It Could Happen Here Weekly 248

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Disarming Hamas Anarchists and the Great War with Andrew The Hunt for Jason Arday Civilization with Andrew Executive Disorder: US Strikes Wedding in Iran, Mail-In Voting Whistleblower, Tupac Killer Convicted You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! Sources/Links: Disarming Hamas https://carnegieendowment.org/events/2026/04/what-path-forward-the-board-of-peace-gaza-and-the-future-of-multilateralism https://www.refugeesinternational.org/perspectives-and-commentaries/six-months-into-gaza-ceasefire-setting-the-record-straight-about-aid/ https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-deal-hamas-israel-lebanon-explosions-morocco-spain-migrants Anarchists and the Great War with Andrew Matthew S. Adams, Anarchism and the First World War George Woodcock, Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-the-anarchist-international-and-war https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-manifesto-of-the-sixteen The Hunt for Jason Arday https://share.google/VTyoNfxD04LW1B51H Civilization with Andrew Against the Grain by James C. Scott Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan Wild Thought by Claude Lévi-Strauss Ishmael by Daniel Quinn The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan Executive Disorder: US Strikes Wedding in Iran, Mail-In Voting Whistleblower, Tupac Killer Convicted https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/29/trump-dhs-1509-summons-records-journalists-nonprofits? CMP=share_btn_url https://x.com/the_amargi/status/2094779953925456352?s=20 https://x.com/JohnSevenTwo/status/2095117948650172862?s=20 https://x.com/jalalisarah/status/2095092338892705851?s=20 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/establishing-the-united-states-space-academy/ https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2093060290371870948?s=20 https://x.com/Acyn/status/2093087605785292936?s=20 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/honoring-the-american-history-of-the-great-lakes-and-renaming-lake-ontario-as-lake-america-3a36/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/08/27/mike-collinss-former-staffer-posted-kkk-nazi-imagery/ https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/28/business/states-prediction-markets-gambling-federal-appeals-court https://x.com/StephenM/status/2093865962730651942?s=20 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/29/rubio-immigration-first-fifth-amendments-01056086?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/29/rubio-immigration-first-fifth-amendments-01056086?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2094436092422340978?s=20 https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-oil-reserves-eb0ed5a1e99602c21a7f690c3368020e https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-oil-reserves-eb0ed5a1e99602c21a7f690c3368020e?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=6a92151a0602a6000171fc7b&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+New+Content+(Feed)&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/how-marco-rubio-runs-venezuela.html https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/2094143793951838328?s=20 https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/iran-news-trump-war-israel-hormuz-august-30 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/2094186148151046199?s=20 https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2094558750254256319?s=20 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117196950497702512 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/117190855202153056 https://x.com/RT_com/status/1492966810202693633?s=20 https://x.com/trbrtc/status/2094949680777994338?s=20 https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2094826294466810366?s=20 https://x.com/jalalisarah/status/2095092338892705851?s=20 https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2094285318170018166?s=20 https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2093246779068137472?s=20 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/30/pentagon-secretly-installs-military-influencers-civilian-roles/ https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/maga-influencer-outed-as-a-pentagon-employee-in-bizarre-turn-after-botching-scoop-state-dept-spox-gave-her/ https://x.com/UnderSecPD/status/2090922149234028711?s=20 https://x.com/AFpost/status/2090993722955567308 https://x.com/JimLaPorta/status/2091970654316700056?s=20 https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10092 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans in amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  When your back starts talking back before breakfast? Signal Core from Signal Relief is one simple reusable system for around the clock comfort. No drugs, no creams, no constant reapplying. Just one simple reusable system with two times the Signal Relief technology. So when your back starts making demands, Signal Core is ready to respond. In a recent consumer trial, over 89% of users felt less back discomfort after 72 hours of wearing Signal Core. When your back feels better, getting through the day doesn't feel like a battle. Try Signal Core for yourself with a 45-day money-back guarantee. Go to signalrelief.com, signalrelief.com and get Signal Core today. Signal Core is a health and wellness product. The product is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent any disease or medical condition. Use the product only as directed.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

• 1:55Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 2:05Speaker 06

  This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 2:23Speaker 06

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:28Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Anna Elkhard, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I want to talk about the recent announcement that Hamas agreed to a second phase of the Gaza ceasefire. So the Board of Peace and mediator countries announced July 30th, last Thursday, I'm recording on August 4th, that Hamas had agreed to a sort of roadmap in which they would relinquish some of their weapons. So this whole scenario has hinged on Hamas disarming, even though in other conflicts, when there have been two parties, disarmament comes at later stages. But in this scenario, the Board of Peace and the Director General, Nikolai Mladenov,

• 3:37Speaker 05

  has basically hinged the entire process on Hamas disarming first. And so in the recent announcement, which President Donald Trump basically celebrated on his social media, calling it a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas, Hamas basically said that they had been in conversation with not only the mediators and their proposals, but with other Palestinian factions and had agreed to relinquish their weapons in a particular way. So they said it was contingent and conditional on a permanent end to Israeli attacks and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as well as recovery and reconstruction. And importantly, they basically said that no weapons would be handed over to Israel

• 4:22Speaker 05

  or to any non-Palestinian party. So what Hamas is saying is we're going to give up our weapons eventually if Israel also adheres to the guidelines of the ceasefire. And we will relinquish our weapons to the National Committee, which is a governance structure made up of Palestinian technocrats. So since the National Committee is supposed to govern Gaza eventually, or at least that's the intention of this of this committee, even though they haven't actually been allowed to do that, the idea here is Hamas is saying, you want to claim that disarmament is the reason that the ceasefire and recovery and reconstruction can't proceed?

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Okay, so we'll disarm, but we'll only disarm to other Palestinians. And like I said, it's contingent on Israel also agreeing, withdrawing from Gaza, ceasing the continued attacks. Israeli officials have basically said that they have like severe worries about it and they're not interested. The National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, basically said that it's not acceptable to Israel. So, you know, it's, it's very much up in the air, but Hamas basically threw the, the ball in Israel's court with this announcement. It's also important to point out that throughout these past couple of months since the ceasefire was announced, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  In the week that this announcement was made, Israel killed at least six in Gaza and wounded many others. And so all of that is going on, and that's not even mentioning what's happening in the West Bank, where things have really escalated in terms of both Israeli army and Israeli settler violence, which often, of course, goes hand in hand. This announcement might really amount to nothing here, especially if Israel doesn't comply, but I think it poses a bigger question around the Board of Peace and its design and its objectives. So that's basically what this episode is going to be about, answering the question of whether the board's design, who sits on it, who pays for seat, who answers to who,

• 6:27Speaker 05

  actually makes a fair outcome for Palestinians structurally impossible, regardless of this announcement or any other announcements or decisions that Palestinians may make. So just as a reminder to listeners, the Board of Peace was announced as part of President Trump's 20-point Gaza plan back in September 2025. 20 points to get Gaza back on track. I shouldn't make jokes here, but that's what it was called, and it was launched in January 2026. Its stated purpose is to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in conflict-affected areas. So not only in Gaza. At the start, the Board of Peace was announced around what was happening in Gaza, but eventually

• 7:11Speaker 05

  it grew into a bigger idea, and Gaza was framed as a template. So this Board of Peace is supposed to be a model for managing future conflicts globally. But as I've argued in the past, this really is not about conflict resolution. It's about conflict management and a very particular type of conflict management where you subdue conflict through repressive means rather than reconciliation or recovery or reparations or anything kind of long-term. So I think it's important to maybe discuss at this point how the Board of Peace is structured. It's basically a three-tier hierarchy with Gaza at the bottom. At the top, there's the founding executive board. This is chaired by President Trump.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  In fact, in the founding documents of the Board of Peace, he is named explicitly. It's not that the President of the United States, you know, will continue to chair the Board of Peace. No, it's specifically Donald Trump. So apparently he's going to be President for life here. That's the top decision-making body. And then underneath that is the Gaza Executive Board, includes a lot of different interesting characters. I'll talk about them in a second. The Gaza Executive Board oversees implementation of what happens in Gaza. Farther, farther, farther underneath that is the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, who are 15 unelected Palestinian technocrats approved by Palestinian factions, but you know, they are not of any particular party.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  They are civil servants, and they're supposed to actually administer Gaza day to day. Now, the National Committee reports to the Director General of the Gaza Executive Board, who is Nikolai Mladenov, not to any Palestinian constituency or to the Palestinian Authority, for example, or any Palestinian body. Now, the six-page charter of the Board of Peace never actually mentions Gaza or human rights. And I don't think this is an oversight. You know, the board is designed as a template for managing future conflicts. It's not designed to uphold human rights. And I think even though, of course, these are problematic positions to take, I think the European reaction serves as a sort of legitimacy check here.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  When the Board of Peace and its mechanisms were supposed to be applied to Gaza, the EU attended the board's first meeting as an observer, for example, and a number of countries kind of floated the idea of joining. But then when the Board of Peace was expanded as an idea to become a template for future conflicts, for example, Ukraine, then, you know, the European Union and other, other European actors basically cited serious doubts about compatibility with the UN Charter. And then France and the UK voiced reservations when Putin, for example, was, was invited to be on the board. So yeah, who is on the top-tier board here?

• 10:02Speaker 05

  It's got people like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who holds a seat on the Board of Peace despite being a party to a conflict that's literally ongoing and is the reason why the Board of Peace supposedly came into existence, and despite having an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes. So clearly, you know, one party to the conflict in this scenario, in, in the Gaza case, is elevated while the other is administered. Then there are a bunch of business figures. So CEOs, venture capitalists, they sit alongside heads of state. So reconstruction is really framed as a business opportunity as much as it's framed as a, an issue of governance. There's not a single Palestinian, nor does the PA actually hold a seat anywhere in this

• 10:45Speaker 05

  hierarchy, even though the Palestinian Authority did actually want to join the Board of Peace, and it sought full membership on it. All they got was basically a consolation prize, which was this coordination committee between the Palestinian Authority and the board with the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mohammed Mustafa, basically representing the Palestinian Authority one-on-one to Mladenov, which, you know, has been described as a type of compromise because the PA doesn't actually have a seat by itself. There was much made about a $1 billion price tag for a permanent seat on the board. So people like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  Basically, we're invited to participate in this way. And it's, you know, kind of a, obviously a sham, turning participation in, you know, quote unquote, peace governance into a commodity for heads of state. Now, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, who is inexplicably also involved in this, at Davos in January, basically presented a master plan that projected $10 billion for Gaza's GDP by 2035. And he talked about new towers and industrial parks and all of this, of course, drawn up without consulting Palestinians living in Gaza. And Trump himself has described Gaza as a, quote, "beautiful piece of property" over and over. So to me, this is a shorthand for how the plan frames the conflict, or wants to, wants

• 12:08Speaker 05

  to convince people that this conflict is fundamentally about underdevelopment. Palestinians have grievances because they're poor, rather than the occupation, rather than the genocide. So, you know, poses the question, what does it mean for this peace architecture when the same people who oversee reconstruction also profit from it?

• 12:36Speaker 05

  Now, who is on the Gaza Executive Board, that second tier? You can find the full roster online. It is important to note that they actually haven't met ever as a board. You know, some of these people have their names and their pictures on the website. And this Gaza Executive Board has really not functioned, except this kind of a legitimacy stamp on, on the Board of Peace's activities. But it really is very indicative of what the Board of Peace is supposed to be and how they want to deal with Gaza here, when you look at who has been invited, even if they've never met. So it's got Gulf diplomats, Turkish diplomats, it has an Egyptian intelligence chief, it has a bunch of Trump administration people, Kushner, Susan Wall, Steve Witkoff, and then

• 13:18Speaker 05

  finance and business interests, like I said, are very heavily represented here. So you have the CEO of Apollo, Mark Rowan, you have venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, and a number of other businessmen, many of them with ties to Israel. There's only really two, let's say, peace process veterans on this board. There's the Director General, Latanov, who I've discussed in a previous episode, who's very problematic, I'll talk about him in just a second, and then Tony Blair, Tony Blair also extremely problematic. He has a history of basically delivering the Good Friday Agreement in the Northern Ireland conflict, but he doesn't seem to be applying any of the lessons of those previous conflicts to the Middle East in any way.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  But the point here is that security, finance, and US political operatives clearly outweigh conflict resolution expertise on this executive board. So who's actually running this? Like I said, they've never actually met. Maybe some of them have been promised a bigger role in the future. I'm thinking particularly the business people here. But let's linger on Nikle, or Nikolai, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Latanov, who is the Director General here. I've talked about him before in a previous episode, but he's the former Bulgarian Foreign Minister, under a government that was toppled by anti-corruption protests. Since 2022, he was the head of an Emirati Diplomatic Academy, which championed the Abraham

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Accords, the so-called peace agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain and a few others. And this is a framework that was disastrous. It's seen especially by Palestinians as essentially cementing their exclusion from statehood. So this is the guy who's supposed to run the Gaza Executive Board and who has turned the peace process on its head by, basically, again, like I said at the beginning of the episode, conditioning the entire process on disarmament first. We have the rest of the Gaza Executive Board, and then we have this Center for Civilian Military Control. So this is a center, it's based in the south of Israel, it's supposed to oversee the ceasefire.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  But every ceasefire enforcement decision, basically, has no sway on Israel itself. Like, there's no mechanism to actually hold Israel accountable. It has no independent authority. It coordinates with the White House, and in particular, the liaison to the White House is this man, Arya Lightstone, who was a senior advisor to a former US Ambassador to Israel, who was extremely right-wing. And there's been recent reporting, which I'll link in the show notes, about how intensely hostile he is to Palestinians. So this is the guy who's supposed to oversee the ceasefire and report to the White House. So what are the consequences on the ground? As I said, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Over half of Gaza is now behind this, quote unquote, "yellow line," which is Israeli-controlled territory. Humanitarian and agricultural access is restricted or prohibited in that area, so Gaza is more and more squeezed. The aid that was supposed to reach 600 trucks a day has never reached that promised 600 trucks, and much of what enters is basically private sector goods that's sold for profit, with the Israelis also getting like a coordination fee on each truck. Now, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee in July 2026, before they announced that they had accepted the mediator's proposals about disarmament. They dissolved this emergency committee and said they were handing authority over to the National Committee.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  But the board basically was uninterested in this move. They said that they were guided by actions, not promises, and it really points to the fact that these kind of procedural concessions that Hamas is attempting to make don't really fix the structural design flaws. I think it's also important to point out here that even though on paper Hamas has given up its civilian government, on the ground, like, that doesn't actually change much. It's still involved in security and policing and bureaucracy. And what they dissolved is this, like, civilian cabinet body that had run Gaza since October 2023, and it's a very, like, specific administrative organ, and it's not all of Hamas's governing capacity. So it was kind of, again, a way of, like, throwing the ball in Israel's court and claiming

• 17:32Speaker 05

  that we are dissolving the committee, we are making these concessions, but they're being very, you know, strategic about this. And in the same announcement, when they dissolved the emergency committee, they basically said that their technical and professional staff would remain in their posts, and it hasn't, you know, relinquished control over the civil service and security bureaucracy. So a few months ago, much was made about Hamas's strategy and whether there were going to be shifts in that strategy, because there was an internal election in Hamas that basically cemented the divide between a kind of more hard-line camp and a more pragmatist camp. And the more hard-line camp won.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  So between Khalid Mishal, who was supposedly, you know, more pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Haya, who demanded kind of more confrontation, the second guy won. And so there was a lot of speculation back in February that that meant if the hardliners won, that this is going to impact disarmament, and that that means Hamas will never disarm and would never actually acquiesce to what was being demanded of them. But in the last couple of weeks, months, you can see that Hamas's strategy is, is

• 18:48Speaker 05

  much more, let's say, nuanced, and attempting to kind of buy time with the United States and, and with the international community, while still saying, okay, we're going to make concessions. This is not to imply that the victory of the kind of more hard-line camp isn't going to impact Hamas's strategy in the future. They are much more Gaza-rooted and a more pro-Iran faction. You know, obviously, these are internal shifts between them, but we'll see how that plays out in, in the, in the near future. But again, I think we go back to the idea of how the Board of Peace is designed, and whether the, the flaws in its design and the dangerous precedent it sets for not only,

• 19:33Speaker 05

  quote unquote, you know, conflict resolution in Gaza, but conflict resolution in every other arena of conflict here, where in this scenario, there isn't neutral mediation, there isn't buy-in from all parties, one side is completely missing from the board, one side is administered. It really poses the question of whether any kind of political movement, any concessions, anything that can be mediated and agreed upon, actually impacts how the board is going to function. Hamid Hadah, who was speaking at a Carnegie Endowment Roundtable back in April, he is a Gazan journalist, I think, put it really well when he said that, quote, "Gaza is no longer just a unique, extraordinary case of human savagery.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  It is a canary in a coal mine. What starts there does not end there." And I think I, I want to end on that note, of framing Gaza as a canary in the coal mine, because the Board of Peace is this model that combines billionaires, profiteering, and kind of the worst actors in the world. In terms of dictators and those who are invested in a more authoritarian world, that is going to be the model that's going to be exported to other weak states or contested territories. That's all for me today. Hope that this was at least eye opening and thanks for listening.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 22:49Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 23:19Speaker 06

  Twelve seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the South now.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  The drums of war are beaten. Everywhere you look, people are picking sides. Governments are demanding unity. Critics are being denounced as naive, irresponsible, even treacherous. And a movement built on international solidarity has been split in the chaos. The year is 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, though you'll be excused if you thought I was describing today. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, also Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Neil Wog.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  To discuss the infamous split among the anarchists over World War I, of all things. So just to be clear, the common anarchist stance prior to the war was fairly straightforward. It was a stance of internationalist worker solidarity against imperialist wars, a solidarity that transcended borders and nationalities, recognizing that ordinary people had more in common with one another than with the ruling classes of their own countries. Such wars were never fought in the interests of workers, but in the interests of states, empires, dynasties, and capitalists. If war came, the task of revolutionaries was not to rally behind their own governments,

• 24:59Speaker 06

  but to oppose the conflict and preserve international working-class solidarity. However, the Great War would strain the internationalist cause, for since splits and theoretical developments owe into the ensuing debates personified in the disagreement between Erko Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin, as well as many others, who clashed intellectually over the nature of war, history, national struggle, and revolutionary change. The First World War emerged from decades of imperial rivalry, colonial competition, military expansion, and competing alliance systems among Europe's great powers. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 served

• 25:44Speaker 06

  as the immediate catalyst, but it merely ignited tensions that had been building for years. Within weeks, a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into a continental and eventually global conflict. On one side stood the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, later joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, and opposing them were the Allied Powers, initially consisting of France, Russia, and Britain, with countries such as Italy, Romania, Japan, and eventually the United States entering the war on the Allied side as the conflict expanded. Attitudes toward the First World War across Europe were deeply divided and often changed dramatically in the opening weeks of the conflict.

• 26:29Speaker 06

  A powerful wave of patriotic enthusiasm swept through many cities, with countless people volunteering for military service under the belief that the war would be short, necessary, or even glorious. Governments, newspapers, churches, and much of the political establishment promoted national unity and portrayed the conflict as a defensive struggle against foreign aggression. For socialists, trade unionists, religious pacifists, and most relevantly anarchists, the stance was deeply skeptical or openly oppositional to the war, as it appeared to be a catastrophic clash between rival empires in which ordinary people would bear the costs while elites pursued their geopolitical ambitions.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  However, one of the attitudes that flared up as a result of the war, even amongst some anarchists and socialists, was anti-German sentiment, manifest in Kropotkin's open letter in the anarchist newspaper, Freedom. This open letter would spark the ensuing debate between Kropotkin and Malatesta. As documented by historian Matthew S. Adams in Anarchism and the First World War, Kropotkin wrote, quote, "I consider that the duty of everyone who cherishes the idea of human progress is to crush the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe. Since 1871, Germany has become a standing menace to European progress. All will live in under the menace of sudden invasion. More than that, Germany was the chief support and protection of reaction," end quote.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  For many anarchists, and even Leon Trotsky, this seemed a clear break from Kropotkin's anarchism, which would be in opposition to alignment with nation-state-based struggles. However, as noted by historian George Woodcock in Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel, quote, "Anti-German sentiment was probably an influence on Kropotkin long before this point, as it was a current in Russian revolutionary movements due to the German rule by the Romanov dynasty, and perhaps also because his fellow Russian anarchist Mikhailov Kunnin had an infamous rivalry with the German Karl Marx," end quote. Though of course, you know, this is speculation.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Kropotkin and Malatesta were both in Britain when the exchange of letters took place. Malatesta wrote in his article, "Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles," that the only war worth fighting was one of liberation, and there was no siding with national agglomeration. He said, quote, "I have no greater confidence in the bloody sah, nor in the English diplomatists who oppress India, who betrayed Persia, who crushed the Boer republics, nor in the French bourgeoisie who massacred the natives of Morocco, nor in those of Belgium who have allowed the Congo atrocities and profited by them."

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Victory of Germany would certainly mean the triumph of militarism. But the triumph of the Allies would mean Russo-English domination in Europe and in Asia. End quote. Now, Kropotkin had previously argued that modern wars were fundamentally driven by capitalist competition for markets, resources and opportunities to exploit less industrialized nations. He pointed to the imperial conquests and colonial conflicts of his time as evidence that financiers and economic interests, rather than ordinary people, were the true beneficiaries of war. And while he saw capitalism as the primary engine of modern militarism, he also condemned the state as the political institution that organized and carried out these conflicts.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  So it was odd for Kropotkin to seemingly come out the contrary of his previous positions and take one state's side over another when he had seen through such sides before. But of course, people and their motivations are more complex. Kropotkin had sympathy for France and hostility toward Germany. He saw France as the heir to the revolutionary tradition of seventeen eighty-nine and the Paris Commune, and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism. He believed the war was a poor moment for social revolution and feared that a German victory would usher in decades of political reaction,

• 30:44Speaker 02

  wiping out the hard-won freedoms that had been achieved in countries like Britain and France. His support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view of history, that social progress was never guaranteed and could always be reversed, that periods of freedom and cooperation could collapse into authoritarianism. He also believed that national liberation struggles were a space ripe for anarchist social insertion and radicalization, and that in times of war, an anti-militarist general strike within the targeted nation would simply gift the country to its invaders, and that anti-militarists advocating such action were thus siding with the invaders and making social revolution more difficult to carry out in the future.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  This is for me a somewhat compelling argument. I feel this way about current struggle. You know, while the worker has no friend in the states of the world, and I don't think it should be framed as a matter of campism, the way we see running rampant today, it is undeniable that there are some victories and defeats that will be more or less preferable to the viability of the struggle long term. I am rooting against an Israeli victory anywhere. And while I reserve my right to criticize the politics, ideologies and other actions of the groups carrying out that resistance, it remains true that the defeat of their oppressors can open up the space for further struggles.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  If it was that anarchists were arguing and acting solely for anti-militarism in the targeted countries, then I would be fully with Kropotkin, you know, I would get where he's coming from, we would indeed have a problem. But I think he mischaracterized the anarchist position, or perhaps did not give them enough credit. As for the anarchists', primary responsibility for anti-militarist ends is in agitating within the invader countries themselves to disrupt the militarism within the threatening nations to the bitter end. Anything less would be an incomplete and flaccid anti-militarist struggle. Kropotkin addresses this in the Manifesto of the Sixteen, which we'll get to shortly.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  And yet, with the context of hindsight, I share Malester's criticism of the pitfalls of lesser evilism as he kinda predicted World War Two. Adam wrote of Malester's position, quote, "German victory would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph of the Allies would result in much the same. Both guaranteed the victory of the state principle. With statism delivered in both cases and the tensions that caused the war remaining unresolved, Malester perspicaciously warned that with both sides exhausted, some kind of peace will be patched up, leaving all questions open, thus preparing for a new war more murderous than the present." End quote.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  In nineteen fifteen, Malester, along with Emma Goldman, Alexander Burtman and thirty-two other signatories, co-signed a manifesto titled The Anarchist International and the War, otherwise known as the International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, Manifesto of the Thirty-Five and Anti-War Manifesto. In this text, the anarchists call out the ridiculous notion that any side of this clash of civilizations had claimed to righteousness, freedom or civilization. Quote, "In the current conflict, the governments in Berlin and Vienna have justified themselves by producing documents every bit as authentic as those produced by the governments in Paris, London and Petrograd.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  It is for whoever on each side who will produce the most unchallengeable, most telling documentation to prove their bona fides and portray themselves as the unblemished defender of the right and of freedom, the champion of civilization." Civilization? Who stands for that at the moment? Is it the German state with its redoubtable militarism, so powerful that it has stifled every vestige of rebellion? Or the Russian state, whose only methods of persuasion are the Naut, the Gibbet and Siberia? Or the French state, with its Bureby, its bloody conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco and forcible conscription of black troops?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  The France whose prisons have housed for years past comrades whose only crime was to have written and spoken out against the war? Or England, as she exploits, divides, starves and oppresses the peoples of her huge colonial empire? No, none of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilization, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense. The truth is that the root of wars, of the war currently bloodying the plains of Europe, just like all the ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the existence of the state, which is the political form of privilege. The state is born of military might, it has grown through recourse to military might,

• 35:52Speaker 02

  and logically, it is upon military might that it must rely if it is to retain its omnipotence. Whatever the form it may assume, the state is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a privileged minority. The present conflict offers a striking illustration of this. All forms of the state are embroiled in the present war. Absolutism is represented by Russia, absolutism mitigated by parliamentarism by Germany, a state ruling over very different peoples by Austria, constitutional democracy by England, and the democratic republican system by France." End quote. Malester rejected the idea that anarchists should support one state over another because it was supposedly the lesser evil.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Doing so, he argued, placed the struggles of some workers above those of others and abandoned international working class solidarity. While he accepted that anticolonial wars and social revolutions could be justified, he maintained that anarchists should oppose wars between rival capitalist and imperialist states, refusing to become complicit in their violence and exploitation. Later, in the brief manifesto, quote, "No matter where they may find themselves, the anarchists' role in the current tragedy is to carry on proclaiming that there is but one war of liberation, the one waged in every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the exploited against the exploiter.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Our task is to summon the slaves to revolt against their masters. Anarchist propaganda and anarchist action should set about doggedly undermining and breaking up the various states, cultivating the spirit of rebellion and acting as midwife to the discontent in the peoples and in the armies." End quote. Going on to describe how anarchists might convince the soldiers, the factory workers, the peasants, the outcasts, the women and, quote, "capitalize upon every stirrin' of rebellion, every discontent, and want to ferment insurrection, to organize the revolution to which we look for the ending of all of society's iniquities." End quote. Powerful words. Yeah. And indeed in line with what anarchists had long proclaimed.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  But Kropotkin, and Kropotkin was not alone, mind you, he took a different position on the war. He and fourteen allies published in nineteen sixteen, The Manifesto of the Sixteen, as a reply. It was not sixteen of them who signed that manifesto, it was fifteen. It just got called The Manifesto of the Sixteen because the home address of one of the contributors was mistaken for another contributor.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Incredible stuff.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so that's what I was known today, but it's like he was living in some town in Algeria, I believe, and they thought the name of the town was a police on his name. Oh my god. Publishing Mystics, Attila Zull's time. In the manifesto.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Of the Sixteen, Kropotkin and the other signatories reaffirmed their opposition to militarism and wars of conquest, but argued that peace could not simply be declared while Germany continued its invasion and expansion. They contended that German workers have failed to resist their own government's imperial ambitions, leaving no meaningful internal opposition to militarism. Although they maintained their commitment to internationalism and the eventual abolition of borders, they concluded that the defeat of German militarism was a necessary precondition for a just and lasting peace, believing it would ultimately benefit both the German people and the cause of human liberation.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  So I get where Kropotkin is coming from too, as I see parallels to the situation today vis-à-vis American imperialism and the flawed actors that resisted. Even though I generally share Malatesta's sentiment, and Malatesta was ultimately correct in his assessment that maintaining a consistent stance is necessary for the clarity of the movement, and also that this war's outcome would be nothing but a precursor to further war and would not advance the class struggle and in fact worsen its conditions. All that being said, I think there's room for a more sympathetic appraisal of Kropotkin's position. As for responses and just the overall outcome of this rift, for one, the Bolshevik Party had something

• 40:18Speaker 01

  to see. Lenin condemned the supporters of World War One as "anarchist chauvinists", Stalin and Trotsky dismissed Kropotkin's pro-war stance as evidence of anarchism's failure, despite the fact that the majority of the anarchist movement remained opposed to the Great War. Malatesta, responding to the Manifesto of the Sixteen with his article "Pro-Government Anarchists", accused its signatories of abandoning anarchist principles by siding with states in wartime. He also pointed out that in the name of defeating German militarism, they had instead strengthened in militarism, authoritarianism, and nationalism across Europe, including in the countries they were siding with the governments of. Alexander

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Bolkov, echoing this criticism, argued that Kropotkin had wrongly treated nations as if they were their governments, when in reality, the war was being driven by ruling elites, not ordinary people. Malatesta maintained the position that anarchists should capitalize on the imperialist war for class war by encouraging workers to resist their own governments and revive genuine international solidarity. Although wartime repression made revolutionary activity extremely difficult, he believed the crisis created new opportunities for insurrection rather than justification for support in any state. The anarchist movement emerged from the other side of the Great War fragmented, some of its adherents forever stained by their inconsistency of principle.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  The war forced anarchists to reconsider strategy and revolutionary tactics, and alongside the economic devastation and political instability unleashed, helped create conditions that fueled revolutionary upheavals across Europe, most notably the Russian Revolution and the wave of labour unrest that followed the war. Though the revolution was initially carried out by a diversity of forces, the Bolsheviks claimed it, and with the seeming success of the Marxist model in Russia, it appeared anarchism would be on the downturn. Though disillusionment with that model would follow, and as many anarchists have highlighted, the metrics of success between the respective movements were in many ways different, it

• 42:43Speaker 01

  wasn't all bad news coming out of the war. The collapse of old regimes inspired experiments in worker self-governance, such as the German Revolution of 1918 and the Bavarian Council Republic, where anarchists like Gustav Landau and Eric Musam sought to build a federation of workers councils rather than a new state. Similar anti-authoritarian currents appeared in the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, where rebels called for free Soviets independent of Bolshevik control. Despite the growing dominance of state socialism, anarchist ideas continue to shape revolutionary struggles in the aftermath of the Great War. Though the war marked a shift in the movement that some would argue anarchism has never fully

• 43:26Speaker 01

  recovered from, anarchism has persisted, continues to reach people worldwide, and has the potential still to intercede in the diversity of struggles and places today. What is needed is a clarity and consistency of principles and analyses across contexts that can encourage initiative and responsibility and solidarity and revolutionary achievement. It's easy, I think, to reduce this story to Kropotkin standing alone betraying anarchism. While ultimately I end up aligning more with Malatesta's position than Kropotkin's, I do think that Kropotkin deserves a bit

• 44:06Speaker 01

  more credit than he has sometimes been afforded in retrospect. While his prejudices played a role, he did seem to genuinely believe that German militarism posed a unique threat to freedom that British, French, and Russian powers did not. Whether he was right is another question, but I think he was still coming from an anarchist place, colored as he may have been by his anti-German prejudices. I think the whole incident revealed the liveliness of the anarchist movement, as one that was constantly questioning and adapting and conflicting and refining its ideas, something that I hope that we will be willing to carry on

• 44:47Speaker 01

  today. But what were your thoughts on this bit of early 20th century drama alert?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, this is the anarchist version of a debate that played out throughout the entire socialist movement and effectively ended up destroying it, in the sense that, you know, the logic that Kropotkin is operating from, to some extent makes sense, but it's also the logic that was taken by every single individual side in the conflict, where like the German Social Democratic Party, you know, ends up supporting the war because they think that if they don't, they're going to be sort of like annihilated by the reactionary forces of the Tsar and, but then like the French think they're going to be destroyed by the reactionary forces of the Germans and so

• 45:36Speaker 02

  on and so forth. And so everyone ends up operating from this logic of like, it's going to be really bad for us if like the other side of this wins this war. And it ends up squandering this moment of possibility, and instead everyone just gets sort of fed into the meat grinder. And I think the struggle playing out this way was effectively the worst possible thing that could have happened, because it meant that like some of the only people who were left resisting it were people who shouldn't be running a dog kennel, much less, you know, like controlling the fate of the socialist movement, and also it meant

• 46:17Speaker 02

  that the war was allowed to continue. And so I think from a theoretical perspective, it's like, it makes sense why people took the positions that they did, and also like supporting this war was so catastrophically wrong that basically every subsequent horror of the 20th century can be laid upon it. But I don't know. The other thing I'll say about is like, it's not clear to me if Kropotkin acting differently would have like changed anything.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  But the sort of general failure of the socialist movement to actually grapple with this moment was a sort of apocalyptic moment in the history of class struggle that we have never recovered from.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely don't think that the blame for World War Two and all subsequent wars in the 20th century, which can in some way be connected to that, that World War One, I don't think we should lay the blame on the feet of Kropotkin or on the anarchist movement or the socialist movement.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  All we can really do is speculate the what if, you know?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And what if there was a unified front, unified stand across all these countries, a commitment, a solid commitment to we will not cooperate with our respective states? How might the course of the war turn out differently? How might history have played out differently? I guess we'll never know.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  But we are in a position to shape the course of history here and now.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  As the title of the podcast goes, you know, it could happen here. It kind of is happening here. By here, I mean on this planet across the world, we are dealing with wars, we are ...with interstate conflicts, diplomatic, economic, and military. And despite how interconnected we are through the internet, it certainly doesn't feel like we've come any closer to the kind of international solidarity that the Great War demanded, let alone the many wars being waged across the world today.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but even, you know, the bleakness of the past and the bleakness of the present does not mean that the future need necessarily be as bleak. As I've said before, the definitional quality of modernity is that today is not like yesterday. And so we don't actually have to live through yet another round of imperialist butchery. We're different parts of the working class, slaughter each other. We don't have to live in a world that's, you know, defined by endless status and capitalist war. We can build something else. But that's something that is the responsibility of not the state, because the state will never choose to abandon its privilege and abandon its wars.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And it's not up to, you know, capital, because capital will also continue fighting its wars. The only people who can do it is us.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  As usual, all power to all the people. Peace.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 51:24Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 51:34Speaker 06

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the South now.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about our crumbling world and the people making it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happen to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going to be talking about the gang of race scientists who went after Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who recently died by suicide just earlier this year, in August of 2026. And I came across a very good article about what happened to Jason and the people kind of responsible to that by Stephanie Lammy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of danides.org,

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  which develops and employs technology for civil society organizations operating in conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political sociology, and she wrote this really, really good article that was published initially on the Club de Media part, which is a French journalism blog, effectively. And she published also a really good translation of it, and I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was really valuable. So I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could pay to host the audio version of her investigation, and she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She wanted me to do that, but I want to make it clear, none of this is my work, and I don't say that to, you know, defray any sort of responsibility or whatever. Like, this is much better work than I could have done on the same subject, and I'm really

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I get into her article, I do want to note that she is the author of two books, Ogora Toxica: Uncivil Society in the Internet Age, which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies, and La Terreur Masculiniste in 2024, An Investigation into Masculinist Radical Milieux, Their Ideologies, Networks, and the Use of Violence as a Political Strategy. Both are published by Editions d'Ude Tour. I think unfortunately they're, I mean, unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate, but they are in French, obviously. I'm going to be reading Stephanie's article in English, and here it goes. The Hunt for Jason Arday. Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. The hunt that led to Jason Arday's death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize it. From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Arday, the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026, was being subjected to racist and ableist harassment, exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described. Arday had been marked as quarry long before the fatal media pylon. An open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach, and political unity. But to break out of the margins of race science, the chase had to become something else.

• 55:01Robert Evans?

  Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story about scientific and journalistic integrity. The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so, legitimized both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists. Marking the Quarry. The hunt for Professor Jason Arday began quietly, three years earlier, couched in the civilized nodes of a scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjean University, began examining Arday's publications. Arday's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news.

• 55:45Robert Evans?

  At 37, he was the youngest black professor in the university's history. From the moment he arrived at Cambridge, Arday was targeted by Freedom of Information requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory, CRT, which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to use public records procedures to target academics and then identify or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of the academic far-right's repertoire, aimed particularly at researchers who examine power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

• 56:29Robert Evans?

  The largely covert campaign against black scholars also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president, came under heightened scrutiny against a backdrop of misogynoir. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the principal architects of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against Gay into a broader political offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo to what would later come for Arday is not only the method, but also the network. Rufo has repeatedly promoted race science-focused online magazine, Aporia, and appeared on its podcast in 2023.

• 57:12Robert Evans?

  Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Aporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, a Wyoming-registered company created as the successor to the pioneer fund, the American eugenics organization established in 1937. Byline Times reports that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's Documentary Foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Koffness, the race science researcher who would later propel the allegations against Arday to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emile Kirkagard had met Peter Thiel in 2019.

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  According to Kirkagard's own account, Thiel subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kirkagard named Koffness and Noah Carl, Aporia's editor. Both have been run out of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism. This network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU, founded by Spectator magazine associate Toby Young, who has himself advocated what he called progressive eugenics. Aporia's Noah Carl is the co-director of Skeptics LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young, while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufman sits on the FSU's advisory council. The funding of race science by Christian nationalists and extractive industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function.

• 58:40Robert Evans?

  As historian of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's Bastards, racialist theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed techno-masculinists with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $10,000 fund for plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt to his campaign

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  to defeat, we called, racialist ideology.

• 59:29Robert Evans?

  Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy. Promoters of the junk science, that is, race science, reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, black academics were describing the climate in their universities as "open season." The Pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May, 2023, Arday received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged his public work. When Arday did not reply, Harris wrote again. "On the 11th of May, Arday eventually responded, accusing Harris of spending hours combing through his work, looking for mistakes. He told him not to contact him again.

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment," citing a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved. Harris replied anyway. "Arday had explicitly asked him to stop, but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed investigator of black academics could recast himself as a guardian of merit, simply a man of learning, asking questions." With no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, professor emeritus of education and social research at the Open University, who has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory.

• 1:00:58Robert Evans?

  His grievance is what he regards as the influence of activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints. On the 19th of May, 2023, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimmick, head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, and Reece Morgan, the university's head of research policy, governance, and integrity, setting out allegations concerning Arday's 2018 paper in social sciences. Crimmick then met with Arday and the faculty's director of research. Arday agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 21st of June, 2023, Crimmick told Hammersley that Arday retained the faculty's full support. Morgan separately informed him that, because the work predated Arday's employment at Cambridge, the university did not consider an investigation to fall within its remit.

• 1:01:43Robert Evans?

  Hammersley escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic investigation of Arday's other publications. Crimmick did not respond. The chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harris and Hammersley contacted academic journals and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded Arday his PhD. Harris and Hammersley also harried Arday outside university channels. As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove, a journalist at Times Higher Education, drawing his attention to the correction to Arday's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, THE, did not investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another professor contacted the publication about Arday's work. Harris then supplied material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Arday's publications

• 1:02:27Robert Evans?

  to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography. By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached Arday for comment, not only on his work, but on his private life. By all accounts, Arday experienced this as a continuation of the harassment he had already identified. The man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Arday's 33 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in social sciences was amended in December of 2023, with additional references and clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper in educational philosophy and theory was corrected in May of 2024.

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  Neither was retracted. By the time THE began its investigation in 2025, both matters had been closed. When the allegations eventually reached Arday's PhD, Liverpool John Moores University found citation defects but cleared him from plagiarism, concluding that they resulted from "honest and reasonable error compounded by inadequate supervision related to his learning disabilities." It's also important to center the story here. From Arday's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards, there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Arday, for his part, consistently described what was happening to him as racist and ableist harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April of 2026, in his British Sociological Association keynote, "Wanted Dead or Alive:

• 1:03:56Robert Evans?

  The Playbook," he described how black academics were being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized against them. By then, Arday had already made public the very tangible effects of the campaign: racist abuse, threats, and intimidation. In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, then Minister for Skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported a physical assault, death, and rape threats against himself and his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he likewise described targeted campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact, the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave Harris in the

• 1:04:40Robert Evans?

  familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic, a variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely mobilized to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and public health measures, while Arday became the eccentric young black professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were recorded as aggression through the classic mechanism of Darvo, deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed. The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim. Inaccuracy in Arday's autobiographical narrative, as well as unprovable facts, were used to discredit his testimony.

• 1:05:22Robert Evans?

  If he was not beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all, and perhaps his place at Cambridge was at self-suspect. And maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled. The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest. Arday could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold, it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th of August, as Arday resigned from Cambridge and lost the institutional protections that came with his position, the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-DEI organization,

• 1:06:06Robert Evans?

  revealed that Arday had reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU, framed Arday's report to the police as a threat to academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher Education helped publicize the same reversal. Jack Grove published his account under the headline "I was reported to police over the Arday case. I was just doing my job." Arday's complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook, the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arday's attempts to protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks on academic and press freedom

• 1:06:50Robert Evans?

  into a single conspiratorial narrative, casting Arday as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics. Quote, "In a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Arday tried to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic." This threat frame survived Arday's death on the 14th of August. That same day, THE published an opinion piece by Ian Pace, an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, AFAF, who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech alongside Cambridge professor and Reform UK head of policy James Orr. As byline Times has documented, Orr himself is a keynote in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge through Orr around the time of

• 1:07:33Robert Evans?

  his appointment, while Orr later helped bring the race science publication, Aporia, into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Arday affair demonstrated, quote, "the danger of treating criticism as injury." Three days after Arday's death, THE news editor Tom Williams maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Arday by Grove was justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads.

• 1:08:08Robert Evans?

  And we're back with the code of gentlemanly conduct. The chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels. The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French on the 21st of July 2026, when Nathan Koffness, the race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. That claim is unverifiable. Three days later, The Telegraph, to which Free Speech Union founder and general secretary Toby Young regularly contributes, published an article with the title Cambridge Diversity Poster Boy in Plagiarism Row. The Times and The Daily Mail followed that same day with similar articles.

• 1:08:50Robert Evans?

  By the 1st of August, The Guardian published its investigation under the sensational headline plagiarism, playbooks, and a pig's head, the new claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday. The story had become a national media affair, still oriented by the race science network's framing. Four days after The Guardian piece, Cambridge announced a new investigation into Arday's qualifications and career, citing new information. Arday resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusations, speculation, and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Arday, not the PAC. The Guardian article subjected Arday's accounts of racist harassment to minute scrutiny, going so far as to check some of them with police and witnesses and finding discrepancies.

• 1:09:33Robert Evans?

  But the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the quarry, the chase, and the context was entirely absent from the story. Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic. But Dave Harris's own history should have complicated his portrayal as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that, in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following a complaint alleging harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He was reinstated the following month, although the rehearing upheld a finding of misconduct and issued him with a formal warning. This history should have at least alerted The Guardian to a possible recurring pattern of behavior.

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  Although Arday had pitched specifically to him, maybe sending the Arts and Culture editor to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to cover a far-right propaganda campaign. In a video published after Arday's death, Harris lied, saying he had been cleared. Furthermore, Times Higher Education accounts repeatedly conflated civility with integrity. Harris's correspondence was described as notably, even excessively polite, as though civility of tone guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times Higher Education's Jack Grove recalled his first email in his August 5th account as "softly phrased." By then, Arday had already asked Harris to stop contacting him and reported him to the police. When Times Higher Education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly

• 1:11:02Robert Evans?

  described the anonymous professor who contacted him as "almost apologetic about raising his concerns." Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, while the repetition and escalation of approaching THG, the very conduct Arday had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two things can be true at once. A harasser can also be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Tavia Nyongo have argued, civility operates as a covert political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation. Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational,

• 1:11:46Robert Evans?

  and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct. The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy, a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of academic standards, positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed to scrutinize Harris's own track record. In its lengthy investigation published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris's pursuit and quoted Arday explicitly asking him to stop, yet did not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from concerns about academic standards.

• 1:12:30Robert Evans?

  Instead, Harris was given space to complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like racial inequality. Harris's own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism. The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjon correspondence described publications produced in the Marjon name as "poor quality and often controversial," a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT was self-published in March 2024 rather than published by an

• 1:13:15Robert Evans?

  academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a generic endorsement from Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard of Harris's research had already been public knowledge since January of 2026, when The Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjon's decision to suspend his emeritus status. In that article, The Telegraph explained the university's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjon name were "poor quality and often controversial." Although The Telegraph framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of title after critiquing critical race theory, the information was now in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing his credibility when the Arday allegations resurfaced in July. Between the 24th of July and Arday's death on the 14th of August, The Telegraph published

• 1:13:59Robert Evans?

  43 articles about Jason Arday. It even ran a box-headed "How The Telegraph's Reporting Led to Jason Arday's Resignation." After his death, the newspaper quietly altered the headline "Jason Arday is living proof that you reap what you sow," removing the word "living." Meanwhile, the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from The Telegraph's website, the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source. What felled Arday was not the action of isolated actors but that of a single, well-connected and well-financed PAC with a not-so-secret plan. In 2023, Nathan Koffness laid out a roadmap to power on his Substack, "How to Take Back Academia."

• 1:14:41Robert Evans?

  He was not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions tend to look very similar. Quote, "There are two ways to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus: remove them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been pushed out of academia for political reasons." The two-pronged approach, eliminate the black scholars, platform the mediocre white males, is apparent with the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his emeritus status suspended in January of 2026, he became a cause celebre in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Friedrich Attenborough, during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also defended Nathan Koffness.

• 1:15:25Robert Evans?

  When Emmanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Koffness's affiliation on the 5th of April 2024 following his writings on race, heredity, and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with Attenborough personally promoting his case. Koffness later stated that FSU chief legal counsel Bryn Harris assisted his appeal. The FSU subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute to his legal fund. The FSU itself says it has supported Koffness throughout and helped him bring legal action against Emmanuel College. In March of 2026, Attenborough, now at CAF, intervened on Koffness's behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist demands that his appointment be rescinded. Koffness had been recruited to Ghent by Bouk De Vries, whose own work on intelligence

• 1:16:07Robert Evans?

  and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditary and researchers. In 2024, De Vries also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human Diversity Foundation co-founder Emile Kirkagard. De Vries had already sought university funding to bring Koffness to Ghent for a lecture in February of 2024, just days after Koffness published "A Guide for Hereditary Revolution", before later hiring him as a postdoctoral researcher on his "Liberalism's Fertility Problem" project. So when, on the 21st of July, Nathan Koffness published DEI fraud and cover-up at Cambridge on his Substack, the architecture of uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris, as well as give cover to the attackers, was already in place. So

• 1:16:52Robert Evans?

  was the framing. Koffness heavily promoted his blog entry on X, where the post exceeded 1 million views. It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the American race and IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual milieu as Curtis Yarvin. A foundational figure of the anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of "the cathedral" to describe what, in secular societies, he presented as a new church. A decentralized system made up, in particular, of universities and mainstream media, responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science, that rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership

• 1:17:34Robert Evans?

  in the cathedral. Discrediting academic knowledge production on race while recasting hereditary and race science as censored truth fitted directly into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper articles appeared three days later in The Telegraph, The Times, and The Daily Mail, Koffness and those amplifying his narrative had already transformed Arday into a symbol of the supposed corruption of universities by DEI. A DEI star whose alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July, Arday submitted to an interview with The Times to defend himself against the allegations, but by then, the media pack was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According

• 1:18:17Robert Evans?

  to News Corp's verified corpus, 52 articles about Arday had appeared by the time his resignation statement was published on the 5th of August. Arday's resignation did not stop the hunt, because the actions of the victim have no bearing on the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target, or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated, the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his resignation and the moment he was found dead on the 14th of August, 214 through the 13th, and eight more that day before his death became known. In all, News Corp records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of July and his death.

• 1:19:02Robert Evans?

  Of those articles, my own, Stephanie's, mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors with links to the FSU, 19 of them after Arday resigned. 21 appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder Toby Young is associate editor and columnist. Another was written in The Telegraph by FSU-linked Alison Pearson, and another in The Times by FSU chair Nigel Bigger. And, uh, we'll continue, but first, we've got one last ad break.

• 1:19:40Robert Evans?

  And we're back. The trophy. Rather than a media pile-on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each individual claim is true or false. It is first and foremost to struggle over who has the power to define reality. That is what framing does. It places certain perspectives at the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what becomes visible, sayable, and relevant. That authority, that power, is precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system fundamentally untethered from reality, needs to be received as science. Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it. Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public, they remain what they are: marginal and extremist. With

• 1:20:24Robert Evans?

  it, they acquire the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge, to decide what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation, and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And Arday was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture that authority. A young black professor at Cambridge with a remarkable life story, working on racism, saneism, and inequality. Make him doubtful enough, and he can be made to carry the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism structures the academy are precisely the people who do not belong in it. You do not have to prove the whole

• 1:21:05Robert Evans?

  proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving. As defense researcher Olivier Schmidt, now research director at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College, has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt. "I'm just asking questions" then becomes a posture through which suspicion can be kept moving, alive, and definitely, even in the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of critical thinking. Arday did not have to be proved a fraud. He only had to be made permanently suspect, and with him, everyone who looked like him. But the hunt could continue, only as long as the pact kept running and the hounds baying. Arday's mass harassment on social media was participatory. For some, the serialization of revelations

• 1:21:49Robert Evans?

  discrediting him became collective fun, harass-tainment. Adam Serwer, the American journalist at The Atlantic, whose work examines race in American politics, captured this political pleasure in collective humiliation in one phrase: "The cruelty is the point." For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starbert, a University of Washington professor who studies collective since-making, has shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative. They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself, to check another supposedly outlandish claim, to uncover another discrepancy, was particularly enticing to those who define

• 1:22:31Robert Evans?

  themselves as rationalists or skeptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the issue back to the reality of harassment, and thereby establish ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination. That reward helps explain why, even after Arday's death, so many of those who engaged with the ready stream of revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable to let him go, even the reasonable minds. Kate Starbert has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies, quote, "not in better facts, but better frames." Arday was hounded to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives, a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender

• 1:23:16Robert Evans?

  white men who believed themselves to be being greatly replaced from the institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Arday's own perspective out of view. On the 20th of August, six days after the kill, Ghent University suspended Koffness as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation into conduct that, in part, predated his post about Arday. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports, and concerns about his conduct and public statements, and their impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, of using his position and Ghent affiliation to pursue and promote his race realism and hereditary revolution, despite having him hired to work on "the future of liberalism." The university regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a misuse of his institutional reputation, and a conflict with its code

• 1:24:00Robert Evans?

  of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation. This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case. Koffness immediately recast his suspension as censorship, an attack on his freedom of speech. The experiences of his racialized colleagues disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very architecture of actors implicated in the hunt, but now with an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. "How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair." "My university suspended me," the article declared. "All I did was tell the truth." U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White then reproduced the free speech frame, pressuring

• 1:24:43Robert Evans?

  Ghent to reinstate Koffness and warning that "all options were on the table" as the United States reviewed its relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a trans woman and former Green Party Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, then became the new target onto which the frame could be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment of a whistleblower and the person of Koffness attracted more than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium, for example, signatories Florence Beauregard Blackner and Xavier Laurent Salvador led back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre Edward Sterin, who funds Salvador's Observatoire du Decolonialisme,

• 1:25:26Robert Evans?

  while his Pericles project funds Justitia, created with the institute Thomas More in Belgium. The latter collaborates with Beauregard Blackner and is linked to a French transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans rights. Pierre Edward Sterren's observatory has since expanded its remit. The organization intervenes in academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom. And like the FSU, it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate in particular through the neo secularist cluster around Le Point, Marion, Franck Tiroux and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far right media organs such

• 1:26:08Robert Evans?

  as Le Figaro, Casseur, Bélier's Actuels and Atlantico. Added to this is Christian nationalist Vincent Bolore's media apparatus, C News, Europe One, JDD and others. But Beauregard Blackner and Salvador are not the only French signatories. Martin Benoit, Jean Fichot, Andreas Bickfahlvi and Charles Ramond have, like Beauregard Blackner and Salvador, signed initiatives organized by vigilance universities, a collective founded in 2016 to combat what it describes as racialism, communitarianism, and attacks on universalism in higher education. The neo secularist milieu thus performs both a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering. The dominant group's identity anxieties and the objectives advanced by Christo fascist

• 1:26:53Robert Evans?

  networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into the language of universalism, secularism, science and academic freedom. Nathan Koffness has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work, albeit remotely and pending investigations. But he is only a cog in a well oiled machine, the one who looks the part. Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media and strategic litigation and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of white cis male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality, a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim to be. The hood is not what makes the racist. Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize. And race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood. The onslaught against Jason Arday was not inevitable.

• 1:27:36Robert Evans?

  It became possible because at every stage of the pursuit, people and institutions, the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not simply follow the hunt, we handed them the trophy, the power to define what is real. To overturn that frame, to take back the power, we first have to lift the hood, collectively name what is wearing it. That starts with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the front lines back to the center and listening when they sound the alarm. Jason Arday was afforded no such attention. The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of Black Studies at Columbia University, writes in

• 1:28:17Robert Evans?

  The Nation, "This is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power and to decide on both shores who is permitted to produce it at all." The question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom or scientific concern and refuse our assigned role in the killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was written by Stephanie Lammy. You can find more of her work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have that linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Stephanie. We'll be back tomorrow.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:30:36Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 1:30:46Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:31:16Speaker 06

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now.

• 1:31:26Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were living about growing up?

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Oh, man. So many. I guess I enjoyed, like, Celtic things because that's like part of the world I'm from.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  It wasn't even that Celtic. I think she was Celtic, like a Celtic warrior, queen, bodicia.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Bodicea is how people used to say it. Boudica, I think, is more accurate.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Fast speed. Like, she was someone who had resisted the Roman invasions, right?

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Where my dad lives is like where the Romans built their border wall, called Hadrian's Wall. And it's just kind of cool to be like, you know, the Romans bought their colonialist wall of Europe and they got here and I can't fucking do it. It might have been, it might have been they got to that part of the world and they were like, it's raining so fucking much, I want to go back to Italy. But yeah, it was just, it was always interesting to me to think of like, you know, the amount of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization and then these people who were able to resist it.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I remember as a child, I was a really big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Greece, you can't go wrong.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Babylon, big fan. I liked the beards.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  You know, very cool.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  As someone who, you know, I grew up like with a voracious appetite for those living long ago, how people live in the past, like historical books, how people dressed, what they eat, how they live day to day. And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanity's great achievements. You know, the magnificent architecture, the advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. But as I got older and I started reading more history from below rather than history

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  through the lens of kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire. And I really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up as the pinnacle of what humans are capable of. Although I am still very much interested in it as an idea and how we think about and talk about it as an idea. And so this is It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by...

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  James. People have already heard me sounding off, but yeah, it's nice to be here again.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  And I want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond?

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  I think I aspire not to be, but like, I have been raised in a society which very much proposed this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right? I guess savage is a word you could use.

• 1:34:46Robert Evans?

  If you were looking at how that society portrayed it, right? And like, even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word anymore. It says a lot about like the state and its desire to to shape narratives in its favor. Uh, so I think I would aspire to decivilize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti civ in the like big scheme of things, but I think in the in the way that it's often used to describe indigenous peoples or peoples who are not under control of the state. I don't like that very much.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they'll probably just be like, yes, they would say yes without hesitation.

• 1:35:23Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  You know, obviously, we're not most people.

• 1:35:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of fashion. You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue, you know, it's not treated as something that you see. And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold. So we still see, you know, we are civilized, this is civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the alternative of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, the primitive.

• 1:36:06Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  I think you can ask people like, what is civilization? What do you mean by being civilized? And it's a bit shaky, you know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know, we throw the word around all the time and it can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian.

• 1:36:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  You know, China infamously treated everything outside of China as barbarian.

• 1:36:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, isn't it like a literally an onomatopoeia, like people are saying like ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  I think I've heard that story as well. Yeah. I'm not sure how true it is.

• 1:37:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm not super familiar with like the little sourcing on that one, I guess.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, the distinction of the civilized and barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race. White man's burden, quote unquote, was to bring civilization to the less advanced people.

• 1:37:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which to me is itself a hubris, because I I think that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach

• 1:37:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, this is it.

• 1:37:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  You know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking.

• 1:37:55Robert Evans?

  Definitely.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually, historically, civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and of course, the state.

• 1:38:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structuring human society is the destination we're always headed to. You know, we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The presumption being that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every anthropologist takes this perspective, but you know, the words that we use carry certain connotations. And I think that for some people, particularly people raised in a in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  They haven't gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet, but that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on.

• 1:39:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be. And then, of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington, who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identity.

• 1:39:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I have I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist, but.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  As do I, I mean.

• 1:39:36Robert Evans?

  I think we all do.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam as a civilization.

• 1:39:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Hinduism as a civilization, orthodoxy as a civilization. And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is just one civilization, Tim.

• 1:39:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I I love that, like Islam is civilization and also like south of the Sahara is a civilization as if uh, never the two shall meet, right? Like, uh, like famously, there were no Muslims in Africa.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Robert Evans?

  Like.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  The maps that I've seen, he does have like Islam in in Africa as well. If you ever look at the map, the map is awful. The map is just awful.

• 1:40:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the map like gives me fucking, yeah, like admittedly, it's been a long time since I have engaged. I'm looking, yeah, Muslim and African. I guess, yeah, he includes the Horn of Africa in Muslim. Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian, Japan just exists as like a uh, like every other culture is like massively homogenized and then Japanese is like completely unique in this little in this little bubble.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is such like, I'm sorry, like, that's so weeb coded to me.

• 1:40:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Tim, it's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with the world coded, you know?

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, yeah, the entire continent of Africa. Sure, fine, whatever. That's that's Africa. Japan, though, like this, Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from the Philippines, from all of Asia. Japan is its own thing.

• 1:41:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, from these places it's had exchange with for centuries. Yeah. And then like the entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe and Australasia is just Western. The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right? Like, like the differences in those cultures.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Western is code for white, so.

• 1:41:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  It's not surprising.

• 1:41:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's that's definitely what he's doing there.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on clashes between the civilizations, hence clashes civilizations being the title of his book.

• 1:41:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you do either.

• 1:41:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, I'm not buying it, to be honest.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it it treats these these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities and discrete entities, when, you know, history has been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration and transformation.

• 1:42:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Finally, for another perspective I wanted to share on the subject of civilization, we have David Wenngroo, who many of you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything. And for him, he argued that if we're gonna keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, civilization is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Typically, people do think of civilizations as discrete entities, though.

• 1:43:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  At least in Lehman's perspective, but the field of anthropology and historical research I know is rife with comparative studies and, you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies. So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward that reframe. And the thing with definitions of words and connotations and stuff, none of it is really objectively correct. The orders point into different things and the way that we use language is always going to be subject to debate. I think the fact that we can't even agree on what civilization exactly is

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  should probably make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it. And really, I feel like we hear about many of the words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development, which of course begs the question, advanced according to whom? You know, measured by what standard? How do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another? You know, if the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output, then yeah, sure, modern states score very highly in terms of advancement.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  But then we can ask, you know, why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why not measure the advancement of a society? According to how much leisure its members enjoy, or by how equal they are, or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem they're embedded in, by how much freedom regular people have over their own lives. You know, we can pick different measuring sticks and get different winners and losers in this competition of advancement. But the measuring stick we're working with when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us. All societies are not working with the same measuring stick, despite the efforts to impose this capitalist neoliberal measuring stick on everybody.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  You know, we have countless experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history. Some lasting for centuries, others millennia. Some expanding into empires, others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same predestined destination. So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it for me. But the language of civilization does work for the people that it serves. The people who see their society as the highest stage of human development,

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest and so on to bring development. And same attitude is extended to people by European colonial powers to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development. That very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something vile and unproductive and waiting to be mastered by civilization. But one thing that's really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James C. Scott, which he talks about this in Against the Green, is just how fragile

• 1:46:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  and not inevitable this civilization development was, you know?

• 1:46:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  These early states very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And for many people in those contexts, the collapse, quote unquote, was an escape to freedom. You know, it was something that gave them an opportunity to disperse and to create smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And so with all that history in mind, I find the concept of civilization, you know, something to think about, but certainly not something to idealize.

• 1:47:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Something that just came to my mind is a speech that De Routy gave to the cops on the eve of the Catalan revolution, right? Uh, so nineteenth of July. So the cops have been sent, right? They know that the military is going to rise up against them, right? They know that in the coming days that they will either have to fight their own military or accept the end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right? This republic in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right? Who are the most capable people of fighting this coup. They would rather state than no state, I guess, right? Like the state's always going to have more solidarity with the state than its constituents.

• 1:48:14Robert Evans?

  And he says to the cops, sometimes when we're given an order, we have to disobey. And even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:48:30Robert Evans?

  It's a really interesting phrase, right? Like to him, I guess, the concept of civilization is dignity and like autonomy. The person who has given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to be the one that makes their decisions for them, right? Like it's an alternative use.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  It's like an inversion, basically.

• 1:48:56Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like he's taken that term and said like it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to uh, to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you. It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance, there's this book, Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan. And he uses this concept of human domestication.

• 1:49:26Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we designed for our own purposes, civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems.

• 1:49:43Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  You know, with all routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, by De Routy's freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what makes us uncivilized.

• 1:50:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like the forced patriotism, I don't know how to say it, like uh, it is what makes us uncivilized, it makes us undignified.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I guess that that is another use or connotation associated with civilization that he is utilizing there, which is civilization as dignity.

• 1:50:18Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  As being upright or dignified. As a person to be civilized is to be, you know, a certain standard or caliber of person.

• 1:50:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly that, yeah.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions over which we have very little control over.

• 1:50:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like, it's interesting, like inversion, I'm not sure how useful it is. Like, I'm not sure if it's a term that anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting, yeah.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Last thing, even if I find that an invasion is not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think playing with concepts, you know, tinkering with concepts, invading them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them.

• 1:51:10Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  In better formulating our sense of what they are and what they are not.

• 1:51:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, definitely. Like, the meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right? It's not like a uh,

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Robert Evans?

  a fixed thing. And obviously we have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words, but like, language is just a way of communicating concepts. And so like we can, we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us. I see that after stretching my back with, you know, great futility as I spent most of my day sitting.

• 1:52:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless simply because they need the income to survive. You know, they are spending most of their waking hours indoors, unexposed to fresh air.

• 1:52:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  If they even have fresh air outdoors, because many of us live in urban environments where the standards of air quality are not the best. Could also speak of the rate of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and burnout that have continued to rise even as our material wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies and our technological capabilities have both increased. I don't think you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some return to prehistory to recognize the negatives to be a C.

• 1:52:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, the internet, especially for disabled people and those medical conditions that would otherwise be untreatable.

• 1:53:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  You know, these are very beneficial innovations.

• 1:53:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  I just don't think that civilization, as we have structured it and conceived of it, has a monopoly on innovation. In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Levis Strauss had merely pointed that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication, they were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization. Human beings have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've always invented, and we always will. I don't think we can or should go back, because I mean, there are billions of us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches human life while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer do. By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint for the future of our species?

• 1:54:24Robert Evans?

  Um, no, I don't think I do, other than uh, working it out together.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, me neither. Hoping someone might. I guess we'd have to figure that out together, exactly.

• 1:54:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Maybe that is the blueprint.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like one correct society that everybody has to adopt.

• 1:54:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed. And we can use that not for mimicry, but for inspiration. You know, to realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new, or to take old concepts and stretch them into new forms.

• 1:55:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  The author Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, had made a point that tribes can be defined not by Huns and Catherine or ethnicity. But as a social organization that allows people to make a living together. Despite this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms of organization all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very flexible. You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them. We can walk away from them.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today. And so really, for me, that's what I want to focus on, a world where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation. A world where organizations are things that people can freely join, reshape and split and leave, and they no longer save on their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, you know, mega city concentrations. I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before on this podcast and on my YouTube channel, it requires opposition to systems of domination, you know, through confrontation and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts and other forms of resistance. And it also requires, on the other end of that equation, that we prefigure the world we want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies, but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions we want to live in and be a part of. And I think that these are two processes that will reinforce each other.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  You know, people will see and then experience different ways of organizing their lives and that informs their ideology. They become more confident that these alternatives are possible and it drives them to push them in new directions. So I still have to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time, but I think that we can let go of that old idea, you know, that we don't have to assume that there is no other alternative. And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an act of replacement.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  To make the cracks of the old order apparent and to make the idea, the omni idea of liberalism, capitalism and civilization unconvincing by the presentation of this other alternative. I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology. At least that's how I try to approach it. And what about you?

• 1:58:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right? And as you say, we should be more focused in like building the world that we want to live in, uh, uh, and not so much building the world we've been told we should want to live in. Language can turn into a way of seeing the world. And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world in a way that inherently like limits our ability to create a better one. And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of, like, when it, when it comes to that. And just like the inherent bigotry that came, came with a lot of civilization narratives, right? Sometimes I do like the idea, Scott talks about this a little bit, right?

• 1:59:13Robert Evans?

  But like, in fact, it is people in states who are domesticated and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought those people in, forced them to live in a certain place, forced them to live in a certain way, also so they could tend and, and care for grain crops, right?

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28Robert Evans?

  Like, I think maybe it's flipping that around might help people understand a little bit.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of the book. It's a botany of desire.

• 1:59:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read that a couple of years ago. And I think it was on that very subject, the idea that the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us.

• 1:59:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Just as we have domesticated them, it's been a reciprocal process.

• 2:00:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I like that idea.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  That I think was like a theme or an element of that book, if I remember correctly.

• 2:00:06Robert Evans?

  Okay, nice, yeah.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.

• 2:00:10Robert Evans?

  Right, either way, I think it's a use, sometimes a useful way of seeing the world.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well. Play around with concepts, think with them, flip them upside down. And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this, I think it's a proverb, or it might be in Ecclesiastes, but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun.

• 2:00:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repurpose what already exists. We build upon everything that came before. And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator.

• 2:00:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  That's pretty much what I have for today.

• 2:00:56Robert Evans?

  Nice.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  All power to all the people. Peace.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 2:02:07Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year.

• 2:02:33Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 2:02:38Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed.

• 2:02:50Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 2:02:58Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 2:03:05Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 2:03:25Speaker 01

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 2:03:29Speaker 06

  Twelve seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:03:52Speaker 05

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, we are covering the week of August 26th to September 2nd. Today, I'm joined by James Stout, Robert Evans and special correspondent, Prop from our show Hood Politics. Welcome.

• 2:04:13Robert Evans?

  Hey, long time listener, first time caller, you know? Glad to be here.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  First time on ED. You've, you've been on It Could Happen Here a few times?

• 2:04:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Your favorite cousin, you know?

• 2:04:24Speaker 05

  James, do you want to start with your little short news items?

• 2:04:28Robert Evans?

  This is a barrage of bad news. Prop, if you're not familiar with this. Last week, I guess barrage was an unfortunate choice of words. Right when we were releasing this, a flood in Nepal caused catastrophic damage. Yeah. Like, if you're on the internet, you've seen the videos, right? Yeah.

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  One thousand people have been reported dead so far with only 4,000 missing. The current hypothesis is that a glacial collapse so large and fast that it caused a seismic event. Caused to detach portion of the glacier to melt due to friction as it fell. So there was like a seismic event. Yeah. And there was some question of the timeline, right? Like, did the seismic event precipitate the collapse or did the collapse?

• 2:05:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Speaker 02

  From what I've seen, the current hypothesis is that so much of the glacier fell that it created the seismic event.

• 2:05:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I remember hearing.

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  Me too. Yeah. And the most logical. Yeah, yeah, it does seem. Yeah. Like it wasn't a tectonic situation here.

• 2:05:29Robert Evans?

  No, it was purely as a result of the glacier degrading.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've I've seen a glacier carve before. It's a it's an incredible thing. But this is on a scale that like is almost unfathomable. There are early warning systems for flooding on that river, but the flooding moved so fast that it swamped and destroyed those facilities before they could trigger.

• 2:05:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Speaker 02

  Like, we're talking seconds here.

• 2:05:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  Secondly, I'm gonna talk about the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which was officially dissolved on August 25th. Had its forces absorbed into the new Syrian army, Maslum Ebd.

• 2:06:08Robert Evans?

  The SDF being, of course, the Armed Forces of Rojava, the the self-administration, the AANES, you know.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:14Robert Evans?

  In in northeast Syria. James and I both reported from there.

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I know it's been really an important place, an important thing for both of us. We will like break this down in more detail in another episode, but I wanted to say really briefly, Maslum Ebd made the announcement and he said that approximately 10,000 SDF fighters have been integrated into the new Syrian army. The integration that matters is the Women's Protection Forces, the YPJ.

• 2:06:43Robert Evans?

  And some of the ethnic minority militias.

• 2:06:46Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, yeah. The non Kurdish ethnic minorities.

• 2:06:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Armenians and and and the Assyrians and the like.

• 2:06:52Speaker 02

  Assyrians. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  As it seems right now, the offer is for the YPJ to integrate as individuals into the Ministry of the Interior. So doing stuff like tourism police, border police. And it does not seem that the new Syrian government is is interested in having women in its armed forces, right? Despite these particular women being some of the most capable fighters in the world who have been trained.

• 2:07:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Speaker 02

  By the US and by other militaries and have been fighting for more than a decade in some cases. Right now, what they want is to remain as a distinct entity with their own structures and not to be broken up as a group of like disparate individuals. In related news, I guess, there have been protests in Kamishlo this week after the government failed to follow through on its promise in the constitution to have Kurdish be a language of instruction. Instead, lessons are optional and three hours a week. Like, this would be a disaster for people, right? There are generations who have grown up in Rojava where Kurdish was the language they spoke at home, Kurdish was the language they spoke at school.

• 2:07:57Speaker 02

  Of course, Kamaji Kurdish has a different alphabet to Arabic. There are older generations who who were educated in Arabic, right? And they're very aware of this, like this difference, but the right to education in your mother tongue. When we look at like autonomous movements across the world, I am right about this for my PhD dissertation, actually, like this is one of the things that is considered sufficient autonomy for these substate national groups and taking it away, it's a very serious thing.

• 2:08:24Robert Evans?

  No, especially since, I mean, a lot of these people, like in in Turkey, it's been criminalized and there have been degrees of this in Syria under different regimes, but in Turkey, it's been criminalized for a long time to speak the Kurdish language.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the school textbooks have explicitly in Turkey, like, I mean, they've written Kurds out of history, right? Let's move to Myanmar, where a Burmese hunter resupply convoy to Barmo has been targeted by numerous FPV drones in attacks on its way up the Irawaddy River to resupply the town. The KIA, Kuchin Independence Army, is attacking government forces there. It seems like this morning, two boats seem to have surrendered. And there are videos of what looked like hundreds of what are probably conscript soldiers being captured by the KIA and associated PDFs. They're relying incredibly heavily on conscripts right now. Someone sent me some documents from a hunter officer who they captured

• 2:09:18Speaker 02

  showing that something like a single-digit percentage of the troops under his command had been in the military before the conscription began. So they're like taking people with very little training and sent into the frontline very quickly. Which relates to my next point, which is that Malaysia is planning to forcibly return Myanmar nationals on Myanmar navy ships at the end of this month. We can pretty safely assume that these will be Rohingya or other Muslim peoples from Myanmar, right? Malaysia has been one of the places where people have tended to go, especially with conditions being what they are in Kosos is bizarre. This would lead to those people most likely immediately being conscripted if they were sent back. That's all I've got. Garen, or you have some stuff too?

• 2:10:01Speaker 02

  Yes, I do have some stuff because it was a big news week for White House Extended Universe related news.

• 2:10:10Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 2:10:10Speaker 02

  On August 28th, Trump signed an executive order to create the country's first US space academy. The order starts by saying, quote, "Space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, scientific discovery, and technological innovation." More details on this will come out in the next 120 days. I'm really excited to see how they're gonna work in the Confederate flag into that, because you know they're going to. It's that mid military academies love that shit. Trump starts the evil Star Trek.

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  Amid trade disputes with Canada, on August 27th, President Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. And as of recording, both Google and Apple Maps have complied with Trump's order. This move has not received universal praise, even among Trump's followers on the right. Matt Walsh came out against this, saying, quote, "This will be an unpopular opinion on the right, but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named."

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  There are several cities in America called Ontario, at least one of them, predating the Canadian province by like 100 years. Because the word originates with native tribes in North America.

• 2:11:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Speaker 02

  It is not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name, so in effect, all you're doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah, it's funny when Canadians are upset, I guess, or whatever, but Lake Ontario name itself is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history, unquote. So that's Matt Walsh's long, long take on this, if you are interested.

• 2:12:03Robert Evans?

  Man, of all the things I would think he'd break with the administration on, I.

• 2:12:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:12:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, okay. All right, Matt. All right.

• 2:12:11Speaker 02

  Well, because European explorers.

• 2:12:14Robert Evans?

  I know. It's just, it's just all so stupid.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, okay, it's stupid. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But America's the name of the continent. It shouldn't bother me as much as it does. But like, Canada's a part of America. Like, you you understand it. The Americas. Yeah. Even if it is a troll, it's not even a, I shouldn't care that your troll sucks. Like, it's deeply frustrating. It's, yes. It's so stupid. That's the, it's, and even calling the the Gulf of Mexico, calling the Gulf of America, you know, Mexico's a part of America. It's still. It's not a, it's just not a, this doesn't matter. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. It's one of the most annoying things that he's that he has done and continues to do as president. Yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  And the fact that Apple and Google Maps is like, the key toeing to this is just, is completely embarrassing. A pundit on Fox News's The Five also did not like this. But because he was concerned that the new acronym that would be given to kids to memorize the Great Lakes, right? Because the acronym used to be HOMES, right, to to go over all of the Great Lakes. Huh. That's the first letter of each said lake. Yeah.

• 2:13:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie Superior. Work well for you. This Fox News pundit is concerned that now the acronym will be too close to Hamas. Because you have to trade the O for the A. Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right. If we could get a Marigo Vespucci in there, if Lake Erie, we'd be there, right?

• 2:13:52Robert Evans?

  I think we could, we could make it to Homo. We could probably get to Homo. If we can, if we're close to Hamas, we've got to be close to Homo.

• 2:13:59Speaker 02

  The next liberal president has to replace the name of Lake Erie with another O word and have Homos.

• 2:14:06Robert Evans?

  Like Obama. There we go.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  Like Obama. Yeah, that's good. Trump has also since renaming, quote unquote renaming the lake. He has also suggested changing the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to the American Ocean.

• 2:14:23Robert Evans?

  The American Ocean, absolutely.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  Has also talked repeatedly about changing the name of the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of America.

• 2:14:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  So we'll see how that works out for him. How's that going for him? We'll check in later. How's that going? Yeah. About to go to your backyard and change the name of it.

• 2:14:42Robert Evans?

  This is just for clout, right? Like, this is just a fucking, like, he's found out that he gets a lot of attention and owns the libs and.

• 2:14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:50Robert Evans?

  Creates like a news cycle whenever he does this bullshit. That's the reason this is happening, right?

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why I don't want to speak anymore about it, but.

• 2:14:58Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's, it's worth a little mention there.

• 2:15:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  HOMES to Hamas is undeniably funny. HOMES for Hamas is an amazing, like, yeah, like, like, fictional NGO that would come out of like a Matt Walsh tweet. That is true. And then maybe the new Daily Wire Plus six. The next film, yeah. It's Habitat for Humanity, but it's.

• 2:15:22Robert Evans?

  Habitat for Hamas instead.

• 2:15:24Speaker 05

  Speaking of something that could come out of a Daily Wire exclusive film, a former staffer for Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who's currently running for Senate against John Ossoff, has been linked to a Nazi account on X, the everything app. This ex staffer is a 24 year old who interned for Collins in 2024, and then the next year worked as a contractor at a pro Collins PAC. On X, this staffer described himself as a quote unquote twink fascist.

• 2:15:54Robert Evans?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 05

  And in one post from July of this year, he used the word twink to type out the shape of a swastika.

• 2:16:05Robert Evans?

  Okay, alright.

• 2:16:07Speaker 05

  I have it, I have it in the doc here, if you guys want to see.

• 2:16:11Robert Evans?

  What is happening? How does he think that's gonna end for him?

• 2:16:15Speaker 05

  I don't think he cares.

• 2:16:16Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. I, I think there's a chunk of people for whom all that matters is the lols, right? So it would seem, yeah, wow.

• 2:16:24Speaker 05

  He also posted thirst traps of himself, captioned racist.

• 2:16:28Robert Evans?

  That's not desperate.

• 2:16:29Speaker 05

  And, uh, and also shared a Grok-generated photo of himself in a Klan robe.

• 2:16:34Robert Evans?

  Fascinating. I never thought I'd see the day of like bored Nazis.

• 2:16:39Speaker 05

  With too much time on their hands online.

• 2:16:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I was like, y'all just bored now. I mean, that's where these Nazis started. Okay, yeah. It began in boredom, and I guess to some extent, you know, it, it should end there. Yeah. Touche. Yeah, it's, it's downstream of being on the internet too much. Yeah.

• 2:17:00Speaker 05

  On Monday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced an emergency shutdown of 110 commercial drivers license schools, which according to the White House accounted for, quote, "more than 5,000 of the drivers who have failed English proficiency tests," unquote. So this will make it harder for people to work as commercial drivers.

• 2:17:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we've got too many of those as it is, so that's good. Yeah, things going great.

• 2:17:28Speaker 05

  A federal appeals court ruled three to one, and that's Trump appointees on that court, that states can regulate prediction market platforms like Kalshi as gambling. This case originated from regulators in Nevada with support from their Republican governor. Obviously, the state of Nevada has an interest in keeping these platforms regulated as gambling or kicking the platforms out of their state entirely, because it's Nevada, it's Las Vegas.

• 2:17:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:56Speaker 05

  The judges in this case wrote, quote, "The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's exchange is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps. Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks betting are unpersuasive," unquote. The judges also highlighted how, in court, Kalshi argued that its platform wasn't actually sports betting, but Kalshi had previously used that term to market its platform to users.

• 2:18:31Robert Evans?

  I didn't go too deep into this, but yesterday, that the first person to get a lifetime ban from Kalshi, did y'all see this? No.

• 2:18:39Speaker 05

  No. Is it Trump's teleprompter guy?

• 2:18:43Robert Evans?

  No, it, it's even funnier. It's George Santos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's back.

• 2:18:52Robert Evans?

  For, no way.

• 2:18:54Speaker 05

  Pour one out for Santos.

• 2:18:57Robert Evans?

  For insider trading.

• 2:18:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:01Robert Evans?

  Did he bound himself getting booted out of Congress? I can only imagine him being like, oh, me, right? Oh, fuck me, right? Fuck me.

• 2:19:09Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 2:19:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:12Speaker 05

  This case here will most likely escalate to the Supreme Court. Another case which might end up going to the Supreme Court relates to this next short story. A district court judge in California ruled that Rubio's use of the NIA to deport non-citizens based on their political speech violates the First and Fifth Amendments. Stephen Miller reacted to this ruling by writing, quote, "A district court judge says America must admit and keep foreigners who hate America and hate Americans. Court ordered civilizational suicide. It will not stand," unquote.

• 2:19:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:50Speaker 05

  Very much in line with Stephen Miller's stance on restricting free speech in order to save our civilization.

• 2:19:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  Second to last here, I want to talk about a story in The Guardian, which everyone should just read the full story. It'll be at the top of our show notes, so you can check it out. Usually I keep the small things show notes at the top, and this one will be at the top of the top, because you should just read the story. Last Saturday, The Guardian reported that Trump admin has been using a, quote, "obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, nonprofits, and unions," unquote, "all without judicial oversight." How The Guardian learned about this is that feds tried to get a search warrant for digital information from a Minneapolis journalist named Georgia Fort and Don Lemon. The judge denied this request, citing a lack of probable cause, and the government then withdrew its request.

• 2:20:42Speaker 05

  But weeks later, DHS requested the information from Google anyway. They went straight to Google. And per The Guardian, they used a, quote, "administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law, 19 U.S.C. 1509, dealing with customs imports," unquote. So all that was needed to send the summons was a sign off from a DHS official. There was no judge involved. Google denied the requests for information on Fort, but DHS did secretly obtain her phone records from T-Mobile, with no opportunity for her to challenge the summons. For more information, people should read this full article on The Guardian.

• 2:21:25Speaker 05

  It has other instances of DHS using this, this little piece of customs law. Basically, DHS is arguing that because this involves people interfering with ICE agents, it is subject to this like customs, like duties and taxes import law, which is, in cases where this has been actually argued in court, has not succeeded. But they have been able to successfully get information on a number of people and have also requested information on outlets like Democracy Now!, independent journalists, and nonprofits. And this follows, you know, a few weeks ago, we reported DHS obtaining information, financial information on unions in Minneapolis as well.

• 2:22:05Speaker 05

  This is all kind of part of this same time zone in terms of the response to Operation Metro Surge. Lastly, for small things, and this, this will be a future episode, probably next week, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was deported last week.

• 2:22:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he sure was. Yeah, buddy.

• 2:22:25Speaker 05

  After promoting ICE and deportations pretty gloriously for years and years.

• 2:22:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Talking about wanting to masturbate while ICE tore people away from their families, like he specifically and directly stated, like, that, that, that, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I got no sympathy for the man.

• 2:22:43Speaker 05

  Certainly not.

• 2:22:44Robert Evans?

  Like, fuck ICE, but, yeah.

• 2:22:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, this is Milo suffering the consequences of the world that he helped bring into existence and has cheered on for years and years and years. This, you know, this should not be a thing that we have in our country. This process should not be something that exists, but it's one that Milo wants to exist, and he still wants it to exist. In his interview with Piers Morgan after his deportation, he said that the problem is not deportations, but that they're just deporting the wrong people.

• 2:23:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, after saying no one deserves this kind of treatment, he then went on to say like, but obviously some people do.

• 2:23:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:23:17Robert Evans?

  But even that, like, this man's treatment, he still got the, like, white glove treatment.

• 2:23:23Speaker 05

  He's fine.

• 2:23:23Robert Evans?

  He's fine. Yeah, you, did you miss a meal, bro? Like, was they handing you stuff? Yeah, maggots in it? No.

• 2:23:30Speaker 05

  He spent less than a day in detention, and now he is free to go back in Britain with all of, you know, the money and resources that he has. He is not suffering the way thousands and thousands of other people have suffered.

• 2:23:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:23:44Speaker 05

  Now DHS claims that he overstayed a visa. Meanwhile, Milo himself claims that his green card was quote unquote canceled without him knowing, and that summons to, to Immigration Court were sent to an address that he no longer lives at, and he never learned about the summons. That, that's what he's claiming. We will go over all of these in much more detail next week. Unless anyone has anything to add on that.

• 2:24:09Robert Evans?

  Nope.

• 2:24:09Speaker 05

  I think we can, uh.

• 2:24:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 2:24:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, whatever. It's funny, I think last time, well, last time me and Prop talked at length, it was about Kanye West, who Milo was working for at the time.

• 2:24:21Robert Evans?

  He was working for him. Yup.

• 2:24:23Speaker 05

  And is, is actually working for Kanye again.

• 2:24:25Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:24:26Speaker 05

  He started working with him again.

• 2:24:27Robert Evans?

  My god.

• 2:24:27Speaker 05

  Earlier this year.

• 2:24:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, good. I think that's what he was in Louisiana for, it looked like.

• 2:24:32Speaker 05

  Quite possibly.

• 2:24:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Okay, obviously there's exceptions to everything, right? But within sort of like black American culture, it's, we're done talking about you, we're done dragging you, we won't even check for you. I'm like, Kanye dropped an album. And I'm like, wait, what? Like, I, I don't know anyone who heard this record. Just, I dropped it into a void. I was just like, this is how you know how thoroughly you burnt your brand. Like, honestly, as a person who bleeds him.

• 2:25:12Robert Evans?

  Hip hop is arguably a generational talent when it comes to production, soundscaping, like creating music, but is so completely insufferable and just, just so, we're just so done with you. Yeah. That like, and, and your boy Milo going as he should be. Yeah.

• 2:25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's what happens when you hire the man who perfected the art of the fall off.

• 2:25:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:43Speaker 02

  To work for your company.

• 2:25:45Robert Evans?

  To help you in your fall off, sir. And you can, you can argue, he's like, he sold out five days at Crypto. Okay, but that's not five days in every city in America, which is Right. what he was doing. Yeah. Anyway.

• 2:26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll talk a little bit more about what Milo's been up to and other issues regarding his ongoing separation from his husband and questions about his legal status next week in a special episode, but for now, let's go to a quick ad break and then return for some more news.

• 2:26:22Robert Evans?

  Okay, so 27 years ago, one of the greatest rappers of all time was murdered in front of everybody. This is Tupac and the killer just now got sentenced. One would wonder, first of all, why this is so important to put it on executive order? And I have a theory as to why, but also why did it take 27 years to solve this? And everybody involved, except for one dude, has been dead. So what is we talking about? So to understand his importance to this, I think we have to understand really just

• 2:27:06Robert Evans?

  how singular Tupac was as a person. And I think anybody born post his birth, it's like you weren't a part of the monoculture that we had all existed in, in the sense that at some point in our lives, we used to all sit down at eight o'clock Thursday night to watch the same television show, like across the world, you know, like Yeah, yeah, yeah. That just doesn't exist. So to be a star in that era means the planet is watching you. And I think that Pac was such an enigma. We're talking about a guy's life who's like, his life would be a bad script. Like if this was, somebody was writing, like, would he actually lived in a script? You'd be like, come on, guys. Yeah, like his, his last words as he was bleeding out and the police asked him who

• 2:27:51Robert Evans?

  did it were something along the lines of fuck you pig, right? Like it was something like that? Yeah, fuck you pig. Like you're talking about a guy whose godfather was Geronimo Pratt, the legendary Black Panther. His mama and auntie, Fanny and Ashada Shakur, defended themselves in federal court while she was pregnant with him. The man was clearly Jada Pinkett's first love, which means that Will Smith is the consolation prize to Tupac. Like, that's what I'm trying to say. Like, the man dated Madonna, he dated Quincy Jones's daughter. Like, there was just genre-defining films, the guy lived four lives, like he literally

• 2:28:32Robert Evans?

  lived four lives inside of the five years that he was a public figure. Rapper, gangster, sex symbol, revolutionary, all before he was 26. So backstory before we get this court case. So 1996, honestly, the biggest star in the world, him and Notorious B.I.G., two biggest rappers that rap has ever seen, right? Pac and his friends, part of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, who was the leader of Death Row, went to Vegas to a Mike Tyson fight. At the Mike Tyson fight, they see a man named Orlando. Now Orlando was a Crip, important to the story, Suge being a notorious Compton Piru

• 2:29:16Robert Evans?

  blood, in charge of Death Row Records at this fight for Mike Tyson, which only lasted 15 seconds, which was why they were so bored, because the fight was done immediately. So while they were out trying to party, still kind of bored because the fight they came to see didn't happen, they run into this guy named Orlando. Now Orlando's important because, again, he's a Crip and a few months earlier, he snatched a chain of Death Row Records, like gold chain, from another person at the Lakewood Mall, no less, which is very funny because Lakewood is a suburb of Long Beach. It's not even like a city. It's just, it's literally just a mall. So these murderous Crips steal this chain from this guy.

• 2:30:01Robert Evans?

  They see him and they're like, hey, that's the dude that snatched the homie's chain. So him and Suge go stomp the guy out. It's all, you could see it all, it's all on, you know, surveillance footage, camera footage. They see him, stomp him out. They're still on a high, they're about to go party, they want to go do their thing. The problem is, the guy that they stomped out, his uncle is this man named Keefy D. Keep Keefy D's name in mind because Keefy D had a friend named Zip, I know, but Zip worked for P Diddy, as in Sean Puffy Combs, as in the, the worst human we've ever met. You know what I'm saying? So, so he works for him, Puffy is the leader of Bad Boy Records, who's got Biggie, they're in this amazing, like, struggle for power to be the king of hip hop.

• 2:30:45Robert Evans?

  It was pretty well-known, worst-kept secret, Puffy wanted Suge and Pac dead, right? So Zip works for Diddy, Keefy D gets a gun from Zip and says, you finna let that man, you know, stomp you out like that in front of the homies? We gotta go get your get back. They get in the car, find out where he's going to be at the club, he's not there, they were gonna give up, and then some girls on the side of the road at the gas station realize that that's Tupac in the car because again, he's the biggest star on the planet at the time. They're screaming, oh my God, oh my God, it's Pac. They go, oh dude, it's him, he's there. Flip a U-turn, roll the window down, shoot through the car, kill Tupac, right?

• 2:31:26Robert Evans?

  Now, all kinds of conspiracy theories as to how this happened because the case went unsolved, but of course it was solved. He's the biggest artist on the planet. They absolutely knew who killed this guy. It's just you didn't have enough to convict him, right? Because it's still, it's still all hearsay, it's still all this, the word of a bunch of Crips who all tell war stories all the time, you can't prove it, right? Anyway, they're waiting for a chance to actually solve this. Six months later, Biggie gets killed, right? So now you got two of the biggest stars in the world in hip hop murdered. Biggie's mom sues NYPD for not solving the case, right? Which means that, damn, we better solve this shit. Well, we kind of know who did it, but we can't prove it yet.

• 2:32:10Robert Evans?

  2008, Keefy D gets picked up on a drug charge, right? It's a federal case because he's doing a whole lot of drugs, right? So now the man finna get put up under the jail. The cops say to him, hey, listen, we know you got all them drugs, but can you tell us about what happened in 96? He was like, what you talking about? They was like, we, don't play dumb, you know that we know it was you, right? And let me tell y'all something about this code that the gangsters have. You throw enough time at somebody, they gonna start singing, boy. And Keefy sang, right? He told them the whole story, exactly what happened, all the names. Let me tell you, look, this is where we were sitting in the car, this the homie, this the one who actually shot, I got the gun from this person, and the gun I got from Diddy's

• 2:32:53Robert Evans?

  homie told the whole thing in exchange for immunity. They was like, all right, we got you, good, shut your mouth, everything's fine. They would go to trial, except they can't go to trial because again, it's the word of just Keefy by himself, because everybody else that was in the car is dead. And are you gonna press charges against Puffy, against Diddy? It's absolutely, you can't do it. Anyway, it had been fine, right up to the sunset, we wouldn't have known until this fool got on YouTube. And then, guys, and listen, it can happen here, podcast team.

• 2:33:31Robert Evans?

  My friends, my friends, he wrote a book, he, he wrote a book confessing all of this, right? He wrote a book. Perfect. He got on every podcast he could get on telling this story. Two years ago, Las Vegas PD say, hey, homie, uh, we gotta charge you for murder. He was like, what are you talking about? I got a deal. They was like, first of all, your deal was with the feds, not with the Las Vegas PD, number one. And number two, the deal was for your testimony to us. You just told the planet what you did.

• 2:34:13Robert Evans?

  You got on the internet and you told the planet, sir, you confessed to a murder. So he like, okay, well, I guess we gotta do. The trial started last month, the man's defense was, I need you to look me in my eyes. The man's defense was, I was making that up for clout. I was lying the whole time. We're seeing a lot of that in court these days. Yeah, I made it up, this not real, I made it up. They was like, sir, uh, we finna put you up under the jail. So he just got convicted for murder, he was not the one that pulled the trigger, the one that pulled the trigger is dead, but he was the one that attained the gun to make sure this happened. He the last one left, right?

• 2:34:57Robert Evans?

  63 years old, about to go to jail for the rest of his life. Now, the reason why I bring this up for executive disorder is I really think this is the destiny of the Epstein case. They gonna wait till everybody dead, except for one dude, and then put him in jail. That's my theory. Thomas Massey was on one in Congress again today, reading off a bunch of

• 2:35:24Speaker 02

  The Epstein co-conspirators, I'm not sure if you, uh, you saw that, but.

• 2:35:28Robert Evans?

  Yes, I did.

• 2:35:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:30Robert Evans?

  And so what I'm trying to say is the case was solved within a week.

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:37Robert Evans?

  Like, like, everyone knows who's guilty. Now, I'm not a gangster, okay? I'm from here, but I do not at all report to be a member of an active gang. I don't think there's a single gang member in Los Angeles who did not know who killed Tupac.

• 2:35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:56Robert Evans?

  I'm like, everyone knew who did it. But you don't talk to the cops, it's their job to figure it out. And, right, that's your job, I'm not, not my job, that's your job. That's their job to figure it out. But either way, now officially, case closed. Tupac was murdered by Keefy D's friend who shot through the thing. And now he's going to jail for a murder that happened 27 years ago. But yeah, you know, keep funding the police, right?

• 2:36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26Robert Evans?

  They're good at their job.

• 2:36:28Speaker 02

  They'll solve murders. I mean, not like they can't solve like a kidnapping of an incredibly famous person's mom.

• 2:36:33Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  But, you know, eventually they solve the really obvious crimes if they're forced to. Yeah.

• 2:36:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:42Speaker 02

  I think that's why we should be funding millions of dollars to big podcasts. Uh, so we can continue to have people confess to murders on podcasts.

• 2:36:49Robert Evans?

  Honestly.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  That's what we replace the police with. It's just podcasts where people confess to crimes. Yeah.

• 2:36:54Robert Evans?

  It just promised them $500 and a Vlad TV interview. They will tell you every crime they did.

• 2:37:01Speaker 02

  That's on your take on true crime. Someone just comes on and talks about their crimes.

• 2:37:06Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:37:08Speaker 02

  I think being forced to talk on the Joe Rogan experience would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. So I don't know about that.

• 2:37:17Speaker 02

  Constitutionally prohibited. Yeah, I don't know. It's one of the amendments.

• 2:37:21Robert Evans?

  Like, okay, guys, just, just, just give me the time. Yeah.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:27Robert Evans?

  So moral of the story, guys, yeah, like, hey, listen, if you were about to get away with murder, just like, shut the fuck up. Like, I can't stress this enough, listeners. He was going to get away with it.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  If you're gonna write a book, at least title it something like, If I Did It. Don't say, I did it. Right, right. That worked great for OJ. Yeah. You gotta put the if in front first.

• 2:37:50Robert Evans?

  OJ got away with murder. Like, can we just, yes, because he was like, well, if I was gonna do it.

• 2:37:57Robert Evans?

  All right, back to actual death.

• 2:37:59Speaker 02

  Okay, so talking of two groups of people who keep shooting each other, let's go to Venezuela first. The United States, uh, yesterday, when we're recording this on Wednesday, September 2nd, so that would be Tuesday, September 1st, uh, announced an oil deal with Venezuela. And when I say Venezuela, I mean specifically with Delcy Rodriguez. But the way we found out was that the president truthed, quote, "breaking news that parts in block capitals." "The United States of America has just entered into an agreement with the country of Venezuela," countries capitalized, I'll just do the block caps, "on the biggest oil deal in world history," that one's in block caps. "At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth,

• 2:38:42Speaker 02

  working closely with highly respected interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and through a partnership with private business, have secured majority US control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela at no cost to the American taxpayer. This historic transaction more than doubles," that's in block caps. "American oil reserves greatly increases our oil supply and will substantially lower gas prices for all Americans long into the future while helping," that's not a full stop, I'm struggling, "while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity. This transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States. Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter. Make America Great Again, President Donald J. Trump."

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  I wouldn't pay too much attention to the claims he's making here. We know that the United States, uh, is planning to partner with some kind of private business entity to develop oil fields. It seems like from reporting, they will take 55% of the effective output and have a right to buy oil at cost. If you remember when they first kidnapped Maduro, Trump summoned oil executives to the White House and none of them were exactly chomping at the bit to, uh, go drill, baby drill in Venezuela, right? That's because the infrastructure is damaged and the crude oil is among the heaviest and dirtiest on the planet. They would just rather go almost anywhere else, right? They, they have to do more work to get this oil in worse conditions.

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  I wanna like recap it a bit, but at, the United States is effectively running Venezuela as a vassal state now. Yeah. Like, it literally receives revenue from Venezuelan exports and then sends it back via private banks. There was a really good NYT article on Delcy and Rubio's relationship that made the analogy that this is like a parent giving a child, what do you call it, an allowance, right? We call it pocket money. The United States deployed hundreds of troops to Venezuela after devastating earthquake. Allegedly, according to this NYT report, Rubio has an effective veto on government appointments. Uh, he decides who gets sanctions waivers to work there. He and Delcy send each other birthday messages and selfies. Venezuela in the meantime has quietly wound down its cooperation with Russia.

• 2:40:57Speaker 02

  And it coordinated Venezuelan intelligence coordinated with the US military when they struck Tren del Agua personnel. They have forced Venezuelan ministers to delete tweets condemning the US attack on Iran. Just for reference, people, Iran has been a longtime ally of the regime of Venezuela, in so much as we can see. There is continuity, obviously, from, from Delcy, from Maduro to Delcy, but things are very much changing. Delcy has run drafts of tweets past Marco Rubio before posting them. Okay. Oh, boy.

• 2:41:27Robert Evans?

  Sheesh. All right.

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  When there were reports that DOJ was building a case against her, she approached him for assurance. And it seems like that directly resulted in Trump truthing. Do you remember a few, a few months ago now, Trump truthed how great she was and how, uh, high, yeah? It seems like that was the assurance that she was asking for. Like, so it came in the form of the president posting, as he did again yesterday, about how great she is. The posters republic. Yes. What incentive does the United States have to move towards democracy in Venezuela? When it is getting everything it wants and it doesn't have to deal with the possibility of the president changing, of the legislature changing, right? The, the US is effectively running Venezuela as an informal colony.

• 2:42:15Speaker 02

  As it has done in all of its colonies, it is not inclined to give those people more rights. I would focus less on this deal and more on the fact that Trump is very clearly trying to lean on gas prices. And the reason he's doing that is what we're gonna talk about next, his ongoing disastrous war with Iran. So the US this week is once again on a path to escalation in Iran. On the 30th of August, a new round of strikes inside Iran began. Uh, this followed the kind of reduced bombing activity that we spoke about last week, right? The United States says it struck launches for rockets which were preparing to deploy mines into the Strait of Hormuz,

• 2:42:59Speaker 02

  which Trump has claimed is not mined. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles at US bases and allies in the region. And a US source told Fox News that, quote, "nearly all of them were intercepted."

• 2:43:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, all right, great.

• 2:43:13Speaker 02

  Well, that's good. You wanna know that most of the missiles didn't make it?

• 2:43:16Robert Evans?

  Nearly all is all the missiles you need to stop.

• 2:43:19Speaker 02

  That's what I read out of a missile defense system.

• 2:43:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:22Speaker 02

  What it means, of course, is that the United States has used more of its interceptors, right? Which it is already dwindling its supply of. The Iranians, meanwhile, struck four vessels in the Strait of Hormuz this week, perhaps soon to be renamed the Strait of America. It does not seem that America has much to say on what goes on there. In one incident on Monday, which I saw a UK MTO, uh, so it's American Trade Office, right? That's kind of the entity which puts out these like safety briefings to mariners. A tanker was hit with three projectiles, which is the first time I can recall in this conflict that happening, right? Like, that's, there's a difference between like, we will strike your vessel to show you

• 2:44:06Speaker 02

  that we can strike your vessel and hopefully cause people to stop coming through here out of fear and hitting it three times, which seems to me like maybe an attempt to sink a vessel, right? Like, that's a, an escalation. In response, on Tuesday, 1st September, the US began another series of bombings with the president truthing. The United States is, as we speak, striking Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz. Strikes are large and powerful and then retaliation for the Iranians' failed attempt to adding sea mines to the strait which currently has no mines. They have been completely removed or detonated. And the Iranians shooting eight missiles, all successfully knocked down at our military base in Jordan. If the failed nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they'll be hit again at a much harder and a higher level. But it will not be the biggest attack of them all that is waiting in the wings.

• 2:44:51Speaker 02

  And when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then he signs it. He also did another one where he said, uh, it's a failed nation, they have no. Eight Navy, they have an air force, their inflation is at 300%, their leadership is disarray. And then he's blaming fake news for giving you other impressions. He also tweeted a shit tier AI slop video of missiles hitting Carg Island, where the observer was in a helicopter with the missiles flying over their head. It was very bad.

• 2:45:23Robert Evans?

  What?

• 2:45:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Prop, have you, have you, have you not seen this? Here, I will drop this, I will drop this in the chat for you to watch.

• 2:45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's get a live react.

• 2:45:32Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 2:45:33Speaker 05

  The video is its own thing. The caption he used for this, or whoever's running his account used for this, is also, I think it's kind of incredible.

• 2:45:41Robert Evans?

  Smithereens?

• 2:45:42Speaker 05

  Carg Island being blown to smithereens.

• 2:45:47Speaker 05

  President DJT.

• 2:45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. It is interesting that that one was not signed. Thank you for your attention on this matter.

• 2:45:54Speaker 05

  That's a good point.

• 2:45:55Speaker 02

  It looks like a cutscene from like a Command and Conquer game. Yes, that is exactly what I thought of.

• 2:46:01Robert Evans?

  Why is this person lowering themselves into the explosions?

• 2:46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

• 2:46:07Robert Evans?

  I don't understand why you would do this.

• 2:46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh yeah, I wouldn't want to be there.

• 2:46:11Robert Evans?

  Who is shooting these missiles? What, what is happening?

• 2:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like infinite secondaries, every like, uh, everything that explodes lands and then explodes again. Like the way the AI understands explosions is, uh, it's fascinating shit.

• 2:46:26Speaker 05

  Just on a very basic level, like this is like an interesting thing for, for a president to do. I know this is Trump, you know, he posts shit from his account all the time.

• 2:46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:34Speaker 05

  But the, the idea of, of a president posting of semi photorealistic, obviously we can tell, but semi photorealistic video of another location being hit by ostensibly our own

• 2:46:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:47Speaker 05

  uh, military is interesting.

• 2:46:49Robert Evans?

  I just, oh man.

• 2:46:51Speaker 05

  Like, a more advanced version of this could be an, an actual video that's indistinguishable from real footage, at least from a service level glance. That's like, you know, the, the president saying that X location has been hit.

• 2:47:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:05Speaker 05

  And like, no, it hasn't.

• 2:47:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:07Speaker 05

  This is the kind of sloppy and bad, it's not clear he's actually trying to convince people that this actually happened.

• 2:47:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:13Speaker 05

  But the, the very basic components of this are interesting and troubling.

• 2:47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, with, from the commander in chief, it's not great stuff.

• 2:47:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:22Speaker 02

  Clearly like he's enjoying watching little AI videos. He posted another one today of

• 2:47:26Robert Evans?

  Lake America.

• 2:47:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, he's kicking the sign for Lake Ontario. He walks up, uh, he's carrying, you know, like it's a wooden sign on a couple of four by fours. Uh, he kicks the sign over. At that point, one of the legs on the sign suddenly becomes shorter when it's on the ground.

• 2:47:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:42Speaker 02

  And then, uh, YMCA starts playing, uh, and he dances in his, uh, characteristic fashion.

• 2:47:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Robert Evans?

  It's just so embarrassing, man.

• 2:47:52Speaker 02

  He's having a great time with the AI machine that someone gave him.

• 2:47:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:57Speaker 02

  So let's talk about what these mean, right? He's clearly losing patience with this war and he's worrying about how it's going to impact the midterms. So much of what we're seeing now is, is like, we're going to talk about other stuff with voting rights later, right? DHS is clearly winding up for the midterms in blue states.

• 2:48:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'll be commenting on that a bit.

• 2:48:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. We can see the work requirements for federal benefits not hitting until January 27th. Like they are still worried about these midterms, right?

• 2:48:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:25Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, they are still fucking up in Iran. I saw a video last night of an Iranian missile hitting something in Jordan. Like this is one of the ones that wasn't most of them, I guess, uh, cause it clearly impacted the ground. Iran claims to have shot down a Reaper. Last night, United States missiles, not for the first time in American history, hit a wedding.

• 2:48:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we've done a bit of that.

• 2:48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep, yeah, this was like a defining moment of, for Obama's

• 2:48:52Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:48:52Speaker 02

  uh, like air war, right? For his, his drone campaign, like

• 2:48:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:55Speaker 02

  When people talk about Obama and how he was a disappointment in foreign policy terms, this is what they talk about, right? Like this is the moment.

• 2:49:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:49:05Robert Evans?

  And he bombed a wedding, yeah.

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. We did that again. This time, uh, weapon fragments at the scene show, I think it's sort of slam ER or slam uh, please email me Navy people, tell me how you refer to the missile. Boeing has touted it as the quote, "most accurate missile" on the Navy's arsenal. It punched right through the roof of this building. Baloo weddings are really big.

• 2:49:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:28Speaker 02

  There were hundreds of people there. There were at least 50 people injured, at least five of them dead, including a child. I've seen videos where like you can see children's shoes, little tiny toddlers wedding shoes among the rubble, right? Like

• 2:49:40Robert Evans?

  Damn.

• 2:49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is pretty fucked up and the images that will come out of it will not look good.

• 2:49:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  Funny, talking of Iranian missile strikes, I want to speak about this. This course about this missile, this missile is generally referred to as a castle breaker. The Persian name is Khaybar Shahkhan, I believe. Castle is referring to a specific castle from like Quranic history. And that's relevant only because this missile is designed to hit Israel, right? Like that, that is what this is for. It's a medium range ballistic missile, something like a 900 mile range. Recently though, there's been a lot of reporting that this is some kind of new and groundbreaking thing that Iran's been dropping in the last like few weeks. And they have had them for years. We know this because they unveiled it on live TV. Like they literally like, well, like whipped, uh, like a tablecloth off it and were like, there it is. Which Iran does this a lot with its weapon systems, right?

• 2:50:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:34Speaker 02

  Um, but I'll include a link to a Russia Today post about it. They do seem to be likely the missiles that killed several US service people in Jordan in July. But in part, the reason that they were the missiles that snuck through are because they're the missiles Iran uses a lot. Iranian state propaganda is making a big deal of talking about these missiles. They do this occasionally with their weapon systems, right? Then they like portray it as like, oh, the American patriot has nothing on this missile system that we have. But they are effective, right? They're smallish, they're maneuverable. And they, in the terminal phase of their trajectory, they maneuver, which makes them harder to intercept, right? Like if, if it's, if it's just doing like a ballistic arc, then it's, it's a math problem to intercept it, right?

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  But if it's, it's maneuvering, from what I understand, that that makes the intercept more complicated. They use these in Syria soon after I left, actually. Like, this isn't some secret, brand new technology, but it is a technology that is effective. And like, the reason it's continuing to be effective is that despite it's more than six months of war, the United States has failed to destroy their launches and failed to destroy their missile supplies, right? And that is why they're still able to strike United States bases all around the region, uh, which they have been doing last night, and they will do again tonight, I imagine. And as the US supply of munitions continues to dwindle, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for the United States.

• 2:52:02Robert Evans?

  What an L.

• 2:52:03Speaker 02

  Talking of big problems, we haven't done an ad break in a while.

• 2:52:18Speaker 02

  And we're back. So at the end of March 2026, uh, which is I think like 37 years ago today, uh, at least it feels like that.

• 2:52:28Robert Evans?

  Feels like it.

• 2:52:28Speaker 02

  President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a national list of verified eligible voters. Mail-in voting would be restricted to the people on this list, which would be essentially an arbitrary list of whoever the administration thought should be on it, right? It was going to be compiled with help from DHS based on like citizenship rolls. Voting law experts immediately complained that this violated the constitution for a variety of reasons. And some people have said essentially this is an attempt at a coup. Under the order, DHS was supposed to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists for each state. Ballots would be given new envelopes with special barcodes for tracking, and federal funds would be withheld from states that refused to comply with this illegal order. As with many Trump executive orders, this one was immediately met by a federal judge

• 2:53:13Speaker 02

  who issued a temporary restraining order that blocked it from going into effect. Trump appealed and the whole situation remains legally unsettled to this day. Despite the fact that the order has been halted, earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, announced that a USPS whistleblower had come forth to assert that the postal service was still moving forward to comply with the halted order anyway. According to an article by the AP, quote, "The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the postal service has been scrambling to try and build a complex system that would normally take a year or more and only three months. Sometimes in defiance of the judge's orders halting work, the goal is to have it ready for use in the midterm elections." "The disclosure contends that, due to the new procedures,

• 2:53:54Speaker 02

  a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters." "It details a system that election officials have already warned could not be implemented before the first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina." "The postal service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans," Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. "This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework on casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons." Now, for its part, the US Postal Service contends that the judge's restraining order still gave them explicitly the right to develop online tools for states who wanted to voluntarily abide by the order.

• 2:54:34Speaker 02

  Even if this is true, it's a massive issue because the changes mandated by the EO are hideously unconstitutional, and no state should be allowed to carry them out. And to make that point, here's a quote from the actual whistleblower complaint to Blumenthal. "When ballots are submitted to USPS in large volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal because, for example, someone had recently changed their name after marriage or they've moved, then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well."

• 2:55:15Speaker 05

  That's what the whistleblower is contending.

• 2:55:17Speaker 02

  The new USPS rules regarding Yes. Yeah. The barcodes and the portal system. Yeah. Like, this is how he's describing the system as working, right? Yeah. He continues, USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot. Should the slapdash portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The rule simply vaguely states that they will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection. Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected or were part of a rejected batch until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person.

• 2:56:01Speaker 02

  Now, I would call this a clear attempt to steal an election, or not necessarily to steal, but at least to create doubt around the midterm elections, right? This is something of a desperate hail mary by Trump and his cronies as the numbers to them have gotten much, much worse nationwide. And if individual states are allowed to do this, even if the TROs remain in place, and this is halted from going forward nationwide before the election, if individual states are allowed to to use this system, then we could see countless Democrat votes tossed out in red states where many Dems are doing well for the first time in several election cycles. And I think a large part of the goal here, beyond just blunt disenfranchisement, is creating chaos, right? Because chaos is almost as good as outright tossing out votes.

• 2:56:43Speaker 02

  It creates doubt and it provides opportunity, a period of time, in which the administration can set narratives about how the election went in an uncertain election night, right? That's a big part of, I think, why they're doing this, is to provide opportunities to where they can throw doubt on the system. Here's another relevant quote from the complaint. According to the whistleblower, USPS's effort to develop and deploy the portal has been rushed, risky and haphazard, because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating a substantial risk of a catastrophic failure of the system that could derail the midterm elections. Quote, "The teams building the new portal and accompanying IT were siloed such that

• 2:57:25Speaker 02

  when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating more work. There were also no clear written requirements, leaving workers to glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings. As late as August 21, 2026, workers were still receiving new requirements for the project. Without clear guidance, different team members continue to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to work." Now, it's good that this whistleblower came forward. Encouraged like this is one of, if not the only ways, that we're going to have a chance to catch and stop schemes like this from coming to fruition. It is too early to know what the fallout from this revelation is going to be. That is still very much ongoing. This all just came out in the last couple of days, so we'll update you on this in the future as this evolves.

• 2:58:09Speaker 02

  But I wanted to talk a little bit more about some other midterm fuckery-related news, some stuff that's a little bit less dark, right? General Dan Cain, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Senator Alyssa Slotkin, a Democrat, early this week, promising her, quote, "The Joint Force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2020 elections. Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material." Now, this was in response to a request Slotkin's office sent Cain and Pete Hegseth, asking for confirmation that the Pentagon would not interfere with the election by having soldiers at polling places or seizing ballots. I'd call this a partial positive story, right? It's good that he's saying that.

• 2:58:54Speaker 02

  It's not great that elected Democrats are so worried about this that they felt the need to ask. It's not just the military we have to contend with here, because back in February, DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity Heather Honey told elected Dems, "Any suggestion that ICE will be present at polling locations is simply not true." And that sounded great, but on September 1 of 2026, just a couple of days ago, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen made some concerning statements to reporters in New York City. Yeah. Per Politico, quote, "The Homeland Security Secretary said that ICE isn't there to patrol the polling areas. We're there to enforce specific threats." He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. "The only reason why we would be at polling places is that there is a threat to that

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down," he said. "ICE's job is immigration, Customs Enforcement. That's their job. If there's, if we're serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be." And that does leave the door open to some degree of intimidation and fuckery at polls, because we've all seen over the last two years that ICE regularly take being brown as a sign that someone might be an illegal alien in need of tasing and arrest. And when the agency was asked for more clarification on Mullen's statement, ICE responded, "ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations. ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a public location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action." So again, what's gonna happen? Yeah. It's hard to say.

• 3:00:22Speaker 02

  So far, DHS and the military are saying the right things, but certainly with ICE, there remains open the possibility of some targeted ICE fuckery at polling locations around the country. So something to keep an eye on as well. Yeah.

• 3:00:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no parts of me trust them in any way that their word means anything. And it sounds like exactly what you said. This is some sort of word judo. Be like, we're not planning to be there for the purpose of

• 3:00:54Speaker 02

  Keeping the door open.

• 3:00:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Well, we didn't, we told you we wasn't coming for the purpose it is. We here for that.

• 3:01:02Speaker 02

  And again, you know, I don't expect some national rollout of ICE, but there's some really close state elections and maybe, you know.

• 3:01:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:10Speaker 02

  There were people who were attempting to do this six years ago in 2020 in in swing states, right?

• 3:01:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:17Speaker 02

  And like, that very narrowly avoided happening through the intervention, I think of a couple of members of Congress, but like, this is something that has clearly been like a, I guess, a strategy, right? It's not a hard one to come up with, but it's, it's, it's a thing that we should be really fucking worried about.

• 3:01:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:38Speaker 02

  Yep. To clarify one thing regarding my reporting last week on the plans for this UPS implementation of the executive order, there was two injunctions that were dropped Yes. last week. Yeah. And then after the USPS published the rule change, a new lawsuit was initiated by, like, over half a dozen states. And then a judge granted a TRO in regards to that new lawsuit. And there will be a hearing tomorrow, which for us is September 3, that will determine if there's gonna be a permanent injunction.

• 3:02:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:14Speaker 02

  And then, based on whatever happens at that hearing, the Trump administration will also likely appeal to the Supreme Court. And it's, it's really just a matter of like, days in terms of ballots being sent out.

• 3:02:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  It's cutting it super close. And like, they're, they're trying to, you know, make this be very close. Right. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:30Robert Evans?

  Usually I can at least follow the logic of the Supreme Court, but this one, I just kinda, I

• 3:02:36Robert Evans?

  whether I agree with them or not, I was like, at least I understand how you got there. But they're just like, I don't know, this ain't illegal yet, but let them cook.

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  No, this, it seems like some of the, one of the more partisan or like

• 3:02:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:48Speaker 02

  subservient to Trump kind of type orders that they've had.

• 3:02:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:53Robert Evans?

  Like, okay, a little bit of our, like, personal information, but basically, we've been waiting for the insurance to, it happened already, but my wife needed a particular medical procedure. This is to like, prevent a stroke, you know what I'm saying? And so essentially, they was like, well, we can't approve this, this preventative procedure unless you already have a stroke. Let me get this straight, fam.

• 3:03:17Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 3:03:19Robert Evans?

  I, okay, just say it to yourself again.

• 3:03:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:23Robert Evans?

  Like, so you, so they gotta, so they gotta break a law before you could say what they doing is illegal? I just

• 3:03:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. That is a fair interpretation of the Supreme Court's logic. Yeah.

• 3:03:37Robert Evans?

  That's what the Supreme Court just said. They gotta break a law before we could tell you what they did is illegal. Okay, okay.

• 3:03:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that does seem to be where we're at. It's great.

• 3:03:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:48Speaker 02

  For our final story, let's talk about Data Republican. Data Republican is a relatively popular conservative influencer or propagandist on X, the everything app. But this isn't just a story about Twitter drama, trust me. Data Republican has almost a million followers on X, and her account started to gain traction in the early days of Musk's Doge by her posts that are kind of like data journalism. I use that term very loosely. They're using, using manipulated data to justify Doge in a very questionable way. And now she produces content which is essentially like, open source, like OSINT-style data journalism for MAGA or a far-right audience.

• 3:04:33Speaker 02

  Her bio reads, "I'm just a tool builder," and has a quote from Musk saying that she's worth following, as well as a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, "You're a must-follow."

• 3:04:45Speaker 02

  Now, last week, Data Republican published a web tool mapping out thousands of Antifa, anarchist, and left-wing websites from across the globe hosted through NoBlogs. And as we discussed last week, the collective that, you know, runs the infrastructure behind NoBlogs was designated as a specially designated global terrorist. Data Republican basically scraped every NoBlogs site that was online as of last week and created an index of posts if they post doxing information, calls to violence, and if they have any financial information or donation links, as well as quote-unquote institutional affiliations to

• 3:05:25Speaker 02

  other organizations such as the SPLC, and any connections to other NoBlogs sites. She described the tool like this, quote, "Introducing an interactive map of 7,000-plus blogs across many countries and languages, anti-fascist, anarchist, ecological, prisoner solidarity, migrant border, revolutionary, every one classified geo-located and searchable down to the verbatim quote. Verified quotes, every claim is a receipt, their words, not mine. 4,000-plus blogs pinned to a live world map, zoom into your own city. Many blogs classified, quote-unquote, operational. Click any blog, author, or cell, and walk the network one tie at a time. No grant funded this. No client asked for it.

• 3:06:10Speaker 02

  I do this for free on my own time because someone should," unquote. And I have a little picture of the tool here below, which was titled Trump Blogs. That's what she calls her, her tool to search all these different sites. She has little nodes on this map that are labeled mainstream authority for groups like the SPLC or the ADL. She has another node for Antifa slash watchdog research, which she calls naming shops, basically, like, you know, info sites where anti-fascist researchers will name fascists in their area. Yeah. She's not the nodes for movement, legal defense, for like official political parties, mostly like international-based parties and for movement infrastructures.

• 3:06:54Speaker 02

  Now, a few days prior, she posted a similar network map for the DSA, inspired largely by Marco Rubio's Cuba conspiracy document. This quote-unquote "DSA Explorer" allows you to navigate an alleged web of connections between DSA members, journalists, politicians, and other left-wing organizations, other quote-unquote "anti-imperialist organizations", foreign political parties, and Islamic terror groups. Data Republican has a few projects like this on her website. Other projects include the National Endowment for Democracy Explorer, quote, "AI-generated summaries of NED's Journal of Democracy articles, authors, and NGOs", unquote.

• 3:07:35Speaker 02

  She also has another database of nonprofit NGOs, their employees, and their volunteers, and whether they receive government funding. For instance, she has pages on 92 nonprofits focused on combating hunger. Truly, the worst of the worst being documented here. Yeah. She also has a database of grant funding, a 2024 voter turnout analysis, and a link to her book on NGOs and USAID, published under her real name, Jenica Pounds, with a foreword by Doge's own Big Balls.

• 3:08:08Robert Evans?

  Oh, my god.

• 3:08:09Speaker 02

  Is he credited using his legal name there or Big Balls? No, he is credited as Big Balls. Like I read it, he is credited as Big Falls. And at the bottom of the Data Republican website is that link to a nearly 5,000-word essay from her pastor titled "The Historical Case for Christianity." Last April, Jenica Pounds, Data Republican, became a credentialed member of Hagseth's revamped Pentagon press corps. Remember when he kicked out all his news outlets? Yeah. Out of the Pentagon last March and replaced them with right-wing cheerleaders?

• 3:08:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:45Speaker 02

  Pounds' admission into the press corps was part of this effort. And then, last month, something odd happened in the Pentagon press corps. Jenica Pounds, Data Republican, accused someone from the State Department of trying to entrap her into leaking old Biden-era documents about Cuba by presenting the documents as an exclusive scoop. I'm gonna read a quick text exchange that Data Republican posted on Twitter. This is her, quote, "Just to be clear, you want me to leak the material you gave to me? Unredacted?", question mark. "Happy to help your efforts." The person that she was texting to responded, quote, "It already contains all necessary redactions.

• 3:09:29Speaker 02

  If you'd rather report on already open-source stuff, that's fine, too. But I wanted to give you the option of, quote-unquote, 'breaking the story as a sort of gift'", unquote.

• 3:09:40Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 3:09:40Speaker 02

  So, as Data Republican, Jenica Pounds posted a now-deleted tweet, reading, "It's not okay when the deep state sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life." Meanwhile, the undersecretary of state, Sarah Rogers, who oversees Voice of America, basically government-funded media, replied to Pounds' thread about this alleged entrapment and tried to explain that this wasn't a deep state plot trying to trick Pounds into committing treason, but rather, a sincere offer from her, Sarah Rogers, to just publish some exclusive documents. Quote, "LOL, these are my text messages and documents.

• 3:10:22Speaker 02

  The, quote-unquote, 'markings are FOIA redactions required for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a, quote-unquote, 'trap, I will happily disclose the documents myself. Here they are." And then Sarah Rogers posted a thread of those documents. Also, it's funny that she calls just redactions "FOIA redactions", because these were not FOIA documents, but she just refers to those as Right. FOIA redactions. Just an interesting note here. Yeah. So, essentially, Data Republican just botched a scoop because of her weird paranoia and because she doesn't really know how to do journalism, even like administration-propaganda journalism. And in the midst of this shitshow, like, this caused a lot of drama, like, on, like, you know, MAGA Twitter.

• 3:11:07Speaker 02

  But in the midst of this shitshow, the far-right news aggregator account, America First News, claimed that Pounds wasn't just a Pentagon press corps journalist, but was actually a, quote, "Department of War employee", unquote. A big claim. And then, a few days later, the Pentagon confirmed that Pounds was indeed an employee of the Department of War, the so-called... This is a statement from the DOD or the DOW, quote, "Miss Jenica Pounds serves at the Department of War as a special government employee and is no longer a credentialed journalist at the Pentagon. Her press credentials expired in June 2026, and she did not seek a renewal.

• 3:11:51Speaker 02

  She began working for the Department in July 2026", unquote. So, that's pretty wild. And I will invite you to return back to this map of, like, Antifa anarchist NoBlogs websites that Pounds created while she was a special government employee of the Department of War. You know, same thing with this DHS list, same thing with this, you know, voter analysis. Although, the voter analysis, who I think was an older piece, but it still has it on her website. But both this NoBlogs list and this network map of, like, DSA were created and published as public tools while she worked, and is still working

• 3:12:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  for the Department of War. And then, a few days after this was revealed, The Washington Post published an article revealing that Pounds was not the only right-wing influencer secretly working for Pete Hagseth. This is a quote from the Post, quote, "The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large-island followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration", unquote. So, according to The Washington Post, at least three retired colonels, who now boast hundreds of thousands of followers each on X, the everything app, have been assigned to civilian roles

• 3:13:08Speaker 02

  in the office of Anthony Todd, the undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. And this office has been focusing on how to make the military less woke, specifically.

• 3:13:18Robert Evans?

  Man.

• 3:13:19Speaker 02

  These influencers are listed as either special government employees or, quote, "highly qualified experts", which can work on a longer-term basis than special government employees who can only work for a few months. Yeah. And like, these are influencers who are actively working on policy, on military policy, on how to make the military less woke, while also posting on their big accounts and in major, like, news publications, you know, like The Daily Caller, and as well as The Washington Post itself. One of these influencers had a letter to the editor published in The Post, like, recently. And so, they're doing all this and posting about how awesome Pete Hagseth is, while never disclosing that they also work for Pete Hagseth. Yeah.

• 3:14:00Robert Evans?

  They work for Pete Hagseth.

• 3:14:01Speaker 02

  Right. And like, again, Twitter sucks. But unfortunately, Twitter is still very consequential to national politics. Yeah. It's one of the primary ways the administration, like, communicates with the people and like the public, like, digitally. And as a platform, it's important, not just to this administration, but especially for the so-called Department of War. Right? We've seen pictures from, like, live military operations that show that Hagseth has Twitter feeds pulled up on-screen while special operations are underway.

• 3:14:32Robert Evans?

  The man is watching Twitter, like...

• 3:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, in the Situation Room. Yeah. Yeah, they're checking hashtags. And now, they're recruiting staff from Twitter, including staff who are building publicly accessible tools, mapping out the left. Yeah. From, you know, the DSA and Palestinian solidarity organizations to Antifa, you know, info blogs

• 3:14:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:51Speaker 02

  and anarchist report-backs. So, she's building those databases while covertly working for the Pentagon. And I want to close with this one reply she made to her posts regarding the NoBlogs tool. Quote, "In the course of building this website, a number of anti-fascists were identified. I disclosed them, but not on the website directly to the USA government", unquote. The government that she works for, that she is working for. Yeah, yeah. How would you have that direct channel? Like...

• 3:15:22Robert Evans?

  When I let myself think too long about, like, follow me, what frustrates me about climate change is the fact that we saw it coming 100 years ago and just watched this slow, slow-moving death. And we're like, guys, it's on its way. This is where, here's evidence, here's what's happening. It's coming. If we get above 2 degrees Celsius, or we're above 2 degrees Celsius, like, this... What we're trying to... It's right there. It's right there. I feel like that when Pete Hagseth said, "I'm finna fire everybody from the press corps, you not allowed to come", and you're going, "He's gonna hire his own press people. Guys, he's gonna... They're gonna put him on the... He's gonna..." There. She works for him.

• 3:16:05Robert Evans?

  Like, it's just, I... It's just so... This is the slowest-moving coup. Like, it's just... It's the slowest-moving coup that you all see. Hey, hey, hey, excuse me, excuse me. They're gonna hire their own press and put... They're gonna send all of our names to the government... Oh, there it is. I just...

• 3:16:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. One of the things that gets me the most about this is how, literally days ago, she was, you know, ranting about the deep state, you know? Of which she is part. While she is a secret, like, covert, undisclosed...

• 3:16:42Robert Evans?

  Special government employee. That's you. She is you and you are it.

• 3:16:49Speaker 02

  People will often talk about like psy ops or psy war, right? And like be like, an individual person is a psy op. And generally that that's not how psychological warfare works, right? But like, yeah, now they're doing it. That is, that is what they're doing now. Like.

• 3:17:02Robert Evans?

  You're the thing. You're the thing. Yeah.

• 3:17:05Speaker 02

  It's great stuff. Oh, and one other thing that I do want to briefly mention, and this could just be a curious coincidence. But late last week, NoBlogs suffered a hack a few days after the group that runs NoBlogs, the IA Collective, was declared a specially designated global terrorist. The Collective published a statement saying that the hack lasted about two hours, during which the title of NoBlogs was changed to Trump Blogs. And the attacker, quote, "may have had access to the user's database." Now, Trump Blogs is also what Data Republican calls her NoBlogs tracking tool.

• 3:17:49Speaker 02

  Now, I'm not saying that Data Republican scraped NoBlogs' data by hacking the website, but these two events did happen around the same time, which could just be a curious coincidence. There is no direct evidence that Data Republican is the one who hacked NoBlogs. And the use of Trump Blogs as a term isn't very original, for one, and could just be a sort of inside joke, troll, or reference. But considering the fact that Data Republican secretly works for the Pentagon, I thought this is something worth mentioning, coincidence or not. You can draw your own conclusions. That should do it for us here at It Could Happen Here.

• 3:18:34Speaker 02

  If you want to email us, you can do it. It's [email protected]. Prop, do you have any other podcasts that you'd like us to listen to?

• 3:18:43Robert Evans?

  Hey, it'd be great, actually. We have a cousin podcast called Hood Politics with Prop where we dive into, not the breadth of topics that were covered here, but a couple of topics that may make you scratch your head a little bit. Like, I feel like what they saying is A, B, and C. And I get to go, yes, you're right. That's exactly what they saying. So yeah, tap in with me. Hood Politics with Prop every Wednesday and Friday.

• 3:19:07Speaker 02

  Yep. We reported the news.

• 3:19:10Speaker 04

  We reported the news.

• 3:19:15Speaker 02

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

• 3:19:21Speaker 00

  It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

• 3:19:43Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 3:19:58Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 3:20:03Speaker 03

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 3:20:21Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 3:20:24Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 3:20:25Speaker 06

  People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes.

• 3:20:30Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 3:20:31Speaker 06

  This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency.

• 3:20:36Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 3:20:37Speaker 06

  White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade.

• 3:20:41Speaker 01

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 3:20:44Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 3:20:49Speaker 01

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:20:51Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.