like they're not likely to get better over time is that a lion on his heart oh yeah dude i feel a little bad because i found his tattoo artist on instagram because i'm a nosy bitch and the guy's like he just knows his career is kind of over i feel like ed sheeran is just paying his rent with his bad tattoos because you can't come back from that yeah wow man god yeah these are i could do a whole you could do a dissertation on this shit someone should someone should yeah hit us up if you already have i mean i will do an entire episode about celebrity tattoos i'm wondering if maybe my grandparents were right about tattoos i could do a solid hour on ben affleck's back tattoo but that's a respectable that's that's a respectable shitty tattoo that's a whole back piece that's just a phoenix and like nothing else on his body like that's a beautiful choice that says only good things about ben affleck in my opinion that's an honest man's tattoo that's for him that's an honest man's god tattoo you know that's for him yeah yeah no one no one else would ever got a moment of enjoyment out of that piece oh my god poor j-lo so eddie sheeran very bad tattoos but also a worm person like all this is and ed sheeran it takes to instagram because everyone's extremely mad at him for doing something really just not cool and wimpy and unfortunate and embarrassing so his response he sold out his boy he blamed the concert promoters for dropping mac more saying it wasn't me it was these big mean people that i pay lots of money to book my shows yeah and then i have leverage over because they also they want to make money yeah he wrote in one section i am not complicit which is absolutely what someone who is complicit would saying my i am not complicit shirt has a lot of people asking questions yeah yeah man i don't know remember the snl skit with scarjo that was making fun of ivanka trump being like complicit oh god yeah right yeah deep cut like if you have to say i am not complicit like dog yeah you already fucked up yeah absolutely like complicit in trying to silence pro-palestinian sentiment just because he's a coward and also in bowing to pressure from billionaires like his buddy robert craft who casually a former epstein associate and also an old pal of sheeran's uh he performed at craft's wedding in 2022 to a very much younger woman so you know i guess that's uh being non-political hanging out with those type of people and uh you know sheeran he can't pretend to have been blindsided right like nakamura is pro-palestinian stance is kind of like all he's known for it's like the thing that he's doing right now which is cool we don't need another fish shop one was enough he's had a successful career like he had his big 2010 hits like as as mackamore said in his statement like he can afford to take this kind of hit he can afford to use his platform to speak out for palestinian people for people who are being being murdered and just destroyed while some people would rather keep politics out of everything and uh his relationship with him is kind of like he's like he's like he's like he's like he's like dates back to that era the two have collaborated on songs like ed sheeran was on a song that mackamore released for his daughter when his first kid was born in like 2015 so ed sheeran knows mackamore pretty well he's definitely aware that the rappers become one of the loudest pro-palestine voices in mainstream pop and sheeran is worth like 400 million dollars my god how did we let that happen internationally tolerated pop star oh my god all i knew is he did he had that song in that hobbit movie which is how i heard of him and then suddenly he's got almost half a billion dollars what the fuck did you people do in between the radio how did this happen there's wild stuff happening on the radio dude it's like a whole other world he is very much like america beast's pop star yeah okay it's dicey right but one of the reasons he he reached for to explain why he kicked his old buddy off of this tour for saying the forbidden forbidden words was that he had to keep touring because his crew depends on him ed sheeran employs a lot of people to bring his nonsense on the road and it is good to acknowledge that workers need to be paid no matter what kind of nonsense is happening but like eddie i feel like you could just pay me like just you just give money you got 400 million dollars i mean that is quite a lot of money you got a smorg pile of cash at your house like just fucking like i'm not casual about like the creators oh just pay for it yourself thing but like 400 million dollars you could pay everyone's salary for that show and still have basically 400 million dollars right send him to bali yeah you could also just score a huge dub like i would i don't think i've ever consciously heard an ed sheeran song but if you've done that i'd have been like okay cool here's the thing i don't like macklemore but i have been forced to be like oh wow that's a respectable person with moral courage and i'd have to say that about ed sheeran if he hadn't fucked up his response oh yeah you could make me i could be miserable right now ed i could be acknowledging you have worth as a human being but i don't have to because i'm not dude thank god yeah well no the way you know the ways in which he has fumbled this are just it's becoming not just like a blip it's becoming a generational fumble because his entire tour is just in the toilet like oh yeah hours after the news broke that macklemore got got four of ed sheeran's other supporting acts dropped off the tour in solidarity with macklemore including his backing band yeah his own band quiz tour funniest part like it's so good and they also were all like yeah also free palestine you fucking idiot he came out looking so bad he lost aaron roe who's irish lucas graham danish guy named phineas who is american but you know he's billy eilish's brother yeah i learned this against my will yesterday as well there you go well okay i'm clearly up on the the pop men yeah and billy eilish has spoken out against the genocide in in gaza and is uh pro-palestine so it makes sense sick you gotta wonder like he hired a bunch of irish musicians first of all and i was like surely they'll be quiet about politics yeah if the irish have a reputation it's for being quiet about stuff like this yeah famously especially palestine there isn't any kind of you know overlap any current solidarity efforts uh one of his backing band i found out through their statement as their founding members of the irish artists for palestine movement like what did you think you probably could have googled that ed i love he didn't he literally didn't google like anyone but well before making his cowardly little thing like where where does everyone else stand on this and you gotta wonder like this has never come up when you're at the bar like literally no one you've ever spoken to is like oh yeah so the news you're going to robert craft stadium right the guy who rents his plane to irish to deport people like the fucking wrapped patriot jets takes people to be fucking deported it tears families apart like you think your buddies aren't going to have a problem with this like wild it's that like like so many of the statements all set like we know he's giving us this huge opportunity like these are it's a stadium tour like there's going to be all these hundreds of thousands of fans and they all it's really it's really impressive that all these bands were just like look this is kind of gonna fuck you up but some things are more important and it also just makes age sharon look like even more of a bitch because he has so much money and like you can't even you can't be cool for one minute like all of your friends just bailed on you everyone can see you being the worst and macklemore just today he i think it was today he posted that he's donating all the money that he got paid for those two shows to six organizations that are working to help palestinians and he's donating all the money to the palestinian people so he's macklemore is like mackling even harder and better he's mackling more god damn it god damn it how did the how did the mackling the correct amount man like we were all wrong yeah yeah we all we were all wrong not familiar with his game but thankfully we were all pretty much right about ed sheeran at least there's that i guess like maybe i'll do a full episode about this at some point but i have found some people on the internet left response to this to be frustrating which is shocking right people who are never wrong culture is important anyone who is arguing with you seriously the culture is not important it's not a serious person like if we look at the movement against apartheid right and the role that culture and music and sport played in that and so like almost every other liberation movement in the 20th century had a cultural element to it if you're going to be like a fucking crass materialist in in 2026 just like don't engage with those people i know i'm engaging with them here but like it's a deeply unserious response like there's not everyone lives on twitter or discord like seeing yeah this news is on espn this news has broken containment from the lefty internet yeah and like any normal person who reads oh this guy just said some nice stuff and said free palestine and he got kicked off this big tour like that's kind of weird like why is that why can't you just say that yeah like i think they're even discussing it on fox news and jesse waters that you know sentient douchebag was like well you just said free palestine i mean that's allowed freedom of speech tucker carlson's going to endorse macklemore next oh fuck this is the trouble right all's left to say you know so what have we learned it's always free palestine ed sheeran is a worm person again to quote our internet daddy zach woods and macklemore you know just just keep on macklin babe you're doing amazing you know what there's a there's a non-zero chance we will have an advert that includes the music of ed sheeran after this if that happens to you it's your own fault you know what there's a there's a non-zero chance we will have an advert that includes the music of the cookies in your browser yeah and we're back let's start with saudi arabia on september 8th saudi oil structure in the jizan region was targeted and struck by houthi missiles at least 73 people were wounded and oil assets in the abha and najran regions were hit as well nasa said satellite show significant damage to the jazan refinery and other infrastructure this is significant because jazan is located on the saudi side of the red sea which provides an alternate route for them to transit their fuel and avoid the strait of hormuz despite the trump administration's claims and some reports that you know the traffic has been trending up as the u.s navy escort ships through traffic at the strait is still disastrously unreliable in 2025 about 21 million barrels a day were moving through the strait at this point in time and the strait is still a disaster. that year and right now we're barely breaking 5 million barrels most days right so that's a significant drop still any infrastructure that has allowed saudi arabia to bypass the strait of hormuz has thus assumed extra importance in the last couple of months so these strikes have at least temporarily forced saudi arabia to shut down their east-west pipeline and this is one of the largest like pieces of oil infrastructure on the planet it goes across some very high mountains and it's it's effectively impossible to defend in in its entirety right it is too big to be adequately defended either from small infiltration teams which hasn't happened yet but very well might at some point in the future you know they've got some options for that but right now they're they're doing quite well striking them with ballistics and drones per an article in the new arab quote the kingdom is still able to export part of its oil which is piped to yanbo and then exported either via the suez canal or egypt's where it is carried by another pipeline to the eastern mediterranean the other option for saudi arabia is embarking on a dangerous journey through the hormuz strait where iran has repeatedly attacked commercial shipping and you know how long is the east-west pipeline going to be shut down i think you'll probably hear fairly soon maybe even by the time you hear this that they've got it going again the problem is we're not likely to see it returning to anything like full capacity and it's going to be going off again like they're going to keep hitting it right is is is my contention so this is not and it's like the straight right this doesn't mean that the the pipeline shut down for good and likewise when you hear they're shipping stuff through it again that doesn't mean the problem is over right it means this is yet another piece of world critical oil infrastructure that is kind of flickering on off like your router when the internet's fucked up right like that's that's the problem the world is dealing with right now so this adds fuel to what has already been a long building calamity and i don't need to inform anyone of like how critical oil and gas is to the basic infrastructure that makes civilization the thing i am focusing on a lot right now because it really concerns me is what we're seeing happen with fertilizer costs fertilizer costs have skyrocketed as a result of the shedding off of the straight already earlier this year there were serious worries that this would cause a massive food crisis in parts of southeast asia and africa which relied heavily on nitrogen shipped through the straight of hormuz to make fertilizer and the good news is that the worst of this immediate crisis may have been averted or at least has been averted for the present time although not without cost as this piece in the financial times explains quote egypt and nigeria increased their urea exports by 98 and 81 percent respectively over that period according to the international trade center a joint agency of the un and the wto the u.s and russia grew their share in key markets the data shows while china also increased its exports analysts warned that fertilizer prices were rising to unsustainable levels for some of the world's poorest countries new suppliers emerged and supply change adjusted to a certain degree but there has been a cost for many developing countries the challenge has shifted from finding supplies to export them pamela coke hamilton executive director of the itc told the financial times and so what you're seeing here is basically a number of countries including you know nigeria the united states china have kind of responded to this crisis by massively increasing the exports of like things that are ingredients to fertilizer that have been cut off by the straight and that's allowed farms to keep going and the immediate beers to be sort of allayed but it's it's come with a tremendous cost right and as a result you are seeing import prices go up and import prices rise for urea alone amongst about 70 percent in q2 of 2026 and in some parts of the world like brazil the cost of importing sulfur has risen by almost 200 percent what we're looking at here is basically we can keep food production at the levels that are necessary to sustain the population which was something people were worried about but cost of food is going to rise and keep rising massively right and this is not just tied to like fertilizer one of the other issues for in terms of ag prices right now is that diesel has jumped up by an absolutely insane amount right like diesel fuel has gotten way more expensive than other kinds of fuel and diesel fuel is what big ag in the united states uses to fuel combines and tractors and everything else that you need to grow and harvest two of the largest commodities that our country produces soybeans and corn per an article by the ap american diesel prices are now 60 higher than they were before the u.s and israel launched their war against iran in late february when the national average was about 376 per gallon according to triple a prices quickly climbed as the cost of crude oil the main ingredient in diesel as well as gasoline skyrocketed amid disruptions to tanker traffic in the strait of hormuz farms that are cash strapped they're the ones that are having to figure out what to cut to make this work paul mitchell an agriculture professor at the university of wisconsin said there are a lot of farms facing that and this is again not a there's not going to be food in the immediate future problem but this is a food is going to continue getting more expensive and you're also this is going to contribute to a much-needed increase in food prices in the near future so we're going to have to wait and see what happens in the next couple of weeks and we're going to have to wait and see what happens in the next couple of weeks and we're going to have to wait and see what happens in the next couple of weeks you start seeing like farms use less of particularly phosphates and that kind of builds up like a level of debt that you know you can do that for a few seasons but eventually it's going to start affecting yields right and that's all kind of colliding with the fact that as a result of climate change particularly in europe you have like massive amounts of crops like wheat barley maize and oats not just europe the united states too but you're going to have to wait and see what happens in the you've seen huge crop losses that are kind of unprecedented in in recent times almost as a result of climate change so all these kind of things are forming together into a perfect storm for what i think is going to be both increasing for the foreseeable future food costs in the united states not really shortages in the united states but there are going to be shortages increasingly in other parts of the world this is not a gets better soon problem or collapses right away problem this is a things are going to keep trickling worse and worse than you're going to see sudden food shocks kind of thing so i i have my eyes on this situation quite a lot it does worry me and it is all rooted back fundamentally not just to our war of choice in iran but to climate change as well although those are both very tied i don't know in less depressing and existentially frightening news the houthis shot down a saudi f-15 today there's a photo of the wreckage and it i don't think there's a lot of doubt that it's legitimate in a statement a houthi military spokesman uh said that the group shot down a saudi f-15 today and it's a photo of the wreckage and it i don't think there's a lot of doubt that it's legitimate in a statement a houthi military spokesman uh said that the group shot down a saudi f-15 fighter that was carrying out hostile operations in the airspace of marib province and that the jet had been targeted by a locally made air to air missile it doesn't look like and i certainly haven't seen any convincing evidence that this had anything to do with the anthropic story james mentioned earlier there's other kinds of locally made air to air missiles right that yeah we're not talking about that we're probably talking about like something that was that was rebuilt or repurposed right yeah they have a history of doing that yeah they've been doing that for a while this is not it's it's not all ai don't like just conflate these two stories in your head and think that they're evidence of the same thing right yeah agreed uh it's also worth noting uh that the same day that the houthi shot down that f-15 saudi arabia accused the houthis of attempting a drone-based attack on mecca which they say was shot down by saudi air defenses colonel turkey al-malki spokesperson for the saudi coalition in yemen called attacks on mecca a red line the houthis were previously accused of having tried to strike the holy city back in july of 2017 but claimed to have been aimed at the houthis and the houthis were previously accused of having tried to strike the aiming for king fahd airbase and they deny these new allegations as well saying there is no threat from yemen to the holy sites our operations target its oil facilities and military facilities and are far from holy sites i don't know that i think the houthis really try i can certainly believe something like hitting mecca because it fucked up or something but like i don't really think they would go after just like random shit in mecca that doesn't seem like the houthi move i don't think it would really help them in their cause but you know i guess anything's possible yeah it does seem like a weird one so i'm going to talk a little bit about the united states war of choice on iran and and generally what's happening in iran i guess i want to to begin with on the day that we're recording which is wednesday the 16th of september i guess i'll just add a little note here if you see things that are auto translated especially on eggs.com the everything website to say the 25th of september that is because grok has not grasped that a different calendar is used in iran and so the months won't line up but what we're looking at here is a general strike that was called today on the 16th of september by an alliance of kurdish political groups they started talking about this a few days ago uh it's a coalition that includes the kdpi the pak pjak habat and two of the kamala parties the strikes which are happening today right and there are pictures of like closed markets closed stores chiefly in eastern kurdistan right the kurdish region of iran the strikes are in part a memorial to jinnah amini jinnah amini is sometimes referred to by her persian name which is masha but her family called her jinnah right she was kurdish and that is important today the 16th is the anniversary of her murder by iranian security forces on the day before the anniversary of her murder iranian security forces began flooding her hometown i mean that both a literal and metaphorical sense they released water from a nearby dam to block access to the cemetery where she is buried and then blocked access themselves with security forces to the main entrance previously her own family have not been able to visit her grave on the anniversary of her murder meanwhile in iran's prisons some women prisoners have gone on hunger strike to mark this anniversary if you're not familiar with jinnah amini she was 22 years old when she was killed by iranian morality police after having been detained for improperly wearing her hijab on a trip to tehran she was kurdish and we can see from other photos that she she only wore hijab when it was something like she felt like she had to do right like uh we can see her sometimes at like family weddings and things in traditional kurdish dress her murder of course sparked a massive protest cycle which took up the jinn jinn azali slogan which is used by the kurdish freedom movement uh it means woman life freedom the words woman and life are like etymologically connected in kurdish unfortunately the slogan has kind of been divorced from the revolutionary context yep and kind of commodified by a lot of people who who either think it came from iran or are ignorant of the uh the woman's revolution in kurdistan perhaps also i mean there was that like hillary clinton thing right hillary clinton yeah hillary clinton has bought the film rights to the book daughters of kabani which is uh about uh the ypga luckily we have not seen a hillary clinton take on that yet we'll see yeah yeah yeah there's still time uh yeah it'd be real good if she could do something useful uh for people in kabani finally another perfect role for chris pratt god uh what's that lady gina caruso yeah hopefully not the protest cycle resulted in a massive outbreak of state violence right i have met several people who lost friends family members loved ones uh who were tortured or threatened with torture themselves uh both at the border here and at the border of korea in the darien gap this call for protests is brave because the iranian state hasn't lost its capacity for violence against its own people right it has continued to execute people it has continued to rule through fear throughout the united states bombing campaign the united states if that was even a goal has not been successful in doing that this call for strikes comes at the same time as baffle talabani ahead of the puk uh one of the most influential parties in southern kurdistan met with iran's foreign affairs minister in tehran this will likely signal an even harder time to come for anti-regime iranian kurdish groups so the raj alati groups groups from eastern kurdistan that we've spoken about have camps in southern kurdistan in iraqi kurdistan in the kurdistan autonomous region right last time talabani had a meeting with iran they moved into their camps since then iran has bombed those camps including this week it seems like the iranian state has been a bit more aggressive than the iranian state this time they might have to move entirely out of kurdistan i heard there's a plan to send them to albania but i haven't been able to confirm that the puk is in a very difficult position here right it got absolutely battered by iranian drone strikes and the united states did very little to help it right trump has this whole animus against kurdish people that we've discussed at length before here and so it's really in a very difficult position we also found out this week that the united states consulate in abil sustained damage during one of the iranian's drone attacks this is part of a more broad realization of the damage done to u.s bases and assets as the dod's inspector general report was released this week we also learned that quote the department of war estimated the cost of operation fuck what do they call it epic it's not epic fail but that's what it is in my head no it's not fury epic fury epic fury that's the one operation epic fury video game ass war yeah operation epic fury to be 33.4 billion as of june 29th and that from february 28th to june 30th 7 u.s service members were killed in action and seven were killed in non-hostile events during oef combat operations during that same period 417 service members were wounded in action as we uh we commented things have not been going great for the saudi-backed government of yemen they lost the port city of moher and mayun an island in the babal mendab strait this is obviously an issue as robert spoke about right because it will continue to see shipping harassed and will further lock down global trade according to the united nations 80 000 people have already been displaced by the sort of uh resumption of full-scale hostilities in yemen talking of yemen this week we found out via anthropic's threat intelligent report that the houthis had been talking to claude specifically they've been talking to claude about the development of ballistic missiles their report identifies them as a group in northern yemen they tried to develop quote a guided rocket that used a commodity phone class flight computer with final phase homing guidance as well as a multi-stage ballistic missile with stated goal range above 2 000 kilometers and a multi-variant missile referred to as the r2000 that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant anthropic said our safeguard blocked many of our their requests but not all of them the actors used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards including hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for and they split their work across multiple sessions so no single session revealed their full intent this is fairly funny right like uh they were like on there being like what if i wanted to build a hypersonic glide food delivery vehicle for better door dashing and uh off claude went they know that the group test had a rocket and they know that it failed because a few hours after the test fire they logged black back into claude to ask why it had failed oh dear that's fun that is very funny it also doesn't point to surface-to-air missiles this report is bonkers i think we will do a whole episode on it we see chinese weapons companies pretending to be u.s firms trying to develop a whole pitch deck for an anti-torpedo system like including asking for like a slide a pitch deck slide and technical we also see russia trying to use it to build software from autonomous drone storm that they trained on combat footage to avoid russian systems and to geolocate and attack ukrainian drone operators this is the future that we live in now that's super concerning yeah robert and i will do an episode on this because like obviously robert and i have both spoken to people in myanmar at great lengths who are like attempting to develop weapon systems outside of the world of military industrial complex right yeah yeah yeah but uh yeah this is this is pretty scary shit there's been a lot of ai kind of news and a frenzy around ai in the news this past week especially in the wake of a high-profile employee resignation at anthropic citing safety alignment concerns which also you know follows the widely publicized hugging face incident hack by open ai agents just this past week multiple tech ceos including dario amadei maltman and elon musk have joined in calling for a regulatory quote-unquote slowdown of ai development but not all tech ceos agree on this others like palantir's alex carp and meta ceo mark zuckerberg as well as the nvidia ceo have called for the opposite zuckerberg has said to accelerate rather than slow down ai development as his own ai model muse has struggled to catch up to where and open ai are at earlier this week alex carp told cnbc we can't pause ai development because of the threat of china and because ai will be a quote-unquote bonanza for the u.s economy but you see this china thing a lot as one of the main reasons why we cannot enforce a quote-unquote slowdown or a pause on development is because then china could get ahead this is one of the justifications that people in the trump administration have been saying to oppose efforts for a regulatory slowdown trump has very loudly said this the past few days truthing that the only quote controls or guardrails ai needs is a strong and smart high iq president and has compared this quote-unquote ai hoax to the global warming hoax and house speaker mike johnson has repeatedly shut down calls this week for Congress to take action and regulate AI. They can self-police. They can self-regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious national security implications for every American family. A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders introduced legislation to ban the development and deployment of quote-unquote super-intelligent AI, with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons. But this legislation also would temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body can establish safety guidelines. Now, the tech CEOs are against this idea for multiple reasons. One, it would hurt their bottom line. They don't actually want a pause. They want this quote-unquote slowdown. Also, they don't want to face 20 years in jail for developing this extremely dangerous technology, which they are, you know, already doing. In an episode next week, I'll go into some more detail about what this proposed quote-unquote slowdown actually amounts to. It's basically self-regulating, while also trying to get the government to weaken antitrust laws to strengthen open AI and Anthropic's monopoly over this whole industry, right? Because obviously, they have their own incentives when they're calling for regulation. This regulation that they're calling for is going to be friendly to them as the big titans in the industry. People on both the right and the left have accused the government of doing this. They've accused open AI and Anthropic of trying to employ a form of regulatory capture. This is something that Linda Kahn has addressed, the former FTC chair, who posted a statement on Sunday explaining that even without, you know, new regulation, the government already has the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws. Unquote. So like I said, I'll go into more detail about that in a bit. But first, I want to thank you all for watching. I'll talk about this later next week in its own episode. But this is something that I'm sure you're going to hear a lot about these next few weeks leading into the midterms as the White House and Congress will start meeting with these tech CEOs about regulation and other, even local municipalities are planning to do the same, including here in New York City. Let's go on an ad break and then have two more little news stories before we close. We are back. So last week, the Republicans held their first ever midterm convention. And unfortunately, none of us could attend. Or rather, fortunately, none of us could attend. We saved a little bit of our sanity. Senator John Fetterman sent in a video message to the midterm RNC. They showed Hassan Piker's thirst to trap on the jumbotron. Oh, yeah. And during Trump's speech, the president promised to give every U.S. citizen adult $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in history, we've never had anything like what's happening. But because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000. I'm definitely filing this on. How is this legal? Is this not just bribing the population? Oh, yeah. I mean, like, Trump knows that it's literally impossible for the Republicans to hold on to the House or the Senate, so this will never actually happen. But still, it's crazy. And a few days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, quote, if you want more money in your pockets, you gotta keep Republicans in charge. It would be really funny if the Democrats won both houses and then pushed through a $5,000 bribe to the American people. Biden bucks, baby. Just nuke the economy, fucking a trillion and a half dollars in added spending. Crazy bullshit. Just see what happens. Another really interesting tidbit about this is that according to an Ipsos poll from September 14th, the public seems largely negatively polarized against a free $5,000. Because we know it's a scam. Because it's obvious. Because he's a liar. It is a remarkable place to have got when the economy is really shit and people are struggling to be polling badly of giving people free money. Because he's our lying-ass, lying-ass president. It's just like loan shark vibes. Yeah. 63% of respondents said they oppose the $5,000 dividend check from Trump. Only 17% said they support it. My God. Pretty, pretty wild. You gotta be so bad at your job to get Americans to hate money. Damn. $10 gasoline. Price of eggs. They try to give away free puppies and people being like, no, they have, like there's something wrong with them. Now, there is one other thing that happened at the midterm convention, which is, it's something I've been keeping an eye on because this is, this has been a, a kind of pet issue of like the gross racist online right for years. And they're pushing it more right now. At the midterm convention, DHS secretary Mark Wayne Mullen told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson that Ilhan Omar married her brother, echoing the years old conspiracy theory, which Omar has, has called absurd and offensive. Mark Wayne Mullen added, quote, something is going to happen. We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with. But all of this we're investigating, unquote. She's been a citizen for mad long, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like what could you eat? The conspiracy theory goes that she, she married someone to help bring them into the country before splitting. Like fraud. I'm fairly sure the form that you fill out for that has a question about that. I'm not absolutely certain. Also, like you can sponsor family members on a form I-130. If you're a U.S. citizen, you don't have to marry them. A few weeks ago, Trump did hint towards this by posting an article on Truth Social with a headline claiming that Omar was the subject of ICE, quote unquote, enforcement proceedings. With this article, detailing that ICE denied a FOIA request for documents related to the immigration fraud allegations against Omar, citing an ongoing investigation. Earlier this week, after the convention, both Tom Homan and H.E. Todd Blanche have also referenced this, quote unquote, ongoing criminal investigation. So I guess to wrap up, I want to talk about a couple more DHS-OIG reports that dropped this week. One was of the Chrome immigration, and the other was of the DHS-OIG, and the other was of the DHS-OIG, The one I want to focus on is the OIG report. It's called, quote, Unannounced Inspection of ISIS Florida Soft-Sided Facility, brackets, quote, Alligator Alcatraz, unquote. They dropped this report on Friday, September the 11th, as one does when one wants to report to get loads of attention and coverage. The report found that employees had no idea what the standards for detainees were, let alone obeying them. Every housing unit was overcrowded, sometimes three times more than it should be in order to achieve the 75 feet per square person standard. Detainees were deprived of any stimulating leisure time and not given access to legal materials. Perhaps the most disgusting find is the use of these tiny cages, quote, Between July 17th, 2025 and January 18th, 2026, FSFF, that's Soft-Sided Facility, Florida, right, confined 79 detainees in small, metal enclosures, each offering about 18 square feet of floor space for periods ranging from several minutes to nearly two hours, a practice unlike any OIG team has observed in ICE facilities. The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment. That's one way of saying it. These are cages that are 4 feet 3 inches by 4 feet 3 inches by 7 feet 9 inches, and the staff called them calming areas. You have to see the pictures of these. Like, you should put on yourself to look up, if you haven't already, like, look up pictures of these tiny cages. They're reminiscent of shit I saw in Sachsenhausen, outside of Berlin. Like, that's not an exaggeration. They sell bigger dog crates for training your dog than these calming areas. Yeah, like, you couldn't lie down. And it's a metal crate in Florida. It's a cage, yeah. Some of them are outside. Yeah, exposed to the sun. Yeah, I think that the one I saw that was outside was under a little roof area, so they'll still be unbearably hot, right? They also state that detainees told us they did not have access to clean drinking water and could not clean their plastic cups. Drinking potentially contaminated drinking water from unclean cupboards cups could negatively impact detainee health something i have also heard myself from detainees they were allowed to shower three times a week they were only allowed toothpaste when staff members applied it to their issued toothbrush this is a facility designed to dehumanize people right like yeah i have been to prison camps all over the world and no longer prison camps from like brutal dictatorial regimes that is what this is this facility won't last long because it's already closed but uh one day this shit will be a museum where we send our children to understand the fucked up shit that we did to people and they will feel a sense of shame but florida does not indeed it is not something that seems to concern dhs because quote dhs stated it did not have a space at fssf dhs indicated florida detained illegal aliens at fssf pursuant to its delegated authority under section 287g of the immigration nationality act and therefore the state maintains authority of day-to-day operations at the facility and that quote dhs stated a section 287g agreement does not give the federal government authority over the physical operation to any facility or over the state employees except to the extent in which they are performing the function of immigration officer this is a crazy argument right like there are ice logos all over this facility uh these people are in immigration detention for a federal misdemeanor in some cases for other cases just for not compliance with with immigration regulations right maybe some have committed crimes or misdemeanors in florida but they are not being detained by a court in florida for an offense in florida florida is a contractor here just like geo group is a contractor how are they not performing the function of an immigration officer they're performing the function of a prison guard right so like someone like a geo group yeah prison guard right but like but there are ice immigration officers there there absolutely are right what's worrying about this is yeah this facility is closed but the baker facility for example is run under 287g there are other people detained under 287g and the line that dhs is taking is that there is no minimum other than that which the state decides to enforce in terms of the quality of these people's food the way they can be mistreated the way they can be tortured like this is really alarming and that is what i want people to take home from this like the conditions were bad and dhs is asserting that there's nothing they can do about it like it's one of these uh pie in the sky legal arguments that the trump administration has increasingly been making and sometimes sticks a landing on and this one is wild there is no minimum is such a chilling phrase yeah like i don't think it's possible to say how this is immigration detention under biden was fucking inhumane like i spoke to hundreds i've interviewed someone on this show who had just left immigration detention and it was horrific then right they call it the ice box because they keep that place super cold and it is something that i didn't well i mean i'm constantly uh i've underestimated how terrible shit could be in this country but uh it has got worse and that should be a national shame well that is all of our stories for this edition of executive disorder yes kim kelly where can people find more of your work anywhere online or uh maybe in flesh space i don't know at a bookstore perhaps oh yeah i have some flesh space they're at flesh give me a break okay yeah absolutely not like we're like we're all internet people i've been reading these anthropic reports all day it's the only way i can think now matrix oh my god but if you do like old school analog books i have created some of those you can find fight like hell and fight to win the kids version of my radical labor history it is out there um the paperback is so much cheaper buy it for some kids radicalism i'm freelance so i am a labor journalism mercenary you can find me all over the place and as of fairly recently sometimes i pop up here in the the cool zone so yeah you can google me and we can argue about tattoos on blue sky or instagram and uh also i just wanted to say there was a little update from robert craft and gillette and all that how cool after macklemore had posted that he was going to donate a million dollars to these palestinian organizations robert craft posted actually before that happened i talked to ed and we decided we're both going to donate two million dollars uh also i've been really cool to palestinians so meh so so internet bullying works is uh my final sort of takeaway for you guys yeah yeah if you want to email us uh about ed sheeran's tattoos don't send them to me yeah yeah if you can find kim at i write okay on social media platforms everywhere god damn it but um if you would like to email us about a story tip you can do so it is cool zone tips at proton dot me we reported the news i think the newsroom guy got the newsroom guy got like divorced or he's like broke up with his like girlfriend he did he and amanda seyfried are getting divorced and the rumor is it's because she's actually into women so good yes so pour one out honey good for her godspeed we reported the news hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions thanks for listening what if your soda actually did something for you introducing skypop protein soda with 10 grams of complete protein zero sugar and 45 calories skypop protein soda offers four delicious flavors with big taste and real benefits light refreshing and ready for wherever your day takes you it's anytime protein that helps you reach higher skypop protein soda reach for the sky get your skypop protein soda now at target or walmart summer me let's host people outside more reality the patio furniture is still in the box the ac just started making a weird noise and the pool flamingo still needs to be inflated so i open air tasker post the task set my budget and pick a tasker to help suddenly the furniture's assembled the ac is fixed and the flamingo's floating which means i am too go to airtasker.com or download the app airtasker get anything done are your kids bored with the same old sports try fencing the olympics olympic and paralympic sport that mixes speed strategy and fun it's like chess meets cardio quick feet quick decisions and a satisfying beat when you score a point kids teens and adults can start anytime fencing is one of the fastest growing ncaa sports with new colleges adding programs every year many clubs have 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