It Could Happen Here Weekly 246

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. How the United States Built its Colonial Empire, Pt. 1 The Dangers of Silica ft. Kim Kelly How AI Companies are Monetizing Intimacy, Ft. Bridget Todd Fighting for Incarcerated Workers Executive Disorder: Iran Ceasefire Expires, Corrupt Military Contractors, Florida Election 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: How the United States Built its Colonial Empire, Pt. 1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241274187 https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/hormuz-fertilizer-guano-islands-act-fertilizer-empire/ https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/navassa-island-the-uss-160-year-forgotten-tragedy https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-09-26/almost-half-of-americans-dont-know-puerto-ricans-are-us-citizens-poll https://www.doi.gov/oia/islands/politicatypes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/30/puerto-rico-independence-movement https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CARIBBEAN/MILITARY-BUILDUP/egpbbnzyrpq/ https://www.nminewsservice.com/cnmi-covenant-united-states-50th-anniversary-explainer-timeline/ https://apnews.com/article/american-samoa-voting-citizenship-alaska-trump-eda6c32ce0fcdca6edb22efac26e403d https://www.nminewsservice.com/cnmi-covenant-united-states-50th-anniversary-explainer-timeline/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-us-controls-iraqs-oil-revenues-2026-01-23/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/magazine/venezuela-empires-colony.html https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-us-state-trump-rodriguez-chavismo-silence-634203c885803b018ecd8ac012bb249d https://time.com/article/2026/06/02/trump-annex-canada-51st-state-rhetoric-carney-us-partnership-message/ https://theconversation.com/us-territories-have-a-voice-in-congress-but-no-vote-heres-why-283547 https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheets-View/Article/4463352/154-the-longe https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheets-View/Article/4463352/154-the-longe%20st-blackout-in-us-history-hurricane-maria/ st-blackout-in-us-history-hurricane-maria/ https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheets-View/Article/4463352/154-the-longe%20st-blackout-in-us-history-hurricane-maria/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-was-serious-about-trading-hurricane-stricken-puert https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-was-serious-about-trading-hurricane-stricken-puert%20o-rico-greenland-n1237336 o-rico-greenland-n1237336 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-was-serious-about-trading-hurricane-stricken-puert%20o-rico-greenland-n1237336 https://www.democracynow.org/2001/8/3/as_navy_pounds_vieques_with_largest https://www.democracynow.org/2001/8/3/as_navy_pounds_vieques_with_largest%20%E2%80%9CNationals%E2%80%9D%20but%20not%20%E2%80%9CCitizens%E2%80%9D “Nationals” but not “Citizens” https://www.democracynow.org/2001/8/3/as_navy_pounds_vieques_with_largest%20%E2%80%9CNationals%E2%80%9D%20but%20not%20%E2%80%9CCitizens%E2%80%9D https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/nationals-but-not-citizens-how-the-u-s-denies-citizenship https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/nationals-but-not-citizens-how-the-u-s-denies-citizenship%20-to-american-samoans -to-american-samoans https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/nationals-but-not-citizens-how-the-u-s-denies-citizenship%20-to-american-samoans How AI Companies are Monetizing Intimacy, Ft. Bridget Todd https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Love-at-First-Prompt/Bridget-Todd/9781668179826 Fighting for Incarcerated Workers https://audrasrealthoughts.wordpress.com/ https://incarceratedworkers.org https://incarceratedworkers.org/ https://www.instagram.com/incarceratedworkers/ https://www.jailhouselawyersspeak.com/new-page Executive Disorder: Iran Ceasefire Expires, Corrupt Military Contractors, Florida Election https://x.com/CBPCommissioner/status/2089395143136731579?s=20https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/08/19/korea-KOSPI-Korea-Stock-Index-fell-six-percent-steep-losses-chipmakers/2411787132055/ https://abcnews.com/Business/wireStory/shares-fall-asia-kospi-57-oil-prices-jump-135759997https://x.com/atrupar/status/2089911556301550045?s=20 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416.212.3_3.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416.212.8_2.pdfhttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416/gov.uscourts.mnd.234416.212.6_3.pdfhttps://archive.ph/ZF3Y0#selection-4307.0-4307.372 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73489661/212/united-states-v-sant/ https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117119807819944656 https://www.foxnews.com/world/trump-confirms-irgc-backchannel-calls-irans-white-flag-surrender https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/vessel-struck-by-unknown-projectile-strait-hormuz-crew-casualty-reported-ukmto-2026-08-18/ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/18/no-talks-with-iran-says-trump-as-us-president-stews-over-hormuz-deal https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2089719923295556095?s=20 https://x.com/UK_MTO https://x.com/RudawEnglish/status/2089263666742931732?s=20 https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-failedhttps://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/11/30/General-Dynamics-Corps-alleged-proposal-to-sell-a-wrench/2171439016400/https://time.com/archive/6710343/general-dynamics-under-fire/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/18/us-iran-war-trump-hormuz-trump-ceasefire-expires-extension-.htmlhttps://www.newsnationnow.com/world/us-iran-economic-strain-strait-of-hormuz-conflict/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/business/strait-of-hormuz-ship-attack.htmlhttps://archive.is/f4Ei8#selection-4447.0-4447.264https://www.reuters.com/world/china/selling-grips-bond-markets-us-japan-inflation-fiscal-worries-take-hold-2026-08-18/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/19/treasury-announces-upscaled-buyback-operation-for-longer-term-debt-sending-yields-lower.html https://www.businessinsider.com/bond-market-warning-yields-hit-2007-record-2026-8 https://angienixon.com/ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-primary-special-elections/florida-senate-results#democratic-primary https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/florida-democratic-senate-primary-results.html https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/2087282981593387046?s=20 https://x.com/genzforchange/status/2088252309243297868https://x.com/genzforchange/status/2088037851086614842?s=20 https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/08/15/democratic-socialists-progressives-tout-momentum-in-south-florida-skeptics-say-its-a-myth/ 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 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, 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.

• 0:48Speaker 02

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

• 0:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:15Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:16Speaker 05

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

• 1:21Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 1:22Speaker 05

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

• 1:27Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 1:28Speaker 05

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

• 1:31Speaker 04

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

• 1:35Speaker 03

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

• 1:39Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:45Robert 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.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Hello, dear listener. You're listening to It Could Happen Here. My name's Carlos. I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico. I'm here with James. Hey, how you doing? Hi, nice to have you on for this, James. Yeah. Let me ask, have you heard about a little thing called imperialism? I have. During my education in the United Kingdom, it was an issue that they raised once or twice. So you would say you're quite knowledgeable about imperialism, then? Sure. I think I have a little grasp of it, both from learning about it and teaching about it. There's a whole lot of imperialism, you know? I don't think I've covered all of it, so I'm excited to learn about some extra parts of it. Same, same.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  And actually, I would say so I'm from Puerto Rico, and as a subject of American imperialism, I'm very happy to share this episode today, which is kind of a history of American overseas expansion, focused particularly on its colonies. There are several American colonies. Puerto Rico is the most populous one and the most known, but there are several others. So I want to start this episode by laying out some definitions and frameworks in case people aren't familiar with them. When people think of the United States, they typically only think about the contiguous

• 3:39Speaker 02

  United States, also known as the Lower 48. This is how most people imagine the US today, and maybe they include Alaska and Hawaii. This is what historian Benedict Anderson calls the logo map in his seminal book, Imagined Communities. Essentially, the way that it works is that if every country had merch, then this is the logo that would be on it. This is literal in some cases. For example, I saw a lot of America 250 shirts that only had the map with the Lower 48 on it. The logo map, whether people mean it or not, is often a political statement. Whatever people imagine the logo map to be is what they consider the dominion of their government. For example, if you see an IDF or Russian soldier with a patch that includes Gaza and

• 4:24Speaker 02

  the West Bank and Israel or Ukraine as part of Russia, then you very likely know that person's thoughts on the territorial borders of their respective countries. However, what is included in the logo map is often just as important as what isn't included. In the case of the United States, which has continuously lied to itself about being an empire, the Lower 48 logo map hides the country's former territories, Alaska and Hawaii, if they're not included, its current territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as a smattering of military bases that it owns across the world. This omission in its self-conception is an act of American exceptionalism, giving

• 5:04Speaker 02

  visual credence to the fact that the country is one homogeneous polity, not a settler, colonial state, or a global superpower with overseas possessions that it continues to colonize to this day. Yeah, I think the America 250 with the, like, Lower 48 on it is a really fascinating image, right? Like, there is no historical argument. The countries on that map were not the United States 250 years ago, the places on that map. Absolutely. When people think in their mind of their imagined community that is America, that is what they think of, even though I think very few of the T-shirt wearers with the 250 map would be like, yes, Hawaii and Alaska are colonies, and like, we should let them

• 5:48Speaker 02

  be, let alone discussing Puerto Rico, Guam, and then you have all the Kofa countries, right? Like, the RMI. Yeah, absolutely. Like, I guess if you wanted to put them on a T-shirt, you'd need a really fucking big T-shirt to keep it to scale, right? Like, it is a vast global empire. Yeah. Yeah, you have bases in Africa, bases in Greenland, bases all over the world. Absolutely. So at a time when Trump has made several overtures towards expanding the physical territory of the United States by either making Canada Greenland or Venezuela or a bunch of other places, ostensibly the 51st state, I think it's important that people

• 6:31Speaker 02

  know that the US is not only a military and economic empire, but a literal one, with control over a series of territories and their people that spans the Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as the aforementioned military bases. So to start, I should say that that kind of ideological game about the US logo map is almost wholeheartedly ripped from the beginning of Daniel Imawar's How to Hide an Empire. Also, James, in the case of the shirt with all of the territories and colonies, that there is a map in there that I will show you later that we could put on a T-shirt. Oh, sweet. Okay, exciting. So How to Hide an Empire alongside Colonial Crucible, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Francisco A. Scarano, were monumental sources for these two podcast episodes that we're about to do. Anyway, James, I know that you've heard this term before, but I want to start out by defining the term, quote unquote, insular area before I get to the meat of this episode. When a place is an insular area of the US, it means that they are a US-associated jurisdiction but aren't states or the District of Columbia. This encompasses several different legal meanings in terms of sovereignty. Free of the US's insular areas, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau are independent nations that have compacts of free association with the US.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  This means that they have their own sovereignty, but certain things such as defense are in hands of the United States. I won't be talking about them too much, but if you want to learn more about them, you should go listen to James's series on the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Thank you. I was in the RMI when they were renegotiating with the Biden admin. They are a proud, independent country, of course, right? And they have sovereignty and a lot of issues, but also, like, the US didn't come at that equal to equal, you know? Like, the US, a country which nuked the Marshall Islands, which it never had any quarrel with, it's still not paying people in those places what it said it would pay them for the damage it did by nuking them when they were downwind.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  And like, even now, when they negotiate, like, they cannot force the United States to treat them with, like, really what one would assume would be basic dignity. Yeah, absolutely. And this is, you know, I think something that extends not only to the countries under the compacts of free association, but all of its colonies, that when they are at the bargaining table, it is very clearly an incredibly unequal bargaining table with this, like, global superpower and its colonies, and they're trying to reach, the colonies are trying to reach sometimes more independence or more federal funding or something or another. Yeah. So the other 14 insular areas are what the US calls, quote unquote, territories.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And I should say that 14 doesn't even tell the whole story, but I'm going to hold on to that fact for a second. These 14 are divided into 13 unincorporated territories and one incorporated territory. There's a complicated explanation for that that I'm going to explain in the next episode, but all you have to know for now is that people often talk about these territories as being part of the United States. And while that is true on a conceptual level, right, when you imagine the United States, or maybe not when people going to the America 250 rallies imagine the United States, but when you map out the US's global borders, you include Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa as part of the United States.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  However, in a strictly legal sense, all of the unincorporated territories belong to but aren't part of the United States. So of these 14 territories, nine are uninhabited and five have people on them. The nine uninhabited territories are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, which is the sole incorporated territory, Wake Island, and Navasa Island. There are also two other territories, Serranilla Bank and Bajo Nuevo Bank, that are claimed by the US but administered by Colombia. Meanwhile, Haiti has also historically laid claim to Navasa and still does.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  This is similar for Wake Island, which is claimed by the Marshall Islands but is administered by the US. In the modern day, these remain mostly uninhabited, save for military or scientific missions. All of these little pieces of land are often grouped together as the US minor outlying islands. Yeah. In the calculus of the US, they're like so meaningless that they're usually not even talked about by their names, right? Right, it's like a footnote of- Like existence. Exactly, exactly. Even though they have been, as I hope to show, very important to the conception of the the United States as an empire.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, the five inhabited territories are Puerto Rico, where I'm from and currently located, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. So this is going to be split into two episodes. The first is kind of giving a crash course on the inhabited islands and how the US's claims to the minor outlying islands created the skeletal framework on which the US would expand its overseas empire. And then the second episode is mostly going to be about how the US acquired those five uninhabited islands and how they kind of shaped the metropole in ways that people rarely conceive of. However, before getting into that, I want to make a quick note about language.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Up until now, I've been using the word, quote unquote, territory to describe these places just to talk about them in the same way that a US history teacher might talk about them or how the President of the United States might talk about them. But going forward, I'll be referring to them by the word, quote unquote, colony, because that's what it's called when a foreign polity controls a place and its people. Yeah, the US, like the book title hints at, has done a very good job of hiding its empire. But like, I think part of that is because it's convinced people not to call it by its name and because it hasn't called it by its name and then no one else does, then somehow it fits into this magical third space between independence and empire, rather than just saying, oh, yeah, this is an empire, but they rebranded it.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It's like, of the, of the, however, many empires that have existed throughout history, the only thing exceptional about the US is that it doesn't conceive of itself as, as an empire.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So I'm going to assume that a lot of people don't know much about the US colonies. So here's a crash course. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are in the Caribbean, while Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa are in the Pacific. Between them, the five US colonies have about 4 million people. Except for American Samoa, everyone born there is born an American citizen. People born in American Samoa are non-citizen US nationals. If they want to become US citizens, they have to go for the naturalization process. People in the colonies can't vote in federal elections, and we don't have voting representation in Congress.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Instead, we have a non-voting representative, whose job is kind of just to squawk at other congresspeople to convince them to do things. Politically, all the colonies, save for Puerto Rico, have the US's two-party system. I should say that American Samoa's elections are nonpartisan, which means that while candidates do affiliate with the Republican or Democratic parties, they run the ballot as independent. In Puerto Rico, political parties are divided based on whether they want Puerto Rico to become a state, independence, or remain in the colonial status quo. That has been that way for going on about 70 years now. Although some candidates in Puerto Rico do affiliate with US political parties, they run representing the archipelago's political parties.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  A bunch of the sources I used, like the AP or the Conversation, among others, are linked in the show notes if you want more details. Puerto Rico is probably the one that people most know about, right? And I'm also going to be focusing a lot on it throughout this, these two episodes, because I'm, I'm from here. We're the most populated and largest in terms of landmass by several magnitudes. The archipelago really only comes into the American consciousness in times of crisis. For example, right now, it's in the news because we're facing a pretty bad water crisis, with some people having gone more than 100 days with no or intermittent water service. This is common across all the colonies, only getting media coverage in times of crisis.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And even then, it's unlikely that they'll receive the same media attention as any state. Puerto Rico is often the one that's in the news, just because it's the biggest, right? But when was the last time you heard a, let's say, like a CNN report about Guam or, or American Samoa, right? Right. In my experience, right, only talking about Puerto Rico, it's kind of a news desert in relation to other states, which I know, right, media has been affected everywhere. But the colonies specifically, because of their kind of colonial status and how it has affected them, there's media blackouts from the metropole to them and in them, they are sometimes a little bit of news deserts. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I would wager to say that the first time Puerto Rico entered American consciousness

• 16:17Speaker 02

  in recent memory was in 2017, when Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed the archipelago and its long-ailing electrical system, causing thousands of deaths and the largest and longest blackout in US history. Shortly after that, a Morning Consult poll found that only about 54% of Americans knew that people here were also American citizens. And that's like after kind of once-in-a-lifetime natural disaster. Yeah. Right? That's been in the headlines, like, and Trump is there, like handing out toilet paper, like. True, absolutely right. He was doing the kind of free point meme. Yeah. Photo that has become famous now. Yeah, yeah, handing out is the wrong word, right?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Sort of, sort of flicking toilet paper at people. Absolutely. And, you know, he also, like, and this is kind of a preview of what I'm going to talk about next episode, or at the end of next episode, but he did remark that he wanted to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. It's Denmark. So like, it would be the Danes who would administer Puerto Rico, or who's he? Yeah. Who's he trading it with? Yeah, no, he's trading it with, with Denmark, right? He would trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, so Denmark would take over Puerto Rico and the US would take over. Why not? Over Greenland. You know, we're just kind of there to be bartered with. Right, yeah, this is not a place where people live. Exactly. I'm sure the Danes would really embrace the, like, like, I mean, yeah, fine, I

• 17:46Speaker 02

  guess, like, that is what empires used to do back in the day, right? We'd just swap land around. Absolutely. I mean, the, the US bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark for a cool 25 million, right? So. Yeah. There's precedent for it. Yeah, true. Yeah, and not so long ago, Alaska, like. True.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  So, like I mentioned, only appearing in US media or receiving national attention is very common for the colonies. This is particularly the case of Puerto Rico, which has been suffering one crisis after another for the last two decades. Our siblings in the other colonies receive even less media attention. If you're listening, and this is the first time you're hearing about these colonies, to be honest, this is what empire does to those it considers lesser than. Make them invisible in public life until it is sociopolitically expedient to use them for one purpose or another. Yeah. Like, trading us for Greenland. And while I was writing, I really struggled to find a concise way of explaining the importance

• 18:51Speaker 02

  of the colonies to the formation of the United States as we know it today. Today, we often talk about the imperial boomerang produced by several overseas US invasions in the Middle East coming back to haunt us. We've seen the militarization of police throughout the country, the rise of what any Latin American country would call, quote unquote, "manodura" politics at home, and much more. Yet, in the conception of the American consequences of imperialism, the literal colonies of the United States are often left by the wayside. But the current and former colonies have shaped the country in untold ways, of which I'm going to be talking about a few today.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  To quote from Colonial Crucible, quote, "The United States held most of its larger colonies for just a few decades and governed only a few million people. Yet empire left an indelible imprint on the United States. Colonialism was a crucible that plunged Washington's raw bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and great power rivalry, forging new heretofore unimagined state capacities. Indeed, the ramifications of this early American empire were far wider than anyone has yet imagined. A marked expansion in the role of the federal government for more activist domestic administration and the formation of an agile, transnational imperial state for more effective global

• 20:21Speaker 02

  governance." I think a lot about how, like,

• 20:26Speaker 07

  American self conception has kind of changed. Like, I guess I think a lot specifically about Cuba, right? And how like, there is not an American politician who would not like to be compared to Theodore Roosevelt.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 20:43Speaker 07

  Could be on any party, right? Most of them would also like to be compared to FDR, which is a whole other interesting thing when you look at internment. But that's a separate topic. A part of that is that he and his like rough riders, right? These volunteers went to Cuba and literally charged up San Juan Hill. And like, at the time in America, there was this feeling that like empires are going to fall and we're going to help them. And we went from that. And some of that was like yellow press stuff, right? Like they're sort of whipping up this popular sentiment of like, we are the Americans and we destroy empires to the plataman.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 07

  Right? And to effectively the United States de facto ruling Cuba in formal colonialism. And like what that says about how the United States conceived of its role in the world. Even like you can go back even further, right? And see Hamilton talking about a revolution in Haiti. And the shit that didn't make it into the musicals, where he is just wildly racist.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 07

  And believes the people, the black people of Haiti to being capable of self government and to suggest that they might want to appoint a king to like, I don't know, keep them under some kind of control, I guess. Like I failed to, failed to follow the logic there. But I don't particularly care to try. But like, it says a lot about this country, right? Which does it seem like, like all men are created equal. Well, fuck, not in Haiti, though.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, not in Haiti, not in the Caribbean, not in land America, not anywhere but the United States and maybe Europe.

• 22:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, like from sea to shining sea is in fact like those people are created equal unless they're indigenous to the place that we want. In which case we don't even fucking respect our treaties with them, let alone them. I mean, Britain did this too, but like just a jarring disjuncture between rhetoric and actions. And like, at the same time that that rhetoric could still be used to justify colonial actions, right? Like when Hearst and the, and the yellow press are whipping up this idea of like Spanish empire in Cuba and how unjust it is and how terrible it is. And that we shouldn't be allowing this in our hemisphere. Let's stop and pause and think about our hemisphere in anti colonial terms. But like, genuinely, I'm sure that working people in America believe that, right?

• 22:58Speaker 07

  And some of the people who like volunteered to fight their genuine like, hell yeah, we're going to liberate another country in the Americas, like fuck them all, burn it down.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  We're going to bring the US freedom and liberty to these people by crushing them.

• 23:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, like we're the best country in the world. And like, we're going to share that with you all because you're our neighbors to like, actually psych, we get to intervene how we want, when we want, whenever we want in your politics. Because we like the stuff that you've got.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, because seeing the colonizer from the, the colonized position, right? The, a lot of the US's approach to the rest of the world is either right at the tip of a barrel or from a position of imperial and colonial arrogance. Like, we figured it out before you did. Let me teach you how to do it. And if you don't follow everything I'm going to say, I'm going to force you to do it, right? And that's what defined this period of colonial expansion by the US between like the early 1800s, arguably to now, honestly, right?

• 24:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, like that attitude is indistinguishable from the attitude that compelled Britain to create an empire all over the world, right? I love to show my students a white man's burden cartoon. And I'm sure you've seen the one where he's like Uncle Sam is like carrying the peoples of like Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba, I think, up in a little basket up towards like civilization.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the shining mountain, the shining city on a hill, carrying us to salvation.

• 24:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, and just like wildly racist caricatures. Like, but I will show that, you know, I've shown that to undergraduates for getting on for 15 years. And it's always wild to see their responses to be like, again, I understand some of us because I'm British, so like I'm coming in there with like a history of our own imperial crimes. But it's interesting to see them conceive of the United States that way. Or try to wrap their heads around that when they're like, no, it's not America. We didn't do that, man, a totally different thing. Like, it's fascinating that they could come through 18 years of the high school system and not be asked to reflect on that or even be aware of it, you know?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  And actually, speaking of colonial cartoons, I pulled it up right now. But I'm really partial to, have you seen this cartoon from Puck that I believe was made in 1900, where it's Uncle Sam teaching its newly acquired colonies, Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba? I can send the, the link in the chat right now.

• 25:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I think about it a lot because I, growing up in Puerto Rico and being educated by the school system, I don't know about the American school system very much or specifically how it's taught. But there was a critical lens to the way that, that we were taught about the US's kind of capture and colonization of Puerto Rico. And that was mostly because I had a really great history teacher my last senior year of high school. But this cartoon has really stayed in my memory for a very long time. Because it's like, it's how I view like the US's approach to so many foreign nations, right? You have so many like facets of this, right?

• 26:09Speaker 02

  You have the black population, which obviously the US is historically oppressed and enslaved for centuries. You have the indigenous population, also historically oppressed and killed for centuries by the US government, represented in the corner. And then you have these new states, which are like depicted as white people in colonial dress, being good students. And then you have Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines upfront, depicted as not in like the clothes the rest of the people are wearing, as if they need special attention to be taught the kind of education of freedom and liberty by Uncle Sam, right?

• 26:48Speaker 07

  Right.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, I think about this, like anytime I'm like conceptualizing colonialism, this is, this is it for me. They peaked here.

• 26:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, that is wild. It's interesting that Alaska is amongst the like, I don't know what to call them, like the older kids. They're trying to portray like a civilization savagery binary here, right? Like, that's, that's what's happening. Alaska is up there with the civilized age. And then there's someone, I don't know what's happening with this person outside the door. It's just like the Chinese exclusion act, like.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  I believe so, yeah. I think that's, that's what they're trying to portray.

• 27:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's an excellent cartoon. Yeah, but there's a whole lot happening here.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Listeners, I know that this is an audio medium, but go, go Google "school begins" and Puck, and then you'll see it. It's, it's really, I don't know if they were made this like purposefully racist or if they were just really good at depicting the US's racism, but they, they popped off with this one.

• 27:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  We should teach this in every school, everywhere.

• 27:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a pretty, like it gets right to the point.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So I want to be clear that the way that the US was shaped by its colonies is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Paraphrasing from Colonial Crucible, every empire is shaped by the Promethean experience of the colonizer and the colonized, both empowering and eviscerating, yet mutually transformative and traumatic. The chain of continuity that now spans almost 200 years of seafaring colonization has profoundly shaped the American empire, unleashing the catalytic forces that have shaped the formation of the American state up to this day, the lasting imprint of which is evident during Washington's recent misadventures in the Middle East.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  And when they wrote that, it was 2009. So they were talking about the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. But 20 years later, it applies almost equally to the current war with Iran. With that out of the way, to start with how the US expanded past the American continent and became a seafaring empire, we need to go back 200 years to the mid 1800s and talk about bird shit.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Manifest Destiny had taken the United States on a genocidal campaign that displaced indigenous people and killed them from sea to shining sea. Meanwhile, the Monroe Doctrine, while still nascent and not completely enforceable by the American state, created the ideological and legal framework for the country to overflow from its recently established national borders. In the midst of all of this, industrial agriculture was becoming the norm across the world and in the United States, which meant that there was a severe need for fertilizer to grow crops quickly. People were experimenting with different things, but the one fertilizer that everyone

• 29:55Speaker 02

  wanted was guano. Also known as white gold, guano is the accumulated poop of birds, bats, and seals. It contains several nutrients that are very good for quick agricultural growth. However, the thing about guano is that it mostly grows on far-off islands or caves. So the big problem with guano is that at the time, most of it was contained in islands off the coast of the newly independent state of Peru. And I'm talking about state as in the nation state, the country, essentially, a country of Peru. And that was a problem for the United States because they needed guano bad, but they didn't want to rely on

• 30:37Speaker 02

  a foreign country for it. And I should say that a lot of this comes from How to Hide an Empire and an article titled "Guano and the Rise of American Empire" by Mauricio Betancourt, published in Sage Journal. So with a desperate need for guano, what is a fledgling empire to do but set sail and lay claim to the islands that contained large deposits of guano? U.S. businessmen originally wanted the U.S. to take Peru's Lobo Islands for themselves so they could extract the guano, but Peru protested and the U.S. backed off. However, the American taste for guano was clear. And in 1856, the U.S. passed the Guano Islands Act, which

• 31:18Speaker 02

  allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to uninhabited islands that had guano on them in the name of the United States. American entrepreneurs set sail for poop-covered islands. And while the law specifically mentioned that they had to be not claimed by other countries, that didn't really stop people from claiming islands that were also claimed by other nations like Britain, Honduras, and Colombia. It's kind of like that meme from Arthur that says, "A sign can't stop me because I can't read."

• 31:47Speaker 07

  Yeah. This is like the wildest period, maybe not, but like, it's just this bonkers period of U.S. history where you can personally expand the imperial possessions of the United States, like on your own free will and volition.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Right. It's like, you know, I mean, that's like part of the American conception, right? You reached a place that was empty of people, you settled there, and now you have brought the U.S. to it, right? That's the story that America tells itself, at least.

• 32:19Speaker 07

  Right. Like, that's Manifest Destiny, like writ large across the whole global map.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So per How to Hide an Empire, by the time that last claim was filed in 1902, the U.S. had added 94 islands to its dominion. All of these were uninhabited, so they weren't quite colonies until U.S. industry moved to them, establishing guano mining outfits that used black laborers essentially induced to work there under false pretenses and horrible conditions. In more ways than one, the U.S. had essentially exported southern style plantations beyond its continental borders to the edges of its empire. Nowhere was this more clear than a tiny island off the coast of Haiti called Navassa that the

• 33:04Speaker 02

  U.S. still owns to this day. Workers there mostly consisted of black laborers from Baltimore. Fed up with horrible conditions, the workers eventually revolted and five white overseers died during the ensuing riot. For this, dozens of workers were charged with crimes ranging from rioting to murder. Free were given death sentences. And when their case eventually reached the Supreme Court, their defense rested on a hail mary play. Since Haiti also claimed Navassa, the U.S. did not have jurisdiction to prosecute them. And this was, to be clear, an extreme long shot, and the decision from this would define the U.S.'s legal approach

• 33:43Speaker 02

  to its colonies for, essentially, until now. The Supreme Court sided with the prosecution, laying it out explicitly that the U.S. owned Navassa and other territories, and that American citizens there were working on American soil, even if it was a sort of corporate fiefdom. President Harrison eventually commuted the death sentences to life sentences per write-up in the History News Network, but raised the issue that the U.S. needed to better extend its government to these territories, ostensibly to protect its citizens and its interests, no matter how far away their people or its land was. At time of recording, the

• 34:24Speaker 02

  94 guano islands have diminished to less than 10 through various treaties and sessions. Nevertheless, the U.S. minor outlying islands still represent important footholds of U.S. military power and American sovereignty across the world, particularly in the Pacific. So I started with these often forgotten islands because they have left a lasting legacy upon the American empire. As highlighted by How to Hide an Empire, the first legacy is legal. Per the Guano Islands Act, these poop-covered rocks shall, quote, "at the destruction of the president, be considered as appertaining to the United States." Appertaining

• 35:05Speaker 02

  is a strange word, right? It's mostly used as a legal term, but to simplify, it means that these islands belong to the United States. This word would come to define U.S. overseas possessions as legally belonging to, but not part of the United States, right? It's, this appertains to me, doesn't necessarily mean that it's part of me, but I own it.

• 35:26Speaker 07

  Right. It's mine, yeah. Like, it's like owned by the U.S. but not in the U.S.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. In a strictly legal sense.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  Legal sense.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 35:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  And it's just like the thing that's, it's hard to explain about the U.S. colonies to some people where they don't get how it can be owned but not in, but also part of.

• 35:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, the second legacy is that the quest for guano codified U.S. overseas expansion as being a quest of resource extraction. This kickstarted U.S. imperialism past continental borders and showed how the U.S. government would encourage its industries to occupy and integrate themselves overseas in order to protect interests at home, right? These companies went off to farm, to mine guano, and then to send it back home. We've seen this play out lots of times throughout American history, like during the so-called Banana Wars throughout Latin America, as well as the continued quest for oil that's played out throughout the 20th and 21st century. And the third legacy is that these guano

• 36:32Speaker 02

  islands, once rich in natural resources, are now part of one of the U.S.'s biggest exports, military bases. Through the bases the U.S. has established there, alongside the ones in the inhabited colonies, the U.S. has been able to project power outside of its continental borders because these tiny islands served or continue to serve as strategic military footholds in their respective regions. This was particularly evident during World War II, where there was a wave of military expansion by the United States throughout the world, but it remains true to this day.

• 37:06Speaker 07

  During World War II, they called some of those islands in the Pacific, like unsinkable aircraft carriers, was the way they would refer to it. Like, still, actually, in many of those islands, there was a serious problem with unexploded ordnance, which I think gets to the difference between like, being a place where the U.S. could put its military and being a place inside the U.S., right? The U.S. would not have left that many bombs and mines inside Ohio. Like, I get that there are some areas with the UXO, including in San Diego, but like, to no end of this extent, right?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely right. And the, actually, to skip ahead a little bit, Puerto Rico during World War II was called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean because of how the U.S. operated, kind of its force projection in the region. And actually, now that you mentioned the mines, there is an island municipality off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico called Biecas that the U.S. used as like a bombing range for many years. And there's still quite a few mines scattered throughout the island, I believe.

• 38:07Speaker 07

  Oh, wow.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  I should have included this, but there's about two thirds of the island municipality are still, you still can't walk on them because of the unexploded ordnance, right?

• 38:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's like Quajulin. When you see like a missile has been tested, normally it's from Vandenberg Space Force Base right up in central California, that's where it's going. Like, Quaj is where, Quajulin Atoll is a toll in the Marshall Islands where the United States has a large base. And like, that is where that missile is headed. Like, still, we still do this, right? We still test those. And we, of course, tested nuclear weapons inside the United States as well. But very quickly, when we realized that those things were devastating and the land never recovers, we started to do that on land which the United States controls but does not consider to be of the same value as land in the contiguous Lower Forty-Eight.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Now, Biecas and its sister island municipality, Colima, were used as bombing ranges for years. Biecas has a very high cancer rate compared to the rest of Puerto Rico. When I say decades, the Navy, quote unquote, left Vieques in 2003. That is still like within living memory for a lot of people, right? You know, the same people that protested the Navy's involvement there are still alive and kicking today in several different activist causes, right? And they only left because they accidentally killed a security guard. That kind of incited the protest that were already going on, but that kind of kicked it into high gear. Actually, I don't know if Americans know this, but like RFK, for a very long time,

• 39:41Speaker 02

  was kind of a local Puerto Rican folk hero because he'd participated in the anti Navy protests here. Then he became what he is today, although I guess he might've always been that, but.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, I did not know that. He has been on a journey throughout his life, I think is fair to say. But yeah, there were people who like doubted the state parentheses good, who have turned into people who doubt the state parentheses bad.

• 40:09Speaker 07

  He is one of those people. I was just thinking too about like this same time period is like the same time period as the Cananea strike. Are you familiar with the Cananea strike?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 40:19Speaker 07

  It's where miners in Mexico go on strike, right? They're in Sonora and the owner of the mine, whose name I think was Green. It's in the Porfirio, right? So Porfirio Diaz is the president of Mexico and it's like very pro American investment. And this is just before the outbreak of the Mexican revolution. And it's a time when like the Americans are just like ruthlessly investing in Mexico is far too high. But they're exploiting Mexican resources, right? And then taking those for American profit. There was a, I think it's called the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company.

• 40:59Speaker 07

  The workers there go on strike and this guy, I think he's called Mr. Green or Colonel Green, maybe basically starts radioing to America being like, the workers are on strike. They're going to kill me. They're going to kill everyone. And they're not being particularly violent, right? A fire starts in the strike, but it is not the workers. It is the guards who are armed.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  As often is the case.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. And the fucking Arizona Rangers enter from Arizona. And I believe they're deputized on entering Mexico to intervene in this strike, right? Like the US is like, Mexico is an independent country, but that's our mine, guys. Like we'll be coming in here like along with, man, the guy's named Emilio or something. He was like a Russian emigre who became like an enforcer for Porfirio Diaz in Mexico. But it just reminds me of the same thing, like the United States literally sending its cops into like invading a country.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  To protect its, its US business interests, right?

• 42:04Speaker 07

  Right. Like, don't fuck with our mine.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  In some ways, right? This was preceded or preempted by the US claims on the Guano Islands, which of course were uninhabited. So it made it easy for the US to take control and establish them as mining colonies through its various industry companies. However, in modern times, resource mining has defined the US's imperialist ambitions. While it's much harder to establish dominion over places that people live in permanently, that hasn't stopped the country from exerting its influence through gunboat and dollar diplomacy in places like Iraq and Venezuela, where it controls a significant part of their oil revenues.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  So this is the end of the first episode, but I'm going to talk a lot more about this phenomenon in the next episode, where we dive into how the US occupies and takes over the inhabited colonies through war and purchase. Any closing thoughts, James?

• 43:03Speaker 07

  Statehood's not independence. And I'm sure we got to touch on this, but I thought it was great. I enjoyed that very much. Thank you.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Thank you for being a guest.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:12Speaker 03

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

• 44:18Speaker 01

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

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 45:01Speaker 05

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

• 45:08Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 45:16Speaker 05

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

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:36Speaker 04

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

• 45:40Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:50Speaker 03

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

• 45:54Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name's Kim Kelly and I'll be your host for this morning or evening or afternoon. I don't know your schedule. A little about me, I'm a freelance journalist based in Philly, a third generation union member and author of the books Fight Like Hell, The Untold History of American Labor and its young readers edition, Fight to Win: Heroes of American Labor. Labor history is obviously a passion of mine, but it's also my job to keep up with current worker struggles here in the US and abroad. Our pals Sophie, Robert, James, everybody else have kindly given me the opportunity here

• 46:41Speaker 03

  to share some recent labor stories you might've missed and add in a little historical context here and there to explain why exactly they're so important. All that being said, let's talk about silica. There are a lot of things out there that can kill you at work, but silica, specifically respirable crystalline silica, really goes above and beyond the call of duty. What is silica, you might ask? Well, it's a chemical compound made up of silicon and oxygen that is extremely common. Its government name is silicon dioxide. It's actually the second most abundant element on earth after oxygen. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, it all comes down to how you encounter it.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  If you eat it in the form of dietary silica, that's fine. You can find it in leafy greens, oats, brown rice is actually pretty good for you. But, and this is a big but, if you breathe in silica dust, you're pretty much fucked. See silica dust is extremely harmful, toxic, dangerous, no good. If it gets into your lungs, it causes swelling and inflammation, which then turns into hard scar tissue, which makes it really hard to breathe and leads to even bigger problems like lung cancer, tuberculosis, silicosis, COPD, kidney disease, and one of the scariest occupational diseases in American history,

• 48:07Speaker 03

  coal workers' pneumoconiosis, which you might know better as black lung. See silica is 10 times more toxic than coal dust and has been fueling a quiet epidemic in Appalachian coalfields for years now. A new report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reveals that black lung rates are higher than they've been in 50 years. A disease that most people assume has been eradicated has come roaring back. And now one in three miners with 25 or more years experience in the mines has this brutal, fatal, incurable disease. It's no longer an old man's disease either. Let's do the math real quick.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  So if a worker goes underground when they're 18, 19, you know, right out of high school, get their first big job, go down the mines, 25 years later, they've barely hit their 40s. These are not old dudes. This is not the end of the line, like the stereotype of the elderly coal miner with the oxygen tank. These are people in their late twenties, their thirties, their forties. It's horrifying. These workers have so much more life to live, but their futures are being stolen from them by silica. And more specifically, the mine operators who refuse to follow the proper safety protocols and engineering. needed to protect them and the Trump administration's refusal to do dilly squat

• 49:34Speaker 03

  to make them. Actually, this administration is actively making the problem worse. You see, after decades of work from coal miners and their allies, the Department of Labor under Biden was poised to enact a new silica rule that would halve the amount of deadly dust that miners would be exposed to. Finally, it took decades to get to this point, and this rule was supposed to go into effect in April 2025. But guess who was president then? For all Trump squawking about beautiful, clean coal and American workers and blah, blah, blah, he and the scrubs who work for him are actively killing coal miners to protect their coal baron buddies, bottom line. And silica isn't just wreaking havoc in Appalachia

• 50:15Speaker 03

  and his coal mines. It's a huge problem in the construction industry, too, specifically among stonemasons and countertop fabricators. See, silica isn't just floating around like loosey goosey. It's not like you're not gonna breathe it in walking down the street. You gotta dig it out of rocks like granite, marble, quartz. Coal miners dig it out of the earth. For stonemasons and countertop fabricators, they release the dust when they're cutting and finishing slabs of stone. Artificial stone, AKA manufactured quartz, is an especially popular material for, you know, that kitchen makeover that is chock full of silica. That's right, your shiny new kitchen counter might have killed someone already. Sorry. California

• 50:59Speaker 03

  is currently grappling with a silicosis epidemic that has sickened over 500 workers. Fifty of them have needed lung transplants, and as of today, 32 of them have died. These are not old men either. Their median age is 46, and almost every case in California has occurred among Mexican and Central American immigrant workers, many of whom have died within a few years of their diagnosis. It is a fucking nightmare. And like black lung in Appalachia, it is completely preventable when workers' health and safety is taken into account and existing regulations are followed. When they aren't, people die. Regulations

• 51:41Speaker 03

  are there for a reason. Like, it's not just for funsies. Like, it matters. Man, it makes me so mad. But with all that in mind, let's wrap up this silica-sponsored portion of our program with a little sweet treat from Starbucks. The coffee giant has gone all in on blended and frozen drinks. You've seen them on Instagram and TikTok. They're very pretty. They look very radioactive in like a fun way. And they've recently started using a new blending powder that contains, wait for it, silicon dioxide, our old friend. Now, this silica is food-grade, FDA-approved, and it's safe to ingest. Caveat, caveat, caveat. The trouble is that the workers who are required to use this blending powder in the drinks

• 52:24Speaker 03

  they're making for you are being exposed to it as they mix up these little treats. That's not good. Members of the Starbucks Workers United Union have raised the alarm over this and collected testimonies from hundreds of Starbucks workers who started to suffer adverse health effects as soon as the new blending powder showed up in their stores. As one worker explained on the union's Instagram, "You inhale those powders every time you scoop them." Workers report experiencing rashes, headaches, coughing fits, nausea, throat irritation, swelling. They had trouble breathing. And as one of them said, "This powder is literally unavoidable." Now, given what we've learned about silica today, you

• 53:06Speaker 03

  might be feeling a little nervous for those Starbucks workers. Some of those symptoms might sound a little familiar. Don't sound good. We don't like silica in things. We don't want silica in anybody's lungs. And you'd think that after said workers alerted their company to this issue, Starbucks management would have swiftly removed this potentially dangerous substance from their stores and stopped requiring their employees to handle it. But as of now, anyway, you'd be wrong. So far, their response has been to blog about it. Here's the entirety of the response Starbucks posted on their official website, and I quote, "The product used in our coffee houses is a blending powder which contains a small

• 53:48Speaker 03

  amount of food-grade silica, an FDA-approved ingredient commonly used in food products that helps ingredients mix consistently and supports a consistent beverage experience. It does not contain crystalline silica and is safe for use in food. We are committed to providing accurate information about our ingredients. To learn more about our commitment to high-quality food and drinks, visit this link." End quote. So, okay, that's not the problem, though. We know it's food safe. We know it's fine. Once you like get it in your guts, it's the lungs we're worried about. We know it's food safe. The issue is that it's not worker safe. In a message the company sent out to its stores, it avoided the potential

• 54:32Speaker 03

  health issue entirely and instead simply told the workers to pour slower when handling it, putting the burden on them to protect their health instead of, you know, actually doing something about it. Classic case. We hate to see it. And for now, Starbucks Workers United are continuing to push the company to address the actual issue here. And I bet they'd appreciate your support. So keep an eye out on their social media accounts to follow this story. Let them know I sent you. And now, a word from our sponsors.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And now for some good news. Deborah Capisha, a medical surgical nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland, is back home after a terrifying encounter with ICE. According to her union, the Maine State Nurses Association slash National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of National Nurses United, Capisha was detained on July 30th while traveling through Boston Logan International Airport. The union and her fellow nurses at MaineMed immediately organized a rally that saw hundreds of nurses and allies mobilize and successfully blocked her transfer to a facility in Louisiana. Quote, "We knew we had to take action, first to stop her from being transferred out of New England while in custody, but also to

• 55:57Speaker 03

  demand her release. We're incredibly proud that nurses and the community came together in Portland to advocate for her, and now we need to figure out how to stop ICE." That's a quote from Kelly Brennan, a registered nurse at MaineMed and a nurse leader with the union, got that in a press release. So Capisha was born in Zambia, and she's legally authorized to live and work in the United States. She's waiting for her asylum case to be processed. There's no reason for ICE to snatch her up, bother her, any of that. Her fellow nurses have written more than 100 letters of support. While the union continues to coordinate with her attorneys, and her coworkers at MaineMed are demanding their employer sponsor her permanent residency. She has a bond hearing on August 10th, and

• 56:40Speaker 03

  I know we're all crossing fingers for her. You know, I don't know if this is common knowledge, but nurses unions, especially National Nurses United, go ridiculously hard for their members and their communities. Like, they are so tough. Like, NNU has been on ICE's neck, calling it a illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be abolished. They've been publicly mourning the ICE murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araho and condemning the persecution of anti-ICE activists in Minnesota and Texas. The union has been extremely outspoken on other human rights issues, too, that many other big unions have ignored or barely acknowledged because they're politically sensitive. Not really

• 57:22Speaker 03

  if you have a heart and a brain. They've been calling out Israel for destroying medical warehouses and hospitals in Gaza, killing thousands of healthcare workers and Palestinian patients, and they just demanded an end to the US blockade of Cuba. This is just the last couple of months of press releases. Like, they've been out here. And NNU is also the biggest nurses union in the country with more than 225,000 members. They have a lot of power, and they're not afraid to use it for good. Today, they're trying to free a member from ICE's clutches. Tomorrow, they may be striking for safeing staffing levels, or organizing a new union in Louisiana, or holding your grandma's hand as she takes her last breath. Nurses really are the best of us, and I'm really glad they're on our

• 58:06Speaker 03

  side. So everyone say good luck to Deborah. Finally, I want to end today's episode with some very big news. As I'm sure you all know, it's now Black August, the month we dedicate each year to honoring the memory of fallen Black freedom fighters and political prisoners. It's a tradition that began in 1979 after the assassination of George Jackson, a Black Panther and Black liberation activist. With that memory in mind, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a collective of formerly and currently incarcerated workers around the country, have just gone public with their plans for a big nationwide prison strike in 2027, and they're calling for allies and comrades to support and spread the word. On August

• 58:49Speaker 03

  2nd, they announced that prisoners will hold a national prisoners' human rights strike from May 1st, International Workers' Day, through June 19th, 2027, uniting the fight to end legalized slavery with the struggle to restore voting rights to the prison class. They shared three core demands, which I'll read to you now. They also maintain 10 national demands on their website. They have a bigger program going on, but this specific campaign is focusing on these three things. One, end legalized slavery. Repeal the exception clause of the 13th Amendment. Two, restore voting rights. Repeal exception clauses.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Including Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment that stripped voting rights from confined citizens, pretrial detainees, and former felons. Three, free all the political prisoners in US prisons. So they've got a lot of work ahead of them. It all sounds very reasonable to me, but unfortunately, I'm not in charge. You know, this isn't the first time that JLS and their affiliated prisoner-led organizations have raised these demands, nor is it the first time they've put their bodies on the line for them. There is a long, long history of resistance behind the walls of the American prison industrial complex. I devoted a whole chapter to it in my book. And groups like JLS, the Free Alabama Movement, and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  have done an incredible amount of work over the years, keeping the spirit of hope and rebellion alive and organizing these huge nationwide actions under nearly impossible circumstances. Just because you haven't heard about them doesn't mean they're not happening. There is so much organizing happening inside prisons in the US. It's just, you know, difficult to report on unless you have contacts and you care enough to do a little bit of digging, which I guess not that many mainstream reporters do, but fuck them. Now, the largest prison strike in modern US history is said to have been the 2010 Georgia Prison Strike, where prisoners in seven facilities across the state went on strike for six days.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  Between 2011 and 2013, thousands of prisoners in California went on hunger strikes to protest the dire conditions in which they're held. Since then, we've seen large-scale, coordinated prison labor strikes in 2017, 2018, and perhaps most notably, 2016, which commemorated the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising, which itself bears a historical precedent to ancient Rome, when in about 135 B.C., just after the First Servile War, a thousand slaves led a bloody revolt in Attica, a region of what is now Greece. There really is nothing new under the sun, at least when it comes to the carceral system and human enslavement.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  And the 2027 Prison Strike makes that connection explicit with its slogan, "From May Day to Juneteenth, we refuse to slave." Now, a prison strike may look a little different from what you're thinking. Strikers have to get very creative, since they can't exactly walk out of their workplace. There won't be any picket lines or cool matching T-shirts, and I'd be very pleasantly surprised if any elected officials or political hopefuls showed up to support these strikes. I mean, it sure would be nice, given that one of the major goals of this action is to have these incarcerated workers' voting rights restored. People in prison are a part of our society and always have been. Ripping away their rights as well as their freedoms is a crime against their humanity,

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  and this strike is another desperate cry for help from people who have been left behind and forgotten. A lot can happen in nine months, and a lot needs to happen to pull off an action of this magnitude. Prison strikes aren't easy. There's so many dangers and risks for the people that participate, so much repression, so many repercussions. It's truly an incredibly difficult and brave thing to take part in a strike behind the walls. And they need support from people outside, too. JLS is calling on supporters of the strike to get involved and support their resistance inside by sharing the strike statement widely, centering prisoner voices, and pressuring Congress and all those other fancy, powerful people to heed their demands, or at the absolute

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  least, show that they're listening. As JLS stated, "The National Prisoners Human Rights Strike is more than a strike. It is a commitment to building lasting institutions, expanding legal knowledge, strengthening political education, and organizing inside and outside the walls until legalized slavery and the broader system of exploitation are abolished." So if you've got some time, you've got some skills, and a desire to burn down the American plantation, give a little whistle. JLS is waiting for you, and they need all the help they can get. This has been a special labor episode of It Can Happen Here. I'm still Kim Kelly, and it's been lovely talking with you.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Until next time, be good, do no harm, and take no shit.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:20Speaker 07

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

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

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

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

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

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

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

• 1:06:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

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

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:06:37Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, we have a very special episode because we are talking once again to Bridget Todd, who we've had on a few times, but Bridget has a new book, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy. And we will be discussing how AI companies are trying to sell you love and how that might have a few problems beyond the sort of base conceit that I think, you know, everyone can pick up on. There might even be more problems underneath the hood. So thank you, Bridget, for coming on.

• 1:07:15Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be back here.

• 1:07:18Robert Evans?

  How did you first decide this is something that you want to, like, dedicate months of your life to researching?

• 1:07:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a great place to start.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  I think, like, a lot of folks listening, I would hear these stories about

• 1:07:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  individuals who would say things like, "I am in love with ChatGPT," or "I am having some sort of intimate sexual relationship with an AI companion." And I can admit that my reaction to a lot of those headlines were, something is wrong with this person, this person is pathetic, or maybe this person is super lonely, super sad, they're putting themselves at great risk for harm. And, you know, I once had this therapist who told me that judgment and curiosity could not coexist. And so I realized I was really treating these stories with such kind of knee-jerk negative reaction and judgment. And then I heard Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast talking about how he thought in 10 years'

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  time, well, everybody, including everybody listening, was going to have AI friends, AI companions. He said that most people don't feel like they have enough friends to have a nourishing social life, and that in the future, it won't be a big deal if all of us have AI companions. So what he didn't say is that it would be AI that he owns, operates, and profits from. But I got to thinking, you know, if Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders are designing futures involving technology Where they believe this will be commonplace, whether the average person wants it to be or not. We should really be looking to the people who are already there to tell us what brought them to experiencing intimacy with AI and what the risks and ramifications might be. It's time to stop treating these people like pathetic freak shows

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  and sort of listening to what they're actually saying, because it could behoove all of us to know where we could be headed.

• 1:09:03Robert Evans?

  No, the freak show aspect, I think, is a real inhibitor towards actually understanding this problem. Because, I mean, a lot of the first sort of like reports around this sort of thing, you know, like AI girlfriends, right? It has this sort of freak show element. You know, even the way that we maybe talk about this on the show when we're like reporting at CES, you know, we walk through all these, you know, ridiculous AI gadgets, you know. We saw like, you know, like an AI sex doll, essentially, you know, that has like a very like low quality chatbot component that can't really, you know, understand what you're saying very often. But I think it is a mistake to just assume that this tech will always stay in its kind of janky form. This stuff is rapidly advancing. It is, it is, it is going to get better.

• 1:09:47Robert Evans?

  And just kind of denying that, I think, sort of pushes the problem, you know, down the road.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Robert Evans?

  Like, no, this is, this is a real problem now. And this requires like regulation and intense, intense like intervention right now. And just to kind of assuming that, ah, this is all like all these like little niche things. Only, you know, crazy people are going to fall for this. The tech is bad. I think that that is, I think, overlooking what is legitimately like, you know, a society wide problem.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Yes, I am so glad you said that because one of the researchers that I interviewed for the audiobook, Love at First Prompt, is Dr. Kate Devlin. She was really one of the first people to sort of take seriously the intersection of AI and robots and intimacy. And when she first started doing this, the place that she started looking was exactly the kind of thing that you saw at CES, right? These physical, life-size sex bots that were also enabled with a kind of, at the time, low-grade AI chatbot quality.

• 1:10:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  If you were around a few years ago, you probably saw so much breathless reporting that was like, oh, men are going to be buying these sex dolls and they're going to not need wives and girlfriends, all that. Now, that ended up sort of not being the case. People do buy those sex dolls, but they're really expensive. They're not really that practical. So they're really kind of a super niche thing. What did take off was the AI intimacy part of that. That's what Dr. Devlin really saw. She said, the physical bot part of this is probably not going to take off in mainstream ways. The AI companion, AI intimacy chatbot feature of these, these physical dolls, that's what we're going to see kind of become more mainstream. And, you know, again, a lot of people listening probably think this sounds really niche,

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  but I think Pew said that one in 10 Americans already use AI for some form of intimacy. That's about as many Americans are left-handed.

• 1:11:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  When you look at younger folks, folks under 30, that number jumps to one in five who are already using AI for some sort of emotional support. So this idea that it's this niche thing,

• 1:11:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  only weirdos are doing it really isn't aligned with what we're actually seeing.

• 1:11:53Robert Evans?

  This is, I think, part of the problem with like, you know, living in your own little internet silo, right? Because like you and your, you know, blue sky friends might think that no one uses AI, no one that, you know, serious, no one that I know would use AI, right? It's, there's this sort of like ideological like resistance to AI. And I think that is a very isolating look, look at the world. Because while that might be true for you and your friends online or maybe your social circle, there is millions of people who go, go through the world every day, who use these things. And they just think of it as like an extension of the internet, right? Because that's what it is for a lot of people. Like, that is what it is. They don't have these sorts of like moral frameworks around whether or not you should use Claude, whether or not you should use ChatGPT, that I think you see among a certain strain of like, you know,

• 1:12:38Robert Evans?

  like liberal, like leftist online. The other thing that kind of, what that silo produces is that it makes it so that I think it's hard to understand that for people using these tools every day, the same way you might use a search engine, right? The same way you might use, you know, a real friend, like bounce ideas off of, how much that sort of regular use can develop a sort of intimate component? The, the line between AI girlfriend and tool you talk to online might not be as like clear as what some people might first assume. I know this is something that you discuss in the book. I mean, that's, that's one of the things I think to be, is one of the most interesting is like how fuzzy this kind of barrier actually is.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. So even before I was deeply interested and sort of consumed on this topic, one of the most fascinating things that I witnessed and sort of saw with my own eyes was when ChatGPT changed models, you know, they had that 4.0 model.

• 1:13:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  So do you remember that was the model that like, people were really developing these intimate connections with because it was so sycophantic, it was so kind of human-like, quote unquote. When you asked it a question, it wouldn't just say, here's the answer. It would be like, dear, you're so perceptive for even asking such a smart question.

• 1:13:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  And so what really deeply fascinated me was that when OpenAI switched that model to make it less sycophantic, less sort of glazing, less complimentary, people who did not report that they were having any kind of intimate connection with AI, who would not have said, I have an AI girlfriend or AI companion,

• 1:14:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  who were just using it exactly as you described, like a search engine, those same people got online and expressed something like grief.

• 1:14:14Robert Evans?

  No, absolutely.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I remember reading someone on a Reddit forum saying, it feels as if my friendly cheerleader in my pocket got replaced overnight with a terse, overworked secretary. And so I think you're exactly right that our brains are designed to project human qualities and human intimacy onto things that we know are logically not human. And it really, the way that these things are designed really easily blurs that line for folks.

• 1:14:42Robert Evans?

  I mean, it's trying to, you know, be as human as, as possible for its own, for its own reasons, so that people use it more, so that it's not, you know, a cold, emotionalist AI that, that is maybe a little bit hostile to the user. Obviously, they, they don't want that. So, so, yeah. It, they want it to be approachable. But I think the specific thing you're talking about, the, the switching from, from one GPT model to the other, from this like overly like, you know, praising, kind of like, uh, it just, almost, almost annoyingly so, model towards something that is a little bit more cold. It produced these reactions online with people that are like, basically acting like a friend died. And like, that was essentially what it was, right? Imagine if you were talking to, you know, a real person online for like two years,

• 1:15:26Robert Evans?

  and then suddenly they stopped, or suddenly they had a complete personality change. And it's like, like, and there was no way to talk to that other person again. That is basically the equivalent of like what happened to, to a lot of people.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's easy to make fun of that or to other people who report this. But I don't think that it's really right to discount the way that online connections really do make people feel and really feel like they are validating and filling a need that people have, you know? It's easy to say, oh, it's just an online friend or an online community or an AI bot. I've talked to people who said, oh, this video game that I was obsessed with, it's gone and I, you know, this has filled my life for two years.

• 1:16:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  That's real.

• 1:16:24Robert Evans?

  Do you want to get into some of the sort of problems beneath the surface of this? Beyond the sort of, you know, maybe socially alienating aspects, the issues of people having to turn towards these things to kind of have, have some connection? But actually now kind of discuss the motivations of the companies behind these products? And like why they are designing them this way? And the sort of risks inherent towards having these sorts of tools be run by and owned by companies with like for-profit incentives?

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  I mean, you really said it. I think that we are spending far too much time looking at individual users and sort of moralizing about what brings individual people to this kind of connection with AI. It kind of goes back to what you were saying about, you know, I'm not a big AI person myself, but I think that it goes back to this idea of conversations about the ethics around AI. Use being hyper focused on individuals, whether or not individuals are good or bad or pathetic or this or that if they use AI. When really, I think the conversation has to be about the companies and what the companies and the people who run them are doing, how they are designing this AI.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  Because I can tell you, AI chatbots like ChatGPT are intentionally designed to keep you talking and to keep you engaged because they want you to be more and more locked into their AI. You know, I went through a personal crisis myself where I was caring for my dying father and was really thrust into a medical situation that was way above my pay grade as a podcaster. And I will admit that in moments of extreme vulnerability, turn to AI to try to get questions answered about navigating insurance companies, navigating Medicare, Medicaid, all of that.

• 1:18:09Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  And the way that ChatGPT did not just give me the answer or try to give me something that looked like an answer, it was, this seems really hard. Are you asking because you're dealing with this yourself?

• 1:18:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  And so it's the way that AI is designed to ask increasingly intimate, sensitive questions of the people who use it with intention. I think that it's not any wonder that individuals might find themselves becoming ensnared in that because that's exactly how they were designed by these for-profit companies.

• 1:18:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, if you're asking it, logistical problems, you help help me navigate the process to file an insurance claim, you know, using it as this sort of like, you know, advanced like internet assistant. But then in doing so, it kind of latches on to, you know, vulnerabilities that it can infer from the from the types of questions you're asking and try to like, you know, coax out more information. That I mean, that's like an incredibly insidious process. Uh, you know, you're you want you want it to help with like a very, you know, direct task. And then in its sly way of of maybe doing that, it's trying to like introduce the sort of like personal therapeutic element. And like, what happens to that data? Like, what is it?

• 1:19:21Robert Evans?

  What is it using that sort of record of your own like personal experiences for?

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  I am sad to report the answer is we don't really know. Recently, I mean, that's really just what it is. The FTC recently asked some of the major AI chatbot companies to give clarity about how these companies are monetizing engagement and how they are using the sort of intimate, personal, sensitive information that is obtained through these conversations. So we really don't know a ton, but to your point, you know, it's not just ChatGPT knows when I'm lonely, ChatGPT knows when I'm sad or scared. It's ChatGPT, this computer knows exactly what works on me when I am lonely or vulnerable or scared.

• 1:20:05Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  And so that to me opens up an entire new level of potential for surveillance and control. And so people have asked me a lot of times, you know, is it so bad if people are getting fulfillment or emotional support from AI? The question is really not if it's bad or good or pathetic or not or whatever. It's what are the companies doing? Are the companies behaving ethically? And are they really honoring the deep, sensitive nature of the information they are intentionally harvesting from people often at their lowest or most vulnerable moments?

• 1:20:38Robert Evans?

  I'm going to reckon to say probably not. I think that the interests of these companies are probably slightly different from your personal interests as a person. Or, you know, obviously, like this is the sort of interest of like, you know, like a therapist or a friend. Immediate guesses is first, an evolution of advertising, like how the search engine optimization has transformed from companies trying to optimize for Google search to now trying to optimize for LLMs like ChatGPT. And to have your products be recommended to users by ChatGPT by creating posts online, specifically intending for those posts to be read by ChatGPT and then regurgitated back to the user.

• 1:21:21Robert Evans?

  And for the past few months, OpenAI has been experimenting with ways to make direct purchases through ChatGPT. And of course, companies pay OpenAI just to put full ads at the bottom of your ChatGPT logs, oftentimes based on your query. The other thing is more so kind of like, um, you know, like the Walmart, like Uber model of like, they introduce a service that is very cheap to start, possibly free. And then people get hooked on the service and then they jack out the price, which is kind of what OpenAI's main model has been thus far. And I could see that becoming a real problem if you have, you know, thousands, millions of people who who use this tool, both as like a tool online, you know, this is an extension

• 1:22:06Robert Evans?

  of of types of things that the internet has like been operating on for years, but using them in this much more personally manipulative way because of this sort of, you know, emotional, intimate component of like, you're talking to something that now just doesn't send information back to you, but talks back to you like a person does. And if that is the, you know, one of the primary ways you interact with the internet, you can easily get hooked on that. And then once you're hooked on that, ChatGPT can start boosting that price.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I think these products are only going to get better and better at convincing us that you're talking to a person, not AI. And I think the more that happens, the easier it becomes to sort of forget that you are actually disclosing intimate information to a private company.

• 1:22:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Depending on what AI you're using, a company that has incredibly cozy ties to the Trump administration. So

• 1:22:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  When people ask me, like, is it bad to be in a relationship, quote unquote, with AI? I said, do you want to be in a relationship with Sam Altman? Do you want to be in a relationship with Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Donald Trump? That's really who you are in a relationship with. And don't let the AI, their human like flattering, you know, back and forth, make you forget that reality.

• 1:23:19Robert Evans?

  Do you have any sorts of idea of what we should do about the problem, I guess? Has governments started to regulate the way that these AIs communicate with people? Is there, you know, efforts to kind of adopt our privacy policies to this like new emerging threat, I guess?

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a really good question. So I would say the most clear cut legislation we see in China, folks might have heard that China's government just recently cracked down on AI companions and the ways that AI companions can be designed to connect with people, they've really cracked down on that. Interestingly, in the United States, we're not really having that conversation in the same way. It might not surprise you to find out that the main legislative interest in the United States is really kind of focused on minors. And this this kind of idea that minors are using AI companions for things like inappropriate erotic role play. And what's so interesting about that, there's two pieces of legislation moving through

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  right now, neither of which have been, you know, turned into law, but they really are quite concerned about minors and sort of sexualizing minors. And when you actually look at the research about how minors use AI, things like sex and romance are actually way down on the list. Much higher on the list is emotional support and advice. And so again, we are always going to this sort of most extreme iteration of the way that AI intimacy is actually showing up for people, whether they're adults or minors, and going right to legislating romance and sex, when in actuality, the much more common use case is things like emotionality and advice.

• 1:25:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that is a that is a really troubling instinct. Now, there's a bunch of the internet, you know, regulation going on right now is is all, you know, focused on this sort of hysteria in some ways, you know, there is real problems with the way that the internet exploits children, obviously. But the way that we are, you know, going about it, resulting in many just proposals to end up giving more of your information over to these companies or the the government, doesn't feel like it's going to solve many of the sort of base problems here and completely overlooks the main way that people use these tools. I mean, if I if I had a nickel for every time I've I've I've seen a story about, this is also an extreme case, but but not like a sexual one, but like a kid, you know, discussing

• 1:25:43Robert Evans?

  their like mental health, leading to a suicide attempt with an AI system or discussing something as as extreme as like, you know, like a a public act of violence, like a shooting and the AI essentially helping coax them into being able to do that. Right? There's a bunch of problems that require like legitimate regulation. But the sort of like puritanical, you know, sex crazy nature of our government, you know, specifically the Republicans, but but also just like American culture in general, is just going to be so ill equipped to actually handle this, this sort of like subtlety, a nuance of a lot of these problems.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, you really put that well. And it's it's a little bit complicated because, as you said, there are real problems. There are real legislative and regulatory needs that we should be having real conversations about. And I think it is so easy to get whipped up into a hysteria. It is so easy to say, we just need some kind of legislation. I need to feel like there is some sort of progress being made on this complex, scary, sensitive issue. And so I will get on board for legislation that is actually not really that good or legislation that doesn't even doesn't even really meaningfully address the actual problem. Right?

• 1:26:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  I think that we're in this really thorny place where even people that I think are reasonable, like leftists, whatever, can quite easily get on board with legislation that really, in the end, might change the internet in ways that we might not actually want because we were so whipped up into this like moral panic about legislating technology in the internet.

• 1:27:28Robert Evans?

  The lack of focus on the specific companies, you know, just talking about these things as like abstract technologies, instead of actually talking about, no, these are like specific companies who are doing specific things and that the government can regulate in a specific way. Will that be the Trump government? Probably not. But I don't think slash hope that Trump won't be in power forever.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 1:27:51Robert Evans?

  And we may as well use the You know, these next two years to try to build more public support for actual, you know, sensible regulation at the federal level. When I was at DC going to that, you know, liberal convention, which I've talked about on the show last week, I did go to a panel with Representative Don Byer, who is getting either a master's or a PhD in in computer science right now, specifically to help him do AI regulation. And he said he's not optimistic about AI being regulated in a serious way while Trump is in power because of, you know, how much these companies have tried to cozy up to Trump. And Trump's trying to shut down states' attempts to to regulate certain things. But he does have hope that in our like next Congress or in the next presidential administration,

• 1:28:37Robert Evans?

  there will be the opportunity to regulate these companies on a federal level. And in the meantime, states can push for their own regulation. States can try to put certain safety measures in place. But I think right now it would definitely behoove us to take this technology as a real legitimate threat, not something that's just going to go away in the next few years, not something that, you know, the bubble is going to pop any day now, any day now it's going to pop. As nice as that is to, you know, tell yourself that is kicking the can down the road in like a real sense. And this this thing is having very real impacts. I mean, people are focused, obviously, on like the data center question. But I think that that relates to the same base problem is that do we have an opposition to these things in this sort of abstract technological sense?

• 1:29:19Robert Evans?

  Or do we have an opposition to these tools being developed by and for for-profit companies who want to make money off of us? For me, that is the main problem. If you want to be like a Luddite, that was also the Luddite's main problem.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Robert Evans?

  They weren't opposed to technology in this abstract sense, but the specific way that it was transforming production to benefit capitalists instead of workers. And if we want to think about the internet in the same way, what's happening is that they're deploying these technologies to benefit the people that own these tech companies rather than regular people. And if we can think about regulating on that basis, not just in complete opposition to these things, I think that might actually have a lot more positive outcomes because these things are going to get developed, these things are going to get built. I don't think we're going to be able to totally shut down AI as an industry in the next few years. I just don't see that being possible. Think about like in the 90s, do you think they could have like shut down the like the internet as an emerging technology? This is where all the capital is going.

• 1:30:15Robert Evans?

  The most hope that I have is looking at something like the Stop Data Center movement as an opportunity to like educate people about how these companies are profiting off of us. And maybe we can team up together across party lines, across, you know, whatever, to to actually have a sort of a popular front against these tech companies so that the internet and that, you know, these advanced tools can actually exist in a way that is democratically decided and actually to the benefit of people and not like three dudes who are overdosing on ketamine every week in San Francisco.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  I completely agree with you. I think while we are all sort of like having this conversation, specific tech companies are increasingly making forays into the most intimate inner parts of our lives. OpenAI just announced their first ever consumer hardware product. And you could probably guess what that product is going to be. It's going to be a hockey puck sized smart speaker that you put in your home that reacts to you like what they call a human like AI companion, an intimate AI companion. And it will have the ability to mechanically, they say, follow you around from room to room in your house. And so while we're all kind of having this conversation, you can bet your ass,

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  these tech companies are increasingly trying to not just be the most powerful AI companies, but the most emotionally supportive, the most emotionally invasive. You know, we've all talked so much about the more kind of logistical elements of our digital selves, you know, our intellectual property, our browsing data, who gets to make money from that. But I firmly do believe the next iteration of the digital rights movement will be about our inner emotional lives and who gets to commodify that, who gets to profit from that. And so, you know, as grim as that sounds, I completely agree with you that I'm also incredibly optimistic about the moment that we're in when it comes to your average person's sentiment around things like big tech,

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  data centers, AI commodifying every resource, whether that's our intimate emotional data or our environmental resources. I am incredibly optimistic that we are sort of on the right page collectively, pushing back and saying, I don't know, these tech companies say that this is all going to be really great for us. Is it actually?

• 1:32:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, based on, let me look out the window briefly. No, no, I don't think so.

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  Let me look at my magic eight ball. Sources say no.

• 1:32:46Robert Evans?

  Signs point to nah.

• 1:32:50Robert Evans?

  Is there any other kind of final points about your new audiobook that you would like to tease to the to the listeners before we sign off?

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is really accessible and the conversation is dark and hard and vulnerable, but also fun and funny and engaging. I talked to people who actually say that they have experienced intimacy with AI. And so if you ever wanted to go beyond the sort of clickbait headlines of some of these stories that you might have skimmed on social media, you hear directly from folks about what brought them into connection with AI, which I find fascinating. I tried to nag ChatGPT into having sex with me in the audiobook. If you want to find out if that worked or not, check it out. And then ultimately, again, I would say reporting the book made me very optimistic. One of the reasons why I'm so optimistic in this moment is that I just think when you actually look at the research and listen to what people are talking about

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  when they talk about intimacy with AI, it just becomes incredibly clear that AI can never replace humans. AI cannot replace human labor. AI cannot replace what people are looking for when they look for nourishing connections and relationships. And so I kind of ended the audiobook feeling incredibly optimistic about the power of human connection and the power of human labor and the desire that we all have to connect with each other that we know will never be replaced by AI.

• 1:34:11Robert Evans?

  I've seen that Spielberg movie, I think. I think it's possible. I think it's possible. I think we could all have a kind of creepy seven year old AI bot soon.

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. I will say I am kind of low key obsessed with movies like that, like AI or Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I think that we're all so, it sounds like a niche thing. But when you look at pop culture, we have been interested in people who have intimate connections with technology and AI for a really long time, myself included.

• 1:34:40Robert Evans?

  No, I think that is a big part of how these companies are able to kind of pass this stuff off to people. It creates a sort of public buy-in because of like the pop culture idea of these things. Both the good and the bad, I think both the sort of apocalyptic versions of it make the company seem more legitimate and that makes investors excited because like, oh, this could actually be a real thing, even if it even if it causes bad things, you know, it's this sort of like a, you know, don't invent the torment nexus book, being like, oh, this is a great idea. But I mean, also in like the Blade Runner sense, you know, these sorts of more like humanistic looks about like, what does it really mean to be human, you know? What actually is the line between artificial intelligence and humanity? I think that that's sort of, you know, very like armchair philosophizing

• 1:35:24Robert Evans?

  as that's in those sorts of films that does does make it easier for people to start to talk to these things like they could maybe be a person. In the more extreme cases, there was that like Google developer a few years ago who like who quit or got fired and was like, I've discovered that Google's AI is a real person. And I think it can it can really like encourage people to like want to almost create this sort of conscious humanity within these tools, even if those, you know, tools aren't even there yet. But there's like, there's like a desire to kind of, if I talk to it enough, maybe it will become human. Which I get, this kind of circles back to where we started. There's these sorts of like, you know, very, very kind of base problems with the way that people use the internet to kind of solve this sort of, you know, social alienation

• 1:36:07Robert Evans?

  and social disintegration that we have in our society and culture. My main issue is that the way that companies glom onto that as an opportunity to make a lot of money.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're seeing, you know? We have a loneliness issue that people have described as an epidemic, right here in

• 1:36:27Speaker 04

  This country, we live under such oppressive structures that the idea of doing the labor that it takes to maintain friendships, when you're working a million hours to be able to afford your rent, that's gone up $100 in the last month, seems impossible. And so, all of these are very real needs. And tech companies are not only making those needs worse, but then selling us back a solution in the form of technology that they own, operate, and profit from. It's a real cyclical problem, but I don't think we will solve it until we have those systemic, institutional conversations about how we can meaningfully fix that what's so broken that is leading people to find this kind of nourishment in technology in the first place. Easy peasy. Yeah, simple.

• 1:37:12Speaker 04

  Where can people both hear more about this in the audiobook and then also find you elsewhere on the internet? Well, you can check out the audiobook at loveatfirstprompt.com. You can get it wherever your audiobooks are sold. I particularly like Libro.fm because they give money to local bookstores and libraries. But you can also follow me on Instagram at @bridgetmarieindc and check out my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. Thank you, Bridget, for introducing a new horror to everybody. One of our favorite things to do on this show. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:18Speaker 07

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

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:39:35Speaker 05

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

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 1:39:44Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:39:50Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 1:39:50Speaker 05

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

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:40:00Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

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

• 1:40:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:29Speaker 04

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about workers and the things that they do to fight to survive and live in a better world. I am your host, Mia Wong. Some of the worst-treated and most-depressed workers in the United States are incarcerated workers, a group of workers who are very seldom talked about, much less actually formally organized by the conventional labor movement. And here with me today to talk about the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is Colin from Iwok, Giselle Garcia, who is Iwok's California Outreach Coordinator, and Audra Dawson, who is a formerly incarcerated person and is MA support. To all three of you, welcome to the show.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Thank you so very much.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Well, talk to the people.

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm excited to talk to all of you. And I guess I want to start. Can you explain a little bit about what the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is for people who are unfamiliar with it?

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  I'll kick us off, and everyone can supplement. So I would definitely say that the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, or Iwok, is a committee of the incarcerated workers of the World Labor Union. And it was formed in recognition that there is probably not a more exploitative kind of labor setting than the prison system. And not just, you know, US-centric, but also across the globe. And so, our effort is to build a bridge with our incarcerated neighbors, build that connection and true solidarity rooted in connection,

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  and then help support those inside with resources so that they can not only come to an understanding of the profound intentionality behind labor exploitation inside of carceral settings, but also give them, support them with tools that they ask for when it comes to organizing those conditions. And it's led by those inside, really, because no one can inform practices in this area other than those who are in the situation.

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do we want to talk more about what's happening right now and then come back to more historical components? Or do you want to try to do the history now?

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Well, I think I can give a tad bit on a system since I was incarcerated, I mean, not long ago, inside of CDCRC, Chautauqua, California.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  CDCRC is the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs California's prison system.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  And I do understand the significance of working for pennies.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  When that same job outside is paying you $30, $40. I worked for HFM, I made $0.35 a hour. That job out here pays, in the streets, $35, $40 a hour.

• 1:43:42Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 1:43:43Speaker 03

  The cost of living was low. The price of what it costs to live inside of a incarcerated situation was high. Toothpaste, $2. After you do the toothpaste, your lotion, your fueler, at the small size, dollar store size prices, you don't have anything left to live with. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  And it takes a lot to live inside of CDCR because they provide you housing because you're incarcerated.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  But outside of housing and the food that they try to put together to make right for us, oh my God, there's really not much more they can do for you. A lot of the things they want you to do for yourself out of your penny job, your job that pays cents.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was really hard. I did almost 16 years. It was a struggle. It was ugly, and it was a struggle. If not for Iwok, they gave us resources to help us with books and paper. They taught us how to exercise our labor laws and how to fight for ourselves and to know what you are allowed and what you can have and what, don't let nobody beat you. Don't let them cheat you. This is your right to have this, you know?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  I think just before I incarcerated, I left, they had raised the percentage rate on some of the jobs, the more harder labors. They gave it a few more pennies. But it's crazy how a multi-billion dollar corporation don't take care of the inmates who keep it working. We do the laundry, we do the cooking, we do the housing, we do the clerk work, make glasses, teeth. Everything is done by inmates. I worked for carpentry, so I built some of the buildings, but yet, I only worked for pennies. And if you think about it, that penny labor is even lower than slave labor in Mexico or some of the more countries that don't provide anything.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, obviously, as you're describing, these are unbelievably horrific conditions in wages. And, God, I keep thinking about, you know, if like $2 for toothpaste, if you're making $0.20 an hour, it's like 10 hours of work for, like, one of the small rings of toothpaste, which is just nightmare. What does organizing look like under those conditions?

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  I think most of us lived in fight or fight mode.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Had to do what you had to do to survive. The mental health level in- C D C R is like ninety nine percent over, super high. Because people are stealing toilet paper and pads, things they give us, but you need more because there's not enough. And I don't make enough money to get some, or, you know, toothpaste, you're, you're doing extra. So it has made the C D C R system a little volatile. Because people are stealing and robbing and mugging like in the free world, but you're taking from penny pinching people that don't have anything. So i- i- it's made our environment a little bit more violent, if you ask me.

• 1:46:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  I wanna reflect on what Audra said. Uh, prison is tremendously expensive, you know, within our circles, I guess. It's famously more expensive to send someone to prison than to send them to Harvard. However, people are in these like really desperate material circumstances for stuff like toothpaste, deodorant, even toothbrushes and things like that. And within people that know about C D C R, the California prison system, on the men's side, they do a thing where they track and monitor the calories that people get. Because the guys all, you know, like to work out a lot and like they just don't want people bulking up that much.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  And so they physically restrict the amount of protein and calorie intake to

• 1:47:46Speaker 07

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Sort of facilitate their ideal security situation.

• 1:47:51Speaker 07

  So, so they're just starving everyone, like intentionally?

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, precisely, yeah. Keeping people, yeah, alive, you know, and in purgatory. And not, not able to like be how they wanna be. And so like that situation of artificial scarcity is, it's reflected on, you know, the outside of prison too, and, you know, just hustle culture, you know, housing scarcity, artificial housing scarcity, all kinds of other artificial scarcity. Um, and I think in prison, it's like a, it's like a form of social conditioning where people are being conditioned into this scarcity mindset in like a really extreme way and being forced into this kind of hustle mindset.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  And so like all of the things that the prison administration kind of like trots out to justify their new security, quote unquote, measures, which is just often stuff like banning physical mail, um, you know, restrictions on visits, restrictions on books, restrictions on showers, restrictions on anything, you know, remotely humane about, uh, prison. Like these things are all justified as security. And the things that they talk about when they talk about security is like, you know, drugs, you know, prison commerce, things like this. And like prison commerce exists because of this situation of incredible scarcity that the prison itself is like maintaining to begin with.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  And the point of I walk in part, like part of our sort of mission and like strategy is to get people together, get people like, you know, talking about solidarity, connecting people who have, have a kind of like-minded kind of outlook on things so that we can start to form a foundation for solidarity that is not based around the prison economy as it exists, but rather based on like inside-outside solidarity on like a, you know, a humanistic, socialistic level.

• 1:49:51Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  In that sense, like there are stark similarities, but also very stark differences with, you know, other, other groups that do the same thing. Right? Like essentially a lot of groups that arise sort of spontaneously that do that kind of stuff tend to have a capitalistic nature to them. And those are the groups that become what the state refers to as gangs oftentimes. And there are different ones and they do different things and they have unique cultures. Like the term gang kind of flattens them all into one, but yeah, they're, they're all very different and have different sort of survival adaptation mechanisms.

• 1:50:30Speaker 03

  They're like large cliques. Uh, I, I think I would like kind of be better for, from a C D R sense. C D C R is like one of the most largest human trafficking industries in the business. Um, they collect people, they work people for nothing, and the revenue all goes back to them. Because no matter what we spend, we spend it with C D C R. So not only are you collecting fifty, sixty thousand a year per person, and the institution is overpacked. So it carries up to twenty-five hundred people at a time. These people are working for either dollars or cents, and every dollar they have is invested back as C D C R.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  So it is a hundred percent financial gain for C D C R, no matter how to look at it. Because they supply everything, they sell everything, everything goes right back to C D C R at the cost of human lives. For medical, for food, the things that they give you is for you to barely make it. And what it does is it keeps you in the same kind of criminal mind state. So you're a better criminal when you leave because you have to do what you have to do to survive in there. And at forty, fifty thousand dollars per person a year, I feel like nobody should be hungry. Nobody shouldn't eat shoes, nobody shouldn't eat t-shirts, toothpastes should be full size, shampoo should be full size.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  They invested thousands, millions of dollars in mental health, and yet the suicide rate is high there. Because abuse rate is high there, whether it's being abused by staff or by inmate.

• 1:52:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  Abuse is twenty-four hours around the clock in C D C R, and only a very few survive. And they don't survive on scratch, they survive because they have a super will to survive. So for me, that's where I was at. I had a super will to survive, so I hid in the cracks. I tried to do my bare minimum, I stayed in groups and stuff, I, I fed my mind, I nursed my body the best I could. I took care of my health the best I could. I just stayed focused, but I will see always, I will always have me, always. I've been a member for almost eight years now, eight, nine years. I was a member incarcerated and now. I would be able to talk to Collins and work through some of the worst moments.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  He would refer me to other entities of the organization for support. They would give me referrals to how to give me books to take my mind out of places, refer me to places that would give us papers and pen. People would help us with laws and stuff we didn't understand, send us copies. You know, it was just really a platform for making you a stronger individual in an awful situation. And for that, I will always be grateful. And even now that I'm no longer incarcerated in C C C D C R, I get to see the fruit of the labor of everything this organization has given to the people that are behind bars. And I'm so grateful.

• 1:53:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33Speaker 02

  Jail conditions in California, and I think a lot of places are like even worse than prison conditions. And I mean, I remember when I was visiting someone in the Sacramento County Jail and she was excited after multiple years in the county jail to go to federal prison. She was like over the moon that she was going to federal prison and getting out of the Sacramento County Jail. So Audra, I was wondering if you could describe the conditions in the Fresno County Jail and how we fixed them, or at least how they kind of Mickey Mouse it for the entire time that you were there, just so that this wouldn't happen again.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  So I was incarcerated, I went back for re-sentence, you know, my life sentence. And that Fresno County Jail is horrible. It's infested, people are dying, dying. If you have nobody, you have nothing. It was really sad. I asked Collins, I walked to get involved. So when shot time came, they had put in to, um, get some funding to help. People didn't have hygiene, it was very stinky and nasty, so they donated through me. And I bought the girls their hygiene, shampoos, conditioners, um, toothpaste, bought bags of snacks, I made them all little care packs.

• 1:54:52Speaker 03

  And I, I got to see a small amount of women in my pod spring to life. All because the organization cared, all because somebody reached into their heart and did a little something different. It made such a difference.

• 1:55:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  Like they really all wanted to be involved, like how do I get involved with this? But I left shortly after this all happened, so we didn't really get to click it in. Because using the phone and stuff in there is not like being in prison. People are dying to get out of county jail. I, I mean, people are actually dying in their cells. One lady was left to, uh, fester in her infestations of, sis, the stuff she had all over her body.

• 1:55:36Speaker 07

  Jesus.

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  We had another lady in there that actually went out non-responsive because they said she, nothing was wrong with her. And yet she had a, an internal disease she had been living with all her life, and they would not help her.

• 1:55:49Speaker 07

  Oh, God.

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  And because I don't know a lot, I'm not gonna name anything or anyone.

• 1:55:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  I just know I was a part of the situations. We were denied meals sometimes, you were too late, you didn't come, people were denied meds. Uh, you should have been there, people who couldn't even walk. And they had no medical assistance. People who were kicking, as we know, to kick alcohol or heroin or crystal can be deadly. All they would do is bring them Gatorade, one cup in the middle of the night. But these people were throwing up their guts.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Throwing up blood. It was crazy. It was really sad in there. But like I said, the one moment of joy was when I W O C came in. I W came in and they literally contributed to making it a better environment for us.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  And we did something with that jail that in activist vernacular or organizing vernacular, you could call it a phone zap or like a distributed action.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  So do you remember what our demands were with the jail? I think we had like four or five and they did. They did most of them.

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  I know one was with medical. It's been so long. I don't quite remember everything. So, but I know the girls were able to call all walk and file complaints or tell people about what was happening with them. And they would, you know, give them resources and help them out the best they could. Women started filing grievances because they were actually being able to receive information that would help them.

• 1:57:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just found what we won, by the way. We won a violent guard transferred from that unit. Undoubtedly, they were just transferred to another unit and then moved back later. Increased access to showers and clean water. Provided mental health care, put in repair work orders for showers and the television and provided grievance forms.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  All that from just like, what I have to assume was like the Fresno County jails, like first serious encounter with like public anger and scrutiny in probably years. Not that people aren't angry at them over this stuff, but like the way they just like absolutely hopped to is, you know, in my experience, indicative of people who are just used to getting away with it and receiving very little pushback.

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

  I just wanted to say that I think it also highlights the importance of mutual aid within our movement work. You know, oftentimes in especially labor movement spaces, you hear a lot of, you know, focus on quote unquote organizing without recognition of kind of like the human element and like the human connection aspect to it. And how, you know, in different kinds of spaces, being able to break bread or if we can provide basic needs and supplies, like, you know, for hygiene. Or, you know, I remember during COVID, being able to provide folks who were incarcerated with soap.

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  Was huge. And it's those gestures. Some people challenge that and say, well, that's not really organizing. Right? Yes, it is. Absolutely. It's recognizing our humanity, our basic needs and showing up to try to support each other. It's not just quote unquote fighting, right? And that kind of advocacy, but advocacy is also about mutual aid. And so trying to live that and making sure we're meshing that with our movement work is essential.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanted to emphasize that like, it's not like we sent some incredible amount of money to the, to Audra when she was in Fresno County jail. It was like maybe a hundred bucks or like not even. And yet it was able to do a lot of stuff. Audrey, you do remember how much it was?

• 1:59:46Speaker 03

  Um, I think it was seventy-five or a hundred. It was one of them.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's like one small example of how like when you're doing prison solidarity, you're able to do so much, like you're able to have a tremendous impact for folks in a way that you are not able to do in any kind of organizing, at least for people in the present moment. And that is something that really attracted me to it as just kind of a spectrum headed person. I was like, oh, this is like a very good labor cost to benefit ratio of like, you can put in the same amount of work and reap like much greater benefit for a greater number of people. And that I think remains true today.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  It's something that, that folks should consider when considering whether prison solidarity is something that they'd like to take part in.

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  Thank you, Collins. The one thing I did remember more than anything out of Collins and their organization coming into our county. The one thing I did see that you very get to see in incarcerated situations wasn't on our pod, a glimmer of hope. They planted a seed when they made it possible for us to fund help for people. And the next time around, people were donating a little bit. People who had more were donating to make sure those people kept things. I've seen unity in its greatest form with culture difference, stigma difference, race difference.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  Uh, gangs didn't exist at that time. I watched this come together. We started having prayer circles. The pod became more positive. And that all started with a heartfelt seventy-five to a hundred dollars. It brought people together and that never left. That never left. And I think it's the same thing in an incarceration situation when you're in prison. When we build our little inside organizations and we help each other, we give hope to each other. I am so grateful to be a member of such a profound organization that believes in labor laws to help us be treated fairly.

• 2:02:06Speaker 03

  Abolishments of institutions because know that they need to reap a little bit of what they sow. And a hand and a heart that says we care from across the mouth. And this organization reaches different parts of the U.S. So it's not from one place. It's, it's a whole unit and it's, I'm grateful to be a part of it.

• 2:02:29Speaker 02

  Right. And in fact, I W O C exists in the United States. We have interest from some law believes in Canada.

• 2:02:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  And there is also established I W O C presence in the U.K., including Northern Ireland.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  What does it actually look like to be doing sort of jailhouse law and to be helping people understand what their rights are and trying to fight for better conditions through the internal legal system?

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  I work for the law library in C D C R at Chachilla, S C C W F.

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  S C C W F is the Central California Women's Facility, a California women's prison.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  And I am what they call a jailhouse lawyer because I helped a few people go home. Not that I was brilliant. I just comprehend very well and I articulate very well. So by me working there, I got to learn firsthand law books and penal codes and processes. And, and, and it was a wonderful thing. But it can also be a sad thing.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  Because before you know, you make a lot of mistakes and those mistakes hurt people.

• 2:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:50Speaker 03

  Because people can't afford lawyers. I mean, I went in there with thirty-six to life, lost all my levels of my appeal and never thought I would ever see the light of day. I knew I would die in prison and a lot of jailhouse lawyers helped me. And just it didn't happen because financially I was not able to do a lot. If you hadn't, Gavin Newsom was sentenced me under exemplary programming. Obviously I did a good program. I've done over a hundred and fifty years for other groups and I facilitate. So I worked my way out. But you got documentation in there that's probably twenty or thirty years old. It doesn't even apply with the laws that are today.

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  People are using old documentation. The courts are rejecting them because they have the wrong paperwork. A lot of things had been happening until some of us started six oh twoing, like we need the right paperwork. We started fighting for that and we started getting it. And people are now being able to see a glimmer of hope. It's all about, for me, it's about the fight. How bad do you want it? You know, I know what I would do to throw my life away. What would I do to have my life back? You know, after I've

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  worked it out. The same energy you put into it, it's the same energy you got to put into it to get out of it. If not a little bit more.

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  Could you talk a little bit more about how you went about actually getting the correct copies of the legal code? Because that seems like just an absolute nightmare.

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  No, it is a nightmare. When I first started, I had two incarcerations, two life sentences. I just beat my second life sentences. I was a three striker first. And at that time, they didn't have a lot of paper and there was a lot of rigmarole going on because of the law was so inarticulate. We put together, um, just to please the, the people of the U.S. But not to be fair, all the way around, a lot of people were getting life sentences for slices of pizza and hot dogs and, you know, and I was one of those people. Don't get me wrong. So at that time, there wasn't a lot, a lot of legal paperwork. The paperwork was so outdated, they were giving us.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  And people started, we started filing appeals. Hey, we, we have a right to the right paperwork. How am I going to get home?

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  If I don't, I'm a fight if I don't have the right forums to fight with. Or we would, organizations would print us paperwork out that we wrote out to and they would send us the right one in. And we would make copies in our own self at ten cents a copy and put, changed the copy that they used to copy, the copy one. And the original would be in, it was a lot of scheming and scamming, but it was worth it because we were starting to go home.

• 2:06:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 03

  The paperwork was being updated, you know? They had a lawsuit because they did have the right paperwork. They really started updating then. Because we had some legal mongrels, you know, lawyers go to prison too.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  So if I'm understanding this right, are you saying that they had the right paperwork? They were just giving you the old one?

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  No, they had the wrong paperwork. So we were sending out for the right paperwork, throwing away the old paperwork and sliding the right paperwork in. The clerks that worked at the law library, we would do anything to make sure we can go home, you know?

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  I mean, but like I said, we had people who used to be lawyers. I mean, if we had waited a little bit longer, we could have had a president. I don't know. People, people are going to prison. These days, you know.

• 2:07:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  So, you know, but it was just that you had to have a will to be a success. And it took organizations like Iwok. When I was there, I needed certain paperwork and colleagues would look it up in reference for it and send it to me. You know, legal paperwork that would help us. Whether we were fighting for our jobs not paying us right, or we can't get a hold to this paperwork for us to be free.

• 2:07:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  He would send it and I would spread it like fire, you know? One sheet, I'm a clerk. I make a hundred copies hoping I don't get caught.

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  You know, it is what it is. And just trying to save lives.

• 2:07:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Speaker 03

  That was important. But I'm on this thing talking. I really want to hear Gigi's aspect because she is like so superheroish. She's a great human being and, and she fights for incarcerated inmates and she fights for labor rights. And she fights for her organization and she fights for everything. And I would really like to hear her. I haven't heard her much. I'd like to hear her side. Oh, thank you, Audra. You are incredible and I just, I just want to listen to you. Thank you. And you are, you know, the one that we are taking notes from. So thank you for everything that you do.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  And everything that you did while incarcerated and everything that you're doing now, just so, just so you know that we are all inspired by you always. Thank you. I, you know, as someone who has been in the legal field for many years, you really. The more you're around legal professionals, specifically lawyers, you learn how little they actually do. I think a lot of the times our perception of civil rights and just movement work, we think of lawyers. We think of big organizations, right, that have been, you know, those big gains in the courts.

• 2:09:21Speaker 03

  But the reality is that the real work happens on the ground, grassroots. And so in the case of our, our prisoner movement, it happens behind those bars, behind those concrete walls. And when it comes to the most vulnerable, as you kind of go down, right? In terms of how impacted folks are, there are less and less lawyers that are willing to do their work. And definitely the less that are even able to, they just don't bother, you know?

• 2:09:59Speaker 03

  And so what you really see when it comes to jailhouse lawyers is that. They said, we can't depend on these privileged class of people to fight for us, let alone free us.

• 2:10:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  So they've taken it into their own hands. And that's why it's such an honor for organizations like Iwok and, and, and our members to be able to support in that. Hands-on participatory defense model where it truly is about its understanding that. Our liberation will not come from external hands. It will come in, you know, internally, it will come from us who are impacted. And so supporting each other is what is going to make the difference. And I found so simple, but sometimes it looks like sending in a book, an article.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  Pulling up supporting evidence that someone can use, right? Doing some research and sending it in and California has the Racial Justice Act, which is opening. A pathway for a lot of folks to reopen their cases and, and have some resentencing done. And a lot of folks are, you know, being free now because of that legislation. And so, you know, how can we support in that way? But also I, I always go back to building the relationship with the folks inside. Because sometimes it looks like writing a letter of support for folks. I mean, you can tell when someone writes a letter that didn't have a relationship with the person who needs a letter, right?

• 2:11:46Speaker 03

  But the opposite is also true. You can really tell when someone actually has a relationship with that person. It comes to life, what you're writing and you feel that connection, right? So truly building those relationships, those friendships, like how you, some of our comrades. Inside I bicker with and we fight and we make up, you know, and we're there for the ups and downs and we give each other advice. And it's true friendships that we built behind those walls. And that alone is also a form of radical love and, and, and a radical part of this movement. To form those bonds with those who the system tried to bury alive.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  And circling back to, you know, jailhouse lawyers and how our incarcerated neighbors have taken. Control and, and a lead of their own defense. How important it is for us to be plugged in on the outside. To different advances or regressions when it comes to the legal system. Because oftentimes we need to recognize that to be able to ignore. Policy, to be able to ignore what's happening in the streets is a tremendous privilege. It's not impacting you. When you are impacted, you cannot ignore what's happening around you because it's happening to you, right?

• 2:13:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  And so for us, if we feel like we're not impacted, even though we are, because it's all interconnected struggle, right? But if we feel like maybe we don't need to pay attention to struggles or advancements. That could be used by people inside, then we're really privileged. And we're failing our, our neighbors inside. So I just hope that we can recognize that and understand that it is an obligation of ours to. Move through life in a way that is thoughtful of those who.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  Who could use our support and who we could empower, because they don't have the same access to that information or, or the resources. And so in, in, in many ways, that's what Iwok does and, and, and there's just something so powerful about getting out a piece of paper and pen. And writing a handwritten letter, stuffing an envelope with literature, with zines. Or sending a book inside and putting that stamp on the envelope. It feels like a material manifestation of your solidarity. Oh no, that was awesome.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  If it's okay, I'd like to dig into some details on the, the sort of state of civil rights liberalism. As we know it here in California, because I think like we, we glossed over certain things. That I'd like to clarify are not acts of benevolence on the part of the state and are in fact. Acts of just that kind of like self-glazing on their part and like things that they do to sort of pat themselves on the back and then move on. So, I mean, first of all, Audra mentioned that Gavin Newsom had something to do with her release. I just wanted to circle back to that and point out that he's also completely screwed over some of our members, like gone completely out of his way.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  To use his like, what is basically like a veto power over parole that should not exist. And it's just like.

• 2:15:15Speaker 07

  Christ.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  Set up to, yeah, create like, I mean, I mean, like this is how Gavin Newsom does everything in California. He's like, if, if I'm going to either take an action or not take an action as governor. Is there any possibility that my action or inaction could make me look bad later on the national stage to people that are not my current constituents? When I'm running for president and he always does what he thinks is going to. Create the least risk and make him look good to a national audience rather than to his current constituents. And that is pretty clearly what happened with another one of our members recently. So yeah, fuck Gavin Newsom, actually.

• 2:15:51Speaker 07

  Why does he even have the power to overrate parole? Why, why, why does that even exist? That's absurd.

• 2:15:57Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. Yeah, the, you'd have to talk to some sort of like California constitutional historian to learn that.

• 2:16:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  The other thing I want to talk about was this Racial Justice Act thing. So this is something that on its surface, it sounds really radical. So first what they did was like in 2020, when as we all know, nothing in particular was happening. They passed this law called the Racial Justice Act that was like, hey, if you're convicted. But it was like due to racial animus or like the length of the sentence perhaps, if not the conviction itself was. Due to like a racial bias, you can, you can try to prove that or, or not prove it, but like do what's called a prima facie showing, which is like the lowest level of. You know, demonstrating something in court and then we'll just like let you go based on that alone, right? So that's wow, pretty radical, right? Okay. So a couple of things.

• 2:16:48Speaker 02

  First of all, that was only from the future on earth. So that was not retroactive. Later there was outcry about that. And so they came back and were like, oh, okay. Yeah. All the people in prison now can do it too. So the thing is, this is also the kind of thing that can like overwhelm the courts, right? So like the way that this is being done in practice is like you get one shot at this ever.

• 2:17:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:17:10Speaker 02

  As I understand it and just like appeals, you, you get different amounts of appeals, I think, based on the conviction. But like, basically if you fuck it up, like you're done. Because the courts are limited in their capacity and you need to be able to move on to hear other people's thing. And of course people file. And it's it's not good. It's not done well. And like the infrastructure to violate your rights is like better funded all the time. Meanwhile, the institutions to like defend your rights are typically not publicly funded at all outside of like the courts proper. And, uh, you know, maybe there are certain government agencies in some states. But then like private civil rights attorneys are who have the option to be kind of the real civil rights defenders.

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  And they get funded based on like court fees that are like set by the the government, right? And so the government like creates these systems where, you know, the the legislature essentially has the power to decide how much money a civil rights lawyer is going to be able to get practicing civil rights law by like suing the cops and stuff. In California and probably elsewhere, it's already like been settled that like if you do a civil rights case for something happening on the street, and then you do the same civil rights case for like the same thing happening to people in prison, you're gonna make less money when it occurred in prison, basically.

• 2:18:35Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, maybe some legal person has a finer, you know, detailed, uh, analysis of that than than what I just said, but that's essentially my understanding. And I did work for for some attorneys who practice this kind of law at one point. So that is, uh, pretty egregious.

• 2:18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  And yeah, I mean, I I think that like there's there's a lot of stuff in the kind of abolitionist sphere that is really kind of like nails on a chalkboard to me. And I think a lot of other people who tend to take a more like radical, yet like radical in the long run, yet day to day pragmatic approach. I mean, one of those things is like the the nonprofit route, basically, or like the the 501(c)(3) route, where you, you know, staff up, hire a bunch of people. If you started out, you know, being in the same class as the people who are in prison, you like quickly propel yourself out of that class by doing this, uh, if you're successful. And then like things deteriorate from there as far as relationships go with people who are impacted.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  And then the other thing is like, there's this strain of abolitionists who are like, well, we're the truest abolitionists because we just believe in, um, like infinite second chances, basically. And so like, we sometimes get questions of like, how are you different from other abolitionist groups? But I would say, yeah, like, A, we're not afraid to like take people out. It's like, you behave badly, I walk like you're talking, like you're out.

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  Like, that's not the same as throwing someone in prison, although people will make that equivalence.

• 2:20:10Speaker 03

  I love this, but I do have to go. I appreciate you guys allowing me a chance to speak.

• 2:20:15Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:20:17Speaker 03

  I appreciate Collins your support. I appreciate your support for allowing us on your podcast. I would just want to say one thing. When I was incarcerated, I would write, and Collins helped me start me a little website, because I would write my emotions. I don't know if I can leak that website. Can I say what that website is in case you guys want to look at it?

• 2:20:39Speaker 02

  It's your website.

• 2:20:41Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you. It's Audra's, A U D R A S, Real Thoughts, R E A L Thoughts, with the S, dot wordpress dot com. And it it talks about my trauma, my prison life and everything. It has pictures and everything, and it would not be possible if it was not for Collins. It was my way of forming a support group from inside out. But, um, I have to go because I do have somewhere else to be.

• 2:21:09Speaker 02

  It's been great having you here, Audra.

• 2:21:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been it's been amazing having you here. I really appreciate it.

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  We love you, Audra.

• 2:21:17Speaker 03

  Gigi Collins, thank you guys so much.

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  We'll talk to you later. If you're comfortable with the Audra, uh, only if you're comfortable with it before you go, do you want to tell Mia and the audience what your third strike was, allegedly?

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  Yes, I was sentenced in 1994 for, um, sales of a $20 piece of cocaine. And I was given 25 to life plus a five year enhancement.

• 2:21:44Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 2:21:45Speaker 03

  This one, I was sentenced to 36 to life for second degree robbery. A lady say I robbed her while she was with her child. And then she recanted that story in court. I still was sentenced to 36 to life because she couldn't find her $40 that she lost.

• 2:22:05Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 2:22:06Speaker 03

  There's a lot behind it. Actually, me and my partner at the time were co-defendants. He was let off because he hadn't been in trouble in California, which was a good thing because he really was innocent. But I had to spend almost 16 years of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit. It has its pros and its cons. I'm a better human being today, not because of CDCR, but because of me and the support system that I had while incarcerated in CDC. And it just made me a stronger person. They say if it doesn't break you, it'll only make you stronger. So for anybody out there in the incarcerated world, don't give up. Because if this doesn't break you, it will only make you stronger. And you will get out because I did.

• 2:22:50Speaker 03

  And it's not always by the means that we think it will be, but when it's time, it happens. I've lived in a system longer than I've lived a lifespan as a human being. I spent more time incarcerated for little stupid things. No murders, no mayhams, no beat ups, no DUIs, no nothing, none of nothing like that.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:11Speaker 03

  Things that no one should ever see prison walls behind, but I did. And like I said, I'm I'm I was made to stronger because of organizations like you who support me. There were others, but you guys were the most impacted in my life. You came in my life like a whirlwind and you straightened everything. You helped me straighten my thoughts out in my life. You helped me in many ways because you didn't come in, get overwhelmed and take off. You stayed the long haul. Your organization is not an organization that quits. It's we're gonna get some more to help us fight type of thing going on. And there's not a lot of organizations like that. They get overwhelmed, it's too much going on, we ain't got enough manpower. You guys only had people and you were making movements.

• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  I if and I don't understand correctly, I think you guys wrote a letter for a friend and supported her through board. Now she's out in the free world, you know what I'm saying? So you guys changed lives because you don't give up on life. And for that, I hope you guys be around 100,000 years from now. And I'll always be a member. You guys have a great day.

• 2:24:16Speaker 00

  Hopefully prisons aren't around for 100,000 years, but we love you, Audra. Hell, yeah.

• 2:24:33Speaker 00

  I just want to add when I clarified like about the Rachel Justice Act, I don't want to, you know, applaud it as a victory of the system. Like, they're not really victories when the system still exists, right? But Yeah. I just want to say that it is still our duty to know when we can find those little kind of avenues for some momentary reprieve for some people. And that can look like some creative ways during COVID. We actually created hundreds of pockets for incarcerated folks so that they can actually file some tax documents and get their stimulus check. Oh. Which was major, right? So a ton of people were able to get their stimulus checks while incarcerated.

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  Do you know how far that went?

• 2:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Speaker 02

  So it's just like those kinds of creative ways, you know? We often think, you know, we drive past a coffee shop and we think, oh, yeah, my mom loves that coffee shop. We just hope that if we can make these connections with incarcerated neighbors, then we can, you know, as we're going through the world on the outside, we also make those connections. Like, oh, you know what? Stimulus checks? Oh, you know what? How do we get our incarcerated comrades to get those too, right? Making those connections with the people that you build bonds with, um, it's it's really important.

• 2:25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can I go on a rant that covers most of the notes that I have that I haven't covered yet?

• 2:26:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, go for it.

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  Okay, thank you. Prison organizing is tremendously popular with people in prison. And a lot of people on the quote unquote left or just with humanitarian sentiments on the outside are really great at, you know, encouraging us and being like what You're doing is awesome and kind of giving us that like moral support, which does help. And also, you know, subscribing to our newsletter and and sometimes doing phones apps and stuff like that. But generally, it is tremendously difficult moving people from passive to active support in this kind of organizing. Typically, I think there is that kind of out of sight, out of mind factor going on for a lot of people.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  And I think there are organizing avenues out of that, that I think we are, you know, always exploring new, new ways to kind of try and make those connections i- in an experiential kind of way, rather than just like, have you thought about how these things are connected, but like actually making it like real for people, you know? But uh, we have just found that like the most stalwart steadfast people in this struggle, for the most part, are people, you know, directly impacted by it, are people who've been to jail and prison.

• 2:27:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  Or who have like close family members who are often currently there or were recently there. And so, you know, we'd love, we'd love to hear from you. If that's you in particular, we'd love to hear from you, love to plug you in. Um, we are speaking, you know, from California, but again, uh, the organization exists across the United States and uh, and aspirationally, Canada as well and, and the UK. And there are also other prisoner solidarity organizations with a similar orientation. So it's not like we're doing something totally unique and unheard of here. There's something called GG slash VO in Germany, which is also like a union for prisoners. And I want to say there's pretty similar stuff in Spain too, associated with the anarchist movement there.

• 2:27:59Speaker 02

  In the United States, I think people are probably pretty familiar with like political prisoner support or like support committees for groups like the Minnesota fifteen or the Prairieland defendants and situations like that. And that's really valuable and really important and no movement that like doesn't look after its people when they're in prison, like is a serious movement that will go anywhere at the end of the day. So that work really, really matters. And I think that when people hear us as I walk, repeat one of our mottos that like all prisoners are political, they don't quite necessarily get the analysis there. I mean, for one thing, like, you know, I'm gonna give the, the spiel from the ground up, I guess, for a second, like crime is an artificial category.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Like what a conviction says on paper is not like reflective necessarily of what really happened. And there has yet to be, I think, some really damning like study about this, just because there just hasn't been a study. But it is widely understood that like essentially all women in prison have suffered some kind of abuse in their lives. And almost all of the women in prison for murder murdered an abuser of either themselves or their kids or both.

• 2:29:12Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:29:13Speaker 02

  And in my book, that ain't a crime.

• 2:29:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Speaker 02

  But GG, maybe if she's, uh, if she wants to, can talk about how narrow the self-defense rule actually is. And this is something that is like a popular myth that like the self-defense rule is actually really wide. And like, if you know someone's coming to kill you, you can kill them first and it's not murder. Absolutely not true. I actually had a manager at a job, he was doing a, a training on something completely unrelated, I assure you. And he was just sort of going off and he was like, and he was this fucking macho prick, right? Obviously, uh, based on what I'm about to say. But like, he was like, oh yeah, like if someone attacks you in the middle of nowhere, you should just like,

• 2:29:56Speaker 02

  kill them if you have the chance. And then there's only one story being told. And I was like, yeah, so that would be murder. And he was like, well, not if they attack you first. And I'm like, yeah, it, it is actually. You know, like if there's just a body and you're like, yeah, you attacked me, like you should not assume that you will just get away with that. Like that is not how things work at all.

• 2:30:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  Uh, GG, do you wanna elaborate on the self-defense rule and what, what it is versus what people think it is?

• 2:30:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so it's really important for us to understand that our legal doctrines in the United States are created to have loopholes for those in power and to be very convoluted and impossible to benefit from for those who are at work. So when it comes to the self-defense doctrine, we actually have seen that it is disproportionately unavailable to uh, victims of uh, domestic and intimate partner violence. Uh, we have seen it disproportionately unavailable to black and brown men,

• 2:31:06Robert Evans?

  to trans and non-gender conforming uh, neighbors. And a big part of that reason is because a complete self-defense claim has six really important elements. Um, you know, you cannot be like the first aggressor. There's distinctions between the use of deadly versus non-deadly force. A reasonable belief that the level of force that you use was necessary to protect yourself. But also this concept of proportionality, right? We've seen that absolutely impact, um, and I'm, and I'm using DV cases because of this kind of concept of imminence, right?

• 2:31:51Robert Evans?

  So if someone was being abused for a long time by their partner or their spouse and, you know, our psychology as humans, our psyche sometimes, you know, sometimes we snap, right?

• 2:32:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:32:08Robert Evans?

  If you didn't snap in the moment as a reaction to, you know, being harmed in that moment, right? If your brain didn't make the proper calculation, that defense is not available to you, right? There's so many, unfortunately, uh, bars to actually being, being able to claim self-defense in a successful way. And it's very intentional, unfortunately. It was intentionally designed that way to avoid the most vulnerable from using it. For example, there's this kind of concept of perception of threat, right?

• 2:32:52Robert Evans?

  Along with proportionality, right? So if someone is taller or maybe physically larger than their abuser, then there's this concept that, well, is your abuser actually a threat to you?

• 2:33:07Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:33:08Robert Evans?

  Right? Um, and so there's just so many ways in which the law has not actually caught up with

• 2:33:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Robert Evans?

  our new knowledge when it comes to the psychological effects of living with intimate partner violence. The impact that it has on our reaction times, right? On the cycles, on the challenges for many survivors to be able to even compile long-term proof of abuse.

• 2:33:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:33:37Robert Evans?

  Et cetera. Right? We can go on endlessly. And so unfortunately, I think it's just a, a reflection of our legal system, again, just created to bar those most vulnerable from any protection. Um, and it's really just there so that those who have the resources and those who have the control of social norms, right? Those like young white men who have been perceived by juries as kind and innocent, right?

• 2:34:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse.

• 2:34:15Robert Evans?

  Exactly, right? That's who our laws were designed to protect, not our individuals. And so that's just tie into our understanding of incarceration in this country and how it's truly not a reflection of what really happened. Um, it's, most of the time it's void of context and it's just outright unjust.

• 2:34:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there are a couple of resources, I think, for people to check out if you're more interested in this. I mean, one question is like, how many people are in prison right now who are straight up innocent? And the straightforward answer is, we have no idea. And, you know, as a rule, we just tend to take prisoners' word on stuff. I mean, what everyone else does is just take the cops' word on stuff, frankly, including the news oftentimes.

• 2:35:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:35:03Speaker 02

  A big part of what we do is we are available to give comment to journalists when possible around certain jail and prison disturbances or, um, you know, actions that, uh, people in prisoner jail have taken to defend themselves against, you know, quote unquote, the law. Uh, the people, you know, torturing them essentially.

• 2:35:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:35:26Speaker 02

  Because oftentimes, you know, local news in particular will just be straight up stenographers for whatever the police press release is. I mean, they'll often also just refer to things as riots that are not.

• 2:35:38Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  Like if people sit down and like refuse to leave the, um, lunch area or like the, you know, like the central sitting area, they will refer to that as like a riot, even if no one is like throwing punches.

• 2:35:53Robert Evans?

  And just to sort of circle labor, if you refuse to work, you get punished for it. It's not necessarily optional, right? It is absolutely a flavor, not just because of the

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  Conditions and because of the, you know, poor payment, basically lack of payment, right? But because you are forced to work or you get punished. And sometimes it goes on your record that could actually impact you for any kind of parole opportunities, et cetera. So it is punitive, it is exploitative, and it is nothing more than slavery.

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, to also touch base on, yeah, like the, the fact is it's slavery. I think that's like, we and other organizers have done a pretty good job, I feel like, of like getting that fact into the mainstream and being like, yeah, like this is slavery, like, period, end of sentence, it is legally and materially slavery. And now we're entering this process in which states like Colorado, for example, are passing laws that's like, yeah, so we're just like abolishing this slavery thing. And it's like, it's like the apparatus to deprive people of their rights has not itself been disempowered in any way. And so they're just like waving a wand over this system of slavery, being like, it's not now.

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  Like, okay, you know what I mean? So like when we demand, you know, abolish the thirteenth, it's like, that's like kind of a long term, like strategic, like legal demands, but just because a state like, I, I feel like this is being recuperated into the kind of like self congratulatory, you know, like, like faux civil rights, like liberalism at this point, because like, states are like abolishing their version of the thirteenth and then being like, cool, our work here is done. Oh, but you didn't do anything actually, right? And Colorado, in fact, still forces people to work in their prisons and it is illegal technically, but like, it ain't quite as illegal as, you know, it ain't the same type of illegal when

• 2:37:53Speaker 02

  the state is doing it, right? The state is not in fact bound by its own laws and practice. Yeah. And I mean, also juxtapose like everything that Gigi just said about self-defense with like the excuses that cops are allowed to give when they shoot people out of, out at random. Yeah. Uh, right? It's like, oh, well, the standard for a human, uh, being, you know, killing another human being is it has to be like in mutual combat, like you have to be using proportionate force, da, da, da, da, da. Whereas like a cop can just be like, well, I, I kind of thought that he was holding something or whatever. So, yeah, and as far as organizing goes, um, I mean, people, I just want to say, people take lots of action. So a lot of the, um,

• 2:38:36Speaker 02

  form that our organizing takes is like, we establish ourselves as a presence. We have our incarcerated members. They give us information about what either they or other groups of people are doing. Other people on the outside know about us. They give us information about what's going on in places and we are kind of known as like the prison labor organization that like does stuff around those. And there really isn't, as far as I'm aware, a kind of organization that like does that direct support specifically around, uh, labor issues anywhere else, uh, in the United States, again, outside of the local level perhaps. So, yeah, what we do is we pressure the prisons and jails to give in to the prisoners' demands and they're not necessarily going to like, be like, oh, well, now that we've heard from the public, we will do all the demands.

• 2:39:19Speaker 02

  But like you heard the list of stuff that we read off about the Fresno jail, like that was a surprising list of stuff and they weren't actually striking or anything. And so oftentimes because of the power imbalance, it does sort of just make more sense for us to just pressure the prison directly, regardless of whether there's a strike or not. But people do go on strike in prison and do work slowdowns in prison and all that kind of stuff. And it helps to have an outside, like buffer and like support team and like a, a relational network of support, just like it does with other workers, right? Like building that kind of network of mutual aid and respect and support is what makes more action possible.

• 2:40:02Speaker 02

  And so that's what we kind of seek to do. And prison solidarity is something that is also not one directional. You know, you probably got a sense of this, you know, in the snippets with Audra, but we learn a lot from our inside members. We learn life-changing lessons from our inside members a lot. And they learn from us too, but we always tell new members, like, especially, you know, if they don't have a lot of experience with prison or whatever, it's like, do not approach this or from like a paternalistic standpoint, like, Yeah. Yes, they have a lot to learn, but so do we. And relationships and lessons go both ways. And also like prison admins are just incredibly vulnerable to public scrutiny. Like we, we heard how bad things are there and it's like,

• 2:40:43Speaker 02

  they don't want people knowing this, like they have just skated by on like the kind of general Reagan eighties vibe of like, oh yeah, this is actually part of the punishment. Like this entire time and like that is still their mindset. It's like, yeah, this prison isn't supposed to be fun. What do you mean? We need to give people toothpaste. Like that is still like their attitude to the T. And we need to intervene in that because that's really terrible, actually. Yeah. And, you know, this is authoritarian country, like straight up for the less wealthy half of the population. And this is like a huge part of that. And we can't just like not challenge the prison system and then do like radical

• 2:41:23Speaker 02

  organizing of any other kind and be like, yeah, we can just ignore this prison thing. It surely will not come to eat us at any point, right? There's also this kind of myth of like labor as rehabilitation, which is just like a, you know, kind of Calvinist sort of, you know, humbug. But it's like, you know, we've already established that a lot of people in prison didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. But like for those who did, well, you have no within whatever immortal framework you're using. Like if you're, if you're someone who like goes around causing harm, how is like performing labor gonna make you not that person? It's not. They're just producing surplus value, right? Yeah. So that's total bullshit. And, uh, and it's also, you know, it's just kind of like this, this old fashioned eighteen hundreds logic of like whorehouses and shit, you know, like make them work. It'll

• 2:42:08Speaker 02

  make everything better somehow. And as for being sued, like we, we know that the prisons hate being sued. The people who really sue them the best oftentimes are jailhouse lawyers. And we know that they hate that because like they will straight up try to have those people killed. Jesus. Not only will they try to have those people killed, they will try to have any kind of prison staff or guard that like grows a conscience and is like, yeah, this thing that we did is kind of fucked up. Like, I can't say with certainty, but like those people have died under suspicious circumstances. Just to contextualize it, like the prison admins fear public scrutiny like so much and whenever we do something like this that is like sustained and like strategic and involving a lot of participation, which it's

• 2:42:49Speaker 02

  unfortunately not always, and we need to work on that and that is part of building a like staunch support base, right? Is doing these distributed actions in a way that is like really sustained. So, you know, we communicate with specific people and apply a pressure to the institution directly without going through any kind of like proper channels necessarily, which tend to just do nothing. But doing this, we have stopped, uh, jailhouse lawyers from being killed. We have gotten firefighters at the Central California Women's Facility, their time credits, which the prison was like dragging their feet on giving them to the extent that like it was actually going to affect when they

• 2:43:32Speaker 02

  got out, like they were having like six months of time that they like weren't applying like eight months from like their current get out time, you know what I mean? Jesus. And so we fixed that. Um, we have gotten multiple people like real medical care as opposed to like fake medical care. There was actually a kitchen strike that we didn't, we didn't directly support just because it like happened too quickly. Like I just, I think I gave some like advice, but that was about it. And like, they just like stopped paying them. Like in California, you're supposed to make like eight cents an hour or whatever. And they just were like, we're just not gonna pay you your eight cents anymore. But eight, eight cents an hour is too expensive for you as a prison. Fuck it off. God. Jesus Christ. I hate these people.

• 2:44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is just the nature of exploitation. It's like they're always just trying to like, oh, we've gotten away with a million things. Let's get away with a million and one things. Yep. You know, like it's, it's, it's the nature of, of oppression and exploitation, right? But yeah, so they struck and they won back their eight cents an hour. And there was a slowdown that you can read about in Prism Reports, uh, which is like a movement news outlet where people did a slowdown, people that were producing like the, the boxers for other prisoners, I believe, did a work slowdown about two years ago, eighteen months ago or so. And this was just to get access to the commissary. So like they were making good money by like prison standards.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  But like the commissary closed while they were still working and so they couldn't spend their money. Oh, but Jesus Christ. Yeah. And so they did a slowdown to like fix that. This was part of California Prison Industries Authority, which like is the manufacturer of oftentimes first resort for like all kinds of like furniture and other supplies for the state of California, including the UC system. And this is often the case with other states as well. And we also just are disseminating helpful info all the time, like with that legal info. It's like, if you show up with like a bunch of like radical literature and like some legal info, it's like a punk show, people are like, why you have legal info? That's boring as hell.

• 2:45:34Speaker 02

  But like in prison, it's like, yeah, you're gonna find some people interested in radical info and like that stuff. People are interested in it too. But like the legal info is what people really want because it is more practical. It's like, you know, we, of course, we distribute information about the I W W and about solidarity, unionism and, and, uh, you know, feminism and all kinds of other stuff, you know, the Black Panthers, you know, the whole nine. But like what people really do want, because it's the most practical, is like, how do I sue the prison? How do I legally hack my way out of this beast? And like it works. And a lot of our best and like brightest, uh, outside members who were once inside members, like they didn't just wait for their sentence to expire. They like had to file grievances and like

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  take every opportunity to like be the prison's worst op to the point that the prison was just like, just up the fuck out already, like enough of this person. Yeah. So, yeah, that's most of what I got. How can people support y'all and get involved more?

• 2:46:34Speaker 01

  So definitely folks should visit us at incarceratedworkers.org. And we will provide those links and definitely sign up for our newsletter where we give some.

• 2:46:43Speaker 02

  Updates on what's happening inside in a safe way to protect our members inside and their organizing work. But also hear about, you know, work happening across the country and across the world as well. I would also, I guess, just add that we really want labor unionists and healthcare workers and lawyers and law students and researchers to plug into our website, because there are spaces just, oh, and reporters and journalists, I should say as well, to plug into our website because there are spaces for just them. This doesn't mean that we don't want other people signing up too. But those professions, I think in particular, you know, and educators also are not, have a lot of impact

• 2:47:26Speaker 02

  and like a lot of relationships, direct and indirect to the system, that we want to kind of zero in on and do something with. And the website elaborates on that. If you're addicted to Instagram, you can follow us there at incarcerated workers and also at S A underscore I walk for California. But if you're not, then good for you. And instead, you should sign up to our email newsletter. Uh, yeah, I will leave it at that. In short, let's burn it down. Amazing. Now, before we go, I want to mention something extremely important that we'll be covering in more detail in a later episode,

• 2:48:07Speaker 02

  which is the planned 2027 National Prisoners Human Rights Strike, planned to run from May 8th to Juneteenth in 2027. We're going to talk more about this in a later episode and get more of the history of the 2016 and 2018 prison strikes that I walk and jailhouse lawyer speak, who we're gonna be reading a statement from in a second, we're involved in. But for now, I'm going to close this episode by quoting the statement released by jailhouse lawyer speak. Why we strike? A political storm is sweeping through many prisons across the nation as the prison class plainly see the hidden mechanisms of a system designed to dehumanize the imprisoned population.

• 2:48:51Speaker 02

  For too long, many of us were kept in the dark about the machinery behind our confinement, how law enforcement, district attorneys, politicians and judges win elections on platforms of mass imprisonment, and how private interests and rural economies profit off our bed counts. Our captive bodies are weaponized through prison-based gerrymandering, where our numbers are used to swell the political power and draw federal funding into rural districts, all while stripping us of any voter representation. Through these exceptional clauses, the prison class is relegated to conditional citizenship, a status where constitutional rights are granted at the pleasure of the state.

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  When officials can openly discuss transferring imprisoned citizens to foreign prisons without constitutional barrier, it is because these exception clauses have already stripped the prison class of the full protections of citizenship behind the razors. This legal disenfranchisement is paired with the reality of living in unventilated boiling cells during climate extremes, enduring endless so-called staffing shortage lockdowns ordered by prison crats, watching militarized roundups in ICE detention centers, and seeing poor people funneled into plea deals simply because they cannot afford cash bail or paid legal defense. The trap extends beyond the walls.

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  Thousands on thousands of people in prison who meet the basic parole requirements are repeatedly denied parole by arbitrary boards citing, quote, "the nature of the original crime," end quote. A static reason that never changes solely to maintain prison bed quotas. Even upon release, the carceral state traps formerly imprisoned people under supervision, debt, electronic surveillance, ankle monitors, and restricted probation and parole systems that serve as a revolving door back to a cell. The core demands. While the full 10 national demands remain active, strike organizers across committed states are focusing on three core demands. One, end legalized slavery.

• 2:50:55Speaker 02

  Repeal the exception clause of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This is the clause that allows slavery as punishment in prisons. Two, restore voting rights. Repeal exception clauses such as Section 2 of the 14th Amendment that strip voting rights from confined citizens, pretrial detainees, and former felons. Three, free all the political prisoners in U.S. prisons.

• 2:51:22Speaker 02

  Thank you all both for doing this work and for fighting this fight and for being on this show. And I hope we all go out into the world and fight for workers everywhere, wherever they may be. And I'm sorry.

• 2:51:42Speaker 04

  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 and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:52:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:52:22Speaker 03

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

• 2:52:28Speaker 01

  Stories of survival.

• 2:52:30Speaker 03

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

• 2:52:37Speaker 01

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

• 2:53:02Speaker 07

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

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

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

• 2:53:15Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 2:53:18Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 2:53:19Speaker 05

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

• 2:53:27Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 2:53:28Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:53:34Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 2:53:35Speaker 05

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

• 2:53:43Speaker 04

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:53:45Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:53:55Speaker 04

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

• 2:53:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:54:09Speaker 03

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

• 2:54:21Robert Evans?

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. Who'd we do? This episode, we're covering the week of August 12th through August 19th.

• 2:54:40Speaker 07

  So I guess I'll start with, I've seen reports ICE is using parked vehicles, I guess, as staging points for cameras. And I have seen videos of what appear to be license plate flippers on ICE vehicles. If you're not familiar, right, like, there has been lots and lots of reports of ICE agents, like, manually changing license plates. This just appears to be a device that goes whoop, rotates 180 degrees, so you've got two license plates available. A lot of the pictures, we saw a man being, I'm not sure if he was arrested or just harassed for saying, like, why don't you have a license plate on your vehicle? Why don't you have a license plate on your vehicle? And it very much appears that that vehicle had a license plate flipper on the front. Secondly, CBP is pausing all construction in Big Bend.

• 2:55:23Speaker 07

  This is according to Rodney Scott, who's the CBP commissioner, who says he is personally on his way there to conduct a, quote, "personal evaluation." It's entirely unclear, like, what that means and what are the criteria for this evaluation, right? Like, there are dozens of laws, treaties, and regulations that cover the kind of thing that they are doing and the place that they are doing it, and they have waived all of them. So this is what we get now, right? We get Rodney Scott going on a plane and just, like, giving it the, like, the imperial thumbs up or thumbs down, like some kind of Roman emperor, I guess. Like, this is a thing that wouldn't fly in, like, a hereditary monarchy like the UK, right? Where we now have one person making this choice that everyone will have to live with forever.

• 2:56:06Speaker 07

  They are destroying a place, which is beautiful, and it, one of the places that has not been ruined by capitalism and the state, one of the few large areas of public land in Texas. So I will keep you updated on what Rodney Scott decides to do. I will probably do an episode on my other show, Natural Causes, about Big Bend soon. And then finally, I guess, as we're talking about border wall stuff from me, people are conducting a tree sit in a cottonwood tree in Arizona. The cottonwood tree, it's a very old cottonwood tree, sometimes called grandmother tree. These people are trying to protect it from being destroyed due to border wall construction. They've been sitting in that tree for several weeks now. I will eventually go visit them. I was gonna go visit them, but I went to Spokane when those fires struck instead.

• 2:56:51Speaker 07

  They have been joined by someone on the Mexican side. So now there are two tree sitters making this the first international tree sit that I am ever aware of.

• 2:57:00Robert Evans?

  That rules.

• 2:57:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, it's great.

• 2:57:02Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah.

• 2:57:03Speaker 07

  Well, like, trees don't know borders, right?

• 2:57:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:07Speaker 07

  As I highlighted in my, my other podcast, Natural Causes, the U.S. left really fucked up when NAFTA came in by not saying, if you're going to try and pay people less in Mexico, then we will try and organize people in Mexico, and together we will demand dignified wages and conditions. I'm glad that people are not taking that approach anymore because that didn't get us anywhere.

• 2:57:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:27Speaker 07

  I'll keep covering the situation there as well.

• 2:57:30Speaker 02

  So, speaking of, I guess, the long-range effects of NAFTA, Kospi, which is the Korean stock index, hit its circuit breaker, which is the breaker that hits if you lose too much percentage of the stock market's value, again on Wednesday. I genuinely have lost count of the number of times that it has been triggered over the past few months. This has become a regular occurrence in one of the largest and most important stock markets in the world. This time, it was fueled by a collapse of tech stocks and the Brent crude index hitting 90. $30 a barrel. We will be getting into some more of the impacts of that later. I don't know. My guess is that it's going to rebound as everyone buys the dip tomorrow. But any one of these could be the one where it doesn't rebound.

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  And we will let you know whether the global economic collapse is on.

• 2:58:18Speaker 07

  Yay. Yeah. What, what happens if there's not a rebound? What is that gonna look like?

• 2:58:24Speaker 02

  Uh, everyone's fucked.

• 2:58:27Speaker 07

  No, I mean, like in terms of like, what is your expecting cascade of events if that goes down?

• 2:58:31Speaker 02

  Oh, I, the entire global economy goes under because the Korean stock market right now is basically a kind of tragedy as far as version of the American market where most of the, almost all of the value is congealed into these three.

• 2:58:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, AI.

• 2:58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, three, three companies like that. Yeah, basically make AI chips, right? And then the rest of the value down the chain is people doing weird gambling stuff on different AI components. If the market just actually crashes, that is those three companies and, you know, we're talking like Samsung here, right? These are vital components in the entire AI. I mean, not just the AI sphere, obviously. These, this Samsung, right? Like, we're talking about, you know, things that are vital components.

• 2:59:10Speaker 07

  The big tech companies.

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. In like all of the manufacturing of like tech all over the world. If that stuff goes down, that takes the American markets with it. That takes all of, all of the global markets that are reliant on these AI surges go with it. And that's kind of just the beginning of the popping of the tech bubble.

• 2:59:28Speaker 07

  Yep, yep, yep. I just wanted to get to that because it's like, uh, it is, it is this mirror of exactly what's gone on in the United States. But I guess the big difference is that so far, the obvious signs of trouble in South Korea have not set off alarm bells in, at least in American investors to the extent that you might expect, but I, I'm sure.

• 2:59:48Speaker 02

  There's, there's been some, like, it tends to be the other way around where Cosby tends to kind of be following the American markets, but there have definitely been days where like, because of the time difference in Korea, all of the American investors wake up to watch like 10% going down, like 10% of the value of the Korean stock market disappearing in one night. And then that like lowers American stocks and then Trump says something about the war ending and it goes back up again. So there has been some notice of it, but our grand collective delusion to maintain the functioning of capitalism continues.

• 3:00:19Speaker 07

  Great. Good, good, good. On Tuesday, there was a GOP debate for the South Carolina US Senate special runoff election. So it's a special election and a runoff. And in this debate, sister of the fallen Lindsey Graham, Darlene Graham, could not answer a pretty rudimentary foreign policy question because it is not her area of expertise. Let's take a listen.

• 3:00:49Robert Evans?

  Senator, are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States? If so, why?

• 3:00:58Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?

• 3:01:00Robert Evans?

  Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States? And if so, why or how?

• 3:01:08Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna be honest here. I'm not on national security that, I'm not that informed on national security. So, but I do support the military. My brother was in the air force for 33 years, so I will do everything I can to support the military.

• 3:01:28Speaker 07

  Great stuff, great stuff. You know what? Honesty. That's what we need in politicians is honesty.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  I love, I love hereditary seats. This is an amazing feature of, of what is supposed to be a representative democracy. It's so good.

• 3:01:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know shit about fuck, but I love the army.

• 3:01:47Speaker 07

  That's incredible. No, she, she later goes, it goes on to literally say it's on her quote unquote area of expertise. Uh, but just talks about how regardless, she will always support the US military. It's, it's, it's astounding. Lindsey Graham rolling over in his grave. So that is Darlene Graham, sister Lindsey Graham, who is facing Republican Ralph Norman in this runoff election, the winner of which will then face the Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews for this general election in November to replace Lindsey's seat. Pretty cool.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  God, I hope she wins the primary. I, I want to see more of this.

• 3:02:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. This will be highly amusing if nothing else. Oh, man. I want to briefly mention some new information regarding the federal investigations into anti ICE protests in the Twin Cities, based on some newly released court documents. This was first reported in the New York Times and I have read through the like 30 page motion filed by the defense that unveiled these documents and a number of the 30 some exhibits. And I'll report on this in full probably next week with its own episode. But I do want to discuss with the group here a little bit. So four days after CPB killed Alex Preddy, DHS opened investigation into labor unions

• 3:03:13Speaker 07

  and left wing activist groups that they thought were involved in funding the anti ICE protests and quote, "providing material support to violent opportunists," unquote. This HSI investigation amounted to a massive spying operation called Operation Puppet Master and later Operation Whipple Shield. God, I hate these people. Whipple is the name of the federal building that was at the heart of a lot of the protests in, in the Twin Cities. And these operations ended up probing three years of financial records from organizations

• 3:03:54Speaker 07

  like Sunrise Movement, the Communication Workers of America, and the Healthcare Union, SEIU, as a part of a quote unquote, "financial investigation into quote unquote, domestic terrorist financing." And I think it's really important to point out here is that this three year time span of, of, of documents extends far beyond the time span of Operation Metro Surge and the protests, right? This, this, this, this is not a probe into, into financing specific protest groups responding to ICE. This is just a, a general dragnet into labor unions, into left wing nonprofits, environmental groups, a racial justice activist group in the area. Like this is, this is a huge probe. They're looking into Venmo transactions.

• 3:04:39Speaker 07

  They're requesting bank records. Like this is a massive probe of like the, the interior of like some very major national unions.

• 3:04:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's interesting when, when you look at who they're looking into, right? Because it's, it's a really, really wide swath, like across the political spectrum of the left. Like SEIU, like obviously there are like locals of SEIU that like do good work, but like nationally, SEIU is not like a radical organization, right? Like, yeah, of the major unions. This is like an extremely, extremely milquetoast union, right?

• 3:05:15Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I guess context with SEIU particularly would be that they arrested David Huerta in, uh, in Los Angeles in June of last year, right? Who's union leader.

• 3:05:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:24Speaker 07

  And I know because Alex Preddy was a healthcare worker, SEIU is a healthcare union. Like I, I went to like a solidarity protest to put together by a bunch of different unions in New York City, following the death of Alex Preddy.

• 3:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38Speaker 07

  It's interesting that the federal government picked up on that sort of union solidarity and then started investigating it.

• 3:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:46Speaker 07

  And I think that is, that is really telling.

• 3:05:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Part of what I'm getting at here is like, they're just going after everyone who's even like tangentially involved in, in these protests, right?

• 3:05:55Speaker 07

  Yeah. The way the state sees this is they're incapable of organizing like spontaneous and like horizontal solidarity or seeing that, right? They understand, yeah, SEIU folks showed up in New York where Garrison is. And I think they're not called the AFT in Minneapolis. Maybe they're called the Federation of Educators or something like that. MFE looks like, yeah, like another union, right? For educators evidently and 5051 and some more explicitly socialist and leftist groups showed up against ICE, showed up in solidarity after Alex Preddy was killed. And the way the state sees this is therefore they are nationally and vertically integrated. And someone is pulling the strings and paying the funds, not like they are fucking mad.

• 3:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, it's like the way that they see it is like, yeah, like SEIU National has like handed down like the riot orders. It's like, no, no, SEIU like.

• 3:06:45Speaker 07

  But she's right. Like that is how they understand it.

• 3:06:47Speaker 02

  It's like time traveling militants from the 1970s kidnapped SEIU's leadership and held him at gunpoint and said, "We will let you go if you order mass riots." They still wouldn't do it. Like, that's not, that's not what this is, but.

• 3:06:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:07:00Speaker 02

  The feds have a hammer and they're trying to hammer down every single thing that even vaguely looks like a nail.

• 3:07:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:07:05Speaker 02

  So they can do sort of the, the broadest and widest ranging repression that they can deal with.

• 3:07:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. And we have like an example of how HSI is envisioning this sort of conspiracy, like what we're talking about, because as a part of the new exhibits that were released to the public, we have this slide that was sent to grand jurors for the indictment, which we'll soon talk about that targeted, you know, 15, 15 protesters. The grand jury was shown this slide that is labeled "The Conspiracy", that has about 15 different organizations with, all with arrows pointing towards Direct Action Minnesota, DAM, which is the protest group that the government alleges the, the 15 people indicted were involved with in some way.

• 3:07:54Speaker 07

  I, I want to read through some of these organizations that are part of this conspiracy. Conspiracy diagram. There's the Monarcha Rapid Response Line. There's Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club, Red Pine Revolutionary Collective, SCIU 26, Showing It For Racial Justice, Socialist Alternative, Veterans For Peace, Whipple Watch, Workers Solidarity Circle, AFL-CIO, Black Cat Workers Collective. It's all of it. The Democratic Socialists of America, The Grease Pit, which is a local bike shop. Hell, yeah. Left jab, Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59, Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Minnesota ICE Watch,

• 3:08:37Speaker 07

  and Minnesota 50501. Pretty incredible. Pretty incredible collection. And they're all supposed to be like sending like a council member. That's what the diagram has is that there's a council member. For the shadow council. That like is a part of Direct Action Minnesota that is like orchestrating all these protests. It's incredible. I love to see like Kremlinology overcoming like a DIY bike shop that opens for a few hours, a few afternoons a week. Like it's the Polit Bureau of Minnesota is populated by like bike co-ops. It's the shadow council, James. The shadow council.

• 3:09:22Speaker 07

  They're running everything. It's incredible. This is what happens when Socialist Alternative and DSA can overcome their differences and support council communism to send a member to Direct Action Minnesota High Council. Black and Red United, yeah. Yeah, it's incredible stuff. Now, of course, none of these organizations themselves have actually faced charges stemming from this investigation. But this investigation did result in 15 people being indicted on, quote, "conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer" Yeah. "for allegedly planning to block a roadway", among a few other charges against specific individuals

• 3:10:05Speaker 07

  for participating in ICE Rapid Response. So although DSA, The Grease Pit, and like SCIU are not themselves as organizations, you know, charged, this this sort of huge, like very broad investigation into into into nonprofit organizations, into electoral organizations, into labor unions, this did result in in charges against specific people, many of whom are not part of these, you know, 15 council member organizations. The defense lawyer Kevin Ryak wrote in a motion, quote, "Homeland Security Investigation's investigation extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded with no evidence,

• 3:10:49Speaker 07

  but obvious political animus that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy to violate 18 USC 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. And it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct." Yeah, it's COINTELPRO shit. Just it never ended. They're just doing it again. They've always been doing it. Yes, and part of what these new docs reveal is is much more details on like the covert surveillance of organizer meetings at libraries and churches and the way in the extent

• 3:11:35Speaker 07

  that Homeland Security infiltrated Signal chats and how undercovers tried to entice people into discussing or committing crimes. And I want to discuss that in in more detail and in its own episode, because I think that requires a a very careful focus on like how Yeah. how that actually went about, because I think that can very easily be turned into, you know, panicking or maybe overstating certain things regarding, you know, were ICE the ones actually, you know, directing all the protests against ICE? And like, no, obviously not. So I think that that requires a distinct focus. Specifically in these court documents, there's the there's a there's a reference to an undercover discussing with someone at like a Sunrise Movement meeting

• 3:12:20Speaker 07

  about getting more involved in direct actions and maybe building, quote unquote, "devices for direct actions." So like it's that kind of stuff, and I want to discuss that more in detail. But this new batch of court documents in this case has revealed a lot about about how this investigation went, how it started off very, very broad against a lot of organizations. And like what, you know, National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 wrote about, you know, looking to the finances of a lot of different nonprofit groups. But then from there, realizing that maybe they are not going to be able to prosecute all these unions for terrorist financing. Yeah. Instead, they find 15 people who are engaged in First Amendment activity that they think they could maybe, you know, turn into an Antifa boogeyman

• 3:13:04Speaker 07

  and get that past a grand jury, because you certainly could not get the rest of this shit past a grand jury. Yeah. Talking of like pushing the boundaries of the Constitution with regards to policing is a good tie in to this next piece that I have, which is to talk about the national defense areas. So the DOJ has issued a new opinion this week suggesting that military forces in the national defense areas that span much of the border can now detain people not just inside the NDA, but also those near the NDA who leave it before they have time to arrest them. And if you're not familiar with the NDA, these are areas on the border wall that have been transferred to the military and are being managed as extensions of military bases. For example, NDA Number 3,

• 3:13:48Speaker 07

  the California NDA, begins, I think, at the western edge of Ojai Mountain Wilderness, stretches all the way to the Arizona border in Imperial County. That is an extension of NAF El Centro. So it's Naval Air Facility El Centro. So that's patrolled by Marines. The New Mexico one is an extension of Fort Huachucha, and that's patrolled by the Army. There is one in Texas, which is an extension of Fort Bliss. Fort Bliss spans those two states, but that NDA goes into Texas more. The bases themselves are being extended. Therefore, the logic goes from the Justice Department that they are not violating the Posse Comitatus Act

• 3:14:33Speaker 07

  because there are recognized exemptions, they say, for military installations. So they're saying because the base is being extended to generally, but not always, it is the Roosevelt Reservation, right? Which is a 60-foot area to the north of the the physical border. But some of these NDAs span areas larger than that. They are claiming that that area is therefore exempt from PCA if the military is prosecuting or in this case arresting or detaining people for trespassing on a military installation, right? They think that the military can also enforce federal law on its installations. So by definition, anyone EWEing,

• 3:15:16Speaker 07

  EWE entry without inspection, right? So that's someone entering between ports of entry. Anybody doing that in an NDA, which is a large amount of the southern border right now, would be trespassing on a military installation, right? You can also see in this opinion, they they're like hinting at adding more NDAs soon. This is the same legal reasoning that they are using. Claim it is illegal to photograph things inside an NDA. I think this one is incredibly suspect, right? So statutory law does ban photography of, quote, "certain vital military or naval installations or equipment." But I think you'd have a very hard time arguing in court that like a pile of razor wire and some rocks is vital military equipment.

• 3:16:00Speaker 07

  But that's what they're going with, right? This is important because what we are seeing here is the Trump administration pushing at the boundaries of constitutionally what it can do. And as I've said hundreds of times on this show over the last four years, this always starts at the border and it never stays at the border, right? Everything we see with mass surveillance now has been a reality in border communities for some time. Everything we see with the increased presence of ICE, of CBP, this has been something that border communities have dealt with, right? This is this particularly violent form of law enforcement that is particularly unaccountable. If we see this at the border and they get away with it at the border, then I'm sure it will continue in other places. It doesn't take like a brain genius

• 3:16:45Speaker 07

  to to look at, for instance, what happened in Portland six years ago, right? And see how like we could edge towards the PCA Posse Comitatus Act waivers in other parts of the United States as well. And so I think this is worth keeping an eye on. And like I would like it to get more attention in reporting. Let's go into that break, and then we'll discuss, in honor of Lindsey Graham, the US military. Who we support, but we don't know where they go.

• 3:17:24Robert Evans?

  All right. There's a lot of military news this week. That ship does not look like it's doing too well. Let's, let's start with the sad boat. The sad boat. Anyone here old enough to have watched the Love Boat on Nick at Night? No, no idea. Okay. All right.

• 3:17:39Speaker 07

  Well, you didn't have that where I grew up, Robert.

• 3:17:41Robert Evans?

  Okay. That's hurtful. This is all very hurtful. Anyway, the sad boat is the USS Abraham Lincoln. How sad is this?

• 3:17:50Speaker 07

  Yeah. Why is, why is Abe sad?

• 3:17:52Robert Evans?

  Well, well, yeah. Mia, you wanna, you wanna start?

• 3:17:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, so the USS Abraham Lincoln, it's, it's actually funny because we have now reached a point where when you say the sad boat, I actually couldn't tell which of the boats you were referring to.

• 3:18:06Robert Evans?

  Cause it was the Jerry Ford before it was the Abraham Lincoln and the Gerald Ford had longer to be sad.

• 3:18:11Speaker 07

  Well, there was a, also a destroyer deploying this out trying to see where the power was out for three days.

• 3:18:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18:18Speaker 07

  So they didn't have running water. Which one was it where they were blocking up all the toilets by like, like jamming there with toilet paper?

• 3:18:26Robert Evans?

  That's the Jerry Ford and I think the Lincoln. All, all of our newest super carriers have serious issues with the, the bathroom plumbing.

• 3:18:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the primary means of First Amendment expression that is available to sailors.

• 3:18:38Robert Evans?

  They practice the two man poop over the side technique, which is an actual thing they have to do whenever the bathrooms don't work.

• 3:18:45Speaker 07

  Which it's, it's so funny reading about these ships and being like, this, this is shit from like my like slumlord fucking apartments in Chicago. They're happening.

• 3:18:56Robert Evans?

  Except for the DOD is your slumlord.

• 3:18:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, like they're happening aboard like the most, like the most advanced and expensive military in human history. Um, oh God, where, where do we even wanna start with, with the USS Abraham Lincoln? I mean, I guess, I guess, I guess we could start with the fact that they have been hanging nets over the side of, of the aircraft carrier because sailors keep trying to jump off to kill themselves, a thing that I last saw with like Foxconn factories in Shenzhen.

• 3:19:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the last time I heard that as well.

• 3:19:31Speaker 07

  Yeah. But at least in Shenzhen, to my knowledge, nobody is shitting into the nets, which appears to be from what Robert has said. You know?

• 3:19:39Robert Evans?

  The shitting would be incidental.

• 3:19:41Speaker 07

  We have covered on this show before, I, I think it was, was it Temu? I think was the one where their, their, their Chinese branch had like timers over the toilets to show how long you've been in there for. Now you say that. Would not, would not rule that out in Shenzhen as well. Good, good, good. Yeah, but this, this ship has not been getting resupplied. It has been out for significantly longer than the, the, the original planned duration. The sailors are just kind of trapped on board. Sailors who have, you know, attempted to commit suicide because they've been stuck on this fucking ship are getting like, like their careers destroyed because of this. Oh, wow. It's just a nightmare.

• 3:20:24Speaker 07

  And this is, this is running into one of the, what I guess is turning into one of the themes of this week's episode, which is that there are a whole bunch of elements of the US Navy and also of the world economy where them functioning correctly are based on the US not fighting a forever war on Iran and are based on the assumption that eventually this is going to end.

• 3:20:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:44Speaker 07

  And it's just not. And so the ship is just also just physically breaking down.

• 3:20:49Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, they're running low on all of the like necessities. Uh, and part of that is because of the success of Iran's attacks on bases, like US bases overseas and US bases in like foreign countries. Um, there was a, an article that came out just within the last couple of days on August 14th, uh, in the New York Times by John Ismay that traced a lot of the supply issues that the Abraham Lincoln's been having for its entire deployment to like, right after the first day of the war, when Iran launched a massive attack on a US Navy base in Bahrain, which destroyed a massive logistics hub that the Navy has relied on basically the entirety of the global war on terror up to the present moment.

• 3:21:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:21:29Robert Evans?

  And that's what's forced them to switch over to using Diego Garcia as a supply hub. If you remember, Keir Starmer over in the UK initially was like, no, you guys can't use Diego Garcia as a, as like the supply hub for your legal war. And then immediately changed his mind when he got threatened a little bit.

• 3:21:46Speaker 07

  Yeah. Brave as warriors.

• 3:21:48Robert Evans?

  Good stuff, good stuff.

• 3:21:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think like, uh, I mean, it's so obvious, right? That Iran, a country which like the US has been saber rattling at for decades, would very obviously have a plan of what to do in the event that the United States struck it and they, they executed their plan.

• 3:22:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, Trump, for his part, has repeatedly stated that the length of the deployment of the Lincoln and the Ford before it are not big deals. Uh, when he was asked earlier this week if carrier deployments were too long, he responded, no, no, no, not nearly long enough.

• 3:22:21Speaker 07

  See, he's really gonna get into it with Lindsey Graham's sister over this one. No, he's, it's also, she's just been very personally meddling with and fucking with a bunch of Navy stuff.

• 3:22:30Robert Evans?

  He sure has been.

• 3:22:32Speaker 07

  There's a whole kind of side drama to this story where Trump has ordered the Navy to go back to using steam catapults to like launch aircraft off of the deck of the ship, which is like a significantly worse thing than, than the electromagnetic systems that the Navy has been using. But Trump like heard that, that some pilot liked them a long time ago. And so he's been trying to force the entire Navy to do this since the first administration. And he's finally succeeded, which means you're gonna have to like refit like 40% of these ships and they're probably gonna have to design new ships because the ships are not designed around having these things and they're just going to be worse because the emperor has decided that he likes steam catapults.

• 3:23:11Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, no, no, no. There's a, there's a piece in The Guardian just about a week ago, Trump orders Pentagon to redesign US aircraft carriers to use steam catapults to launch jets.

• 3:23:20Speaker 07

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 3:23:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cause he thought the digital systems were too complicated. I had missed this in the long list of like bullshit insane military stuff he said recently. Yeah, he signed a national security memorandum directing Pete Hegseth and the acting Navy secretary to make this change. That's great. That's good.

• 3:23:38Speaker 07

  It's this astonishing combination of like, he's, he's, he's made the, the cardinal mistake that all of these people make, which is that American military and economic supremacy is premised on having the world's most expensive army and not using it.

• 3:23:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:53Speaker 07

  And now he's used it. And then also he's like doing all of this weird emperor fucking with it stuff at the same time, which is.

• 3:24:02Robert Evans?

  There's amazing quotes from this. Apparently this started back in 2017, when he told Time Magazine about a conversation that he'd had with an unnamed Navy officer. Quote, "So I said, what's this, sir? This is our digital catapult system." Trump went on, "It sounded bad to me. Digital, they have digital. What is digital? And it's very complicated. You have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out." And I said, "And now they wanna buy more aircraft carriers." I said, "What system are you going to be? Sir, we're staying with digital." I said, "No, you're not. You're going to goddamn steam. The digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good."

• 3:24:35Speaker 07

  He's also trying to get them to move the fucking control tower of the aircraft carriers into the middle of the ship, uh, according to the Washington Post.

• 3:24:45Robert Evans?

  This is beautiful stuff. I, I hope he gets his way. I hope he gets his way. It'll protect the rest of the world from us.

• 3:24:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, the rest of the world would do better if all these ships were not deployed right now. This is, yeah, outstanding.

• 3:24:56Robert Evans?

  Great stuff. Great, amazing shit. Ah, God.

• 3:25:00Speaker 07

  Very normal. This is how, uh, this is how a successful military is organized.

• 3:25:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:04Speaker 07

  I should point out that like the latest statistics on people wounded in action now suggest that there are about 700 US service people who've been wounded in this six month operation.

• 3:25:15Robert Evans?

  Allegedly, the, the Washington is coming in to replace the Lincoln. Unclear what will happen to the destroyers and also unclear when this is actually going to happen.

• 3:25:26Speaker 07

  The destroyers have to come back so they can put a mast on them.

• 3:25:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:29Speaker 07

  Because that looks more epic and a big fucking cannon, like a black powder cannon on the front.

• 3:25:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the, the, the last I heard from Trump, uh, he said that a replacement for the Lincoln is quote, "Moving right now or very shortly." And it's being replaced with another very similar ship. So that's, that's what we've got so far. It is worth noting, just in terms of a general update on the situation in Iran, that the ceasefire, that no one has really been holding to, um, has, has come to an end or is in the, in the process of coming to an end and does not look like it's going to be renewed, uh, for all of the good that that did everybody over the last 60 days or so.

• 3:26:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:26:08Robert Evans?

  The Trump administration has gone back and forth up until earlier this week. He had been claiming that he was in, that the US was in active talks with Iran, uh, but he said earlier this Tuesday that the US has not been in any talks with Iran and has no plans to start new ones. Uh, this is around the same time that he started saying that the Strait of Hormuz is open and that the US is going to take it and make it a new US territory. This has just been something he released as a series of truth posts or truths, um, including one showing a map that circled the Strait of Hormuz with the words "New US territory, Strait of Hormuz" above and below it. So again, hard to say what's gonna happen here. Other than that, oil prices are continuing to rise.

• 3:26:52Robert Evans?

  The same day that he announced that there was no, were no talks going on and that the ceasefire was not going to be extended, uh, US forces fired on a Panama flagged ship. And around the same time, Iran struck a ship as well, killing at least one sailor. Since the war began, 17 sailors have been killed in 65 attacks. Uh, most of those have been the result of Iranian strikes, but three of those deaths have been caused by a US Navy ship that struck a merchant ship in June. So sailors are getting killed all around. The USS Abraham Lincoln's probably getting rotated out. The ceasefire's over and I guess we're trying to take the strait, although it's, I mean, there's no way to know what any of this actually means or what Trump's going to do. He could announce that they've got a new ceasefire tomorrow.

• 3:27:37Robert Evans?

  Like I, it would be silly to take any of this as a final word on anything.

• 3:27:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, let me pick up on that where Robert left off. Like it does appear that in response to Trump continuing to just post insane stuff, uh, Iran has been having talks with Oman, probably talking about like joint tolling the strait, right? Which is something we've spoken about a lot on this podcast. Trump did an interview with Trey Yenks. Uh, if you're not familiar with Trey Yenks, his job is to kind of be a credulous nodding head to broadcast shit that Donald Trump says. He's the chief foreign correspondent at Fox.

• 3:28:09Robert Evans?

  Now I asked the president about these parallel talks that are taking place between Iran and Oman about control of the Strait of Hormuz. And the president told Fox News, "If Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the S out of them."

• 3:28:22Speaker 07

  That is Donald Trump threatening to bomb the shit out of Oman. A, a fantastic U-turn in United States policy. This is a wild thing for him to be saying, right? This is a country that obviously the US has had previously good relations with. Yeah, this is, this is like a CIA outpost, like. Brand new country to do to do Middle East war with. Yeah, exactly right. We've we're running out of countries. We're having to turn on our own. Trump has also claimed in the same interviews, Trey Yanks, that he has a back channel to the IRGC.

• 3:28:53Robert Evans?

  Interestingly, President Trump confirmed to Fox News that there is a back channel with the IRGC. These are the hardline officials inside of Iran and that the United States and officials in Washington are speaking directly with IRGC officials in Iran.

• 3:29:09Speaker 07

  So yeah, there he's talking about the United States negotiate directly with IRGC. I would assume like that they have had back channels in the IRGC, right? Like that is something one would assume. Yeah. This is very normal when you have two states of this size, which are frequently kind of squaring off against each other. And generally, it is something that can be used to deescalate conflict. Obviously, that ain't happening right now. It was later reported that these, and you don't have to be a brain genius to work out that these probably came through the Kurdistan region of Iraq, right? Southern Kurdistan. In related news, Iran then attempted a drone strike on Bazani. What? Yes. Wait, what? President of Kurdistan region of Iraq. Yeah, they sent two drones to Bazani's residence, I believe. What the fuck? Yeah.

• 3:29:53Speaker 07

  Sorry, I missed this. Why was this not front page? What the hell? Yes, they sent two drones to the office of the Kurdistan region Prime Minister, Masul Bazani, and the residence of the head of the Kurdistan region Security Agency. The drones obviously did not cause any casualties. I think they were intercepted. This was reported by Axios, right, that this this link between Southern Kurdistan and the IRGC back channel was reported by Axios on the 16th. And then on the 17th, Iran attempted to drone strike Masul Bazani, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Yeah, they attempted to drone strike his office and the residence of the Kurdistan region Security Agency, both in the Bill province of Kurdistan.

• 3:30:37Speaker 07

  And like this again is like I have reported extensively, I think, that Iran is bombing Southern Kurdistan and has been for some time. But this is a hell of an escalation. Yeah, try to assassinate like Bazani is like the political figure in in in this part of Kurdistan like. Yeah. And like the Bazani family has been has been a political faction powerful enough that like a lot of politics revolves around whether you're not, you're like in their client networks for a long, long time. This is this is kind of like trying to like, I mean, again, he literally is like the Prime Minister for Rocket Kurdistan. Like this is this is like attempting to assassinate a prime minister. Yeah, yeah. It's a staggering escalation, like. Bazani zited, I tweeted, Xed that it was dangerous escalation and direct threat to the security instability of the Kurdistan region. He's not wrong.

• 3:31:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. When you combine this with the US having a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, right? Like this is bad. And like, it is very clear that Iraq is continuing and even escalating its policy of punishing the Kurds for United States aggression, right? There's this perception that the Kurds and US are like always aligned. As Robert said, Iran has continued to strike vessels in Strait of Hormuz. What's interesting about this recent strike and the number of strikes that came in the days before it is that normally there has been a pattern by which the bombing relaxes. Iran strikes a vessel, the US bombs Iran, things peter out, lower intensity. Iran strikes a vessel, the US hits Iran, right? Like. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:32:08Speaker 07

  The US has not hit Iran yet in response to these most recent ones. And I think part of the reason that might be is something we've talked about before, that the United States is not capable now of doing what it did in February. Like it has significantly diminished its stockpiles.

• 3:32:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, by by an estimate around 70% plus, depending on the munition in terms of like our long range, like cruise missiles and our interceptors.

• 3:32:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's so like just to to de-jargon that for people, that's like attack and defense, right? It's your ability to hit Iran and also your ability to stop Iranian.

• 3:32:46Robert Evans?

  It's all the stuff that lets us hit Iran without endangering the lives of US airmen. And it's what allows us to defend our bases and all of the allied bases and increasingly fuel infrastructure in the region, right? And it's low enough that in part why they don't want to continue burning more, even though they have like a third or more left, is that they have to keep a stockpile in case shit goes down with China or, you know, expands with Russia, right? Like, these are our our primary weapons. With Iran, they're completely unnecessary.

• 3:33:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, or a mon. Yeah, or our new war with the mon.

• 3:33:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if we were to theoretically get into any kind of anything approaching a near peer conflict.

• 3:33:29Speaker 07

  We're not in a good spot right now.

• 3:33:30Robert Evans?

  These would be our only weapons other than nukes.

• 3:33:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I know we're going to come back to the US like a defensive procurement situation. But I do want to just point out that the the president, I don't know if this is related to the fact that gas prices are still bonkers six month into this, but he has posted an AI image of a trimmer version of himself ripping the Keystone Pipeline out of the ground with a banner reading Buried by Biden in the background. Not clear if he understands how pipelines work. What? Yeah. Your guess is as good as mine on that one. What? Like, it's, it's, it's, I mean, here, let me just drop the link, I guess. Sometimes I'll just scroll this true social page. It's, it's, it's, it's wild up in there. That is not a task for the faint of heart.

• 3:34:16Speaker 07

  No, like this is one of the things I do for work, you know, that traumatizes me. I've put it in the chat, the Zoom chat.

• 3:34:21Robert Evans?

  We don't want our oil in the ground in those pipes. We want it straight from the Strait of Hormuz in barrels.

• 3:34:29Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, right.

• 3:34:30Robert Evans?

  Like, what is he thinking? What is he thinking?

• 3:34:32Speaker 07

  The Keystone Pipeline, I should note, also has a plaque affixed to it that says Keystone Pipeline, Completely Free, Energy, Jobs, America First. No, and there. The Buried by Biden is on a gravestone. The pipeline also has some handles. Trump's kind of in, oh, we get sort of a stable wide stance there, pulling it out the ground like. It's got roots on it. I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but there are also some soldiers in the background, like underneath an American flag. So. Yeah, this is the guy who just decided we were at war with Iran and now has killed a shit ton of people over it. Yeah, I guess now the response to the war with Iran and gas prices being up is is more pipelines at home,

• 3:35:14Speaker 07

  which is sick. Like, I should add, I guess, that there is a continuing ecological disaster in the Strait of Hormuz because people keep shooting boats, which are full of fuel.

• 3:35:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:22Speaker 07

  And Iran is having to clean up these oil spills.

• 3:35:25Robert Evans?

  Well, there's also a further ecological disaster in that you have an enormous fleet of vessels that are just sitting around waiting and accumulating a huge number of different kind of like mollusks that you don't want to spread around the world that are definitely going to, and it's also getting stuff is getting sucked into like their water tanks and their, what do you want to call it, their ballast tanks and shit. That's going to get squirted out somewhere else. Like, there's a lot of potential problems.

• 3:35:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, there are some procedures for like dumping ballast and stuff, but.

• 3:35:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:54Speaker 07

  This is all the problem is, right? Everything is delayed. Every shipping company is losing money hand over fist.

• 3:36:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:01Speaker 07

  And they're going to want to get moving pretty fast on this. If the Strait of Hormuz ever opens again, and yeah, we will see more environmental damage. Like every war is an ecological disaster, but this one, that isn't getting as much reporting on. But it's great that we're bringing that home with with the Keystone Pipelines. So we'll get a little piece of that, too.

• 3:36:20Robert Evans?

  So I wanted to give an update on a story because I talked about two weeks ago, something like that, about the General Dynamics artillery shell factory in Mesquite, Texas, that was meant to by now be producing somewhere between 20 and ideally 30,000 shells a month, of specifically the kind that were being used most rapidly in Ukraine before Ukraine pivoted to using drones for a lot of stuff. I mean, they're still burning through 155s, but like that was, I mean, they incurred a shell debt of something like 3.6 million shells in the United States as a result of that. And so it's a massive issue to get these shells being produced because in any kind of modern war, we're going to be burning through a shitload of them. We have 100 something years worth of heavy artillery in warfare to know that you never have enough shells.

• 3:37:04Robert Evans?

  So this is a problem the US has been trying to get its handle on for a while. And as I noted, this factory that was supposed to be producing like a third of the total of all the shells in the United States has not produced any so far. And a few days after I discussed that on ED, Jesse Coburn at ProPublica published a beautiful investigation into that General Dynamics factory in Mesquite that that opens with just a great lead. A robot was on fire again. And it's talking about the fact that all of this factory is like filled with these because it was supposed to be meant to be heavily automated, which is why it was supposed to be able to keep up with such a high level of production. It was automated using these robots that had like giant metal arms with clamps for hands.

• 3:37:46Robert Evans?

  And because of the way they were designed, wound up soaked in oil constantly. And that oil would combust because they were moving steel blocks that had been heated to about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit into and out of a machine that also would periodically belch flame at them. And the robots were not roofed against this much flame. Per the ProPublica article, one blaze that summer melted a robot's cables, putting it out of commission for a week. Now, this series of fires in the factory came just a few weeks before Trump administration, defense officials and executives for General Dynamics, the company that made the factory, toured and threw a gala opening event there to celebrate that it was supposed to be up and running by now. Exploding robots were not the only method of uncontrollable failure that workers had documented at the factory by that point.

• 3:38:30Robert Evans?

  For one thing, the robotic arms had a tendency to flail uncontrollably and destroy equipment. They also would periodically drop heavy loads at random. The most sensitive and expensive equipment in the entire factory was a machine that was meant to stretch metal in order to make artillery shells. It cracked them nearly constantly. The factory was filled with smoke at all times and was usually over 100 degrees inside. Every description of the state of the art arms factory sounds worse than the ones that were operating in World War I. This is probably my favorite part of that article. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly, but still blocked the shaping of nearly every shell. "We didn't really have any standardized practice," said Quantel White, a former employee.

• 3:39:12Robert Evans?

  "It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night."

• 3:39:17Speaker 07

  This is Warhammer 40K. Shit.

• 3:39:20Robert Evans?

  Wirehammer 40K works a lot better than this. There would be a priest.

• 3:39:23Speaker 07

  That's true.

• 3:39:24Robert Evans?

  He'd be reading from a bible. There'd be unguents and oil. My God. Well, there's lots of oil.

• 3:39:28Speaker 07

  I love this.

• 3:39:29Robert Evans?

  Now, by last summer, which is when reports first started coming out about the difficulties the factory was having, by that point, General Dynamics had missed eight deadlines to get this thing up and running. Their factory still has yet to produce a single usable shell despite $533 million in Pentagon funds going towards refurbishing old machines and ordering new ones from Turkey. Even so, the Pentagon continues to sign contracts with General Dynamics. And two months ago, the company announced a new solution to all of their ill-fortun'd factories' many issues. Can you guys guess what the magic bullet that finally is gonna fix everything that this factory that doesn't work is supposed to be?

• 3:40:06Speaker 07

  AI?

• 3:40:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's AI. It's fucking AI. Of course it's AI.

• 3:40:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:40:10Robert Evans?

  Quote, "A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. AI-enabled capabilities and intelligence and connectivity would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories," the company's wrote. "AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets," Deterrence's CEO said in the release. "We're building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time." By the way, what that CEO said, I'll guarantee, was written by ChatGPT. The whole AI transform, that, that, that, yeah, very clearly.

• 3:40:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:40:39Robert Evans?

  "These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. What are they talking about? There's nothing to learn or adapt or scale," one said. "It's all broken."

• 3:40:47Speaker 07

  This is, God, it must have been fun writing this.

• 3:40:49Robert Evans?

  It's really fun because no one who actually works at the factory and no US military officials who are allowed to speak their minds openly have had anything positive to say about General Dynamics and how they've proceeded with this project. The article quotes a former official in an army office supervising the factory as saying, "It's an absolute disaster. The army should have gone after recovering money from General Dynamics." Yeah, no. I mean, they should have.

• 3:41:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, but, but that, but that gets the central contradiction of the American war machine, which is that the point of it is to, is to give money to defense contractors. You're not actually supposed to have to use the stuff. Like...

• 3:41:23Robert Evans?

  I should say here, General Dynamics is one of the companies most responsible for inventing that state of affairs. This is that, we're gonna talk about these folks because they keep coming up when you look into like, defense-related golduggery and fuckery and like, US history. I feel like now is probably is a good time to talk a little bit about their history. We're gonna give, I'm gonna give a brief overview of these guys because we're in an illegal war that's currently shuffling a fortune to defense contractors, and we should probably talk about one of the most corrupt members of that family. The General Dynamics Corporation was founded at the tail end of the 19th century by Isaac Leopold Rice, a businessman and a musicologist who was born in Bavaria and raised in Milwaukee. He made his fortune doing a mix of railroad law and publishing sheet music and eventually got into the electric battery and vehicle business. This

• 3:42:08Robert Evans?

  ended with him involved in submarines because early Navy subs ran on electric power when submerged. In 1899, he purchased the Holland Torpedo Boat Company and named it the Electric Boat Company. The Electric Boat Company remained a submarine manufacturer after his death in 1914, providing subs for not just the US government, but the Peruvian government, and gradually spinning up to produce other kinds of boats, including PT boats for the US and Canadian militaries. After World War II, it purchased Convair, which made anti-aircraft missiles, jet fighters, and the Atlas rockets used in the first US crude orbital flight. This new company, a mix of the Electric Boat Company and Convair, became General Dynamics. In more recent decades, General Dynamics became the manufacturers of the feared Tomahawk

• 3:42:51Robert Evans?

  cruise missile, arguably the most iconic ballistic missile in the entire US arsenal. It also kept making subs, including the famous Los Angeles Class. And as time went on, the company got really, really good at corruptly fucking US taxpayers out of their money. Investigative reporting first started shining a light on the constant cost overruns and blown budgets in a series of GD defense contracts. Per a 1985 Time article by Charles Alexander, "A federal grand jury first started investigating the company's cost overruns on submarines in 1979, but dropped the probe in 1981 for lack of enough evidence of fraud. Now the Justice Department has reopened the case in light of new information from P. Tachus Veliotis, who in 1977 became head of Electric Boat, the company's subbuilding division in Groton, Connecticut. His word is hardly unimpeachable. In 1983, he fled

• 3:43:35Robert Evans?

  to his native Greece to avoid being tried on charges of perjuring himself before a grand jury and taking 1.3 million in kickbacks from a subcontractor. Veliotis has produced tapes and company documents that he claims reveal a pattern of waste, corruption, and cover-up at General Dynamics. In a tape of one talk he had with Lewis, the chairman, for example, the chairman suggests that Veliotis reassured James Ashton, a discontented electric boat executive, that he is still in the running for a promotion in order to keep him from popping off about shoddy work at the yard." So we have all of these tapes from this equally shady dude Veliotis because nobody who's in a high position in the defense contracting industry is not constantly committing crimes. And the tapes that he provided showed several things that are very familiar to the Mesquite factory case. For one thing, Veliotis provided a 1977 tape of the company's

• 3:44:18Robert Evans?

  executive vice president, Gordon McDonald, telling him that the company had issued an impossible delivery timetable for the first Trident submarine because the CEO of General Dynamics wanted to, quote, "keep our stock price from sliding." In other words, every time that the stock price slides, you can announce, "Oh, we're about to release the Trident," and you get a quick boost on the stock price?

• 3:44:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:44:38Robert Evans?

  As a result of this kind of fuckery, the sub was not produced until two years after this date. Now, that's pretty bad, but the incident that actually sparked the first known criminal investigation of a defense contractor came in 1983, when General Dynamics tried to charge the Air Force $9,600 for a four-inch-long wrench? And there's, this revealed a bunch of, if you've ever heard stories of like, $6,000 wrenches and yada, yada, $4,000 plungers, it's General Dynamics that people are talking about. That was a real series of like, news articles and eventually congressional investigations into the fact that they were charging absurd amounts of money for bullshit. Now, part of the reason for this was that like, Navy and Air Force procurement was completely fucked in this point, and they just did not keep a backlog of like, the material they

• 3:45:22Robert Evans?

  needed to repair their shit on hand. But a lot of it was just massive rampant corruption with companies like General Dynamics in particular. Now, charges like this inspired further investigations into how GD functioned, and this eventually led to a congressional inquiry. It came out that in 1982, General Dynamics had asked the Pentagon to pay almost $19 million in overhead costs for their company HQ. These were not what you'd call unavoidable expenses. Quote, "$491,840 for Lewis's, that's the chairman's, personal flights on corporate jets, often to and from his farm in Albany. $538,781 for contributions and memberships, including country club fees for top executives, and $155 for the kindling of a dog named Firstin while its owner, a General Dynamics executive, attended

• 3:46:07Robert Evans?

  a company conference at a South Carolina resort. At last week's hearing, Congressman Dingle quizzed Lewis about a $571 charge for a king-size CertaPerfect sleeper mattress and a box spring set, which was delivered to the Clayton Inn in suburban St. Louis. "It was for Mr. Veliotis," said Lewis, who explained that the executive said he needed the bed for times he came to St. Louis for meetings, added Gordon McDonald, a General Dynamics executive vice president. "Mr. Veliotis, being a very large man, complained so much to the secretary of the company that he got tired of hearing it and bought the bed. Veliotis denied that the bed was for him." Just very funny stories consistently. When you look into like, 80's defense contractor procurement issues, specifically around General Dynamics. Now, I know what you're wondering.

• 3:46:50Robert Evans?

  How did they get away with such corruption? Well, that $19 million the US government spent on complete bullshit fees was matched with $1.24 million in the General Dynamics accountment purely to entertain Pentagon officials. In 1977, they gave a $1,125 diamond earring set to the wife of Admiral Hyman Rickover, head of the nuclear propulsion program. Now, to be fair to Hyman, the real reason they were trying to butter him up is that he had repeatedly complained about the company, but this is the kind of shit that they have been doing forever. Like, the fact that they have now spent half a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a factory that does not work is nothing new to General Dynamics. And I'm sure they've now promised to put another $200 million into the factory

• 3:47:33Robert Evans?

  and that it'll be producing 20,000 shells a month, at least, within a year. I'm sure at some point they'll get it working if they keep shoveling a bunch of money into it, but make no mistake, it will not be General Dynamics money. It will be money, one way or the other, that US taxpayers have given them, that winds up eventually maybe making this factory produce a single shell. Anyway, General Dynamics.

• 3:47:56Speaker 07

  Let's go on one more head break and then talk about bonds in Florida, I guess.

• 3:48:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:03Speaker 07

  Wild.

• 3:48:13Speaker 07

  Speaking of unbelievably corrupt bullshit that is directly tied to the American war efforts in Iran. Okay, so, bonds are not normally an extremely exciting topic. So let's start off with the glaring part, which is that early this week, the yields on US Treasury bonds, specifically 30-year T notes, hit highs not seen since 2007, several weeks before the collapse of the American stock markets. It is also noted by several analysts that the other times that we've seen peaks like this were like, 1939, right before that. And I, I think there was another one of these, I forget, I forgot the other

• 3:48:57Speaker 07

  economic collapse, but there was, there was a giant one of these right before it.

• 3:49:01Robert Evans?

  Like the 1920, no, 1931? Is that like, Black Fright?

• 3:49:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's one more. I think it might have been like, the dot-com bubble or something. I forget which one, but experts suggest that bond markets only do this when they are in extreme distress. So what, what does this actually mean? Bonds are a thing that, in this case, you can get from the government and you pay the government money and the government promises you to pay back more money later, and the yield is like, how much more money they're, they're giving you back, right? High yields on bonds means, you know, an increase of the cost of borrowing. And high yields on US government bonds is a sign of growing distrust in the long-run economic future of the US. Usually, these bonds pay

• 3:49:47Speaker 07

  like, absolute shit, but the reason they pay like shit is that it's the US government you're guaranteed to get your money back. So they're supposed to be an extremely safe asset, right? And when these rates are up, it's because everyone is, you know, looking at something happening in the market and something happening structurally in the US economy and panicking. Now, one of those things is they're looking at the US debt and panicking and, you know, whether or not that's like, a great way to evaluate how panicky they have to be is an open question. This has been one of the lines that's been coming out, is that they're looking at, you know, the US debt increase. Raising faster than expected. The main thing, however, that has been setting off this particular wave of like mass selling of

• 3:50:28Speaker 07

  bonds is the collapse of that 60 day peace deal that Robert was talking about earlier, which, you know, I don't think anyone who was actually following the conflict really thought that was going to go anywhere. But the thing that was important about it strategically from the American side was that this was, this was the thing that investors and financial analysts were hanging their hat on. And, you know, these, these people had convinced themselves that this process was actually going to result in the end of the war and that quickly ending the war was going to, you know, restore economic growth, et cetera, et cetera, and save off inflation. And this was sort of the week, as, as I mentioned earlier, the Brent crude index hit $90 a barrel

• 3:51:07Speaker 07

  and the peace talks formally completely collapsed, that there was a growing realization that this war is not going to end. The economic conditions caused by the war not ending are going to continue, which means inflation is going to increase and it's, you know, going to have sort of far reaching and long lasting economic impacts. Now, this is a global squeeze that's been hitting most developed countries. Japan has also been very badly hit by these sort of shocks in bond yields. Now, what's interesting reading analysis of it is that you're actually starting to see a lot of firms, JP Morgan is a good example of this, where JP Morgan for, like basically since the war has started, JP Morgan's analysis has been the war is going to end and when the

• 3:51:51Speaker 07

  war ends, things will go back to normal. So we're just going to keep projecting things are going to be fine. They are finally pointing out the things that we've been saying, which is that, yeah, no, the war is not ending and it's wreaking havoc on global supply chains. Now, the other thing that's been causing this run up, there's two sides of this back to back that seem very conflicting, which is, on the one hand, there is growing fear over the fact that the AI bubble looks like it's going to collapse. Right. And we've seen this with sort of like the Coaseby shock I was talking about earlier, where, you know, the stock market, like 10, 5% to 10% of the stock markets, create a stock market's value keeps disappearing overnight and then reappearing the next day. But then, and this is sort of fascinating, one of the other things

• 3:52:36Speaker 07

  that's been happening is that there has been an unbelievable proliferation of bonds issued by AI companies, because these AI companies are having to go to the finance markets to like fund all of their weird data center bullshit. And this has gotten a bunch of investors to pull their money out of very safe US bonds and put them into hideously unsafe AI bonds. A thing which I don't even, this obviously is going to go catastrophically wrong. I don't have a sophisticated analysis for why, like, taking the money out of the US government and putting it into this AI company is going to,

• 3:53:17Speaker 07

  like, create a transcendent god is a terrible idea. And what we've kind of seen in, in, in the past couple of days, as, as these bond yields have risen as from a combination of these factors, is it looks like the beginning of the moment where Wile E. Coyote, like, looks down and realizes that he's off the cliff. Now, on Wednesday, the Treasury began a massive buyback of Treasury bonds. I'm going to quote from CNBC here. "Under the accelerated buyback, Treasury, led by Secretary Scott Besant, will target the 10 to 20 year and 20 to 30 year portion of the market, which has seen a buyer's strike since late June. The government will at least double the maximum

• 3:53:58Speaker 07

  size of its buyback operations from $2 billion to, quote, 'at least $4 billion,' according to an announcement from the department." Now, in terms of the actual size of this buyback, which is like not a great sign when the government is buying back its own debt in an attempt to stabilize the market, but that's not, you know, in terms of the size of like the US bond market, that's really a drop in the bucket, but it does seem to have temporarily sort of stabilized. The market's on the belief that if things continue to go wrong, the government will step in. However, the actual underlying economic metrics remain bad for everything in the economy that

• 3:54:41Speaker 07

  isn't AI. And this is one of the things that traditionally heralds a fall in economic collapse. Now, it's also worth noting that, you know, Coaseby, for example, keeps hitting its circuit breaker. That's something that also traditionally has been like the prelude to collapse and it hasn't yet. So, you know, we're, we're in it, we're in a deeply weird and semi unprecedented time in the markets and in sort of the behavior of these investors and financial actors. But it's not good. It's my, it's my, it's my conclusion on the state of the US bond market and the global economy. Let's close with elections. And I want to start with a quick correction for one or two

• 3:55:25Speaker 07

  of my last election segments. I keep calling Governor Tim Walz, Mike Walz, and I don't know why this keeps happening. I pick, I picture his face in my mind and it just like autocorrects to Mike. I've caught this a few times and fixed it before the episode goes out, but this past time I did not. Now, slightly more importantly, I also accidentally referred to Mike Rogers in Michigan as the incumbent, and that is not true. This Senate race is open and Rogers is a former congressman. I know, these are, you know, smaller details and stories that are focused more on how DSA and left wing candidates are running their campaigns, but these types of details are still

• 3:56:06Speaker 07

  important to get right and I regret the error. Let's turn to Florida, where I'm sad to say, the resistance has been defeated. Now, Garrison, are you talking about Florida, the state, or Florida, the musical sensation? No. You missed a good chance to pivot with talking of regret and then we. I thought about doing that, but I'm like, no, I would rather not because. I'm just saying. I still think there's hope for Florida. That's a bold take. But American hero Alexander Vindman will not be that hope. You'll be issuing another correction for that bad boy, let me tell you. I'm talking in the grand, okay, I'm talking about in the cosmic sense, not in the short term. Yeah, okay, I, I agree with you. I, I have hope for the Floridians.

• 3:56:51Speaker 07

  The resistance has been defeated. American hero Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower who testified in Trump's first impeachment hearings, has lost the Democratic nomination for US Senate in an upset to Angie Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville and a democratic socialist. Nixon won by 150,000 votes. Oh, wow. It's 56.1% to Vindman's 43.9. And this, this, this, this is a big upset because Nixon was out fundraised 16 to 1. She had just under $1 million while Vindman raked in over 16 million.

• 3:57:28Speaker 07

  And I think like a, a resist lib hero, losing a primary to a socialist in Florida is astounding. Yeah. Now, Nixon, Nixon's a union organizer who's running on Medicare for All, taxing billionaires, free childcare, universal jobs program, and opposition to Israel. She was endorsed by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Nina Turner, Cori Bush, and Ms. Rachel, who is listed in the national leaders section of Angie Nixon's website. Good for her. Our, our, our only truly good national leader. No complaints with her. Yeah, Ms. Rachel has shown more spine than most of Congress in the last few years.

• 3:58:09Speaker 07

  Nixon was also endorsed by Working Families Party, local unions, JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Track AIPAC. She joined DSA this past June, but did not pursue an endorsement. So is a relative newcomer to DSA as an organization. I want to do want to play this clip from her back in November 2023, a month into Israel's attacks on Gaza.

• 3:58:33Robert Evans?

  We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough? I also.

• 3:58:43Speaker 07

  One of the lawmakers, Republican, Michelle Salzman, just shouted out all of them in the hearing. I'll continue the clip.

• 3:58:49Robert Evans?

  Jesus. One of my colleagues just said all of them. Wow. One of my colleagues said all of them. One of my colleagues also stated that this is going to dry up their fundraising if we vote on this resolution. I also want, like, that's what we've become in this state. That's what we've become in this state, where we don't care about innocent babies that don't even get the opportunity to blow out their first birthday candle?

• 3:59:24Speaker 07

  So this was a ceasefire resolution, just a month into the war. Do you have a sense of like turnout versus like electoral, like, I'm wondering, is this a, like, people who turn out for primaries tend to be like a more politically engaged and people who turn out for generals? Or is this a, like, this late, because she clearly has, like, just looking at that speech, she has a genuine commitment to what she's talking about. And I think people. Yes. Appreciate that more than, like you said, a resist lib hero. Definitely. And I mean, certainly, I think generals can attract a bigger, a bigger portion of the electorate. Yeah. But I, there's, there's a few things going on that created this, this pretty, pretty big difference in votes, like over 150,000. Yeah, it's, it's big.

• 4:00:08Speaker 07

  And like, in my mind, this relates to two of the elections last week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The MyPillow primary, where Trump endorsed Mike.

• 4:00:20Speaker 07

  Lindell lost the Republican gubernatorial primary to the state speaker of the House. And like, this, this is kind of like the idea that a national political celebrity can just like waltz into your state and gobble up a nomination. Yeah. Both Lindell and Alexander Vindman, you know, come from like the Trump world, albeit on opposite sides, but it's still part of like, it's like, you know, the Trumpian political circuit. Yeah. And voters rejected both of them in favor of proven state lawmakers, you know, one, you know, a more like regular, you know, state level Republican and Angie Nixon, who's like a community organizer with like deep connections to a lot of, a lot of different communities in the state and specifically the working class black community.

• 4:01:04Speaker 07

  Now, the other interesting thing that this race kind of continues the conversation on relates to Francesca Hong's loss last week. As, as I discussed last week, Hong did not pay for any TV ads and Nixon only spent 60,000 on ads with zero spent on broadcast or cable. Meanwhile, Vindman spent 2.2 million on ads. That's 36 times as much as Nixon. Yeah. And Nixon still won.

• 4:01:30Robert Evans?

  Dumping money off a cliff.

• 4:01:32Speaker 07

  That's because she actually ran a real campaign, like on the ground and Vindman did not. He ran an incredibly lazy campaign. He, he really thought he could just like coast to the nomination. Yeah. Based on his resist lib credentials. And, you know, while that maybe helped in Palm Beach, it did not help him in the rest of the state where, where just, he got absolutely trounced by Nixon. Like, if you look at like the county map, it's like, whoa. Yeah. So come November, Nixon will face the incumbent Senator Ashley Moody, the former state AG who Ron DeSantis appointed to fill Marco Rubio's Senate seat after he was tapped for Secretary of State.

• 4:02:13Speaker 07

  And like Rubio is, Rubio has had a stronghold on that seat for decades. So the, the hope for Florida Democrats is that Ashley Moody won't command as much loyalty at the ballot box as Rubio does, or as Rubio did. Yeah. And maybe, and maybe, maybe like a critical 1% of the Republican vote thinks that she's another Nixon. Yes, hopefully. You never know. But like, this could very likely be, you know, a much harder uphill battle than even, you know, like the Texas Senate race with Talarico. In this recent election, there were around 300,000 fewer votes in the Democratic primary than the GOP primary. Like this is, this is going to be a very difficult race to win. Yeah.

• 4:02:57Speaker 07

  I, I don't want to, you know, understate how impressive this primary win like really is. And like, I don't think anyone will fault Nixon or her politics if she loses in the general. I mean, someone will, someone will write a shitty like, is this the end of the left op ed, right? They always do, it doesn't matter. They will, they will try, but like, a lot of centrists do not expect Vindman to win if he wins the primaries. So like. It's, it's a Senate seat in Florida. It's like harder with that. That's right. It's, it's Florida. I'm, I'm reflecting on the fact that like people have taken Hong's result and been like, oh, the progressive left is dead. And then they're still treating Talarico like he's, uh, like the presumptive victor. Yes, yes.

• 4:03:39Robert Evans?

  And on El Sayed, but like, yeah, I mean, I think one thing we probably should take from Hong's, uh, election is that television ads cannot be disposed of so quickly yet.

• 4:03:48Speaker 07

  At the general.

• 4:03:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it, I mean, period. Like it, I think that's one of the things that definitely hurt her campaign is that they made a big choice not to do TV ads.

• 4:03:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:03:59Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't want to write everything down to that, but yeah.

• 4:04:02Speaker 07

  That was certainly a factor in Wisconsin. Nixon's like ground game in, in Florida was able to, to overcome the massive deficit in, in spending and just not really much, many funds for TV ads. And I, I think, yeah, because this is a Florida Senate seat that Vindman was not expected to win in the general, he was the presumptive nominee. But because this race will be so hard to win, it'll be harder to like blame her or her politics specifically for losing. Yeah. I think this race can also be a big opportunity to push the overturn window in Florida. And I, come November, it will be really interesting to see what the results of, of this election are, because if this is a super close race, even if she still loses, hopefully she will not lose, but if this race even gets to be where it's like more competitive

• 4:04:45Speaker 07

  than what it's been for the past like 10, 15 years, I think that could be an interesting look at how much Trump is hurting Republicans in elections. Like exactly how upset parts of his base are at the current state of things and to what degree that affects turnout. But also on the other hand, if Nixon and her politics are able to form a new coalition and attract voters that might not usually vote for Democrats, might not usually vote for socialists, or might not vote at all. Cause even just in this primary, her core voter base was very different than what's currently considered to be DSA's most reliable voters.

• 4:05:28Speaker 07

  Nixon did best in districts that were majority non-college educated, and that's usually the reverse for a lot of DSA type candidates in other states. So she was getting out a slightly different voter base than what El Said was getting out, than what DSA candidates in New York have been getting out, especially in the primaries. So I think she is someone to watch and could alter what's seen as politically possible in Florida. Yeah. I, I want to say briefly also that there, there is a chance that, you know, with, with how badly the Republicans are doing on generic ballots, I mean, like the good projections right now have them down seven points on just like a generic Democrat versus Republican ballot.

• 4:06:09Speaker 07

  Like there is a small chance that we get a 2008 style blowout and she wins, which it's not impossible in a way that it usually is. It would be historic, right? It would, yeah, no, it's, it's possible. It's just extremely unlikely, but like. Hey, I don't think it's likely, but it would be like historic. It's more likely than any of the times people have said the Democrats were going to take Texas. That's all I'll say about this. Like, it's like actually technically possible. So while this is a big win for the left statewide, DSA candidates did not fare as well in the recently redistricted US House races in Florida. Let's briefly talk about my boy Oliver Larkin. Larkin was running for House District 25. That's Miami Dodd, Palm Beach and Broward County.

• 4:06:54Speaker 07

  Not exactly the friendliest waters for an anti-Israel socialist. Uh, Larkin got 16,284 votes while the incumbent House Rep Jared Moskowitz won with 28,294 votes. Larkin is DSA endorsed and he ran a solid campaign with an impressive ground game, over 500 volunteers, 40,000 doors knocked, 750,000 calls. He campaigned with Angie Nixon. Also this past month, Larkin has gone, and this is a technical term, a beast mode in TV news interviews. Here's Larkin getting some pushback from a Fox News anchor on abolishing and prosecuting ICE.

• 4:07:39Robert Evans?

  What, what is the number that is fine with you? Is there, is there a benchmark? Is it fine? How many children can be raped and it's fine if you're in relation to the immigration community?

• 4:07:50Speaker 02

  If we're going to talk about children being raped, then we need to hold this pedophile president, Donald Trump accountable and all those that have been implicated by the Epstein files that the Department of Justice is still not leaking. And they've sent AIPAC after Thomas Massey for having the temerity to hold accountable the pedophiles that are in control of our government.

• 4:08:09Robert Evans?

  Thank you. Oh, we appreciate your time very much.

• 4:08:15Speaker 07

  So beyond like attention grabbing moments like that, he, he's also very clearly articulated the details of his platform and defended it and DSA against bad faith attacks. He's, he's talked about the need for a new path to citizenship and just how cost prohibitive it is for immigrants to maintain the documented status. And Trump has made things even harder on purpose to manufacture a political crisis. On Fox, he argued very eloquently against providing Israel with so-called defensive weapons, which he rejected as a categorical term. And he's gone toe to toe with Sean, AKA Scott Hannity on tax reform. Earlier this week on Local 10, this week in Florida, host Glenna Milberg abruptly cut

• 4:08:57Speaker 07

  off her interview with Larkin after he said that Israel has committed a genocide, which she claimed was quote unquote factually incorrect. Jesus. Now also late last week, Laura Lumer and Democrat State Representative Michael Gottlieb tried to shut down a get out the vote rally for Larkin, Angie Nixon, and another DSA candidate Elijah Manley called Chomp the Oligarchy with a, I want to say alligator or crocodile on front. Don't, don't at me. It's got to be an alligator, right? Whatever the ones are in Florida. That's an alligator. I don't think we have any indigenous crocodiles. Democrat State Rep Michael Gottlieb said the rally was quote unquote anti-Jew and

• 4:09:42Speaker 07

  told his constituents to not support the venue hosting the event. Laura Lumer led an online harassment campaign targeting, quote, jihadist Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who was slated to speak at the rally. Lumer said that Tlaib was.

• 4:09:56Speaker 02

  Bringing her band of Jew haters to South Florida and said that Oliver Larkin, quote unquote, hates Jewish people and that he's trying to primary Jared Mosowitz because he is Jewish. Now, the venue originally contracted for the rally canceled, they pulled out when the organizers wouldn't remove Rashida Tlaib as a speaker. The rally was rescheduled for August 14th and organizers secured a second venue, which also canceled the night before the Chompy Oligarkey rally was supposed to take place. Next morning, the organizers found a third location, which was kept secret until hours before the rally, which was then also streamed live.

• 4:10:38Speaker 02

  And the owner of that third venue, which did ultimately host the event, said that within hours, his phone was bombarded with like 600 messages from people protesting the rally. This kind of shows like the speed and scale of the harassment campaign led by Lumer and this state Democrat. So unfortunately, you know, Larkin did not, did not win. I'm interested to see what he does next. I think it would be a mistake if he just completely disappears. I think he's a good communicator, whether, you know, something like DSA National wants to tap into that, or if he wants to work on some other campaigns, like Angie Nixon's campaign, which I think he's, he's indicated he'll do, but, but after the general, be very interested to see what, what he does in the future.

• 4:11:19Speaker 02

  And to close, like, at this point in like big cities, you know, in blue states, DSA or left socialist candidates can only really like run to win. Like that's, that's what you have to do now. There's no more of this like participation trophies. It's, it's, you have to, you have to win. But it's, it's also really important for DSA to expand their electoral efforts into red states and districts that are not solid blue. And in that vein, I think what DSA has done in Florida, this primary reminds me of what NYC DSA was doing in New York like a decade ago, experimenting, building, organizing campaigns, running candidates, even if there is a huge uphill battle. Campaign volunteers get to, you know, get experience and you find your base of support that can be built on in future races.

• 4:12:04Speaker 02

  And in that sense, I think what they were able to pull off, including in some very hostile districts, was, was impressive. Now, we'll, we'll continue in some form with Angie Nixon running for Senate these next few months. Finally, finally, before we close, I should mention James Fishback, enemy of the pod, the Groper candidate for governor, came in third place in the GOP gubernatorial primary. He was expected to come in second.

• 4:12:30Speaker 07

  Oh, wow.

• 4:12:31Speaker 02

  So that is, that is interesting. But Jay Collins instead got second place with almost half a million votes.

• 4:12:37Speaker 07

  Oh, he got waxed.

• 4:12:39Speaker 02

  Byron Donalds, the expected winner, won with 810,000 votes. Fishback got just less than 200,000, which is way too many votes.

• 4:12:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 4:12:54Speaker 02

  He should not be, he should not be getting that number of votes. That is not great. His campaign was very tailored to a type of voter and also like places online and locations in the state that the other candidates were not tailoring for. So I, I don't want to like overstate the sort of impact of Fishback's campaign because there was really no one else kind of going after that block, like especially late. Fishback was pivoting very hard into like anti data center stuff, very late into the race, trying to, you know, attract more voters.

• 4:13:26Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 4:13:27Speaker 02

  So like he was, he, he was doing stuff that other Republicans just were not doing and, you know, using that sneaker, Nick Fuentes Asmigold endorsement, which, which, which got him more than 150,000 votes, which is not, not great.

• 4:13:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:13:42Speaker 02

  It is, it is, it is just over 10% of the Republican vote.

• 4:13:45Speaker 07

  I think Garrison and I made an episode about Fishback, god knows how long ago.

• 4:13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, I don't know what he'll, he'll, he might just try to get some sort of like right wing, far right pundit job in the future. We'll see.

• 4:13:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, I want to, I want to also convey Sophie's message of fuck Byron Donalds. This guy also sucks, but.

• 4:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:14:08Speaker 07

  It's, it's a Republican primary. They're all going to be like, you're, you're in a race with the worst, second worst and third worst person you've ever seen. So.

• 4:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. But yeah, that is, that is Florida.

• 4:14:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:14:23Speaker 02

  That is our, our bi, biannual Florida check-in.

• 4:14:27Speaker 07

  Uh, if you are in Florida or elsewhere, you can email us using the email address [email protected]. If you want it to be encrypted, you have to send it from another proton address. Yeah, have fun with that. Don't, it's still doing it with the fucking marketing emails, by the way. Like every time I think I've blocked or you bastards.

• 4:14:47Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 4:14:48Speaker 07

  Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news.

• 4:14:54Robert Evans?

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

• 4:15:06Speaker 01

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

• 4:15:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:16:04Speaker 03

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 4:16:08Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 4:16:09Speaker 05

  There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

• 4:16:14Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 4:16:15Speaker 05

  Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything.

• 4:16:20Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 4:16:21Speaker 05

  And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 4:16:24Speaker 04

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

• 4:16:28Speaker 03

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

• 4:16:35Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.