It Could Happen Here Weekly 256

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season two of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers, and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received scholarship many to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. The best podcast in the world. It's really funny, I think it's time. Really? Yeah, yeah, I think statistics just came back and we're one of the funniest two guys with mics. And that's pretty hard to beat right now, but it's true, actually. Why should people listen to us tell them? Well, we're trendy, we're funny, we're topical. You get all your news here. Not, you know, the facts, but maybe our takes on it. And everything in between. So listen to Out of Character on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get worse with Kyle Pru on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Darryl Bell. And I'm Cadeem Harrison. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcasts on the "Black Effect" podcast network, a different world view with Darryl and Cadeem. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lines a different world. We're sharing never before heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. Listen to a different world view with Darryl and Cadeem every Thursday, from the "Black Effect" podcast network on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when romance gets a little monstrous? On Radio 831, a romance podcast, join us. And John Abasker and Tyler McCall, as we host our own "Monster Romance" extravaganza. We're joined by the villain edit author Rosie Dannan and sent in object romance expert Gracie Delgado to explore with these unexpected love stories can reveal about desire, fantasy, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool, so media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello everyone, and welcome to "Cat Happen Here." My name is Adal Kurt, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I wanted to talk about the Israeli elections that are coming up. International Crisis Group published a Q&A on the topic, which I found useful and will link in the show notes. At the top of that Q&A, there's a photo of a Palestinian farmer in Romtesse village outside the Tawbaullah, walking past his olive groves, and hanging over him are two giant campaign banners. One is Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other is for Gadi Eisenkant, the former army chief who wants Netanyahu's job. That Palestinian farmer can't vote for either of them. He can't vote in this election at all. But whoever wins will help decide whether settlers come for his olive groves this harvest, whether the army stands there and watches, and whether there's a road outside of his village next year. That's the Israeli election in one picture. It's coming up on October 27th, and for Palestinians, the options range from bad to catastrophic. Now let me explain why without bearing the lead. Every serious contender in the Israeli election supports the occupation, and nobody is promising to end the war on Gaza. Jewish currents also published an explainer on the Israeli elections that I'll link in the show notes. And the news editor of Jewish currents writes in that piece that he almost ran the election guide under the headline, the vote doesn't matter. But he says when he talked to Palestinians, he changed his mind. Although the Israeli political landscape is abysmal, Palestinians will suffer different impacts based on who wins. And so obviously they're watching this closely. It comes down to two names. It's about Ben Gavir and Beza Bit of Smotrich. Ben Gavir runs the national security right now, which means the police and the prisons and he's responsible for a lot of the abuses that have happened. At Beza No Smotrich, which is the head of the religious Zionist party, he's the finance minister, and he has enormous sway over the West Bank. Netanyahu losing doesn't end the occupation, but it almost certainly takes those two out of their ministries. If you're a political prisoner or a farmer in some of the rural areas in the West Bank, that isn't abstract. An organizer in Yafa, Abidavish had the told Jewish currents that nobody is talking about change anymore. People are just asking, "How do we just survive this point in history?" That's very bleak, and it's also realistic. Crisis group frames this as a contest between different right-wing ways of running a country that already controls everything from the river to the sea. The occupation isn't on the ballot, but I think its intensity is. The next government that will take over in Israel starts from a very different baseline than four years ago. Israel has taken more land. Gaza and the West Bank have been squeezed into smaller, smaller areas. Cities and refugee camps have been raised, and at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Carst's script count, but we know that this is an undercount. The settler movement will stay active, no matter who wins. So the question isn't whether things get better, but the question is how much worse and how fast. Now, let me explain some basics for those of us who don't follow Israeli politics closely. The Kineset, the Israeli legislature, has 120 seats, and you need 61 to govern. A party basically needs 3.25% of the vote to get into the Kineset, which is about four seats. Follow short of that, and your votes are essentially burned because they simply vanish, and about a dozen political lists are expected to clear that bar. And there are basically two teams or two-ish. Team one is Netanyahu's block, Likud. And Bank of Yers party, which is openly gahanist, and Smotruc's religious-itis party, running this time with another one. Mosheh Feiglin has set on camera the head of the hoot that he wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians, and that's who the religious-itis party is running with. And then the two-hority parties, Shaz and United Torah Judaism. So that's the coalition that has governed since December 2022. One that Christ's script says is widely seen as the most extreme in Israel's history. Their shared agenda, as the past few years have made clear, I think, is to expand settlements, push towards formal annexation of the West Bank, stay in southern Lebanon, and push the Palestinians entirely out of Gaza. Likud's slogan this year translates to the right or Palestine. Basically that either you're voting for the right wing or you're voting for Palestinians. The message is that any other government would hand Palestinians a state. This brings us to team two, and maybe you'll see why this slogan is funny. The second team, so to speak, the opposition, is led by Gadi Eisenkot and his new party, Yashar. Eisenkot is a former army chief. In 2006, he formulated the Dahlia doctrine, basically the idea that Israel wins by using overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure. After October 7th, he set as an observer in the war cabinet, and he lost the Sun in Gaza, which earned him real public sympathy. On Palestine, Eisenkot has called the two-state solution "delusional," and he says he's very much believes in settling the West Bank. But he has criticized settler violence in the E1 project, and says he'd clear outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Not to be clear under international law, all of them are illegal, but they like to split hairs, these Israeli politicians. Alongside him is Nafdali Bennett. He's a former prime minister and former head of the Yashar settler council. He's running out of slate with Yaya Lapite, and Bennett openly supports annexing area C of the West Bank. Then there's Abu Durali Burman, who's far right, but he's personally done with Netanyahu, and has floated the idea of handing Palestinians in a shrunken territory over to Jordan. So again, not give them their own state, just hand them over to someone else. The Jordanians, I'm sure, have not been consulted on this. And then there's the "central left," the Democrats, the labor Moritz merger, led by Yaya Golan. They're the only Jewish party that even nominally backs two states, but it's two states with long-term Israeli security control over all of it, and they're not talking about now or in the meeting-game term feature. They're basically saying maybe a Palestinian state someday policed by the Israeli army. Now look at what the opposition actually attacks Netanyahu on. They're attacking him on October 7th, and who's to blame? They're attacking him on the cost of living, and the draft exemptions for herity is really citizens. When they criticize his wars, it's not because he's overseen war crimes or genocide, but because he's too soft. Lapeid said, for example, that Israel should have. bombed Iran's oil and gas facilities. And Bennett once got the list that doesn't enemy state. Here's how I would put it. The Palestinian question isn't contested in this election, because it's been settled within Jewish Israeli public opinion. There's near consensus on keeping security control over the Palestinians. The actual debate is about the style of control. Do we want something managed quiet out of sight or do we want something extreme and turbocharged? Now at this point, you might be asking, well, is it 20% of the country Palestinian? These are Palestinian citizens of Israel? Where do they fit? Saudi Aboujjada, who heads butted the Palestinian Nationalist Party, is running with two other parties on the joint list. But Saudi Aboujjada himself is not on the ballot anymore. And I think what happened to him reflects the condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Right after October 7th, he wrote an article analyzing what had just happened, calling the attack a significant historical event. And Ben Gavir's camp then moved to disqualify him under a basic law amendment that bars candidates who support armed struggle and cite racism or reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Now Aboujjada denied supporting armed struggle. He said he was analyzing the events and explaining their significance. He's a lawyer who works on human rights and has decades of experience attempting to work within the system in Israel to represent Palestinian citizens of the state. I'll link in the show notes and interview he did with Peter Bynarch for the podcast Occupied Thoughts. You can hear the outrage in his voice over the accusations he was faced with. And by Ben Gavir, no less, someone with a criminal record with multiple convictions for offenses including incitement to terrorism and racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Well, as you might expect, the attorney general backed the ban anyway. And here's where it gets really bad. This wasn't just the far right, instigating a campaign against one of the few Arab Palestinian politicians and getting away with it. This was the situation where the whole Zionist spectrum got behind the ban, including Yehr Golan of the Democrats. So the supposed left. And of course, here's where the Israeli left and right agree, oppressing Palestinians. And I want to note here, apparently, there is a lot in Israel that bars incitement to racism, but apply that law evenly and half or maybe more of the current governing coalition would be in trouble. But of course, the difference between them and Aboujada is that he's Palestinian. And I'm not even saying he did incite to racism. I'm just saying, this is their accusation of him. Now, the Supreme Court was clearly going to uphold the ban. Sami Aboujada mentions how the judges felt threatened themselves. And then they also threatened him with more severe legal action if he tried to oppose this. So earlier this month, he withdrew and he was trying to avoid a precedent that would make it easier to knock out Palestinian candidates later. The far right has tried this for decades and this is one of the times it's worked. Orly Neu, a candidate for the joint list and a ballot member told Jewish currents that many supporters wanted him to stay in and basically make the court own this decision. Aboujada, the Palestinian organizer of Femialfa that I mentioned earlier, he's Sami's relative. He described people waking up sad and humiliated on top of frightened. I moderated a panel with Aboujada for Jewish currents live recently where he reiterated the sentiment, how heartbroken he was over Sami's decision. And this has ignited the debate again among Palestinians about whether there's any point in participating in this really system if you're a citizen. Because if you stay in, you lend legitimacy to a rigged game. Or you exit and you lose the one lever you might have. Palestinian citizens are being asked to keep voting in a system that basically doesn't want them and showed them where the line is. Now there's a parallel attempt to disqualify the entire joint list, the number of error parties and ROM, which is an Islamist party, as whole parties and that attempt failed. So they're still on the ballot. But after election day, they'll be negotiating with the same parties that help push their leader out. So which of the Jewish Israeli teams in this election will win the upcoming election? Probably nobody at first. Rough numbers from the latest polling show that Netanyahu's block will likely get around 50 seats. And then the opposition will also likely get around 50 seats. Then the joint list, the error parties and ROM, the Islamist party together, will get around 14. And then there's a new right-wing anti-herody slate the reservists, they might get maybe four and they're leaning towards Eisenkot. So let's do the math. Nobody gets to 61 without the Palestinian parties. Crisis group puts the odds of either block winning and outright majority well under 10%. On paper, that would make the Palestinian parties extremely important, they're kingmakers in this election. But in practice, Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, all of them have said they won't govern with them. Jewish currents compares it to the riddle of the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage. If you bring in the haridim, you lose Lieberman. You bring in the Islamist party, you lose Yashar. Every boat sinks. So here are the four scenarios that crisis group plays out might happen. Number one is a hung parliament. Nobody forms a government is your votes again early next year. Netanyahu stays on with Ben Kovir and Smotrich still in their ministries until that next election. He doesn't have to win. He just has to make sure nobody else does. Number two, Eisenkot forms a minority government with Palestinian parties backing it from the outside. Now, there's precedent for this. Error parties in the past have, for example, propped up Yitzhak Rabin from outside his coalition in the early '90s. Under Israeli law, a government just needs more yes votes than no votes. So, Ram, the Islamist party wants in. They want to be included. The head of that party wants to our best as added to this, basically we're here to govern. Furthermore, the jointless leader, Yusuf Jabadiin, has offered to be a safety net for any anti-Nitanyahu government. The catch is Lieberman. He says he won't sit in a minority government and he won't be on the side of any Arab party. If you take him out, then Jewish current smath puts that coalition at around 49. Outvoted by Netanyahu's block. So, this only happens if Eisenkut decides losing is worse than breaking his promise. Then the third scenario is defections. In this scenario, one of the parties are a few lawmakers switch sides. Now, Yashar's list, for example, is full of political newcomers, makes them targets. And another party Shaz has hinted it could back Eisenkut because they're angry that Netanyahu never delivered their draft exemption. Or maybe there's a unity government that would minus the colonists, which Netanyahu has floated. A number of different ways that that could happen. And finally, the fourth scenario is that someone wins outright. This is possible if several small parties fall under the threshold and burn their votes. But it would mean months of polling were wrong, so we're not sure how likely this is. Now, after a vote is really president Herzog, picks someone to try. And they get 28 days plus up to two weeks more to try to form a government. And if that fails, two more people get a shot, then new elections. And there's one more wild card. Axios reported that Netanyahu and Trump discussed restarting the war with Iran before both countries vote. The US Defense Secretary was in Israel this week to talk about Iran. And crisis group notes some Israelis worry a strike could be used to delay the election. So something big happens before the election. All of this is basically up in there. Now, what does this mean for Palestinians? Obviously, for me, the top concern. Let's go place by place, because Palestinians here means people living under very different rules. So first, Palestinians, citizens of Israel, they're about a fifth of the population, and their most urgent issue is surviving. And increasingly, you're oppressive and racist society in government. And also dealing with a record wave of organized crime and gun violence in Arab towns that they feel is being allowed to happen underbank of years watch over the police. And behind that is a deeper fear. Thorlingoy, again, bedded member, told Jewish courage that Palestinian citizens increasingly feel they're next in line. That forced expulsion could come for them too. Crisis group says Netanyahu's opponents worry he may try to discourage or intimidate Arab voters as in past campaigns. And turnout in Arab towns is quite variable in this race. If it's high, then the anti-Natanyahu math gets easier. And obviously it makes sense why he would want to depress their vote. Now, for Palestinians in the West Bank, the situation is different. Remember that settler violence is the one occupation issue Israel's actually arguing about a little bit. Even Netanyahu has pretended to condemn what he calls fringe groups while making every excuse for them, of course. But crisis group points out that the worry is mostly about the strain on the army and Israel's image globally. No one in Israeli politics actually cares about the Palestinians being attacked by his cellars. And little has been done to stop it. I argued in an op-ed beginning of this month for Prospect magazine that the settlers in the state are symbiotic. They work together to achieve objectives using tactics that other side can't use. So the state can continue pretending these are fringe groups while achieving their goal of ethnic cleansing. For Israeli politics, the issues of economic stagnation, home demolitions, land expropriation, they barely come up outside the Arab parties. So an Eisenkaught government might reign in vigilantes and evict some of the smaller outposts. And of course, that might mean the difference for a Palestinian vulture who faces expulsion. The joint-led baseline ask is basically that you need to stop the daily terror. But actually annexing area C and doing something about permanent security control and doing something about the fact that Palestinians have no state, that's not on the table. This has brought us to you. support across both blocks. Now let's turn to what the election means for Palestinians in Gaza. Here the blocks mostly argue about who should govern Gaza and whether to prop up the Palestinian authority. The crisis group report calls these peripheral disagreements. The far right still talks about expelling Gaza's population and rebuilding settlements there. The opposition doesn't say that but it also doesn't say anything else. Then there's international pressure. In September, the UK let a ban on trade with settlements. And crisis groups read is that it won't really shift Israeli views much in the short run because Israelis tend to dismiss outside criticism. But they're also not oblivious to isolation and maybe that'll matter a little bit after election day whoever wins. Okay, one last statistic. An Israel democracy institute poll in September found that 51% of Jewish citizens are optimistic about the future of democracy in Israel. But among Palestinian citizens that number falls to 20%. So it's pretty obvious to everyone that the system is working as designed for one group of voters. Which brings us back to the photo I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the farmer in run these walking under the banner of two candidates who both agree he doesn't get a state but they just disagree about how hard to squeeze him in the meantime. That disagreement is small but it's also the difference between the next harvest and a burned olive grove between a prisoner who gets visits and a prisoner who doesn't. So yes, let's watch the Israeli elections but we can't confuse a change of management with a change of the system that is really not on the table. And if I's not caught really would rather hand the country back to Netanyahu than lean on Palestinian votes. You know, the audacity of actually including some of your citizens will learn exactly what Jewish and democratic means in practice. Thanks for listening everyone. Take care and stay safe. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives like the cool Uber driver we just had or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out because our opinion matters and so does yours and this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods or wherever you get your podcasts. For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Well, are you ready ladies? Okay, here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America. Investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America pageant. I never received scholarship. I need to pay for my student loans. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. So, if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in Blackmail, Love, Bomb, and Cloning yourself are getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill 'em. Kill 'em with a gun. Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing. You look the bear in the eye and you say, "This isn't you." Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse Podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Darryl Bell. And I'm Kadim Harrison. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, a different world view with Darryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lines and so many others, a different world. We're sharing number before her stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way. We did a movie called "School Days" and me being a train actor. You get the first shot, so I hit the train back and you go ahead. And you're being the dude that said, "Hey, he's fighting on the street you saw him and they're coming out of the bathroom with something and today he's fighting coming out of the bathroom." I might have made that up. So don't miss the start of something great. Listen to a different world view with Darryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm former USman's National Soccer Team player, Carly Lloyd. I'm Fox Sports reporter, Jenny Taft. And on our new podcast, whatever it takes, we're talking motherhood, marriages, careers, and figuring out how to balance it all. And we'll discuss the game that brought us together because nothing is off limits. Do you remember your initial reaction when Fox called you to be a part of the World Cup? I was like, "No, I don't want to do it." You said, "No." I played with players that didn't. I don't think that they really truly loved the game. I found the love with the ball at my foot. But in my head, it was the long game. It was like, "I don't care what I'm being asked to do at Fox. I'm going to go get some reps and I'm going to learn it and love it and embrace it." He said, "This group of people will never be in the same room as part of the same team ever again in your life." And it is your job to make sure that you enjoy the moment, you're proud of what you accomplish together. Listen to whatever it takes with Carly Lloyd and Jenny Taft on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could App It Here, a podcast sometimes about elections, but a different kind of election. Hell yeah, we're talking union elections. Talking loosely, reformed, caucus-y stuff, kind of, not really, but sort of. Yeah, I don't know. Welcome to a different kind of 2026 election episode. I am your host, Neil Wong. And today we're talking about some other kind of union election that's just to say, union election in the IWW. And yeah, here with me to talk about that is Pam Sweetland-Hallis, who's an IWW member in DC, also Andrew D. Ferguson, who's a Nat large member from Houston, and Elizabeth Coppaz-Duclow, an IWW member, and an associate treasurer of the Portland branch. Yeah, you three, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. So let's start, I guess, by doing a thing we've had a few times on this show, but I think it's worth at least getting into briefly here, which is, can you talk a bit about what the IWW is? And I guess, for these purposes, what it's up to these days? Yeah, so the IWW is an all-industries-industrial union, which means that we're organized based on what the people working, what the union members make, what industry they're in, rather than exactly what specific job they are. So if you're an accountant for a school, then you are part of educational workers. And if you're an accountant for a car manufacturer, your industry is manufacturing, because it's based on who employs you, and not what specific job you do. Yeah, it's not divided into different trades or whatever. It's like, no, no, one union, one big one. Yes, yes. The dream of the IWW is to have all workers, in one big union, organized as best we can, so as to maximize worker power, so that we can end the wage system, and the need for people to be exploited by a capitalist class by having their labor stolen from the form of profits. Yeah, something that we emphasize a lot is like workers' democracy or like workplace democracy. So one thing that, like, like the IWW does when organizing, you know, like building up to the industrial, because it's not like you get everyone all at once. You might do an office by office or shop by shop, but we don't defer decisions to an outside representative. People tend to be able to vote on things themselves when it comes to them and like what they want to do and how they want to do it. Aside from four national paid employees that just take care of mostly paperwork style stuff, we are an entirely volunteer based organization. People engaging this, you know, not as their job, but as in a way of helping their fellow workers, sort of in a neutralistic, mutual aid sense. And all power within the union is held by members who are elected by other members in elections like the one that we're running in. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I think like a very unique aspect of the IWW and that it is the most democratic of the unions, but both in terms of like, you know, I guess what you would call like shop floor autonomy, where, you know, like the actual, like unions themselves get to make decisions on how they're going to run their campaigns, but also, yeah, in terms of the direct election of officials, which is a, like, it's like genuinely staggering that there have been a lot of unions in the U.S. that you know the names of where you couldn't directly elect like the president of the union for a very long time. I mean, I don't think I have a vote in electing the president of the National Educator's Association, even though I'm a member of that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, distressingly very common. Well, to be fair to our allies in the broader labor movement, a number of the larger unions, the U.A.W., the AFL CIO, I believe they do actually elect their leadership from among the members now. So that's not as big a difference as it is good. It is good. It's got to be. But, you know, there is still even among those unions, even though they've made that change, they still often will come into a workplace where a group of workers have said, hey, we want to unionize, they will come in with a playbook and say, okay, this is step one. This is step two. This is step three. And if you deviate from this, we're not going to help you anymore because you're not doing what we want you to do. The IW is different because we believe that the people who are doing the work know the best about the work and know the best about what the workplace needs. So we let them lead. Yeah. And we just support them. Yeah. It's a practical matter because we are, you know, more accepting of the shop floor democracy. We often get a lot of union and unionization efforts that come from places that are overlooked or rejected by the mainstream unions. Yeah. Recently, of course, as probably many of your listeners have heard, we, you know, organized an all trans union, which I'm incredibly proud of, type in a part of. Yeah. The organization effort. Not the union. Yeah. The service were for union organizing, which also doesn't mean you get a bunch of trans people because guess, guess who's doing service work? It was both unions wrote organized. Well, one of the things that I met when I said that, like, you know, we get to represent ourselves, like folks are talking about here is, I don't know which major union it was, but I know some library workers locally who didn't get to see their contract that like I'm using scare quotes here. They agreed to until after the city council had seen it, like until after it had been fully negotiated, you know, they, they, there's not a lot of participation in that sense. That's, I think that's what's very different from in the IW of compared to other people. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I mean, we've talked to NNU or National Riches United folks on here have talked about like their union, like cutting deals with bosses behind their backs and like that. Like, not a thing you can even do here. Yeah. Yeah. Because when workers want to engage in negotiations with the boss, which we don't require them to do, we have an organizing model that doesn't necessarily rely on formal structure or negotiations. But when the workers do negotiate, it is the workers negotiating. The union does not send people in from Chicago where we're based to negotiate for them. So there is no possibility that the workers at the workplace can get cut out. Yeah. And I think the other consequence of that structure and of that decision-making is that it also means that sort of internal elections are very important, even though unilelections are, we finally found a kind of election that has lower turnout than like regular elections, which is sort of astonishing. But Jesus Christ, no one votes in these, which, yeah, it is especially a problem in larger unions where like you get these, you know, you get these like admin caucuses that have been in power for like 40 years and who suck and who just went on and come and see every single year. Mm-hmm. Yeah. In situations a little different in the AWW, do you want to talk a bit about what the elections are like actually for or what people do and yeah. Yeah. So, right now there is the North American wide election for the North American regional administration. And so that's electing a handful of people for offices. Usually these aren't all very competitive races, you know, often these are, you know, races to fill, you know, committees like the education department or the IW editor and it's, you know, a matter of more of a wanting people to step up, you know, volunteer to do that, then a super competitive race, but typically GST, the general secretary treasurer who is in charge of finances, not wholly in charge, but who has a lot of say over finances and the execution of, you know, the union's constitution as well, the general executive board that's supposed to act as a check on the general secretary treasurer and a being a board of seven people, that's the sort of highest level executive for the IWW, you know, in my eyes, these are, you know, people that are supposed to be acting in the background largely the education committees, the general secretary treasurer that facilitate all of the branches and industrial unions being able to execute their own local union democracy, you know, and there are some elections there for treasurer and whatnot, but largely the democratic decisions are made at union meetings and the secretary for Portland, for instance, like his main job is just onboarding off boarding people. He's not in charge of the union at all. He just, you know, facilitates the, you know, kind of secretary of work. Yeah, also on the ballot this year, like in addition to what you were talking about Elizabeth, there's the gender equity committee, which they do a lot of great things, but they also, you know, facilitate like mediations between conflicts and that kind of thing. The IW editor, by the way, is the editor of industrial worker, which is our official publication. There are a number of committees suffice it to say that do really important administrative work to keep the union running and support our core mission of organizing workplaces to put workers in power, not bosses. And you know, when these roles go unfilled, the union suffers when people who are less concerned about the work and more concerned about the status come into these positions, the union suffers. So these positions are really important as they would be in any organization. But especially here because we are trying to do something that is bigger than just, oh, we want to raise, oh, we want, you know, more break time. We're trying to actually build worker power in society. And so we really want to encourage the members of the IW who are listening to this as we hope many of them are in your audience to pay attention to these elections, to look at the options on the ballot. And next year, consider running for any office that takes your fancy. Mm hmm. Yeah. Also, there will be positions that will go unfilled after the election unless there are a freak amount of writing campaigns. So if you can fill those positions, you can also volunteer for the mouth of the election is up if they are still vacant. Yeah, it is one of the classic like, there's this kind of like dialectic as not the right term, but it's what's appearing in my somewhat sleep deprived brain of the one hand you have this thing where it's like, okay, this is a position that allows you to do stuff and there's like people who want to do it. And there's also sort of the classic anarchist thing of like, okay, all right, there's a responsibility here and it technically comes with power, but you have to find someone to do it because it's like, that's exactly right. And it's reflective of broader trends within the IWW as well because historically, we were inspired quite a lot by Marxist ideas, obviously, but we are structured very much in a very much a syndicalist way, I'm not going to say fully anarchist necessarily, but we take a lot of inspiration from anarchism and how we operate. So the IWW is very much a meeting of the minds there. So it makes sense that we'd have sort of problems from both ends as well. I mean, syndicalist organization as a method generally came out after the IWW, but I'm not sure that's really that important. I'm sorry, maybe don't include that IBK. Yeah. to get into the history of it. You're right that it wasn't necessarily a form thing. I'm not good on dates, but like for the nerds out there who want to look into it, like the IWW kind of was like one of the early voices in some of these things, you know, so like syndicalism and all of its flavors. There were a lot of socialists, whatever their political tendency was, like collective control over your working conditions was a central theme for sure. Well, I just mean the specific structure of the IWW Union. I think moreover came about through naturally recognizing the troubles that the IWW encountered and sort of created its own idea about how to solve these things, certainly based on previous theory, but in a lot of ways contributing to future theory that would come from later workers, IMA and philosophers, you know, anarchist and syndicalist ideas. That's my very brief understanding. Yeah, I guess what I'm sort of curious about is I guess partially like what y'all have been up to and talking a little bit about like what the union has been sort of up to recently and then how that relates to, yeah, like what you want to see happen at the kind of like large scale level of like the national union. Well, I could talk on a very particularly Portland experience, but maybe you wanted to talk about the larger experiences first. Well, I mean, I think that's part of it is that the North American regional, that it's transnational, it spans many, many boundaries. And you know, most of what the union is up to is the aggregate of what all the branches and large members are doing. So I can speak on my recent campaign in DC going back to like what was it we were saying before that there's sometimes the bosses go and make like backdoor deals with the unions. Well, I'm a canvasser, you know, I've got a lot of skills. I worked a lot of jobs, but for the last seven years, I've been a canvasser in the DC area. And the people that I worked for when we formed our canvassers union with the IW a couple of years ago on their board is the heads and like like union industry leaders of our state. And that absolutely played into, you know, how things worked out for that specific campaign. But yeah, I'm saying campaign a lot. So a lot of what we're doing is organizing campaigns across the country. I think different sections of people are coming together depending on the locality. Yeah, I guess I guess I'm curious sort of on that level where something I run into with the IW a lot is like people know maybe about like one thing that the union is doing in their like local area. And then there's like 16,000 campaigns going on. Yeah. Yeah, that people just don't know anything about. So I guess what I'm kind of curious about is like yeah, like what are you taking from your sort of local campaigns that make you like want to get involved in like what do you want to see out of like out of the union from that? Mine are pie in the sky. I mean like my my goals are, you know, I mean, first of all, I do want to build up industrial unions, but like I'm hoping that we double our membership, triple our membership and like not just like growing numbers to have numbers, but have people participating. Yeah. We were talking about how we found an election that somehow has lower turnout than all the others. But you know, that can be turned around if you decide to go out and vote in your local election. And our election period doesn't run for very long. So it's not supposed to take up too much of like you as a rank and file members time. But if you go out and vote, if you vote in the congressional races, for example, your vote might be like represented as like one in 400,000. Here you are making you a much bigger impact when you do that. And then take next steps to say, what do you want to see? Like that's actually been my experience. And what I've heard from a lot of people who get good stuff out of the union is it's folks who say, I think we should be doing this, you know, like I have this frustration here at work or whatever. And then you have an avenue to kind of pursue that within the union. Yeah. Absolutely. Like the unfortunate reality is that, you know, a lot of the people who are members of the IWR, I wouldn't say not awake members of the IWW. They're not active participants. But that means that everybody who does participate has a massively outsized impact. You have a genuine chance to change the trajectory of the union if you get involved. And as far as, you know, what our goals are, why we're running, you know, my perspective as an at-large member, a recently at-large member because the Houston branch unfortunately had to decarter a few months back because we couldn't find somebody who had the time to be branch secretary. You know, a lot of the experience that we had in Houston was that we were waiting for somebody to come along who wanted to organize their workplace. The members of our branch, we were all very eager to help people organize, but none of us were in a situation where we could organize ourselves. So I think there are branches like ours out there who, you know, the problem that they're facing is that there isn't enough interest from the general public to find people who are in a position where they could and want to organize. There are branches that are like Portland and like Philadelphia and like Chicago where they've got a lot of people in them already. They've got a lot of leads is what we call them to organize already. They don't need publicity necessarily. They need material support in order to support all those leads. So there's not a one size fits all path here to making the union stronger, but I think all of us who are running together and it is a broader group than just three of us. All of us who are running together want to treat branches as individual branches want to speak to them understand their circumstances and provide them with support that they need to be successful. Whether that is, you know, more people to help on board members and process leads or whether it is, you know, better support to use the internet to get the word out about, hey, you have an IWW branch in your city if you want to organize, come do it with us. Oh, yeah. So my perspective from Portland has been sort of based on the just reality of how it's been organizing in Portland. So in Portland, we entered say 2024, so on a bit of a downturn. We had a couple campaigns that were moving along very slowly and weren't working on a whole lot else aside from that. As a group, we put together a strategy to increase membership, to find and create campaigns and to generally just make the union, our general membership branch of the IWW much more impactful in Portland and much more active. So we started tabling at any sort of political rallies or, you know, queer events or just, I mean, any events that, you know, would have us in that, in that we would fit for and we would, we began to, you know, sign up people, we would talk to people, you know, learn what their workplace problems were and we started, you know, finding a lot of leads, we started working on a lot of campaigns. We have a number of private campaigns that, of course, I am not at liberty to talk about fun fun IWW problem of sorry, we have a bunch of campaigns you're working on that no one can know what they are because don't want it getting out. Yeah, unless you join. Even then we generally try and keep secrecy I'm a priority so people don't get fired for organizing. But, you know, publicly we have the Mooji workers united, realm workers united, really you elect Charlottesys workers united, Burgerville workers union, Friday workers union, Punchbowl workers united. I want to say, think these are all of our public campaigns. We might have a couple more. There's a lot going on. It's it's gone to be a long list. And so we've had a lot of success as an IWW branch and we're really proud about that and unfortunately in my experience working as the assistant treasure for the Portland IWW and as an external organizer helping these unions. GEB has and General Headquarters as a large has ended up acting more as a hurdle to us than as somebody helping us. Our realm workers united campaign got stuck in a limbo regarding the acceptance of it by the general executive board. They demanded that we jump through a handful of hoops. I forget the exacts of it. Admittedly, I think some of them were just genuinely needed. But, you know, rather than try and help us in getting everything in order, they would just continuously send us back with no ratification from the General Executive Board. And Moogie workers united. The lawyers working for Moogie were able to put out actually through information about how the IWW has had a ULP filed against it by the workers working for the IWW. We'll probably have to talk about this later. Maybe we won't be talking about it too much. I don't know this is sort of an aside. And we've had plenty of people who, you know, talk about signing up, talk about wine to sign up. And they're like, I love the Portland IWW. You all are doing great things. But why is 40% of my dues going to national when I have no idea what national does? And it becomes hard to justify it when, you know, we're not able to get monetary support from national when we are having our campaigns hindered by nationals for as like their ratification and whatnot. And when national has been often dismissive of the work that we've been doing. And so I saw those and I started attending GEP meetings. And what I saw was really disappointing. I think the first GEP meeting I was at one trans woman was talked over by one of the members of the other day. I was active board. And then when another trans woman asked him to be more polite, he dismissed that other person. And then after that whole frankly rude incident at the very least, he never apologized. Instead, another GEP member apologized on his behalf to everyone, which I just wow. Comes off as very deeply childish. And I feel like unfortunately, this immature behavior has been repeated over and over by different general executive board members. And it seems to be that a lot of them, not all of them have found more interest in common with their fellow executive board members than with the union as a whole and see themselves. And sometimes describe themselves not as stewards of the union, but as its leaders that they have been acting with authority to control and dictate how the union is run. I can go on about this at length, but you know, it was the disappointment by the general hindrance and lack of support from general headquarters. And the belligerent behavior of some of the general executive board members that made me realize that there needed to be members of I think better character and greater humility running. And to be honest, I don't want to have to be that person. But I've always believed that if you see a problem, the first step to solving it is finding someone to try and solve it. And if you're the one seeing the problem, that'll often have to be you. So when we started talking about the problems we are experiencing as Portlanders and how those problems were being reflected to other general membership branches, I was one of the Portlanders that raised their hand and said, I will do this if it means that Portland can continue to do its amazing work. I love the WWW as a whole, but I have given so much of my time, my effort and my life to Portland in particular. And I want to make sure that Poland is able to do its amazing stuff without having to deal with national. National should not be an obstacle. We have to overcome or opponents we have to fight. It should be our backup in the corner in case we need it. And it should be stewarding the union along so that these local, more democratic, more grassroots organization of the branches and the I use bees can do what they are meant to do. Well, I'd like to pick up from that if I may, if everyone's all right with that. I go for it. Everything Elizabeth is saying is things that I think all of us running have seen in this current general administration. And it is the impetus for why I think all of us are running. The culture that we have seen of disrespect for members based on their identity, but also just based on the fact that sometimes they don't seem to agree with everything that the officers are saying is a major point of contention in the union. And it drives people away from participating in the NARA level of the IWW. And I think that is one of the priorities for all of us running together in this campaign. It's certainly one of my priorities. I am, I am running to restore respect for the membership on the general executive board. One of my major points in my campaign has been that it does not matter who you are. It does not matter what I personally think of you. If you are a dues paying member of the IWW, you deserve a basic amount of respect. And that basic respect involves me not calling you names. It involves me not talking over you. It involves me being willing to listen to your ideas, even if I disagree with them in the end, but being willing to hear you out. And that's how I try to live right now. And I think it's really important for our administrative officers to live that way as well. If we're talking about personal stories, one of the issues that I've faced, I was a member of our international committee of working with unions around the world last year. And we had an incident where one of the portions, one of the sections of our union, the incarcerated workers organizing committee, there was some irregularity with their finances. And it turned out that they hadn't been keeping proper records. And that was a serious problem. But the general administration took that as an opportunity to punish them and sort of freeze their accounts for while the investigation was going on. They can make very specific transactions. But the rest of the things that they needed at that time were, you know, subject or review or not approved. And the international committee, we decided to sort of speak up because we felt that this was a concern of the entire union. We felt that this is a concern of all the members. If this could happen to one organ of the IW, it could happen to any one of us. And in the process of that, I expressed my personal view that legal compliance is not always the goal. It's, it's not the thing that we should be always striving for. What we should always be striving for is to do the right thing. What is ethical, what hurts the least people. And that is a sentiment that I believe is obviously that I believe is reasonable. But it's a sentiment that I've heard expressed by many people inside and outside of our union. It's not an uncommon sentiment within our union at all. But because I was an officer, it was deemed dangerous for those who aren't familiar with the, the constitution of the IW, as well as the labor management reporting and disclosure act of 1959 as amended guarantees union members certain rights, including the right to freedom of expression. And despite both the constitution and the LMRDA, guaranteeing me a right to freely express my views. In this case, this was a view that I was expressing. I was doing so respectfully. I was still removed from my office. And the general executive board had the opportunity to overturn the charges because they were in violation, direct violation of the IW constitution and the US federal labor law. And they failed to do so. And so that was my personal moment of, okay, this is the last straw. I have to do something to change who we've got making these decisions because they're not putting the members first, they're not putting our rights first, they're not putting our interests first, they are doing what appears to them to be the easiest option. They are doing what appears to them to be what the law demands of them, whether they're correct or not. And allegedly, allegedly. I think you both encapsulated that motivation for running pretty well in terms of how I've related to it as well. For those who don't know, I am running for the GEB, along with these lovely people. But my candidacy has been kept off of the ballot. So I'm actually running a writing campaign. Oh, jeez. Oh, no. You know, yay. But yeah, something that's really important is just like the common theme is that the IWW is and has always been a diverse and inclusive union. Every good organizer knows that you're supposed to meet people with compassion and be constructive in your in your solutions for things. So the GEB does many things. But to me, one of the more important things that they're tasked with and are empowered to do is supporting campaigns like Elizabeth was talking about and supporting branch formations. So like, you know, if Andrew's area becomes particularly interested in that way again, then it should be that you aren't feeling alienated or excluded when you try to access these things, but that you're being guided and supported. Yeah, when you're interacting with your union. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And if we can touch on sort of the legalistic sense for a second, I've seen the GST and GEB back up their argument. by referencing a sort of reverence or respect for the law, and for the IWW Constitution, when of course they're only giving their personal interpretations on the law. And if you talk to a union lawyer or any lawyer, they will tell you these things vary in their dependent on specific circumstances, and it's, you know, a lawyer's favorite two words are it depends. Just below this is not legal advice. It depends. Yeah. Well, it depends also allows you to get out of giving legal advice. The one to punch. Yeah. So even even if they were experts on labor law, you know, they would not necessarily have the correct answer. In fact, matter is they're not experts on un labor law. But members of the GEB have acted as if they have the final say on what is and isn't legally correct. And whatever they say is them following the Constitution or is them following labor law is just unquestionably what needs to be followed. And so they have sort of used that authority to reach their power beyond what I think it's responsible for the GEB to be doing. Well, I can go on with what they've done with this, but I think just the the thing I was trying to say, the thing I'm trying to get at is that like I think that there is to some degree a certain amount of legalism that the GEB and GST are following that is guiding what they're doing. But I also think what they want to be doing is guiding their legal opinions regarding matter is of the IWW. A lot of this kind of comes back to a question that we've talked about on this show a lot, this kind of fundamental question of like what democracy is in the sense of is democracy a process by which you come together and make decisions or is democracy a process by which you know a group of people is elected and they get to make the decisions for everyone. And it feels like a lot of what is being described here is people sort of wielding their power to like make decisions for everyone and try to enforce them. I think it would be fair to describe this as a conflict between those two notions of democracy. I think that our notion is that the members are the ones making the decisions. We appoint people who execute those decisions. And yes, sometimes make very small incidental decisions in the process of carrying out our will. But the people who are in the regional administration are not supposed to be making decisions for us. They're supposed to be carrying out our will as the rank and file and it is our sense that they haven't been doing that. So we are stepping up to say and we can do this because of how democracy in the IWW works. We are stepping up to say it is time for you to go. It is time for an administration that will follow the membership not try and leave it. Yeah, I think that's that's very true. Yeah. So I guess in that spirit, what do you want to see the GB do if you were able to take office? Yeah, so my hope is to act as GB member as somebody who is somewhat distant and partial and connects with the branches and talks to them as a fellow member and a fellow worker and finds where I can help them, where they want help and where there's confusion. And otherwise just facilitate the smooth running of the union without much if any intervention. I would rather focus on connecting people, connecting different local branches together as they can help each other, connecting people to the different parts of the regional administration that are dedicated to education and organizing and international connections and whatnot. And otherwise being someone who helps but does not lead. Yeah, I think what I would like to focus on quite explicitly is like I said, helping branches form, I'm helping new branches grow, you know, supporting the smaller groups among us. And I mean, it sounds so dry, but like properly funding campaigns, just making sure things are properly funded, not irresponsibly. You know, I like to look at spreadsheets and I like to look at budgets, and that's a lot of what you have to do with the GEB. But above all else, I'm hoping that I can learn. Like it's it will be such a privileged position to be into like as my job essentially being contact with membership and branches and just learn about what's going on with people and what they need. My personal goals for a term on the GEB are honestly cultural because at the local level, we're in somewhat of a holding pattern right now. We need to sort of lick our wounds and rebuild. But we we need people to do that. We need driven people who want to organize. And we believe it, frankly, a branch is best built around active organizing already. So we're going to try and foster that at the local level, but really for me at the national level or at the regional level rather, I want to I want to model the kind of officer I want to see. I want to be a respectful officer. I want to be an officer who listens. I want to be an officer who will basically take orders from the membership and, you know, not do what is convenient, but do what is right. And that involves, obviously, motivated by my personal experiences, defending our members' rights when something threatens those rights. And it is in my power to push back on that. I will. I will defend our members' rights to freedom of expression. I will defend our members' rights to a safe environment in which to express themselves and speak to power to disagree with power. But at the same time, I want to reach out to those members who I described earlier as being asleep. I want to reach out to the people who aren't taking an active role in our union. I want to see what it is that we can do to make them interested. Whether that's at the local level, because there are plenty of places out there that don't have branches, or at the regional level, and make NARA basically a place that isn't hellish to interact in, make the NARA level something that members can participate in without fear. You know, maybe I'm shooting too high there, but I think it is a change that can be made. And I think that every little bit helps. And I think that modeling those changes on the GEB will help bring them about. Yeah, I think that's a fairly reasonable set of things to want the national level of your union to do. We're just wild and out there. I would like to be able to safely interact with the national level of my union. It's incredible radical demands. And have it like actually support the things that I'm doing at the local level. Oh my god. Yeah. Like a national organization is supposed to function. Hot tape. Organizing can be fun. You know, many are saying this. And it should be fun. And when it's not fun, we need to figure out why and we need to change it. And that's what we're here to do. We're here to make organizing fun again. Hang on a minute. No, no. That's a bad cadence. Hang on. Scratch that. If I can hold things back to Vai Wu, because it's just on time, always happy to talk about, you know, all of the people who were on the picket line at Vai Wu, they were showing up every day. They were there in June and July heat, but they were always approaching things in a happy and positive way. Not because it was easy to do or because it was exactly fun to do, but because everyone there was uplifting everyone else. It was a community that had come together and was based on mutual support and mutual love. And I want to see that in the IW at large. And I also want to be able to as a, you know, external organizer, be able to say, you know, this is what we do in Portland. And this is what we do at National. And both of these can help you in this way. Not this is what we do at Portland. And don't worry about National. They won't help you, but we'll try our hardest to make sure they won't mess anything up for you. Yeah. That's not a good pitch to perspective fellow workers. Well, full circle that 40% goes to strike funds. Or they should, you know, that's a much better answer than I'll get back to you. Yeah. Yeah. This current GEB has in addition to other problems. They've also been pretty dedicated budget hawks. You know, they have basically been cutting from every single committee as much as possible. And while I do understand there is a need for, you know, fiscal security and whatnot, I think it's been taken to the point where it's been sort of overriding the needs and community decision making of the individual committees. to the point where just a lot of funding for the things that the committees at national are supposed to do and want to do isn't supportive. And you only really get support if GEB likes you or likes what you're doing. I know members of the education committee, they had put together a budget and you know a list for what they're planning on doing for the year. And GEB said, well, we don't want to support this. Do you want to do something completely different instead? No, then we're not going to fund you. You know, it again comes back to this question of whether or not you are a steward or a leader, you know? Obviously, no matter what, the people in GEB will have an amount of power, but I think we need to elect people who do not want to use that power and who will not take that as permission to have control over other people. And also maybe in the future, we can institute reforms to decrease the amount of power that GEB can take for itself and other institutions can take for itself, continue to make the AW more and more democratic. The AW is, I'm going to say, just pretty definitively, the most democratic union in the country and in Canada as well, but it can always be more democratic. And I think that we can always make the AW better as it makes it as it currently is. Yeah. If I may, actually, this is something that's that is really important to me. I don't think there's any place for austerity in a radical left union. Yeah. Or at a radical left organization, you can't grow by cutting, you know? Like there are many creative solutions to times of downturn, but I think how Elizabeth described it as perfect. To me, there's a difference between fiscal responsibility and using the budget as a boogieman. I think it's incredibly dismissive and assumes that like myself and my fellow workers are too ignorant to understand numbers when people say, so this is a personal experience of mine that I'll ask for like line items on things and they'll say, just look at the budget. And it's like, well, I did. That's why I'm asking, right? It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. There's a huge fund here that's not being dispersed, you know, if that makes sense. To me, there's no place for austerity here. Our solutions will come from other ways of organizing and supporting each other. And this current administration has seen a huge downturn in members, and therefore in funding. And I don't want to say it's all general headquarters doing. I think a lot of these are trends outside of any members control, but I don't think that it has to be as bad as it is now. And I think that if we were a union more willing to support its members, more visibly supporting its members, that we would not be having to worry as much about the budget because you would have growing membership. And therefore increasing funds. Yes, it is absolutely a policy of austerity at the current general executive board is maintaining. And that's their solution. Their solution is cuts not growth. And that doesn't work. Obviously growth cannot be infinite. That's one of the problems that we're running into with capitalism. But, you know, in July, 2026, the Federal Reserve estimated that there were 210 million working age people in the United States. We are a union of, I think, the largest estimate we've got is 9,000 members. I'm not even sure if that's accurate anymore. So we are not at any point of reaching the limits of our potential growth yet. And in terms of specific financial analysis, I looked at our balance sheets, which is something that any member can do. And I sent my analysis in a letter to the member bulletin in July of 2025. And from what I saw, I calculated that we could afford to maintain the deficit at the time for six and a half years. Now, that is not forever, but it's certainly not the kind of crisis that this GB has used it as in order to slash committee budgets and barely took to their own. And it's definitely enough time to turn around our flagging recruitment numbers. You know, we need a GB that can meet this moment. And that is the kind of board that we want to be. Yeah. Also, one note, I mentioned some ways that we might change the union and improve it. I don't think it's necessarily the GB's place to make those changes for the members. We shouldn't get in the way of change. We should be able to facilitate it when it happens. But again, we're not in charge. We're not the ones changing the union. The membership at largest. Yeah, it's ultimately the workers, the fellow workers of a union who will change it is a good place to start wrapping up. So there has been a lot of mention of we in this endeavor. Do you all want to talk about who is running and what the sort of campaigns and writings are? Yeah. I specifically would like to highlight the right. And so for recap, I'm Pamela Sweetlin-Aula. Say, oh, I'm running a writing campaigns. So that means that if you could please write in for G.E.B. Pam S or Pamela S. In addition, we have John Hollingsworth running for G.E.B. as a write-in. And Greg Murray from Portland running a write-in for G.E.B. So to recap that, writings for the G.E.B. includes Pam S. John Hollingsworth and Greg Murray. In addition, we have a fellow worker who in addition to myself was obstructed from the ballot who is running for the iWalk administrative assistant. They go by A.G.E. But I believe their name in Red Card is Philip I or Philip A.G.R. Toe. So yeah. And then you can find the rest of us in the G.E.B. me and Andrew, both Cot Cross and Dorst each other and a whole bunch of other people who are all supporting each other in trying to make this union better. Yes, there is a candidate statement section in the October G.E.B. that lists our visions for the union and then make sure to check the member submission section for our write-in candidates statements because unfortunately as writing candidates they weren't given a dedicated space. Yeah, we will get a link to that in the description. Yeah, thank you all so much for being on the show and thanks for fighting to make the union a better place. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you for having me. Indeed. And trans rights are workers rights. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. It's a podcast. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours and this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Pods or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, are you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. They said, goodbye to swimsuits. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. He looks and he goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love, bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. - I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. - The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. - Do not preserve relationships, you don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the GetWorks podcast. - Listen to GetWorks with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - This is Darrell Bell, and I'm Cudame Harrison. - And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcasts on the Black-Effect Podcast Network, a different world view with Darrell and Cudame. - We're sharing never before her stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. - We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way. - We did a movie called "School Days" and me being a train actor. - You get the first shot, so I hit the train back and go ahead. - And me being the dude that said, "Hey, Spike, you wanna teach you some?" And they're coming out of the bathroom with something and say, "Hey Spike, coming out of the bathroom." - I made that up. - So don't miss the start of something great. - Listen to a different world view with Darrell and Cudame, every Thursday, from the Black-Effect Podcast Network on the IHR Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. - I'm former USman's National Soccer Team player, Carly Lloyd, and Fox Sports Reporter, Jenny Taft. - Do you remember your initial reaction when Fox called you to be a part of the World Cup? - I was like, "No, I don't wanna do it." You said, "No." I played with players that didn't. I don't think that they really, truly loved the game. I found the love with the ball at my fight. I'm gonna go get some reps, and I'm gonna learn it, and love it, and embrace it." - He said, "This group of people will never be in the same room as part of the same team ever again in your life." And it is your job to make sure that you enjoy the moment, you're proud of what you accomplish together. - Listen to whatever it takes with Carly Lloyd and Jenny Taft on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. However, as I think you can tell by the opening music, you're listening to a very special episode. Today, about El Jupa Cabras. I'm Carlos Barrios Polanco, and I'm at an undisclosed location outside somewhere in Puerto Rico, where my only company are the creatures of the night and the sweet music that they make. Also, my dog is here with me, and she's pretty chill. The reason that I'm out here is that I wanted to set the scene for this episode by being in the same headspace and meat space as all of those people that claim to have seen something eating their livestock and draining their blood 32 years ago. And so far, I can definitely see why a person might see something, probably a dog or a mongoose ripping the fruits or biting the necks of their cows then attributing it to something that they could not explain. If you've spent any time in the middle of the woods, away from the noise and lights of the city, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you, especially if hundreds of years of colonialism and societal and economic stress have your mind reeling, it would be easy to think that something was stalking you out here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So what even is a Jupa Cabras anyway? Well, in Spanish, it's called Jupa Cabras, which often gets translated as goat sucker in English, which has always rubbed me the wrong way because it's Cabras as in multiple goats. So it should actually be goats sucker. That's just the quibble I've had for ages that I'm happy to share with you right now. I'm sure that I must have seen something about the Jupa Cabras on the history channel, but my first interaction with the Jupa Cabras as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 directed DVD movie Scooby Doo in the Monster of Mexico, which is like really funny to me because it's actually the Monster of Puerto Rico and everybody else just ripped us off. I should say upfront that I'm not a believer. Although I think the truth is out there, the truth is that the Jupa Cabra is fake, a shape-shifting creature of the mind, not an extraterrestrial creature of the night. However, while it's not real, the animal attacks and the hysteria they caused, as well as the enduring obsession with it in some circles, I think, is really interesting because it is kind of the perfect bookie man manifestation of a lot of the colonial history here and all over the world, honestly. For the book, tracking the Jupa Cabra, the vampire beast, in fact, fiction and folklore by Benjamin Radford, which was a huge source for this episode and was way more serious than I expected it to be, there's free versions of this blood-second beast. The first is the original. The Puerto Rican version that is about three to four feet tall with spines or feathers running down its back, that also has some kind of reptilian look to it. It was first "seen" in the small town of Kanoanas in 1995. The second is more of a dog slash coyote-looking thing that's been seen up and down the American continent, but mostly on the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands and Latin America. Several corpses of this type of Jupa Cabra have been found in that area and pretty much every single time it ends up being some type of animal with mange. Meanwhile, the third version is a catch-all for any type of unidentified animal that can carry the blame for an unexplained attack pretty much anywhere in the world. For this episode, I'm mainly going to be talking about the Puerto Rican version with a little bit of context here and there about the other versions. So the first "siding" of the Jupa Cabra occurred in August 1995 in the small town of Kanoanas, in the center north part of the archipelago. There had previously been attacks on livestock that year that had left them with two bite marks in the neck and without a single drop of blood. But this was the first time that it was seen. The woman who saw it, Madeline Torrentino, claimed that she saw the beast from a window from her house alongside her mother. And she didn't get a siding of a piece of it, caught in the moonlight as it slipped into the darkness. No, she got such a good look that she was able to describe it in incredible detail. Her tracking the Jupa Cabra, quoting the book, "Jupa Cabra and Other Mysteries by Scott Corales, which I cannot find an ebook for, so I'm trusting Radford on this. It had dark gray or black eyes that ran up its temples and went up into its sides. It walked like a human and its arms were, quote, drawn back in an attack position as though it were a TV monster." Keep that in mind for later, by the way. It had long skinny fingers and close cropped hair all over its body and skinny legs that had free-separate toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat. Torrentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say, lack the rev. According to Corales' book, she somehow got on the floor from her window and managed to see that its genitals were sealed, even having time to make a joke to her mom about how it might have pooped for its mouth. According to the book, a young boy who worked for Torrentino's husband was also in the house and he sprinted out to catch the beast, even managing to do so and get close enough to perform an impromptu dental inspection because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corales' books, they are truly wild-looking. And from what I can tell, they're pretty much all written from the perspective of a person who believes or at least wants you to believe that the cryptids and aliens described in them are real. Meanwhile, Radford's book is written by a skeptic, a person who's open to the idea, but is actually trying to use a scientific method to see if the chupacabra is real. From reading Radford's book, he kind of has some serious beef with Corales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, dragging the chupacabra points out several inconsistencies in Torrentino's statement. First, it moved like a robot, but then it ran, then hopped, then seemed to float. Also, she was watching from the window but was able to get to the floor to see its genitals. It's possible that she said window, but she meant like a sliding door in her house. But yeah, it's improbable. Also, the fact that the boy managed to catch the creature and inspect it as wild. And when Radford interviewed Torrentino in 2010, she said that that never happened. The kid went out to find it, but he didn't actually see it. So it's unclear where that description came from. To let the Canada the bag quickly, her Radford's book, the creature that Torrentino saw in the darkness was actually a half-remembered and more reptilian version of the creature's sill from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. "Sill" was played by Natasha Hentstridge and designed by H.R. Geeger. Yeah, the guy who designed the Xenomorphs is the reason that the chupacabra exists. Salentino quote unquote, "Savage you per cabra" in August. in species had come out just a month before in July. And if you look at pictures of Sill and the Chupacabra drawn from Tolandino's memories, there's an uncanny resemblance there. I know that this is an audio medium, but I'll publish pictures on Blue Sky whenever this episode drops, and you'll see it. Part of the movie, it even been filmed in Puerto Rico. And one of the first images presented in the film is the Odyssey Hoteloscope, a gigantic radio telescope that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017. That had actually been used to send the first ever signals into space in 1974. Tolandino was even asked about the film, but her reaction was interesting, to say the least. In a 1996 interview with Lucy Blah and Jose Manuel Rodriguez, highlighted by tracking the Chupacabra, Tolandino said that Sill's resemblance to the Chupacabra was, quote, "really impressive," end quote. And she wondered, quote, "How can they make a movie like that when these things are happening in Puerto Rico?" End quote. "I really do not want this to come off as being mean to Tolandino because we've all seen weird stuff in the woods that we can't explain, told a few friends, and then forgot about it." But the reason that Tolandino's tall tail became the myth that it did is because the news media absolutely pounced on her story and took it to insane heights, attributing any and all mysterious occurrences involving cattle mutilation or unexplained attacks or anything along those lines to the Chupacabra. Before Tolandino saw, quote, unquote, the Chupacabras, there had been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the Chupacabras and it slowly became a bogeyman that was at the scene of everything that could not have an easy or normal explanation. I should also say that the name Chupacabras was reportedly coined by comedian Silverio Perez. Although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolandino's encounter with the Chupacabra, she described the Chupacabra to artist Jorge Martin, who's drawing made the front page of El Nuevolea according to tracking the Chupacabra. El Nuevolea is our paper of records, so this was a big deal. And although I can't find this front page anymore, as a nation, we're pretty bad at archiving the past and it's not really easily accessible online. From reading the book, their coverage seems to have been significantly less sensationalist than other local papers. Although I did manage to find an article from 2010 whose headline reads, quote, two Chupacabra attacks reported, unquote, so your mileage may vary. However, the Chupacabra reads worldwide fame when talk show host Cristina Salalegi aired a story about the Chupacabra on El Show de Cristina, which aired across the Spanish-speaking world. Salalegi even had the mayor of Canoanas, José Chamosoto, who was up for re-election to talk about his experience hunting the Chupacabra in his municipality, which is something that he became super famous for in that late '90s period. And it helped him a lot because he was re-elected all the way to 2004. He was a publicity stunt, clear and simple, but it worked. Per the book, governing spirits, religion miracles and spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898 to 1956, by Renan Lo Román. He eventually came to be called Chamo Jones, because of his hunt for the blood sugar. It was clear to everyone this was a publicity stunt, but everybody went along with it, including more than 200 volunteers, scores of journalists, and off-duty police officers that accompanied him on October 29, 1995. Wait, do you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no. It's just ads. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we're talking about the Chupacabra. Even though not all Puerto Ricans believed in this blood sucking beast, urban and international media almost always portray these rural folks as being a mass of fools that believed in mysticism and this extraterrestrial beast. So there was always a very real class aspect to the whole coverage of this Chupacabra. Per the book, tracking the Chupacabra, quote, "When reading accounts of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico, I often came across phrases like, quote, the Chupacabra terrorized the island and quote, or, quote, fear-gripped Puerto Rico, and quote, or, quote, the island populist was near fever pitch," end quote. There is, of course, some truth to this description, but mystery-mongering hyperbole aside, it is not accurate to suggest that the entire Puerto Rican population, or even a majority of it, was gripped in terror over the goat sucker. Of course, some individuals in groups grew very concerned over the mystery, but most Puerto Ricans, especially city dwellers, went about their daily lives giving little thought or concern to the creature that they had heard about, mostly in backyard gossip and tabloids. If El Nuevolea and Cristina brought the creature to mainstream attention, El Vocero, which is now a respectable newspaper, but was a lurid tabloid back then, is what, quote, unquote, "created the Chupacabra in the popular imagination." Per governing spirits, El Vocero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about Chupacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that, in hindsight, were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in "Tracking the Chupacabra" is about a five-year-old girl, almost being abducted by the beast, but then she managed to escape, and it raised her IQ to a genius level. This story was seemingly confirmed by a police officer at Del Vocero, which saw it fit to print. We're gonna talk a little bit more later about people in positions of authority confirming Chupacabra, but this was the type of thing that flooded El Vocero newspapers at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time, this was happening. He told me that El Vocero's tabloidness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of accidents and murders led people to say that if you squeezed the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per "Tracking the Chupacabra", the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by El Vocero, without really any proof or an autopsy being performed, quoting from Bradford here. It is likely that if the animals owners expressed any doubts that their animals had been vaporized, the tabloid reporter would have no reservations about massaging the facts and selecting the course that would make for a better story. A farmer or housewife who excitedly swears that the goat they found had absolutely been drained of every single drop of blood, makes for a better story than one who isn't sure, or who admits he or she didn't really look, end quote. Mass hysteria is often caused by mass media covering an event badly, essentially a failure to perform journalism. Each instance of the Chupacabra getting attention made it spread wider and wider until it was absolutely inescapable. Yet very little of this coverage attempted to show that it wasn't real. Any mysterious thing was now the result of the Chupacabra because it was the new thing that everybody knew about and the creature that everybody was telling you to be very, very afraid about all the time. Actually, the animated 100% real documentary Paranoia agent deals with mass hysteria spreading throughout Japan as a result of a mysterious boy attacking people with a bat highly recommend. El Vosero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact, El Vosero's first year of publication was marked by another vampir creature boosting its numbers. In 1975, there were unexplained attacks in the Western Municipality of Mocha that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El vampiro de Mocha, the vain buyer of Mocha. El Vosero led some of the story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabra. Although they were admonished for their coverage at the time by editors from other newspapers, they said they were just reporting the stories out just effects. Although they later acknowledged it did lead them to reach a circulation of nearly 90,000 in their first year according to governing spirits, which is a fuck ton for a small tabloid in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than 3 million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with the Chupacabra by analyzing El Vosero's actions during the time of El vampiro de Mocha. Both times they knew that by focusing on sensationalism and obscuritism, it could make money, which is a lot of the reason that these myths spread. By the way, if you speak Spanish, the great podcast El Ilo did an episode in March of this year about El vampiro de Mocha called, quote, "El vampiro entre nosotros", end quote. That's excellent and was a big source for this section of the episode. So 20 years before the Chupacabra struck, Puerto Ricans were already familiar with another blood sucker. And although the natural inclination is to think that the vampiro de Mocha is just the Chupacabra, from what I've read, people mostly view them as two separate creatures that show there are unexplained things going bump in the night in Puerto Rico and that the government was either mostly powerless to do something about it or largely uninterested in doing so. Speaking of the government, there's an even older story than the vampiro de Mocha that had already created a strong association between the government and vampirism on the archipelago. First, to set the scene, Puerto Rico has been an important U.S. military stronghold since the late 1930s because of its strategic location that allows the military to project force towards Latin America. The archipelago eventually became an incredibly important part of U.S. military strategy in the Atlantic. At its peak, there were 20 separate installations that occupied roughly 13% of all arable land in the archipelago. Her master's thesis, written by Robert Jordan in 2008, for the University of Texas at Dallas titled "El Chapacabra Icon of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism." The biggest installation was the Roosevelt Road's naval station, which was eventually closed in 2004, but was reopened last year. The U.S. military also occupied the island's municipalities of Viekis and Kulevra, which they used for all types of training, including using it as a bombing range. Per the Guardian, they dropped up to 3 million pounds of ordinance in Viekis per year. This includes 263 rounds of depleted uranium tip munitions that were "accidentally expended" during a training exercise on February 1999 per Navy facilities command. Today, about two thirds of Viekis are natural reserves that the public can't access because of all the unexploded ordinance there, and its people have sky-high cancer rates compared to the rest of the archipelago's population. I talk a little bit more about all this in my episodes about U.S. colonies, so check that out if you want to learn more. Viekis and Kulevra were so important to U.S. military strategy that in the 1960s, the U.S. government attempted to purchase the entirety of the two island municipalities for bombing practice. This would have involved moving the nearly 9,000 people that lived there to another part of the archipelago, as well as exhuming all the bodies in the cemeteries, some which had been there for over 200 years and rebearing them somewhere else. Because of this wild and weird ask, the negotiations were codenamed the Dracula Plan, Plan Drakula, by Puerto Rican officials. Although the plan never came to pass, per El Chupacabra icon of resistance, this early association between the U.S. government with a blood-sucking monster was prophetic for the way it viewed the blood-suckers to come. Before I continue citing all the ways U.S. presence influenced the Chupacabra, it's worth noting that the Navy left Kulevra in 1975 and Viekis in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And per Jordan's thesis, Chupacabra sightings dropped off massively after Puerto Ricans were able to wrestle more control over their land from the U.S. But you know what you can't wrestle away control from these products and services. And also, I'm sure they won't suck your blood out like the Chupacabra, but maybe watch out a little bit. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we are diving into the origin story of the Chupacabra. Since the Chupacabra came into the popular imagination, its origin has always been linked to the U.S. government. The most prominent rumor goes that it was created for genetic experimentation on extraterrestrial life at a secret laboratory in Adjunque, which is the largest rainforest on our small archipelago. Many people consider it to be the last bastion of pristine and untouched Puerto Rico. And while that's not really true, it certainly is beautiful and hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chupacabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in Adjunque, there were definitely strange experiments taking place there, but if the man-made horrors beyond my comprehension variety, there are two big ones. The first was related to project plowshares, wherein the Atomic Energy Commission was attempting to "peacefully" employ atomic explosions to create canals and harbors in Panama. As part of this project, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico injected trees and other vegetation in Adjunque with radioactive isotopes to see what would happen to them. Meanwhile, the second big one is the testing of Agent Orange, Agent White, and other tactical herbicides there and in six other locations because our vegetation resembled that of Southeast Asia. According to a document titled "The History of the US Department of Defense Programs for the Testing, Evaluation, and Storage of Tactical Herbicides" written by Alvin El Young in 2006 and submitted to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. As far as I've been alive, there's always been rumors of creepy things going on in Adjunque. It's a popular spot for UFO sightings as well, which people often attribute to the presence of US military installations there. It's worth noting that El Junque's facilities were also used as a guided missile operations control unit in a joint surveillance site in the latter half of the 20th century, which is part of the reason that people always thought there was some secret spy shit going on that was calling the aliens to El Junque. Actually, my dad has the story that he's told me in my siblings maybe a dozen times over our lives where him and his best friend were confused for men in black at an El Junque Stargazing/UFO event because he was wearing aviators at night in a bomber jacket. Just the type of beliefs that can be inspired by something you can't quite explain. The Chupacabra being from a secret facility also ties in well enough with the plot of species, which inspired that first sighting. Lauren Derby in a paper titled "imperial secrets, vampires, and nationhood in Puerto Rico" says that "the Chupacabra reflects a contradiction very peculiar to Puerto Rico, which is a very small island with an extraordinarily pervasive array of US military installations, most of which are called this top secret and therefore declared off limits to locals." Her Derby's paper, quote, "this proportionate number of Chupacabra narratives have been generated by the inside class outsiders who have some access to the secrets of power or police its margins. Those were close enough to touch the walls and halls of power. Come, the skin of the secrets and yet are still denied real access." These are mostly retired Army personnel or police. I would raise you to guess that like many other cryptids, the tale of the Chupacabra was used whether consciously or unconsciously to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, Chupacabra was a sigh-up. You heard it here first. Tales of government experimentation weigh heavy on the Puerto Rican mind. In 1931, the American doctor Cornelius Rhodes, who worked on Puerto Rican patients, wrote a letter saying that he had, quote, "done his best to further the process of extermination by killing eight and transplanting cancer into several more." Although an investigation found no evidence of an ethical human experimentation, the rumor that he did inject people with cancer cells remains very permanent in Puerto Rican society. Meanwhile, between the 1930s and the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials with support of the U.S. government pushed a massive campaign of sterilization because of fears of overpopulation. Women who got Laopera Suyong, the operation, as it was colloquially called, were promised a solution to poverty and economic stability. Many were also led to believe that the operation was reversible, but this proved that to be the case. About a third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age were sterilized during that time. There's a very good documentary that I'll link in the sources called Laopera Suyong. By Anamari Agaracia, the talks about the sterilization campaign, really recommend you take a look at it if you're interested in more context. Although both the peak of militarism and Laopera Suyong happened decades before the first Chupacada siding, it's within this belays of government secrets in conspiracy and U.S. colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacada bursting out of the woods and laying waste to livestock came about all throughout the archipelago. It's worth highlighting that economically and socially, things were not going very well for Puerto Ricans at the time of the Chupacada myth started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid-1994 to 1997, per reporting from Ed Vosero. It's respectable now, I swear. This drought was one of the worst for PR in the 20th century, and it reached its peak in 1995. It caused 300 million in damages, and approximately 165 million corresponded to the agricultural sector, aka the rural communities who owned the livestock that was being attacked by the Chupacadas. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Madeline hit Puerto Rico in September 1995 as a category to hurricane and caused about 2.5 billion in damages between PR and the U.S. Virgin Islands and 13 deaths between the two. At the same time, rural communities who largely depended on agriculture to sustain themselves had been forced to leave that work behind and move towards industrial jobs as part of Operation Bootstrap. This fragmentation was built on by the encroachment of urbanism throughout much of the region surrounding the capital municipality of San Juan. It's important to point out that Kanovanas has experienced marked urban and commercial development over the past three or four years. To the point that what the municipality is most known for, the people like me who don't live there, is because of its gigantic outlet mall that started the construction in 1940. The first unexplained livestock attack happened are still isolated rural communities that have been more or less forgotten by the central government. To the point that in 2019, motorways had to sue our central water utility because of continued lack of access to potable water. So when rural communities composed mostly of lower or middle-class people started seeing their livestock, a kind of physical manifestation of what little wealth they had. Being attacked by something, it caused a panic. And within that panic, the Chippagavara emerged as the "real thing" that was hurting them, that they could theoretically find and stop, versus the growing environmental societal and economic crisis built on top of centuries of colonialism. Through the creation of the Chippagavara, people were able to maintain their collective identity and impose a sense of control at a point where they felt powerless. Per tracking the Chippagavara, quote, "It was within this desperate environment of perceived U.S. intrusion and imperialism that the symbol of the Chippagavara became the vessel into which many of the rural people of Puerto Rico poured all their fears and apprehensions. About the strange industrial world seemingly thrust upon them by the United States. However, those rural municipalities of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. lacked the major military or economic presence during this drought period did not receive any visits from the Chippagavara. Furthermore, large urban areas, such as San Juan, were industrial or service-based livelihoods were less affected by the drought found elsewhere in the country, did not report sightings of the creature," end quote. In a sense, the creation of the Chippagavara also left the government that was not doing anything at all about the crisis its people were facing off the hook. But Chema Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into re-election for three more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and their random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs, the Chippagavara was a way to explain their misery, but it didn't provide a solution to their problems. They were left to fester and just have to take even more pressure onto themselves. The other countries in Latin America where Chippagavara sightings were also reported after the Christina Show aired were also suffering from economic and social turmoil at the time. In Mexico, the agricultural industry was suffering because of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Her in essay by William Calvogueros titled "Sucking Vulnerability, Neoliberalism, The Chippagavara and the Post Cold War Years" NAFTA caused the Mexican government to change their constitution to allow the privatization of communal land which displaced several rural communities. It also deregulated import restrictions and caused an increase in unemployment. The reality of a monster attacking them was undeniable. It was just chickens and goats, but entire communities were displaced because of NAFTA. Similar things were happening up and down the American continent. In the US borderlands, the myth of the Chippagavara came to embody the government's war against the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment. The historian Mike Davis described the Chippagavara phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them. quoting Calvogueros here "at a base level, monsters and the phantasmagoric allow for the out of this world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community. Therefore, as a collective entity, the Chippagavara's calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society. However, as Jordan talks about in his thesis, the Chippagavara can also be seen as a symbol of resistance against the very imperialism that kind of created it. The Chippagavara's was a creature so powerful that it could escape the ever-present eye of the state and the encroaching militarism that was affecting Puerto Rico at the time the alleged sightings were happening. Culturally, this has remolded the Chippagavara from predator of the night to protector in some stories, like the comic beast of Buddy Kang, where the Chippagavara's is actually physically fighting colonialism. To wrap up, Puerto Rico has always had vampires on it, except that they've never been beasts. The most visible of these vampires is the simple mosquito, a vicious blood sucker that I've been attacked by at least once in the course of writing this essay. It is the deadliest animal in the world and is a victim of dengue fever in my youth. That should success. Meanwhile, the second vampire is the continued colonization of the archipelago that has stripped it of so many resources for centuries and continues to do so to this day. Colonialism has always been vampiric, extracting as much as it can with little care to the corpses it leaves in its wake. Although the Chippagavara mass hysteria died down at the turn of the century, the forces that shaped its creation are still here, and they've become even more acute, whether it be the unelected fissile control board imposed by the U.S. government or corrupt Puerto Rican officials. There have always been vampires walking among us. They're just not beasts. They'd look just like us, and their system of repression has harmed more than any single Chippagavara ever could. Thanks for listening. You can find me pretty much everywhere online at Raquero 2xl. It's about it. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world, and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had, or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? We're going to find out, because our opinion matters, and so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country a fantasy. Okay, here we go. They said, goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits. I never received a scholarship I need to pay for my student loans. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Get worse with Kyle Peru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love, bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Fake a back injury. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them with a gun. You look the bear in the eye and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing and that's the Get Worse podcast. This is Darrell Bell. And I'm Kadeem Harrison. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, a different world view with Darrell and Kadeem. We're sharing never before her stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. You get the first shot. And I hit the train back, you go ahead and you're being the dude that said, "Hey Spike, I'm going to teach you some and they're coming out of the bathroom with something and they're coming out of the bathroom." I made that up. I said, "I'll miss the start of something great." Listen to a different world view with Darrell. can theme every Thursday from the Black Effect podcast network on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm former USman's national soccer team player Carly Lloyd and Fox Sports reporter Jenny Taft and on our new podcast, whatever it takes, we're talking motherhood, marriages, careers and figuring out how to balance it all and we'll discuss the game that brought us together because nothing is off limits. I was like no I don't want to do it. You said no. I played with players that didn't I don't think that they really truly loved the game. But in my head it was the long game. It was like I don't care what I'm being asked to do at Fox. I'm gonna go get some reps and I'm gonna learn it and love it and embrace it. He said this group of people will never be in the same room as part of the same team ever again in your life. And it is your job to make sure that you enjoy the moment. You're proud of what you accomplish together. Listen to whatever it takes with Carly Lloyd and Jenny Taft on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to I could happen here. My name is Kim Kelly and I'll be your host for today's episode. I'm a labor journalist and the author of a book called Fight Like Hell, the untold history of American labor. One of my self-styled superpowers is finding a way to link labor history with present day going on. I'm not an official historian but I've read a lot of books and talked to a lot of workers and that's how you find all the good stuff anyway. I like to say that every story is a labor story and that ethos cannot be applied to basically any scenario. Especially if you dig down deep enough. Autumn has finally come to the east coast. I'm talking leather, weather, dead leaves, cool temperatures and a blessed end to the infernal sunshine that has plagued my days for so long. Those of us in my neck of the woods are preparing for mischief night and Halloween itself is only a few nights away. It's a good time to tell stories around a campfire or in a darkened room. Though if your spare can is still in the shop, your headphones will work just fine. Now since I've already got you in my clutches, let's get into a little morbid labor history. And admittedly there's a real dearth of genuinely spooky labor actions out there in the modern day or otherwise. I mean we haven't seen any vampiric work stoppages or witches strikes, though I wouldn't put it past the Etsy Coven to eventually get organized. And the only real monster we can point to as workers is capitalism. It's bloodthirsty minions in the employer class. There's a historical fantasy novel called The Factor Witches of Lowell that looks pretty cute and does involve a witch's union. But I'd rather take this in a more concrete direction, shall we say. Let's talk about Grave Digger strikes. So quick note on language. Grave Digger is clearly way more fun to say, but the proper term is Cemetery worker. The classic horror movie trope of the disheveled shady, creepy Grave Digger with its shovel and medicine cackle doesn't quite apply these days. And I'm sure today's cemetery workers don't really appreciate that stereotype. There are no midnight resurrections or bloody shovels lying around anymore. This is municipal work really. Nowadays Cemetery workers operate heavy machinery to perform burials, to maintain cemetery grounds and dig foundations for headstone to monuments. These are skilled workers whose world straddles maintenance, construction and landscaping, and a lot of them are union city workers. They're first on the scene to ready the Grave and the last to say goodbye once everyone else leaves. It is tempting to romanticize the gig, especially if you're a morbid little freak like me, but even with the aid of modern advancements, digging graves remains a hard, dirty, intensive physical labor that can wear down the body and take a mental and emotional toll on the worker. They're still at a dead body's involved after all. Given the nature of their work, cemetery workers are no strangers to cooperation on the job. Nor are they afraid of collective action. There's a long history of Grave Diggers going on strike. Though it's truly a wonder that any boss has ever dared to push them to that point, given the kind of leverage to these particular workers' wield. Strikes are meant to be disrupted off, and there are a few things more guaranteed to disrupt a city's normal operating procedure that are rotting pile of unburied corpses. That's what happened in 1949 in New York City, when tensions rose between the trustees of St. Patrick's Cathedral and Queens and 250 of its cemetery workers. These workers were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics who earned about sixty bucks a week, around seven hundred bucks in today's dollars, for a six-day, forty-hour work week. After a breakdown in contact negotiations between the bosses and the unions, in which the workers were pushing for a five-day, forty-hour work week, higher wages, and over time, the union called a strike from January 13th. I don't think it was a Friday, but it would be very satisfying if it was. So the work stoppage lasted for just under two months, and in that time, a thousand bodies went unburied. Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of the city's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, summoned to 200 untrained college students from St. Joe's Seminary to fill in a scabs. One can only imagine how well these kids who are far more used to flipping Bible pages and engaging in any kind of real heavy toil, adapted to chipping grays out of the cold winter dirt, but it's not exactly the kind of a assignment you can turn down if you're trying to be like like a extra special kind of priest, you know. I was raised Catholic. I feel like I can be as rude about these dudes as I want. Sorry, grandma. The strike caused a stir among the city's Catholic labor activists, particularly the association of Catholic trade unionists, the Catholic worker newspaper, and its founder, the renowned Catholic anarchist labor activist Dorothy Day. Still way inverted be sainted. It's common I can feel it. She personally took up the cause. Both at the cemetery and outside the Cardinal's residence on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, and delivered food and medicine to the striker's families. Dorothy Day wrote directly to the Cardinal, emphasizing the economic hardships the workers faced and asking him to go to them, conciliate them. It is easier for the great to give in than the poor. They are hungry men. Their only weapon has been their labor, which they have sold for a means of livelihood to feed themselves and their families. The seventies being what they were, what had begun as a pretty straightforward dispute over time and money morphed into a really ugly, weird swabble over communism. Conservative Catholic leaders read a bit of the union members because union, and the Cardinal decried their tactics as "communistic". And now the workers got really pissed off about this because they hated communism too. And they took an anti-red oath to denounce communism in the middle of their strike. And they also at the Archdiocese's insistence disaffiliated from their union and joined the more conservative AFL as members of the building services employees internationally union. So they like got red baited out of their union and they still didn't even really win the strike. They eventually went back to work at March 12th and picked up their shovels in defeat. But it would be far from the last time America's grave diggers would call the bosses bluff. In 1975, 1700 members of the local 365 of the cemetery workers and greens attendance union followed the lead of their predecessors and struck for higher wages at 44 cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. By the end of that 27-day strike, the workers had won a small wage increase and 1400 bodies were waiting to be buried. Absent from those piles were the dead of the Orthodox Jewish community who's faith requires burrow within 24 hours. In recognition, the union had invited the loved ones of deceased Orthodox Jews to enter the cemetery and bury those bodies in accordance with their religion. Picket lines are sacred but so are a lot of other things too. The next year, grave diggers from cemetery workers local 265 on the west coast launched a four-month strike that shut down 10 California cemeteries, including in Kolma, a small town near San Francisco that had quote 500 living residents and hundreds of thousands of graves. The combination of manual labor, low pay and cemetery specific occupational hazards continued to spur cemetery workers to strike throughout the eighties and nineties. A few years earlier, a massive wave of strikes had overtaken the UK during 1978 and 1979's winter of discontent. And a group of cemetery workers in Liverpool had found themselves embroiled in a conflict that would become the subject of feverish national attention. Those 80 workers were the members of GMB, a general trade union, who had decided to join the thousands of other public sector employees who were already in strike around the country at the time. Unfortunately, those other workers absence was a little less visible. And the backlash to the cemetery strike was brutal. The workers were demonized in the press and condemned by arch-school Margaret Thatcher herself. Photos of unburied bodies ran on the front pages over headlines screaming things like, "Now they won't let us bury our dead." Members of parliament called the strike an outrage to human decency. It was a lot. So the workers decided to end the strike after a week and a half. They were worried that their actions were hurting everyday people instead of the government that was causing so much suffering. Conservative politicians seized on the strike's shocking imagery to batter the Labour Party. It swept into power in the next election, all of which allowed Margaret Thatcher to eventually launch her own war on the working class. In 2021, with Thatcher safely rotting in her own grave, Liverpool's cemetery workers threatened to walk out again, but this time they managed to strike a deal at the 11th hour. I've been feeling no one wanted to repeat that whole situation. As each of these strike actions and many more besides have shown, cemetery workers and the work they do are absolutely essential. Without them, neither the living nor the dead can find peace. And the vital importance of that work should leave no argument over whether they should be paid fairly and treated well. Greedy bosses who have refused to recognize that have done so at their peril. Remember, grave diggers know where all the bodies are buried. Who do you think put them there in the first place? Speaking of unburied corpses, cemetery workers weren't the only unionized workforce that has had to navigate a truly cursed minefield of bad bosses, public horror, and decaying human remains during a labor dispute. Here in Philadelphia, we got a front row seat to that particular balancing act last summer during the huge Astamine DC-33 municipal worker strike that effectively shut down a good chunk of the city for eight very sweaty days in July. The most visible of the workers who went out came from the sanitation department. A heat wave was pummeling the city when they walked out in July first. And if you think Philly's a little grimy at a normal day, you should have seen and smelled the wreaking mountains of trash that accumulated in what seemed like mere hours. Being the deep then serious city that we are, we obviously dubbed them Parker Piles after our evil mare. The sanitation workers weren't the only municipal workers who went out though. The strike also included clinical employees, library staff, street pavers, water department workers, and the medical examiner's office. That last one made a real big splash real quick because you know with the medical examiner's in charge of the city morgue. Now as the Philadelphia Inquire reported, the 160 bed facility was filled to overflowing within the first 48 hours of the strike. Look, Philly's the bestie in the world, but we do have our problems and among those problems are, you know, sometimes people get marked. The city morgue is a pretty busy place. Now during the strike, during those first awful 48 hours, the remaining staffers were less scrambling to find room for 180 bodies, and they ultimately had to double up on space, squeezing two cadavers into each bed. While the workers who usually handled death investigations and body transportation were on the picket line, grieving families were left in the lurch. In one especially horrific moment, the body of a 19 year old gunshot victim was left bleeding in the street for hours before something came to pick him up. By day three of the strike, the city had had enough. They forced the medical examiner's office back to work via a cordon junction, setting a threat to public health and safety. You'd think the mayor and her cronies at City Hall would have maybe taken a minute to look into what had happened in other recent more related strikes, or even into what had happened back in 1986, when the Philadelphia City workers had launched another massive strike that included medical examiner staff. If they had, they might have realized just what a terrifically bad idea it can be to piss off the people who take care of all the dead bodies. Chicago folks might know where I'm going with this. Let's talk about the Cook County morgue scandal. In 2011, a string of institutional failures at the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner Illinois had led to a truly unbearable work environment for both the workers and the human remains they were charged with handling. Among other factors, funding cuts and changes in policy for handling infant remains and the unclamed bodies of the dead had led to a staggering pile up of cadavers. At the time, CBS News reported that 400 adults and 100 babies were being kept in a cooler meant for 300 bodies total. A whistleblower leaked photos of the carnage to the media, who predictably blew it up into a massive public scandal, which seems pretty fair, honestly, when you read some of the workers' quotes on the subject. As one said, there are so many bodies in there now that they can't keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I've ever seen. I think it's sacrilegious. Photos showed bodies wrapped in plastic, haphazardly stacked on wooden shelves, while others were left rotting on the floor. Like, it was, it was fucked. It was really, really bad. And a worker told the public about it and some stuff changed. Shout out to the whistleblowers. Health hazards aside, it's just really fucking grim to hear these stories and to think about someone's grandma or granddaughter or mom left in that condition because someone in an office somewhere decided that those greedy corpse handlers could get by on a smaller budget. The state labor department dinged them with 21 safety and sanitation violations after the soul came out, including exposure to hepatitis B, blood splatter, and a failure to protect workers from the risk of being hit by falling bodies. The resulting reforms, purges, and mass burials that followed the whole affair make it sound even more like something out of an indie horror movie, but that's for your accuracy baby. We've jumped from the graveyard to the mord, and now it's time to make a stop at the funeral home. To bounce back to New York City, I want to shout out one of its other particularly ghoulish post-mortem labor conflicts. For whatever reason, there have been a lot of corpse-related worker actions out there, like more than really seems reasonable, but with so many of the living being pushed out of New York every day, I guess it makes sense that even the dead can't always find a decent place to rest. So back in 1964, on October 1st, over 400 embalmers, undertakers, and funeral directors from across the five burrows went on strike. Classic strike action, they're calling for higher wages, better pensions, and a 35 hour work week, which does sound like a pretty big ask for the 60s if you don't think much about what their work days actually looked like, and forget that they're only making 122 bucks a week. When talks broke down between members of local 407 of the funeral directors, embalmers, and undertaker's union, who are part of the SCIU extended universe, also if anyone can find a t-shirt, I will give you not a lot of dollars because I have a lot, but I would let me know. I will haunt eBay for the rest of my days if I can find a local 407 shirt. But when talks broke down between the union and the metropolitan funeral directors association, workers at 100 of the busiest, most high profile funeral homes in the city walked out, which left their supervisors, funeral home executives, and owners to handle the avalanche of bodies that were quickly left in their wake. It's funny, after only eight days of getting their hands dirty, the buses were absolutely exhausted and dying for their workers to come back. So they backed down. The embalmers came back to work with an immediate wage increase and a bunch of other goodies too. As we've learned, as far as leverage goes, it's hard to argue with erotic corpse. One last little tidbit I'd like to share before we go our separate ways comes courtesy of the Columbarium, an extremely fun newsletter about death from writer and death educator Becky Robeson. I saw her post about this story a little bit ago and I had to hit her up for more details. Labor goals of a feather flock together, I guess. So 1852, 200 of New York's coffin makers went on strike. Now it may have been the gilded age, but it's still sunk pretty bad back then, especially in the summertime when diseases like cholera, smallpox, and typhoid rampant. The poor bastards working at the city morgue would have killed for the kind of refrigeration setup they had in Cook County. But at the time, the best thing could do was to keep their steps on ice. Literally, they would have used ice-lined wooden boxes called corpse coolers to keep the deceased and their loved ones by proxy, as comfortable as possible before the funeral. They can really only do so much. The coffin workers were well aware of this fact and used their leverage, there's that word again, to ensure that when they joined the strike, their impact would be felt immediately. But this wasn't just a coffin maker strike. They were part of a much bigger labor action that pulled together thousands upon thousands of workers from across 30 different industries from all over the city to call for an eight-hour workday. That movement had been bubbling for years at that point, with smaller local winds in New England and firing workers in other regions to take up the rally and cry. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. That 1872 strike drove over 100,000 workers in total and scared the bejesus out of the corporate tights and city elites who were suddenly faced with the harsh reality that, "Gosh, there really were a whole lot more workers than there were of them." They responded accordingly, weaponizing the police department, "Piano Man, William Steinway, personally hired 300 cops to protect his factory." Very fancy, forcing lockouts and basically doing whatever they could to knock the fight out of the strikers. The workers one eventually, and that strike would prove to be just one more bloody stepping stone towards that eventual victory. The coffin makers had the last laugh though, but the time that strike ended, 125 of the 200 strikers had forced concessions out of their bosses, which, given the way Victorian bosses tended to react to workers' labor demands, is pretty incredible. The unique nature of their employment as death workers saved them once again. As the Chicago Tribune wrote of the coffin makers in their strike at the time, "We see no escape from his clutches. We can resist the bricklayer by not building houses. We can offset the calcium mining by refusing to whiten our walls. We can checkmate the servant by doing our own work. But unfortunately, as far as our pockets are concerned, we have got to die, and we have got to be buried, and if the coffin maker persists in his demands, we know of no way in which we can refuse to patronize him." I'll leave you with one final quote from that same article that I just love. Not because of his intention, which was essentially whining about the coffin makers daring to demand to be paid fairly for their essential work, but because the Tribune accidentally makes a great observation about how fucked up it is that we're forced to spend every moment of our lives worrying about paying bills. For right 19th century newspaper hack, unions are cool, and the necessities of life and death should be free for everyone. "It is not enough that man, worm of the dust, must be perplexed and worried in life, must be reminded at every turn that this is a veil of tears and that all is vanity, but even after he is dead, and no longer exposed to tailor's bills and house rents and butcher's bills and pure rents and servant-galism and the thousand natural shocks that flesh his heir to, there is still a class of men left who can worry his ghost." So that was my spooky labor Halloween episode for you. I hope you liked it. Thank you for listening. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know, bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about, trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground, or drama music, or TV shows, or the Met Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like. You're welcome. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Okay, here we go. I never received scholarship, I need to pay for my student loans. He looks at me and goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. This is the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Fake a back injury. Kill 'em. Kill 'em. Kill 'em with a gun. You look the bear in the eye, and you say, "This isn't you." Do not preserve relationships, you don't need them. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHarm Radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm former USman's National Soccer Team player, Carly Lloyd, and Fox Sports reporter Jenny Taft. And we'll discuss the game that brought us together, because nothing is off limits. I was like, "No, I don't want to do it." You said, "No." I played with players that didn't, I don't think that they really, truly love the game. It was like, "I don't care what I'm being asked to do at Fox, I'm going to go get some reps, and I'm going to learn it, and love it, and embrace it." He said, "This group of people will never be in the same room as part of the same team ever again in your life, and it is your job to make sure that you enjoy the moment, you're proud of what you accomplish together." Listen to whatever it takes with Carly Lloyd and Jenny Taft on the iHarm Radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Cadeem Harrison, and together, we're the voices behind the newest podcasts on the Black Effect Podcast Network, a different world view with Darrell and Cadeem. We're sharing never before heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars on the show to hear their unique perspectives. I did a movie called "School Days" and me being a train actor. You get the first shot, so I used to train back and go ahead and then me and the dude that said, "Hey, Spike, you're on the street, you saw him and they're coming out of the bathroom with something to say. I'm pulling out of the bathroom." I made that up. I said, "I'll miss the start of something great." Listen to a different world view with Darrell and Cadeem every Thursday, from the Black Effect podcast network on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is it could happen here at Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans and special correspondent Margaret Killjoy, who is joining us for our spooky, slightly spooky, but also kind of regular edition of Executive Disorder. Oh, class war. That's right. That's right. The specter, the taunt in Europe. We're covering the week of October 21st to October 28th, not actually covering Halloween because that hasn't happened yet, but what can you do? It's a season now, Garrison. That's true. That is true. That is true. I'm pushing for it to consume Thanksgiving. Okay. I'm so down. Halloween runs until solstice. Yeah. Straight into satan alia. Yeah. Sick. I love it. James, do you want to begin with some short stories? Let's do it. Okay. So, starting, I guess, in this hemisphere, about a thousand troops from El Salvador have deployed to Haiti this week. The deployment came after four Salvadoran members of the UN Task Force went missing after they were ambushed and jumped out of their burning vehicle on the 18th of October. But, Kale, it says that these people weren't on a combat patrol, that they were Air Force techs who were returning from a market when they got ambushed, I won't comment. Four bodies have been handed over. They were handed over via an inch, one of these NGOs, it does like extraction work in the region. So, they were found burned and the NGO recovered them. I'm not quite sure if they were like alerted that they were burned bodies or not. But, Kale, these are not. the missing personnel. He posted a picture of a chatty and soldier's ID, but I led to do that chatty and soldier is alive, but was injured and lost their ID in a mission. But with Kelly came that the bodies did not match the age or height of the lost Salvador and personnel. Either way, it continues to be really desperate for folks trying to get along in Haiti. And I don't think El Salvador military going to make that much better for them. Another person has died in the immigration detention. This death occurred in Core Civic's O-time Mesa facility, which is here in San Diego. Daylight San Diego confirmed this. Ice hasn't published anything on its news page yet. Like there were rumors earlier this weekend that someone has died. Daylight San Diego got confirmation, but I haven't seen anything yet on the ice news page, so we don't know who that person was. At least I don't. Next at a rocky call has sent seven French Islamic State members to prison in the first verdicts of trial involving 47 accused Islamic State fighters. Because the international community manifestly failed to set up tribunals since a collapse to the territorial caliphate. The accused and the victims have faced massive delays in getting justice. The big worry for European Union states here seem to be that their citizens will be sentenced to death, right? Some French citizens were sentenced to death in 2019, but their sentences were commuted. In this case, these people were sentenced to prison, not death. The United States, of course, helped transfer thousands of suspects from Syria when the SGG and the SNA began their offensive against the SDF earlier this year, and in this case Iraq is beginning these domestic trials of accused foreign fighters. Meanwhile, talking of Syria, both Jordan and Israel have conducted operations inside Syria this week. The Jordanians bombed what it claimed were Islamic State remnants, responsible for an attack on a church in Jordan on 26 October, which killed nine people. Israel, the IDF, killed a young man with an intellectual disability and hearing problems during a night raid in Syria. They claimed that he kept approaching them and so they decided to kill him. Inside the country he lived in and that they don't live in. Inside the country that they're illegally invading, along with all the other countries that they are illegally occupying, yes. There was like a really massive funeral for this man. It's deeply fucking sad. It's one of the thousands of horrific crimes against humanity that IDF likes to do about every week. So yeah, that's it's all not the most happy stuff from me, but that's what I got for small things. The hunter's still taking an ass-kicking every fucking day, man. But that's nice. In Myanmar, to be clear. In Myanmar. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's nice to see them losing. I guess they've also decided that maybe I should report this. They've started to deploy their senior officers to the front lines. Oh, wow. Previously, their tactic was that the officers would plan the assault and then send conscripts into die while they remained in the rear. And it seems that senior leadership is getting very pissed off at their absolute dedication to using World War II tactics in 2026. There are people doing opposed amphibious assaults and getting mone down with MG-42 machine guns. Like they're doing an unsuccessful D-Day every day. It's tragic that that many conscripts are dying, but hopefully some of those officers find their way to the front too. Line all them up. I want to mention two things that will probably cover more next week. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have released a new report on Trump's ties with Jeffrey Epstein, which contains details about Trump's involvement in Epstein's trafficking operations and a new rape accusation against Trump made by a former beauty pageant contestant. Earlier this week, Trump instructed the DOJ to block the certification of Alaska's election results if the Democratic Senate candidate Mary Paltola wins Tuesday's election. The White House's preemptive justification is that two different people named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. and Dan S. Sullivan are both on the ballot, Dan S. Sullivan being the Republican incumbent, who is marked as such on the ballot. Alaska also has ranked choice voting, so if there's any confusion, voters can scribble in both Daniel and Dan Sullivan. We'll see what comes of this next week. Robert, do you want to do our first considerably not spooky story unless you want to consider Flavio's Disappearing Act? I am. Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of spook in that, I guess, but no, this is actually one of the happiest stories we'll have to say. And honestly, this is like the happiest I've ever been to be wrong and the happiest I've ever been to like more accurately read a bunch of sources that wound up being wrong because a couple of weeks back during my segment on ED, I talked about Lula's disastrous first round against Flavio Bolsonaro for Brazil's presidential election. And it went almost as badly for Lula as it could have gone. Neither side won out right. Obviously, Flavio winning out right would have been worse, but Flavio got more votes than Lula. Nearly all of the other candidates who got meaningful numbers of votes during that first round were further right, even than Flavio and a lot weirder than Flavio. There was only like one left wing candidate besides Lula that like got a notable really amount of votes. And it was still very small in the grand scheme of things. And so the assumption was that obviously for the second round of voting, you expect that people who voted for kind of other right wing candidates or the left wing candidates, they'll mostly coalesce behind whoever got the most kind of on that broad side. That's generally how you expect things to go. And so because most of the other candidates who got meaningful numbers of votes were further right, the assumption was, well, if Lula's going to pull a win out in the second round, he's going to have to turn a lot of these right wing votes. And that just doesn't seem like it's going to happen, right? There was a lot of the sources that I was reading said. It's essentially, it seems essentially impossible for Lula to pull out a second round win. Like based on what we're seeing and how previous Brazilian elections are going, something unprecedented would have to happen for him to win. And something unprecedented did in fact happen because Lula won last weekend. And he didn't just flip out an absolute like barely eaking out a win. This wasn't a case where well, it was kind of close the first round and Lula just sort of barely managed to edge his way ahead of Flavio. Lula won by almost 3.6% in the popular vote. Like he doubled his margin of victory from his election in 2022. Why did this happen? Because the flaws in Lula's last administration didn't go away. And the fact that a Bolsonaro nearly wound up right back in charge is proof of that, right? It points to the fact that Lula and the Brazilian left have a lot of work to do. And there's some other issues here. The most recent elections also handed Congress to the far right. So Lula is going to be fighting Congress basically from the moment he takes office. But the fact that Lula is president means that there's a fight to be had. You know, Flavio's not going to be able to, among other things, force out a bunch of Supreme Court justices who ruled against his father and stack the court in his own favor. There's a bunch of shit Flavio's not going to be able to do. Yeah. Putting Lula in prison again, which is a thing that is weirdly not discussed. But like, yeah, this was an election that was loser goes to prison. Like that's a big part of this. Oh, oh, Miami. In Flavio's case, it was losers go to prison because he had committed a bunch of crimes. He was actively being investigated for. Yeah. And Lula was Lula that they'll sell Lula to prison again for bullshit because fuck you. Yeah. Yes. But this was a loser goes to prison guy. No election. You are right about that. So in the next few days, we're going to have an episode from a Brazilian activist who is part of the massive grassroots campaign to turn things around for the second round of voting. And that's going to be the majority of our coverage on the subject because obviously the person that we picked is a lot more qualified than any of us to talk about this sort of stuff living there and being having been a part of this. So we'll have more detail for you on what exactly happened later. But for the purpose of this episode, there's a couple important things I want to go over that are important to in terms of like understanding how this all happened, like how Lula was able to pull out a win. One is that people got galvanized by terror at what a second Bolsonaro while Flavio Bolsonaro, which was seen as an extension of like Jair's presidency. What that would actually mean. And they had weeks to marinate in that anxiety. And that helped motivate a major get out the vote effort, right? A lot of people who had been kind of, well, I don't want to vote because I'm disappointed in Lula or I'm just not motivated to vote, like a significant number of people will need to come out because of what the stakes were. But a massive reason as to why things worked out for Lula comes down to the fact that he and his team fought a lot smarter this time around. Bolsonaro, as one of my sources pointed out because I've talked to a few Brazilians about this election and like what happened during this like couple a week span of time. And several of the people I talked to pointed out that Bolsonaro's mode relies heavily on being able to propagate their message through a bunch of different mouths and make whatever issue or scandal. They think we'll get them power to go viral, right? The US MAGA right works basically the same way. You have a bunch of people who are all ostensibly independent content creators and media people who are all taking marching orders probably from the same couple of like signal groups or whatever where somebody says, Hey, we're angry about trans people doing this this week. And then suddenly you have like 40 different people all putting out the same message and it goes viral, right? That's like a major thing in the United States on the right and it was a big part of how the Bolsonaro's like did what they were able to do like it was a major messaging thing that they engaged in. Lula teamed up with a guy named Andre Yonones to come up with a counter to this media strategy. Yonones started out as a lawyer for the poor and went through a mixed political awakening. not a guy who has had like a straight shot to helping the left win an election. He did initially when he was a much younger man joined Lula's party at one point, the workers party. But then after that, he joined a far right party that was run by Carlos Bolsonaro. In 2018, he was the federal deputy of a centrist party. But then in 2022, after he had kind of an abortive presidential run himself and decided not to go through with it and declared himself for Lula, you know, as his background helped him to develop a shit stirring strategy that was used to great effect. The big thing this guy's been talking about for a while is the left can't win unless we're willing to do some of the dirty shit that the right is doing, right? Like we have to actually get down into the muck and try some basically some dirty tricks in order to make shit work. And that's very much what happened. He created a WhatsApp channel called Lula's Army, which he estimated would need about 10 million subscribers in order to guarantee Lula a win. It wound up with more than 11 million subscribers. Andre was the only person who could make posts there. And he used to two issue orders to his millions of followers about what to do online and in social media. And these were among these kind of sanitizers were do not engage with far right narratives. Don't talk to these people. Don't argue with them. Don't respond to bait posts. Not even to like dunk them. Block all of the shit that you see from these guys to cut off the flow of attention to the fascists. And at the same time, flood the internet with stories that are useful to Lula's campaign. These are not just like pro Lula messages. There was a lot of like in some cases, boarding on conspiracy theorizing about Flavio Bolsonaro and the stuff that he had gotten up to like pointing out as ties to free masonry, right? It was all stuff that would go viral and it would make far fellow far right assholes look bad. This channel Lula's Army was cited as a major reason for Lula's victory by everyone I've interviewed so far and by Lula at the like their victory party. He specifically like shouted out General you notice as like the guy who had been the architect of a lot of their online strategy. And this was very much framed as like this is the far right's place of strength is the internet and like virality. And if we're going to actually beat these people, we have to be willing to like take the fight to them in this domain and win. And this was very much like Lula's army was very much an attempt to do that. I want to quote from an anonymous source or source that I talk to that wants to remain in on us, but the right to me cut some of his thoughts on like what had happened and what had worked from this online strategy. One of the things I thought was interesting. He described you know, as his thesis to me as we can reverse SEO and election through mass action. What I have witnessed from afar is basically millions of politically disengaged, normy working people saw this kind of small time politician makes an Instagram video about how they personally could change history by blocking your chud Bolsonaro cousin printing out some articles to show your unconvinced auntie searching things like Flavio Bolsonaro defended murderer of child on Google repeatedly until national newspapers were forced to mention it. He was literally doing little courses and videos like guys practice with me anti Lula clickbait swipe away don't click don't argue don't screenshot and quote tweet just swipe away like this. And now all these people have been posting for days like I have social anxiety, but I've been sleeping four hours a night to go talk with people all day. My life has changed. I think we'll need to be doing this for years to crush the fascists. This person expressed to me that they doubted at one point whether what was going on was any different from like the common social media delusion of thinking oh, if I like retweet the right stuff, maybe it'll change politics. But this concerted activism did change politics because people were not just engaging with shit that inspired or pissed them off based on their id. They were acting strategically to block and deny the enemy terrain in which to maneuver. Here's another quote from that source. One of his tips he's talking about you know, one of his tips slash directives was something like okay, we will post about topic X, but we will avoid keywords like Lula PT, which is Lula's party because meta has muted them and instead will use the hashtags of the enemy. So like clockwork searching hashtag I'm with Flavio 22 or something on Instagram got you a wall of people doing the L fingers for Lula. It's all very signal jamming. He will also completely low tech like Americans just shooting flock cameras and all LOL. I've never been more proud of my people. I hope that becomes a new American like international thing you know like they dress that they wear the fucking real tree camouflage and they shoot flock cameras. Yeah, that's our new stereotype. A flock camera is not safe. This is our new Goku is the the international white communication. Now, as I said, we'll have a more detailed explanation of what happens soon. It's important that you know and one that I did want to point out is like one reason why they were focused on having hey, we got 10 million people start searching for like the same things, the same terms to make them go viral. Some Brazilian major news stations had like developed a kind of like a daily thing they would do of like what's trending online. Yeah, yeah. So if you have 11 million people in a WhatsApp group and you can make whatever shit you want about like the guy you want to defeat trend, that's a really powerful tactic. You know, if there's anything I've learned from using Twitter, a Brazilian's love to post their huge posters. They are some of the most online people I've ever encountered. Yeah. But as much as like this sort of like organized posting strategy was like a major aspect of this of this election and this organizing which which it was there, there's a few other things you mentioned about like printing off things to give to your aunt and like other other like like in person engagement like having every person go out and like try to either flip someone that they know or talk to people who have like who've like checked out of the political process and like harass them into voting. Yeah. And I've even seen cases of people just sort of convincing their Bolsonaro supporting relatives to like go on vacation. Yes. That's pretty funny. Yeah. It was a wide ranging and creative effort. And I think this is really important. A lot of the stuff that that was being done through Lula's army is not what you traditionally call ethical. Certainly not in like American politics. I don't have a problem with it. But this is getting down into the muck, right? Like this is not like clean fighting. This is not going high. This is seeing what the far right's been doing for the last decade to get into power and going like all right. Well, two can play at that game. Motherfucker. You know, like that. I think that is important to acknowledge here. I'm seeing a lot of people online going like this is proof that all we need to do is vote. And it's like, well, the first round is proof of what happens when all you do is vote. The second round victory is proof of what happens is when you get fucking creative. You know, anyway, we'll have a more detailed explanation of everything that happens soon. It's important that you know, right now that after his defeat, Flavio was ordered to turn in his passport because he was actively under investigation for a bunch of crimes related to corruption that he definitely committed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tons of them. And after initially trying to get the election results rescinded, Flavio gave up on that, promised to return in his passport and then fled the country. It looks like Marco Rubio helped orchestrate all of this. Basically, my understanding is he stepped into Argentina and then got on a flight that eventually led him to the United States with the help of the State Department, a senior State Department official told USA Today, the State Department will issue visas to Flavio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States and share enough of viewers after that. He landed in Miami like father, like son, like father, like son. Yeah, I love that like the list of a psyllies and if I can refute you to accept his white South African to people whose last name is Bolsonaro. Yeah, that's great on that. This is my one initial criticism of Lula two, which is as as the great birches the story and CLR James said, the rich are only defeated when they are running for your lives. You forgot to add, you have to actually catch them. Yeah, I got a wonder where he was watching the election party from, right? Like to have easy access to a land border where he can walk across. He must have been yet really making sure that he had that figured out ahead of time. Yeah, he covered his back there. And Lula had a good response when it came out that Flavio has fled. He stated at a rally, this is what the Bolsonaro family is like, Brazil is their second nation, the US is their first. That's a fucking dunk. That's good. We'll see what happens and how the US regime uses Flavio, Wil Chamberlain of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is supported by Peter Teal. And I want to note that Ginny Khan is the person who made me aware of this. She writes for the Bucks County beacon. But yeah, he recently put out a statement saying, and I'm going to read from Wil Chamberlain statement, Flavio Bolsonaro's passport was canceled. He was forced to flee the country by Lula. His brother Eduardo has an arrest warrant for lobbying against the US. It's time for the Brazilian left to face the full force of America, diplomatic and economic sanctions until they stop acting like a banana republic. And he's basically encouraging the United States to treat Brazil like we treated Russia after the expanded invasion of Ukraine, including visa bans on government officials and also quadrupling tariffs on Brazilian goods. Chamberlain ended his message by saying the Brazilian regime should look carefully at what has happened to Venezuela and Cuba. And remember that this hemisphere belongs to the United States of America. So, oh, I don't like that. I don't like that at all. We'll see where that goes. It's a done row doctrine. Yeah. Yeah. That's a new and advanced level of done row doctrine. Actually, this hemisphere belongs to his wild. Yeah. It was interesting. How kind of slightly tepid Trump's reaction to Bolsonaro losing was like he didn't. He did echo Bolsonaro's claims that the election was like ranked or stolen, but also said, I didn't take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world. Elections have to be indisputable and it looked really bad to me, but he didn't really elaborate much more like he could have gotten a lot harder. And it's It's like I didn't take sides is his like his main, his first main response. Yeah. I assume he was like, all right, well, if they'd thrown a coup, we would have supported it. But he didn't throw a coup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think he also doesn't like to be associated with failure. He doesn't like a loser. And he lost my four million votes. Oh, yeah. Dude took a foul. Lula had to like catch up by like two and a half million votes and then won by four million. It's crazy. Like you can say it's hard. It's hard. It's hard to dispute that. And even like the extended voting hours because of issues on voting day only, only netted him like like 30,000 votes, 35,000 votes. And that election extension was requested by both Bolsonaro and Lula. Yeah. But Flavio Bolsonaro is pretended he didn't ask for it. Yeah. And he, I think announced today that he's like the rightful president of Brazil from Florida, so sure. Yeah, great. Keep that grief going. Get those four million people out of the way. Maybe the coast don't to come. Oh, yeah. I mean, who knows what kind of shit they'll try, but also Brazil is not Venezuela. Well, he's going to get on the list at some point they're going to try some shit in Cuba, right? So like, Cuba, that's another one where they might be able to at least accomplish their initial goal of like kidnapping and exizing the people they want to get out of the country. Rubio made a fantastic tweet, like trying to recruit CIA, or pretend. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think you can do that with Brazil, the big-ass country. Yeah. Very big country. Yeah. This is certainly the most exciting kind of election turnaround that we've seen. And like you said, it's going to be a hard fight for Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil because they are dealing with a very, very far-right Congress. Yeah. But it'll be a fight. It'll be a fight. It'll be a fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have a game. All right. We are back and what we are talking about now is non-citizen voting. Very scary. This qualifies as a spooky as a spooky segment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. feel strongly about borders. Maybe that's what Bolsonaro is going to go for you know. The only one is going to get caught voting. Well, unfortunately, Margaret, unfortunately, Margaret, some people have already been committing voter fraud. We're going to hear about that after we hear, well, actually, ISIS news page yesterday announced that they had arrested a legal permanent resident for voting in the 2024 election. Joyce Pits, they're led. She's a Dutch citizen living in Pennsylvania, who cast a ballot illegally in 2024. She's one of nine people charged in a statewide investigation. Nine people. So yeah, if anyone's keeping tabs, just, you probably won't need more than your fingers and toes. And you will actually, meanwhile, the DOJ is claiming that 20,000 non-citizens are on California's voter rolls in a post on x.com, the everything website, the White House asserts this number as an absolute. But in the criminal complaint made by the DOJ, it's not a criminal complaint actually, but in the complaint filed by the DOJ, they are referred to as quote, likely non-citizens. And this is a super reported distinction. Yeah, yeah, this is going to be important. We're going to find out why, but let's just forget Nevada. Yes, yeah, right there. And I think we're not of them turned out to be non-citizens who are voting. It's worth noting that the DOJ is attempting to get California to sequester ballots from its 20,000 likely non-citizens, right? Saying that they could influence the outcome of the election. It's worth noting that they filed this on October the 15th. That is less than a month before polls close, right? Well, into early voting at some states. The list was sent on a thumb drive to the state. And the state failed to review said thumb drive within 48 hours as a DOJ asked them to. The DOJ is asking California to sequester its ballots and it's trying to go through the courts to make them do it. Whether or not they will have to do that. It's currently being decided in court by George David O Carter. Oh, it's his middle name, the initial of his middle name there. It's not like a look at the way an Irish person would have that name. But I was just confused for a long time about this, but I couldn't find an apostrophe anywhere. It took me a while. Yeah, honestly, if your middle name starts oh, I feel like you just got to go by your name or cut it out entirely. Yeah, it's either way, but very confusing way to present one's name. On Monday, the Ninth Circuit dismissed the Trump administration's appeal saying, quote, the United States failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider his application for a temporary restraining order. For that reason, we lacked jurisdiction over this appeal. So we grant the county's motion to dismiss this appeal and deny as you know, the United States emergency motion for relief. So in this case, the county would be LA County, right? They're trying to force the counties to sequester these ballots. The county's saying, no, we're not going to do that. In the hearing, the day before we recorded the news on Tuesday, Judge Carter, going to just use Carter from now on, asked first assistant, United States attorney, Bilal Asali, why if the issue was so big, they had not charged more people. Cal Mattets has some good courtroom porting on this quote, if it's that big, you've got a remedy for goodness sakes. The judge said, go out and indict. Carter is previously denied the DOJ's request for the entire voter rolls of the state also said quote, some of these may be very valid voters, and that's my concern about disenfranchisement. He indicated that he's likely to appoint a special master to look at the evidence, which will not happen before November 3rd. He did seem to indicate that he would be ordering the feds to stop intimidating local election officials saying, quote, this court believes it would be wise to any threats to state or county election employees cease immediately. What a formal way of saying like, I'll fuck you up. Yeah, yeah. The court believes it would be wise if you would step back. Yeah, immediately. Yeah, that is a very judgey way of saying, come at me. Like, oh, don't. Yeah. I will come at you. So let's talk about that intimidation. On Friday, the DOJ sent letters to all 53 California counties are calling to reporting in the New York Times. The letters contained a subset of the 20,000, they say, and gave election officials 48 hours, 48 hours from Friday, that's a weekend to identify who on the accompanying list in a citizen who is not it's a quotation. It then went on to say, if quote, citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate, not cancel those individuals vote by mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined. It seems that they tried to cut up the list by county here in your county, for example, Northern California, got two names, neither of whom have been issued ballots. Mendocino, according to the registrar who was interviewed by the Times, got the wrong list, quote, it's from another county. She's incredible. Feds requested sensitive personal information like social security numbers to determine eligibility and social security numbers do not correspond to someone's citizenship status necessarily. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there are certain points within your citizenship journey where you can get very like an ITIN or an SSN, but that's not like a that's not like a black white, that you say. The Feds also sent a letter to the office of the council. So that I'm saying council, SEL, not council, CIL for Los Angeles County. Like legal council. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. It's just in the audio format. I'm trying to extinguish three to two red. They sent a letter to the office of the council for LA County and included a statement quote, if persons knowingly tabulate ballots, cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as non-citizens, they risk becoming aiders and a betters to a federal crime. Yeah. Bill is salient, posted a very similar message to X last week saying quote, "It's simple. California has not verified citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are non-citizens on their roles. Nominally processing non-citizen ballots is a federal crime under 18 USC 6/11, Section 6/11 and two. We hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law." Yeah, they're trying to scare local officials into taking away people's ballots. Exactly. Yeah, they're trying to scare people out of voting and scare people out of taking votes. This comes after Trump in June. At a rally, he said he asked the United States attorneys to quote, "Look into the state's voting practice." I called up the very powerful, very good US attorney, and California, and I said, "Do me a favor. Take a look. They're trying to steal that election too. I guess they called up over the next week. He was definitely going to lose, but the US attorney called. We want to check your votes about an hour after the call. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won." We did trim a little diversion that the president went on in the middle there about the local US attorney being present. The DOJ has also bought in California charges against 28 foreign nationals who it claims voted or registered to do so. There are various charges here, right? In some cases, they're charging people with lying on the naturalization application, either lying and saying they hadn't previously committed a crime for which they had not been prosecuted or lying and saying that they fraud, and they had not fraudulently claimed to be US citizen when they had. Not everybody here actually voted. In some cases, they registered to do so. I was kind of just looking demographically at this group. Obviously, it's people who are not born in the US, right? But they tend to be older folks, I noticed. like I think the youngest person was 30, it's very easy to register to vote and I could maybe see how it'd be possible that someone who didn't have English as their first language or the best command of the language could could accidentally do that but I don't know about any of these cases. The DOJ says they're all legal permanent residents as was the case in Pennsylvania. I want to move on now to another case of misrepresentation and legal voting practices. This one takes place in Hennepin County and involves serial streamer of his own crimes James O'Keefe because he is out again. This shit is wild. Have any of you seen this video? I have not watched the video yet. We're going to go on a fucking journey together friends. No, but I just want to acknowledge that oh in this case is part of the last name and not a middle initial. I know everyone's confused so. Yeah, yeah, well really if we're mixing up with the oath. Yes, in this case James O'Keefe, that is his last name and his colleague, Kam Higbee. They represent themselves, misrepresent themselves in Minnesota by entering polling places and representing themselves as registered voters. Quote, James Edward O'Keefe 42 and Kam Higbee 26, both face felony charges of unlawful voting and identity theft in the primary in Minnesota, calling to an Hennepin County turn his office press release that came out this morning. These are like right wing trolls. Yes, James O'Keefe probably most famous for his project Veritas stuff back in the day. I think they kicked him out of Veritas something to do with the finances. He's the guy you killed Acorn. Wait, do people even, no one remembers Acorn? No one might. Yeah, that's like 15 years ago, yeah. The dawn, yeah, it's the dawn of time. Yeah. Oh, I have like separate reasons. I'm out of Acorn from 20 years ago, but from the opposite direction. Oh, yeah, very funny. They also suck when he killed Acorn. Yeah, I'm guessing you have a little that you share. Margaret. Yeah. It is amazing how much shit just goes down the Hennepin County. So what happened here is at O'Keefe and Higbee, enter a polling place and they wanted to draw attention to a practice called vouching, vouching. It's been established for a long time, Minnesota. It allows a registered voter to vouch to someone who perhaps has recently moved to the area, right? To say, hey, I'm coming in, I'm a registered voter. You got me on your list. This is my neighbor. They want a vote. O'Keefe obviously thought this was a offered a wide opportunity for fraud. And so, so he committed fraud. Yes. Not only did he commit fraud, Garrison, he filmed himself doing it. And then he posted at x.com, the everything website. A video posted to O'Keefe's ex account with the opening credit seeming to identify him and the other people as members of the citizen justice league shows him dressed up in what he calls traditional Muslim attire. He's wearing a thob and Higbee in Nikab. Fuck, Garrison, if you could just pay the first 34 seconds. I've never been more excited to watch James O'Keefe clap. You're going to see some shit. Fuck. I mean, like they're not sticking the landing on this. I'm James O'Keefe, and this is vouching for seven other Muslims at the Minneapolis Polygooth. We're going in to this location and I'm going to say that I'm vouching for them. The name is William Horace. The question about the vouching program, yeah? About vouching. I hope I can vouch for them for the day or not. That's okay, that's fine. Can I bring five more? Up to eight people. That's a good thing. We go back and we get traditional and Nusdom and Muhammad. In Minnesota, you can show up on election day and vouch for up to eight unregistered voters. Pretty incredible stuff. Yeah, I mean, you guys can't see this. O'Keefe's wearing a Halloween tear outfit and affecting an accent. It's like a level of racism that like there are several things that I think he might be doing that he's filming in a polling place. I don't know what the rules are on, like, recording consent in Minnesota. Hey, being in the cab as you heard there is the one using the cover name Ernesto. O'Keefe is the one using the affected accent in the video. Can we play 40 to 45 to see what's going on with Ernesto? You guys can probe the gas, but I'm slightly less excited as I was a few minutes ago. You've made me a cry. Members of the Justice League dress up in traditional Muslim attire, including a transgender wearing a burka and put this vouching law to an extreme test on primary day August 11. Yeah, not a burka, but that's all right. I see. Yeah, they're also pretty on brown face by the way. Yeah, yes, that's what I wanted to add to me is that they did include footage of them applying brown face. It's a lot to unpack here. Like, they're putting on brown face and I don't think that's the most racist part of this. This is the spooky week section. This is my fucking night at God. The fact that I have to live in this world is fucking spooky week. Yeah, it is the most American Halloween thing to do to find an incredibly racist costume that is also offensive and myriad of the ways. No, we've learned that the most American thing to do is to put on camo and shoot flock cameras. These people are doing it wrong. Oh, yeah. They don't deserve to come to America. These white people are born here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. So later in a video, you see that the poll workers have very clearly worked out that something fucking weird is going on. Yeah. Because they're outside filming O'Keefe and his crew and following the back to their vehicle, Higby hides in the foot well of the vehicle as they peel out and attempt to do the same thing at another polling location. O'Keefe attempts to construct this evidence that they know that the vouching system is wrong and not that they know that the group of people in brown face are probably up to some weird shit. I'm quoting again here from the presser. Minnesotal law clearly states there's no individual shall intentionally mispronounce individuals identity and applying for a ballot depositing a ballot in a ballot box or attempting to vote by means of a voting machine or electronic voting system. Well, Mr Higby and Mr O'Keefe did not sign the oath. Those men intentionally misrepresented their identities in applying for ballot suppressories set. The person O'Keefe impersonated only found out once the video was released. He was posing as a real person. Yes, that is a person that is a registered voter in that precinct. Oh my gosh. This is a federal crime. William Pomeranz is a guy. Holy shit. Jesus Christ. That's wild. I don't know. They actually did it. They actually stole some ones. They did. Holy shit. And it didn't work. The poll people were like, no, you're fraudsters. Well, they didn't say that because O'Keefe never actually did the thing. He never actually signed the oath. You attest that these people are residents. Just want my entry to any other contract. This is a fairly well established thing that happens in law. You can attest to things. In this case, I'm guessing he thought he wasn't stealing the identity because he didn't sign the contract. But Pomeranz found this when it was sent to him by one of his students. Jesus. Can we just play like 8.59-905 when the poll workers work out what's going on here? Yeah. That's the biggest scam I think is that you can as long as you know their name and their address, you can show up and vote in their name, no verification required. It looks like you may have problems you all made us check it out. What we could do is reposition. He's going to go out and learn somebody. You see work there? I know why Sherry told me to shut up. I'm out. I can't help her see me. Holy lark. Oh my god. Yeah. I can't let you get close. I love that at the moment he's saying you could vote without having an ID. But several poll workers have already followed him to his vehicle. And also just like the just the hypocrisy if I can film them and they can't film me. Yeah. Like the whole thing. They're filming us. Get down. I don't expect better from them. You're posting it on Twitter. What do you think this is going to do? James O'Keeze, serious journalist. Never thought to ask a lawyer. What if I do a number of federal crimes? I'm then video them. The world is just that Simpsons meme of like filming this crime spray is the best idea we've ever had. Video T-thing this crimes free. Yeah. Yeah. So amazingly, O'Keefe's most recent tweet reads, "Siren emoji. Calling or election judges, county clerks, poll workers and watches, are you serving in the upcoming election? We want to connect with you to help ensure transparency and integrity in the electoral process. And as a DM with your name, contact info and the best time to reach you. He then links to the video in which his alleged crimes are recorded." Great stuff. Well, I'm glad that we were able to catch at least someone doing voter fraud. Right. Yeah. Big problem is before I'm approaching, very to ask people in this country undermining democracy. Oh, boy. Excited to see how this court case plays out. So I'm going to do an actual, I think, authentic, classic spooky week style segment and talk about doppelgangers. Rather than ghosts or goblins, zombies, werewolves or vampires, the only spooky creature of sorts that I've ever been kind of scared of felt like the Hebe Gebes about is the, doppelganger, the idea that you suddenly happen to encounter and a parent double of yourself, whether just a glimpse for a short second or maybe an extended encounter with someone or something that looks exactly like you. And I'm not talking about like lookalikes here, not talking about someone who just kind of resembles you. I mean, like you wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and as you walk down the hallway, you see another version of you standing there or you're like cutting through like a crowded sidewalk and you noticed, as you kind of pass by someone, you turn, you turn back because they look just like you, but then they're lost in the, okay, loss of random passers-by. That's the sort of doppelganger I'm talking about. It's so-called scientists say the odds of someone having the exact same facial proportions on like a scale like eight features is like 0.11 percent. Not very likely that that's you that you experience someone with the exact same features as you, but I got on I'm talking about more of like a high-strangeness type of situation here. So although this scientifically, not likely to happen in the meat space flesh world, online digital doppelgangers are now quite plentiful, according to a report from the waslay in media project which tracks data on political ads, they identified at least 220 political ads from the 2026 election cycle that were generated at least in part using AI and of these 220 ads about half contained AI deep fakes of real politicians. This is a growing industry. It's this year more than $137 million has been spent on AI political ads compared to less than $50,000 in 2024, and that $137 million figure is, quote, almost certainly in undercount given that it is difficult to detect uses of AI per waslay in the media project. This report found that 81 percent of AI generated ads were sponsored by Republican candidates or groups, while only 12 percent of the ads are sponsored by Democrats. And a lot of the groups or candidates using these ads might not have a lot of funding, right? A lot of smaller campaigns may turn to AI when they are tight on cash because what could have cost in millions to produce now costs essentially nothing, which is not to say that candidates with big budgets don't also use AI, they do. And this is part of why you saw so many like AI ads during like primary house races because a lot of those candidates might not have as much money as the big name Senate races. These AI ads have shown up all across the country, at least in 34 different states with most being found in Oklahoma and Texas, and just 27 percent of these ads contain a disclaimer that the ad featured AI generated content. Let's go through some examples because since since kind of this spring, I have been saving AI ads that I come across in the wild because I think they are fascinating. I don't like the future. I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I'm so excited to count fingers. A June ad paid for by Michigan State Senator Eric Nespit stars a deepfaked Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, including with an AI version of who I think is supposed to be New York governor Kathy Hokel as they conspire to register a legal aliens to vote. Hey, maybe I can hear the numbers are a disaster. We don't have enough illegals. Don't panic. I know someone who can help. Hey, what's up, Gretchen? Don't worry, we got Michigan covered. Oh, don't forget to register to vote. Free bus rides for illegals. So that's the general vibe of stuff we're dealing with, where we live in a satire. God, Deb. If that feels kind of like confused or chaotic, that's because it is and that goes on for a whole other minute. That's that's less than one third of this ad. I'm, I'm invested. I need to know how he saves America. It's pretty cool. The GOP state Senator Eric Nesbitt then drives a tractor to intercept his caravan of a quote, unquote, illegals on their way to vote. Then ice pulls up with guns drawn cool. And then at the end of the ad, the statue of Liberty comes alive and grabs Zora Mamdani and Abdul Al-Sahid. Some interesting notes here. I went when Zora on starts talking completely different voice, then he talks in the rest of the ad. But also, A.I.Zora calls the blonde woman Gretchen. Gretchen Whitmer, they're going for yeah, as in Gretchen Whitmer, even though like the text accompanying this ad and per the visuals, she's supposed to be secretary Benson, not Gretchen Whitmer. So a little, a little confusing. Great, great stuff happening here. Yeah, that's definitely my problem with it. Yeah. It does scream the kind of attention to detail you want is someone who gets to decide what the law is. Michigan law requires me to tell you that this video was generated completely by artificial intelligence. It has been manipulated by technical means and depicts speech and conduct that did dot occur. But that's, yeah, that's a general kind of vibe that we're going to be dealing with. For people confused, that was supposed to be a bull eagle, even though that's not what a bull eagle sounds like. Thank you for that clarification. I almost was going to make that particular note that all of the sounds we have for bald eagles are not bald eagle sounds, but yeah, I'm glad that the A.I. continued in the great American tradition of getting that wrong. Yeah. Also in June, a Trump aligned organization, Citizens for Sanity, spent six figures on a 15 second ad of Talariko in a May dress singing a quote unquote trans kids version of a few of my favorite things. I feel like I'm being hate crimes by being on the show. Yeah, this sorry, Margaret, you've come on a record. No, no, it's all right. Changing the gender of all your offspring. This is. Wow. Favorite things. So this does not have a disclaimer that it's a I even though it's maybe not impossible to tell by looking at it, yeah, the apron dress doesn't have strings. This is kind of one of the more low fi ads compared to what we will see in the next few months, because in September, Ken Paxton released his own A.I. generated ad depicting a deep fake to James Talariko sitting at a home desk reading paraphrased and abridged quotes from Talariko from like years past that are all stitched together with the things he hasn't said. Some of these quote unquote quotes are being scribbled into a King James Talariko Bible. I'll play this clip here and I know this is, you know, visual content. I will link the list of these ads below at the top of the description. If you want to for some reason, watch them all yourself. If you too want to annihilate your brain cells and like feel your soul physically drain from your body, which is the experience of watching this, yeah. In the beginning, God was non-binary and he wasn't a Christian and God said let there be six genders and there were. Then God so loved the world that he gave us his only son who was a radical feminist and never asked people to worship him. Look, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity. James Talariko wrong for Texas. America is not a Christian nation and wrong for America too. I'm Ken Paxton and I approve this message. Yeah. A lot of the things Talariko is saying there are things that are just like biblically accurate and like true. Yeah, that's Elaine Pagel's whole shit like God's not a Christian. What? I know. There's a lot of stuff that's just like accurate and like true. That's besides the point with the way that they're stitching all these things together into sentences, he didn't say and then having his likeness say them, this is this is bad for democracy, right? This is this is not a good thing to do. And this ad in particular is pretty photoreal at least compared to some of the others highlighted in this episode. It's funny that riots are illegal. Like this is more destructive to our society than fire is. I'm just going to anyway. There's teeny, teeny, tiny text, the very end of the video that reads certain video content depicted in this advertising was generated by artificial intelligence, certain video content. All video dogs. Yeah. Uh-huh. Now, following the lead of Iran State propaganda, as you candidates like Doug Basler in Seattle have a generated Lego style animations as well as political ads like riffing on adult animated sitcoms and we couldn't sit and laugh at how bad these are, but because they are not deep fakes, I'm going to skip them. But I will link two examples below. Again, if you want to check these out yourself before the Florida primary this summer, attend crews linked Super PAC called frontline action paid top dollar to broadcast a ads targeting Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback during the world cup. One of these ads has groups of people showing up to Fishback's house for an anti-Israel party, including who is supposed to resemble Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, AOC, Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar, Columbia campus protestors, Hassan Piker and code pink activists, as well as Vladimir Putin and finally some like Iranian state officials who then slash and Israel Party cake with a sword, the ad says, is this really what you want your Republican party to look like? So it's like a pun with the word party because some of those people are right wing people. I know I, I know I live under a rock, but that's a list of people that's right wing people that they're that's rushing. Okay. So I'm off. And well, yeah, I mean, Ted Cruz has had like an extended beef with Tucker, Candace and bike engine Nick Fuentes for the past few years over Israel over Israel. Yes. Okay. And like as weird as this ad is, it's not nearly as weird as the other anti fishback ad made by this Ted Cruz link super pack depicting two fishermen who catch a what I'll call a talking fish back fish. What? We can't throw this fish back, he'll ruin the other fish, we don't throw this fish back. What do we do? Election day keep James fish back out of office. The front line action is responsible for the content of this advertising. You watch any of the, you got to look through the show notes to find this, I'm gonna see this at my nightmare. This has so many layers of I don't even know who's criticizing what about what? Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the pro Israel part of the Republican party fighting back against the gripper anti Israel part of the Republican party, which fishback was kind of the main representative of. Okay. Thank you. The front line action seems to specialize in like the sloppiest of the high slop ads, right? Like this stuff looks almost indistinguishable from those like creepy, vegetable fruit, like cuckoldry videos that you may have seen if you like ever scroll Instagram. Those are popular a few months ago, the visuals of these are, is kind of of a similar quality. In September, they released an ad targeting Abdul al-Sahid titled Family Values showing Abdul, his sister and Hassan Piker in his mouse suit in a kefia, playing a quote, death to America board game about destroying quote, the West. I fucking wish the destruction of Israel and the West isn't just a game for them. It's a mission. His sister, everything about America, his pal, Hassan Piker, thinks America deserved 9/11 in his father-in-law, founded a charity, tied to the Muslim brother Al-Sahid isn't playing games. His family lives are wrong from this. I'm starting to think that the Republicans are racist. It does look that way. Yeah. So this last image is a framed family, porched with Abdul for women in the cobs and again, Hassan Piker, whom Abdul is not related to. This is, he's not part of Abdul's family. But no, this is the most like post 9/11 style anti-Arab racism. Yeah, it's 2001 gutter racism like the unfiltered shit you used to get with people talking about nuking a rock. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Half of these ads is kind of in that vein and ad that came out this month from a GOP candidate for Congress in North Carolina uses AI-generated video to attack Democratic candidate Jamie Aegar for hosting drag performances at his barn in 2019. And what's really insidious about this ad is that the first five seconds of the ad are actually manipulated media using real footage of Aegar with a pride flag aren't officially added to the background. And then this real footage is used as the visual basis for the rest of the AI ad with him like dancing with various famous drag queens with no disclaimer that the drag queen footage is fake. I hate election years. There's this sort of like blending of reality in ads like this, which is like extremely dangerous. But the single candidate that's utilized AI ads the most is Republican candidate for New York governor Bruce Blakeman. According to the New York Times, Blakeman is posted at least 22 AI ads since April. He's been just pumping these videos out from more traditional ads, just like replacing stock footage with more like cinematic AI visuals to short little films or short videos of AI constituents talking about how bad New York has gotten under Kathy Hocal to of course deep fakes of Hocal herself. Blakeman's use of a deep fakes has been rather innovative. One ad from September takes the form of a pharmaceutical commercial starring AI deep fake a governor Hocal, and what is supposed to be Mayor Mamdani, introducing Kathy, the political delusion pill for New Yorkers who'd rather not think about what four more years could actually cost them. Before Kathy, I worried about things like tax, utility bills, crime and whether families could afford to stay in New York. And now I just say it's someone else's fault. It's working. Side effects may include chronic wallet shrinkage, higher tax, higher utility bills, higher costs, shrinking paychecks, business leaving New York, uncontrollable government spending, sudden urges to defend socialists and other financial complications. Every accusation is a confession. Like many others, this ad contained no AI disclosure in violation of New York law. Blakeman produced another ad in the form of a retro TV commercial also starring AI deep fake Hocal where she offers free healthcare to quote illegal immigrants, sex workers and homeless drug addicts. That is supposed to be a bad thing. Yeah. Based on all the ads I've watched, which is more than I've included in this episode, I sort these AI deep fakes into three sometimes overlapping categories. First, there's demonstrated or like descriptive AI, basically using AI visuals in place of real photos or videos and more traditional ads. This is kind of using AI like customized stock footage footage that looks and feels relatively realistic like someone standing next to AI Trump at the White House or a deep fake of a candidate reading quotes directly to camera with just like a plain white background. But because of its simplicity, this type of use could actually be the most deceptive. A deep faked candidate reading a quote direct to camera without the context of why they said that quote could dramatically change its meaning and could be more easily mistaken for authentic footage. And then there's this other type just like skits, right? This is what we've seen like the fishback ads. And this is deep fakes of political opponents, usually acting in some sort of satirical sketch or narrative scenario. This could be either dramatic or comedic, sometimes have like a brief plot that leads to a climax. This is most similar to what we would call like AI slop. Things that are much more easily recognizable as AI. And I think part of why these sort of skits are so common is that for the sort of laws that are trying to regulate this sort of thing, there is first amendment carve votes for satire and parody. And so a lot of these ads could legally arguably be considered some form of parody. And that argument gives them a little bit of wiggle room. But there's another category of ad, which I'm going to call an AI scandal ad, a little bit of that like drag queen barn ad, I think would fall into this and that's AI generating footage to visually implicate opponents and some sort of political scandal, whether by dramatizing event that did happen, but with deceptive framing or just depicting something completely fictional. A few months ago, an executive disorder, I talked about that negate Kentucky ad with a generated footage of Republican representative Thomas Massey holding heads and getting dinner with AOC and Alon Omar, followed by like surveillance style footage of them checking into a hotel room with the ad being themed around Alon Omar and AOC and Massey are in a thruple together. And Massey is betrayed Trump. Thomas Massey caught in a thruple in Washington is cheating with the squad on the American first movement. Massey voted with the squad against Trump's tax cuts. As he voted just the squad against finishing Trump's wall. He voted with them against hiring new border agents. Well, this is a personal job tree. It's a complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives. On May 19th, fire Thomas Massey. Maga Kentucky is responsible for the content of this advertising. Massey has said that this ad did trick people into thinking that he was in a real thruple with these people because the footage is actually pretty convincing for someone who's like older than like 60. It could be hard to distinguish that this is not real footage, especially when they put like these like filters on it to make it look like it's a surveillance footage of them checking into a hotel room. Currently 31 states have laws regulating the use of AI and deep fakes and political ads. Maryland has banned misleading election-related deep fakes entirely in California and Texas have banned the publication of deceptive or harmful political deep fakes 30 days prior to an election. Minnesota has a similar law. But other state regulations just require a disclosure if AI was used and obviously disclosures are not enough for this problem and those don't those don't even get followed half the time. We need to get as close as we can just banning AI ads entirely. There are currently two bills seeking to federally regulate quote deceptive AI and AI in politics. These are pending in Congress and probably won't pass any time soon. At least certainly not until there's a new Congress and for these bills to see. succeed, they do need to be written carefully because if they're overly broad, they could be struck down on first amendment grounds. Lastly, I'll mention there was a 2026 study and communication research, which found that even when participants knew a video of a political figure was an AID fake, that deep fake, quote, still has the intended delegitimizing impact on the attacked politician by lowering support for the targeted candidate. So just because these ads aren't necessarily convincing all the time doesn't mean they don't have negative effects. So yeah, doppelganger is pretty scary. You'll ever heard of a butlerian jihad. A lot of that going around these days. Oh god. Speaking of ads, hopefully not AID generated ads, it is time for one more ad break. And we're back. And I know what you all are thinking. You're thinking Margaret hates everything. And that's not true. I like widespread revolt. Also I like Sophie's outfit. I wish all of you Halloween's out there could see. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. It's so nice to be someone who's wearing an outfit that isn't racist and it's just nice. It's so rare in my line of work. So countries all over are doing a widespread revolt thing right now. That is happening. That has been going on for a couple of weeks, depending on, well, a couple of months, depending on how you're going to be paying attention to this and Albania is on the list of countries of widespread revolt, but it's one of the ones that no one covers, despite the fact that it has the coolest flag of the countries that are covered in this particular way. Although I probably just like medieval looking things is actually, yeah, well, is it cool in the poll though? Whoa, isn't a poll in the poll? In the poll, I guess you could consider the first one of these from like a couple of years ago. Okay. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. The dragon flag's cool as hell. Yeah. We got to acknowledge that. I mean, the one with the machete and the talking about Mozambique, yeah, that's the best flag in the world. We just have to acknowledge that machete in the AK. I don't even like a hammer and sickle all that much. Oh, I recognize it as a good icon. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Okay. So Albania is on the list and people don't know shit about Albania. And so I thought I would talk about the revolt in Albania. And this is going to be a situation that is entirely unfathomable to the American mind. There are two major political parties, only two. And one of them is center left and one of them is center right. And they're both corrupt as fuck and they're both privatizing the shit out of everything. And they're the only, it's funny because it gets called a regime because they are the only parties that have been in power for like 30 years. Yeah. Anyway, think on that. It gets called a regime because it's like east of some delineating line, maybe Poland right where everything. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And it also is a regime. No one likes it. That's why they're having this big revolt. The cost of living keeps rising and conditions are getting worse. People are mad about their country setting aid to Israel. They're mad about the destruction of the environment and the name of rich people having fancy shit. They're even mad at like Jared Kushner has released all this. And they are tired of the violence of the police and other voices not getting heard. So they are in pretty open revolt right now. And I'm still working on building more about this. I basically just spent the past couple days talking with comrades in the area. They're like busy and there's like stuff happening, you know? And so they're like sending me some things and then like here's 170 page book about the like neoliberalism of our country. And I'm like, okay, Albania is a small country. It's about two and a half million people. It is a one quarter of a New York city, depending on how you're mapping New York city's metro area. And it's in the Balkans. It's northwest of Greece. Albania was once part of the Ottoman Empire declared independence in 1912. It's liberated the place from Nazis in 1944. And then they did a communist dictatorship that overall is not looked nicely upon even by the modern left wing of that country, right? So people aren't like, oh, I miss when everyone was Stalinists. That's not really what's happening here. It got multi party elections in 1991. The communists lost their first election in 1992, which put a guy named Sally Berushi in charge. And I have only been reading and I have not yet talked in person. So I'm going to mispronounce important names here. It put a guy named Sally Berushi in charge. Me, I hear the most likely to randomly know this guy's actual name. Yeah. Unfortunately, I strike out after Hoxa, which was out there, I didn't put Hoxa in here because I had no idea how to pronounce that name. Who was the main communist? Yeah. He was the communist dictator. Went from Maoism to the Maoist got too far right. So he became Ju-J. And then built a bunch of bunkers, a whole thing fiasco. Oh, this is the bunker country. It's the bunker guy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. This is bunkers. People know bunkers in a Norman, Winston. I should point out before someone goes into ready.com that I am aware that Albania is not to the east of all of them. Yeah. Totally. All right. So Sally Berushi is still a player in this story, the guy who won in 1992. He was a big anti-communist reformer. He's a majority Muslim country and he basically unbanned religion. He privatized the fuck out of everything he could. And then under him, literally half of the country's wealth was invested into a series of pyramid schemes. Oh. And so everyone gave all of their money to these pyramid schemes because they just got not a communism. And so people were like, oh, I know you can do your money with guaranteed returns. And probably all they've ever been hearing is like, get guaranteed returns. That's what people tell you about the stock market in America, you know. Like people did get rich in like Russia, right, like like grabbing a bunch of previously nationalized shit. Like that's how some of the oligarchs came to be. Yeah. So like you can see happening and like it's very fertile terrain for this shit. Yeah. It's not like it's not like half the country are fools, right? Yeah. But the pyramid schemes, it's not a very stable form of society. They collapsed. And it fucked everyone over because so many people had invested in these short deals. So Albania had like basically a civil war level of revolt against corruption in 1997. It wound up with its current constitution, but it still has a fuck ton of corruption. It went on to join NATO in 2009. It's not yet in the EU. It's a candidate country. It has been for about 12 years. And Sally Barishi, the guy who let all this bad shit happen under him with the Ponzi schemes, he ends up prime minister again from 2005 to 2013. But then ever since then, he's the Democrat party, the Democratic party. They are the center right party. Then the center left party, the socialist party has been in charge ever since 2013. Under the direction of a guy named Eddie Rama. And he has been prime minister since 2013. He's currently on his fourth term. And he is corrupt as fuck. Rama came to power by being, oh, and you all will like this. Rama came to power by being the popular socialist mayor of the biggest city in the country. The capital, Toronto. And he won everyone's hearts by repainting the city vibrant colors to move away from like the drab Soviet era. So he was like, I've done civic improvement and I'm the socialist mayor. Everyone loves me. And that's how the socialist party was able to come to power. But then he changed nothing. And he's fully into privatization and corruption, just like the other guys. And he is fully in bed with organized crime. It seems like obviously people like to argue about this. And press freedom is terrible there. Everything is just, it's getting bad. About a third of the country has emigrated. There's about 1.1 million Albanian-born people living elsewhere, right? And to quote an as-get-un-published piece from some comrades in the Balkans, quote, "For years, Eddie Rama has used his power to seize control over every sphere of social life. Much like under the government of Sally Berisha, oligarchs have forged close criminal ties with those in power." Oh, and then the worst thing about this man. He's a podcaster. Oh, wow. Oh, no. Yeah. He has a podcaster. It's just a way of it. No. Yeah. You have a new sum, too. So that's the setup. Why are there big protests? And one of the reasons I want to do this, people feel, and Albania feel pretty misrepresented in the West. And it's like, everything I've read has been like, it all started in France and it's spreading. And that's like, no. Not really. I love the France revolt. Don't get me wrong. But like, every country has its own reasons it's doing this, you know? So then Jared Kushner, I hate that I finally have to learn these people that you all talk about in your day job all the time. And this is why I do history for a living. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, he visits Albania and he sees a cool island called Sazan. And I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. And it was undeveloped and it was protected. It was protected wetlands. It was like, don't fuck with this island. We all love it. All that's there is an abandoned military base. And he's like, but my dad is Trump. So what if I want to put a really fancy resort there? And also a big part of the protected area of the wetlands on the mainland as well. So Rama personally visited Kushner and was like, yeah, fuck it. All right. We'll figure it out. We'll figure out a way to make this legal. And so they passed a law that was like just kidding. Rich foreigners can bulldozer protected wildlands. And people didn't like that. So in May, at a protest against the playgrounds for rich right-wing tourists that should have been a protected ecosystem, a protestor was dragged and beaten by a private security guard who then put a gun to the guy's head, right? And all of this happened in front of the cops. Everyone's like, why aren't you doing anything? And they're like, I don't know, because we're the cops, right? We're corrupt. And this was the spark. But The protests aren't about the resorts. They are and they aren't. This is the spark, but the fuel is decades of corruption, privatization, rising cost of living, mass emigration, and a sense of powerlessness, right? All protest movements have been captured by one political party or the other, going back for decades. And so now you have the flamingo protests, and they're called that because flamingos live in those wetlands, and they're very explicitly against both Rama and Berisha. Berisha is the opposition leader still, and he keeps trying to be like, oh, these are totally my protests. Everyone loves me. And best I can infer, I'm still waiting on confirmation. I believe that when his people show up to try and co-op the protest, they get pushed to the outside and sometimes literally thrown in the river. We've got to start doing that, we've got to hijack protests. And so it isn't a Gen Z protest. This is a whole generation of people who've only ever known the Rama regime, and they see no future in themselves, so they are out there protesting. And for 130 days, it was a big peaceful daily protest, which was a whole new kind of protest. It was a little more an occupied type thing. People will go out every day, and they would have a kind of carnival air, right? And the one rallying cry, uniting the crime, because all different types of people are there with all types of different demands. The one rallying cry is Rama to prison, Berisha to prison. So they want the head of both their political parties and fucking jail for decades of corruption, which reminds me of the Argentinian protest chant from 2003, Kasey Vayan-Toros. They all must go. I think it's, it isn't one. Is it 2001? I trust you far more than I trust me with remembering things like that. Which is funny, because that's the exact line that came into my head for you. Yeah, no trouble. They all must go. Right? Yeah. They must all go to prison. Yeah, totally. Or in the season. So that 130 days of peaceful protests were just ignored by the government, and or oppressed, right? And so finally, on October 13th, the students were like, "Meant fuck this shit." And so they had, they threw a student strike, and the protests have escalated ever since into a genuine uprising. And the way it's presented by the people that I'm reading and talking to is like the only question is what we're going to do when the Rama government falls. Like they believe they are going to win as of time of recording, last I talked to some people. Right? Yeah. And the government has been attacking people in the streets with all the usual shit, chemical weapons, water cannons, baton rounds, they took out somebody's eye. They're kidnapping people in the middle of the night. There's plain close officers attacking people, arresting people, people being beaten inside of the jails. They're passing all of these new laws specifically to punish. Now, it's no longer illegal just to break shit at a protest, but if you're in a protest where anyone breaks shit, you can get in trouble for that. And this isn't stopping people. As for who is doing it, quote, I'm quoting this unreleased thing. That is not, this is not the finished translation. And I'll be covering this more on some of my shows as I get more information. As for who's doing this quote, students and pupils, trade unionists, parents and children, political groups and leftist political parties, sports fans, right wing groups and nationalists, a whole host of people from diverse spheres, ranging from educators to social media influencers. And quote, there is no clear vision for what should follow the fall of the Rama government, nor is there a defined strategy for how the resistance might continue. But one thing is certain, there is no turning back. And public gatherings are being restricted. People are being told they can't leave the country, which is unconstitutional according to Albanian law. You're not supposed to be able to prevent people from leaving the country. And it seems like there is a chance that this will turn into a thing where people form assemblies and build counter power. And if so, we might see a real revolution and not just one party replaced with another. I am a cynical enough person who's seen a lot of uprisings around the world where I'm not specifically holding my breath, but I fucking, yeah, fuck yeah. And in the meantime, Rama refuses to sit down. He's like, I'm willing to talk to you all, but everyone's like, no, get the fuck out. He's like, no, I'm willing to talk to you. He said, chairs up in front of his office is like as a symbolic, like come talk to me. Sit down. We'll have a conversation. So they set the chairs on fire. Hell yeah. They're going after it. They're not talking to this man. They are the power. They are the people. And they want him fucking gone. That's what I got. So far, by the time this comes out, it might be completely different because even my news is about two days old. Nice. Alright, Princess Peach is, I believe, blessing the Albanian revolt. That's what's so sad for you. So fee right now. Okay. Yes. Yeah. All the Orthodox Princess Peach. You all are going to be so sad this is not a video show because so fee is fucking killing it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I got a headless horseman costume for my dog. It's perfect. I'm just going to wear one of my one Z's that go away still. Anyway, that's what I got for this week. I have a bunch of other podcasts. One's called Cool People. Cool stuff where I talk about history, except I also sometimes talk about modern revolt. I actually talk slightly less fast on that. And I also do calls on media book club, which you probably know because it's in the same feed as this particular show. But also on Halloween, this very year, I have a spooky collection of short stories called The Folk Tales of Lowlands, a con that comes out from Tangled Wilderness.org from Strangers and Tangled Wilderness. And it is only six bucks and it is the most beautiful scene and it has five of my stories in it. And you should pre-order it because pre-orders are awesome. Oh, yeah. And if you like my fiction, which you have no way of knowing if you do, because I didn't say anything fictional, I told you about some other stuff. I need to eat. I'm done. Okay. Magic. If you're listening on The Davies Comes Out, I'm doing a book talk in San Diego on Sunday at the Garden Centre in Mission Hills through the Fall bookshop is what the place is called. If you would like to email us with a news tip, cool zone tips at proton.me, some of you marketing people still trying. The tenacity, not going to work, put a trans girl in your spooky couch, I don't know. We reported the mostly scary, but not always scary news. 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 as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season two of the podcast, Curth of Miss America. He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received a scholarship money to pay for my student loans. Listen to the Curth of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The funniest podcast in the entire world. I like that. That's a good way to promote ourselves. We are too funny guys having fun enjoying ourselves, and we just know how to have fun, unlike anyone else. If you guys like fun conversations, hot takes, what else? Not too hot, just kind of lukewarm takes to get your mind thinking a little bit. Listen to Out of Character on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get worse with Kyle Proo is not one of those podcasts. If you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something, for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get worse with Kyle Proo on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Darryl Bell, and I'm Kadeem Harrison. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, a different world view with Darryl and Kadeem. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives a different world. Listen to a different world view with Darryl and Kadeem every Thursday. On the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. St. John Abaskar and Tyler McCall, as we host our own Monster Romance Extravaganza, were joined by the villain-edit author Rosie Dannan and sent in an object romance expert, Gracie Delgado, to explore with these unexpected love stories, can reveal about desire, fantasy, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.