It Could Happen Here Weekly 242

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. CZM Rewind: Safe Gun Ownership CZM Rewind: Oops All Gambling, Political Betting Joins the News CZM Rewind: Shadow Banking: The Once and Future Economic Apocalypse CZM Rewind: How To Build A Revolution: Myanmar, Part One Executive Disorder: State Dept. Summit on Left-Wing Extremism, Alien Terrorist Removal Court, Canada Tariffs 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! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: CZM Rewind: Safe Gun Ownership inrange.tv https://www.omnycontent.com/d/playlist/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/e5f91208-cc7e-4726-a312-ae280140ad11/d64f756d-6d5e-4fae-b24f-ae280140ad36/inrange.tv https://theliberalgunclub.com/https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Farmedequality%2F&data=05%7C02%7CIanJohnson%40iheartmedia.com%7C9136fa949d9245c6392608dd09a4e454%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C638677326007095336%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2Fpjm7vGQ4AIF4yPDhPkwjDm%2Bhz3miMcT6Kzuvqj44PM%3D&reserved=0 https://www.instagram.com/armedequality/ CZM Rewind: Oops All Gambling, Political Betting Joins the News https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partnership https://www.businessinsider.com/kalshi-cnbc-deal-cnn-data-integration-partnership-2025-12 https://x.com/Kalshi/status/1996233186251075862?s=20 https://illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2008/3/Cherry.pdf https://www.axios.com/2025/11/20/time-galactic-prediction-market https://dune.com/datadashboards/prediction-markets https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/behnamstatement051024 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/appeals-court-allows-kalshi-election-betting/index.html https://www.datawallet.com/crypto/polymarket-restricted-countries https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/are-the-walls-closing-in-on-polymarket-after-latest-european-ban-2837953/ https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/polymarket-banned-romania-for-operating-without-a-licence/ https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2025/08/18/114882-polymarket-banned-in-australian-amid-crackdown-on-illegal-betting-election-wagering-concerns https://dune.com/rchen8/polymarket https://blog.uma.xyz/articles/unpacking-polymarkets-meteoric-rise-in-numbers https://www.marketwatch.com/story/polymarket-authorized-for-u-s-return-days-after-donald-trump-jr-joins-as-advisor-c3c8b348 https://truthpredict.net/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2025/12/04/alleged-insider-nets-1-million-on-polymarket-in-24-hours/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcPwUiMPj6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcPwUiMPj6w https://news.kalshi.com/p/zohran-mamdani-cites-kalshi-election-odds https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/tennessee-us-house-7-special-election-polls-2025.html https://www.natesilver.net/p/sbsq-26-do-prediction-markets-make https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/nate-silver-polymarket https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting-states/ https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/23501236/supreme-court-strikes-federal-law-prohibiting-sports-gambling https://x.com/Polymarket/status/1996978855538823522?s=20 CZM Rewind: Shadow Banking: The Once and Future Economic Apocalypse https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and-structural-change/non-bank-financial-intermediation/ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/shadow-banking-is-now-a-52-trillion-industry-and-posing-risks.html https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7992100/ https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2013/06/basics.htm https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/inside-the-cdo-market-that-catalyzed-the-financial-crisis https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48512#ifn146 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26153238 https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/economists/adrian/1306adri_map.pdf https://tellerwindow.newyorkfed.org/2025/10/17/nbfis-in-focus-the-basics-of-private-credit/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/bank-lending-to-private-credit-size-characteristics-and-financial-stability-implications-20250523.html https://libcom.org/article/debt-first-5000-years-david-graeber Executive Disorder: State Dept. Summit on Left-Wing Extremism, Alien Terrorist Removal Court, Canada Tariffs https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-man-accused-of-setting-fire-outside-immigration-court-charged-with-arson https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/business/media/new-york-times-subpoenas-phone-records.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/21/katie-porter-done-now-with-politics-will-become-book-influencer/ https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2079578782604689855?s=20 https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-ministerial-on-the-resurgence-of-political-terrorism https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/ministerial-on-resurgence-of-political-terrorism-results https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/09/rubio-tries-enlist-other-nations-antifa-fight-some-allies-recoil/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/09/rubio-tries-enlist-other-nations-antifa-fight-some-allies-recoil/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/politics/foreign-policy/1309861/rubio-cites-fatal-greece-firebombing-as-he-urges-global-action-against-far-left-terrorism/ https://apnews.com/article/france-student-beating-death-politics-melenchon-d333739b9f6025828ffaba3bceb1d263 https://apnews.com/article/rubio-polticial-violence-antifa-trump-e1dad3924bd1b018e43d5b89ac07bb0b https://www.atrc.uscourts.gov/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.51.0.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-104publ132/html/PLAW-104publ132.htm https://www.courtwatch.news/p/alien-terrorist-removal-court-has-its-first-case https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/visa-restriction-policy-targeting-far-left-terrorist-and-other-aligned-groups/ https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/17/2026-14439/establishing-a-fixed-time-period-of-admission-and-an-extension-of-stay-procedure-for-nonimmigrant https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf https://x.com/BaselineNow/status/2079560456117551204?s=20 https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/2077776039074230375?s=20 https://x.com/TeamFishback/status/2078957886403670411?s=20 https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2079633911181725999?s=20 https://x.com/Julesnader386/status/2078847789606334715?s=20 https://x.com/roomcguire/status/2077484311608008925?s=20 https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/outside-spending-floods-michigans-us-senate-race-most-for-haley-stevens/ https://x.com/VaughnHillyard/status/2077940482869453085 https://x.com/AOC/status/2079618843815645552?s=20 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8183/pdf/COMPS-8183.pdf https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/trump-may-revive-1930-trade-discrimination-law-for-reciprocal-us-tariffs-125021200628_1.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-10-duties-expiring-trade-181612201.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/20/trump-canada-tariffs-wildfire/90987616007/ https://time.com/article/2026/07/21/trump-tariffs-canada-alcohol-motor-vehicles-dairy/ https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-hits-canada-50-tariffs-203346290.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/trump-generic-drugs-tariffs-medicine-trade-.html https://archive.vn/LzzYv https://reason.com/volokh/2026/07/20/trump-imposes-new-illegal-tariffs-on-canada/ https://reason.com/volokh/2025/06/03/does-the-smoot-hawley-act-justify-the-trump-tariffs-no-says-philip-zelikow/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2026/07/21/canada-tariffs-prices-rise-impact-limited/90993514007/ https://aomeara.com/section-338-and-the-ghost-of-smoot-hawley/ 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

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• 0:33Speaker 02

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• 1:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:41Speaker 04

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

• 1:46Speaker 03

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

• 2:04Robert Evans?

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

• 2:09Speaker 06

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

• 2:14Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 2:15Speaker 06

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

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  It's raw.

• 2:20Speaker 06

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

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:38Robert 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.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  What's pew pew in my pews? This is Robert Evans, and It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, as it seems to be more every week. And when things get worse, one thing that a lot of folks start talking about is, should I buy a gun? And obviously, this is a fraught question, and the only responsible answers to it are very complicated. And so to talk over some very complicated answers, we've got James Stout, and we have in the audience with us the great Carl Cossarda. Carl of In Range TV, thank you for coming on to be our resident firearms expert in this podcast, where we try not to be deeply irresponsible. Yeah, thank you for having me on.

• 3:44Robert Evans?

  It's always a pleasure to come back to the show, and people always ask for more collabs, and here we are, but on a very important topic. And the only question I have is now is, when do you change the name of the podcast to Oh, No, It's Happening Here? We're talking with the marketing people. It done happened here.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Oh, shit, it's happening again.

• 4:03Robert Evans?

  It's been happening here.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:05Robert Evans?

  Here it is, here, now, right, right in this moment. Be here now, comma, it.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've got to, we've got to work out which one SEO is best, but we're on it, Carl, don't worry.

• 4:17Robert Evans?

  Okay, great. We're working on it.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  So as I think both of you know, but maybe listeners don't, gun sales typically soar before elections, as do ammunition purchases. People are afraid of gun bans has been traditionally one reason why, and the firearms industry is not afraid of hyping those up to increase sales in election years. And normally, prices increase in line with demand. Like, if you go back to November 2020 and look at the prices of ammunition and guns compared to now, you'll see how much incredibly high they were. That was for a number of reasons, but considering inflation, gun prices are pretty low right now.

• 4:51Robert Evans?

  You know, that is kind of a recurrent thing for the most part, is that while everything else gets more expensive, television and firearms remain affordable? Guns have gotten to the point where they're more affordable than they've ever been. Uh huh. Yeah, they really are. AR-15s are, I used to talk about this on In Range, AR-15s are essentially cordwood. And you can get a fully fled, good to go AR-15 now for like 400 to 500 bucks. Yeah. You can get pistols for 250 bucks. Oh, yeah. The prices on guns are like through the floor. And it's interesting to note that like, if you are a gun manufacturer or firearms dealer, even if you don't hype elections, it would be unintelligent of you to not prep for elections because they're so consistently the Christmas of gun sales.

• 5:35Robert Evans?

  So this is an issue in which we didn't see that, and it's, it's kind of interesting. I think there's an element, because obviously, when we talk, I think, to people who are not into guns and talk about how cheap guns have gotten, they're like, well, that's very bad. And there's definitely downsides to that, but an upside of that is it does kind of suggest we are not seeing the degree of panicked hoarding for a civil war that we have seen at previous points when gun prices were not as, as cratered and ammo prices were a lot higher and ammo availability was a lot lower. Like, in some ways, that's kind of an optimistic sign. Yeah, or the dark side of that is the traditional prepper, air quote, is so saturated in guns and ammunition that they don't even need another one. Right, well, that's, I think that is where a lot of people are.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Also, like, capacity really increased in 2020, and I think they've been pumping out, like, it's interesting to look at like the cost of nine millimeter and 556 ammunition, which, if you're not familiar, are like the most commonly used defensive ammunition rounds compared to more niche stuff, like that hasn't gone down as much if you're trying to get 300 Wism or something.

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  The funny thing that, yeah, 556 and nine millimeter, both defensively as well as just recreationally, are the most common ammunition by far. And some of the weirdo stuff I like to shoot, like percussion caps for percussion revolvers, you can't find that stuff to save your life. That stuff's through the roof and expensive. So they've literally just bunkered down, intent there, and are making 556 and nine millimeter because that's where the demand is and will continue to be.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't find, you can't see it, I have a little reloading setup here. I can't find shotgun primers or certain powders anywhere now.

• 7:17Robert Evans?

  And this is going to be a problem because if we have another Cowboys and Aliens kind of situation, what are we going to use? You know, what is Harrison Ford going to use to save us? Anyway, nobody saw that movie. Why am I making that joke? Let me know, I've got a good stash of percussion caps. We're all going to be leaning heavily on Carl.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Carl for all humanity.

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  So I think we've gotten a little bit ahead of our skis here. We should, we should start by talking, because again, I think we've all seen a lot of people being like, well, I guess I should get a gun now as in the wake of Trump's victory.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:48Robert Evans?

  And I think the first caveat we should give everyone is like, if you are reacting in a way that is totally reasonable to this news, being depressed, right? If you're somebody who deals with suicidal ideation, if you have been spiraling lately, if you have been thinking about self harm, if you are just not in a stable mental place, and especially if you have no experience with firearms and are not in a stable mental place, don't go rush to pick one up now. Look, for one thing, I assure you, they will be available in the future. They are not going to get harder to buy. No, you know, it reminds me of a line from the movie We Were Soldiers, which is actually a pretty, pretty good movie, I'm talking to speaking. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun, not at all. In spite of Bill Gibson, it was pretty good.

• 8:30Robert Evans?

  And there's a scene where like the old hardened soldier from World War II in Korea gets to Vietnam, and he's like, he's just got a pistol, and like everyone's around him saying, don't you want an M16? He goes, don't worry, there'll be plenty of those laying around if I need one. So, right, kind of, that's where we're at in this country. Don't worry, there'll be plenty laying around if you need one. Yeah. Yeah, we are not entering a period where that's, you know, I think there are some specific worries where there may be attempts to restrict specific groups from arming themselves, but even so, I wouldn't say that elevates it above a threat if you are dealing with suicidal ideation. Having a gun is not a talisman, as our friend Tactical Girlfriend often brings up, and you shouldn't treat it as one. And part of what that means is that like, you have to model like the, the threat that you're facing, right?

• 9:15Robert Evans?

  And if you are not in immediate danger, if nobody is threatening to kill you specifically, you know, then that may not be the safest thing for you, right? And particularly, I think the other side of it that Carl, you are much more qualified to talk about with than me, is that if you are going to buy a firearm, if you want that to be a thing that can actually protect you in a situation where you are in danger, where someone is threatening your life, you have to train with it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that, not to make, to make light of that at all with that little joke about that movie, but the reality is, we as people, humans in general, all of us are bad at threat modeling. And that's not to say that the perceived threat that we're seeing with the results isn't real. Yeah. I think it is, but that said, at the moment, if you're dealing with some of those

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  issues like you mentioned, or the, the living situation you're in, or even the community around you, isn't one in which a firearm laying around is particularly safe, could mean that you're actually inducing more threat and risk to yourself than what might come in two years. So that is something we have to think about very carefully. Can I possess this responsibly? Do I know how to use it responsibly? Am I in a place, not only in my living situation, but my mental state, that possessing this very Quick and easy to use lethal device is safe to have around. Yeah. Those are questions you should ask first before worrying about tomorrow. Right.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, maybe we should address like a couple of things that Carl said right off the bat. Like you said, having a firearm lying around.

• 10:40Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  One thing that we should address is like, I know I recently purchased a new gun safe, but like, if you have X budget to buy a gun, Robert also mentioned that without training your liability with the gun, right? Maybe we can break down, if you have a thousand dollars, you don't need to go out and spend a thousand dollars on your gun, right? Perhaps it would be better to to save some of that money and put it towards other things. I think it might make sense to just break those down for people in case they're not familiar.

• 11:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that that might be a good place to start is if you decide, number one, I'm in an emotionally stable place. I either have some specific threats or I want to be prepared for a future where those threats are more likely. And let's start with a budget of a thousand dollars, right? And you know, this is one of the, there's going to be people who can't afford a budget of a thousand dollars. And that's very unfortunate, but this is one of those things that like, isn't fair, right? Like guns cost money, not everyone has disposable income. But a thousand dollars, I think, is a reasonable floor for not just acquiring a firearm, but like the things you need to be able to start building proficiency with it. So like, like, let's talk about that, Carl, like, what would you do? What would you advise someone with a grand who is looking into getting into shooting?

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  And also being set up to potentially defend themselves if they need to. Right, so this, this was, it's such a nuanced question and answer because there's so many variabilities there. One of which is you have to understand the living situation you're in. Are you living in a place that is solely your own? Do you live with roommates? Do you have, do you have children and your parents? I mean, like, these things all come into the equation about how well can you secure this thing? Should you acquire it? And so that comes up to, do you need a full bolt into the wall safe? Do you need something that is locked with cable underneath the bed that still is reasonably difficult to get into? But is accessible otherwise? Do you have a situation in which you're the only one that could access this? And therefore you're not worried about that?

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  So the first thing you have to think about is I'm taking possession of responsibility of this. It is a lethal weapon. What am I going to do to make sure that that doesn't fall into the wrong hands? Whether there are people that live within your own structure or outside of it, should something go awry? So you have to consider that. So right off the bat is what are the situation I'm in? And what are the things I need to consider to make sure this doesn't leak out of my control? Because we've seen in so many instances, especially some of the horrible spree shooting and such, in which it's not the person that possessed the gun, but someone around them that took it from them and used it for that. Absolutely. And that's because it wasn't stored well. And so that's number one. So you're going to think about one, are you getting a small, a pistol? Or a long arm? And that's a discussion to be had too, but those two equate.

• 13:18Robert Evans?

  And then depending on which one of those two you're acquiring determines the kind of safe storage requirements that also align with your current living situation. Of course, the best thing is a safe bolted to the floor that only you can get into. But that's not viable for everyone. Yeah, right. But it's something, right? Yeah, yeah. What comes along with that is you also, this is going to be true at every stage of this process. You need to know the laws of your state.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  And maybe even your local area, right? Like in Oregon, we have very strict safe storage laws, right? Like you, you can be held accountable to a higher degree in this state. If you don't secure a weapon and someone gets access to it, right? Now, obviously, if you have a safe and someone drills into your safe, you're not liable, right? Like you took the actions you could to stop them from being able to get to your firearms. There's not an expectation that you have a fortress of solitude or whatever. But you have to have taken reasonable steps to lock them away, right? And you know, that's going to be different. A lot of states have absolutely no requirements whatsoever. But you need to be aware of what your local legal situation is. Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that to the table because myself, living in Arizona, we have no such rules. And so I could essentially. You can just keep them on the floor.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  I could stack them in my front yard, right? I'm like, ah, I'd put them out in the yard. We'll see. I had extra ARs, I use them to make a fence, cheaper than wood right now.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, literally gold wood now.

• 14:39Robert Evans?

  So the thing about that is this is, again, these, these things get more and more complicated over time. And we don't want to make this conversation impenetrable. Right. But like, the kind of safe you acquire is important too. And this, that's a deeper topic than we could ever do in one video. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and just dovetail out to a friend of mine, Devi and Olaf. He has a channel. He does a lot of video work about gun safes and which ones are good or bad. But let's just say the cheap $90 thing with the cylindrical key lock isn't it. So you got to be a little better than that. So I would estimate, let's go with costs. You're buying, let's say, an AR-15, you're probably going to need to spend, and I'm guessing here around $250 for a safe that's actually worth a damn.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's about what I spent recently for a little handgun safe.

• 15:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  So let's, let's build on that, right? Let's say you've decided that you want a gun and that it is safe for you to have a gun. I think, yeah, the first thing you ought to prioritize is making sure that no one who, for whom it is not safe, gets that gun, which we've addressed, right? The second thing that you need to prioritize is that you could use that gun safely. And like, you are not a liability every time.

• 15:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  That you pick up and load that gun, right?

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  Yes, and part of that is in, and maybe I will have different opinions on this, but I think we're probably simpatico. Picking the right type of firearm. I see a lot of people saying, I am worried I'm going to get attacked. You know, I have, I've been, I've gotten a death threat, you know? I'm scared particularly of this group of, you know, Nazis or whatever, so I'm going to buy a handgun. And I will tell you right now, my opinion is that if you are looking for a self-defense weapon, a handgun probably shouldn't be what you pick unless you are looking to carry a gun. Yeah, no, that's a good quote, right? I carry a handgun because it's unwieldy to walk around with a 50 BMG. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I cannot, I cannot take my AR with me in the street, right?

• 16:34Robert Evans?

  So I keep a nine on me, you know? Handguns are the most difficult thing to use skillfully under distress and duress than any other firearm. And above and beyond that, they are actually the least effective at doing the job you think they're going to do than anything else. Yeah, yeah, there are a shocking number of people are shot way more times than you would expect. They could survive with a handgun, right? Like, that is just a reality of the way that they work because they're much, much less powerful than a rifle. And it's also like, I had a friend a couple of years ago who bought a Snub Nose 38, thinking, well, this is simple. I can't fuck it up, it's a good. And I took her out and was like, I need, I'm going to have, set up a 10-foot target and we'll see how many times you can hit it with this gun.

• 17:18Robert Evans?

  And she could not do it one out of five times. And then I brought out my Glock and she was able to hit it every time, right? And it's because one of those is a much easier weapon for somebody who is a complete novice to learn how to use functionally, right? And it's not the Snub Nose 38. Yeah, in the roughest of most senses, typically the smaller the gun is, the more professional you need to be to use it. Right.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like with that in mind, you're responsible for every shot you fire, right? Training in self-defense, whatever, by fucking accident because you don't know how to clean your gun or what have you. Every bullet that leaves that barrel, it's your fault. And every one of those is potentially someone's life. So when you're thinking about buying a gun, you want to have something where you can, A, handle it safely and B, discharge it and know where that bullet's going to go.

• 18:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so on that note, this has been asked for me many times and we're talking about, we're all, we are on the same page. It's like when someone asks me this question and it comes up more than you'd think. First of all, we're getting past the issue of like, are you safe to own this and safe storage? So now we're at the point you are buying a gun, right? So you have to think, oh, what's the threat? Are we worried about three years from now and the potential realities of a very caustic and dangerous political future? Are you worried about only home defense? Are you worried about your own self-protection walking down the street? Because obviously you're not going to be, well, not obviously, but for the most part, you're not going to be carrying an AR-15 down the street. But if you are only worried about your castle, make a joke about castle doctrine. If you're only worried about your house, inside your house, there is no reason to be picking a pistol, none whatsoever.

• 18:55Robert Evans?

  Now, I will say that there's a number of folks in the lefty gun space who will say, so just get an AR-15. That's not always going to be practical depending on your laws, right? Like, that is not something that we can say everyone will be able to do, right?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:09Robert Evans?

  But we can say there will be a non-handgun option that will probably be a better fit for you. Yeah, absolutely. And this is where we see a lot of people in the gun space. It's kind of weird, there's like cultural shifts in the zeitgeist of what's the cool defensive thing of the time. But there's a lot to be said, depending on what you think you're going to have to shoot. And hopefully never, of course, but like, and AR-15 does things like armor piercing in terms of Kevlar and da, da, da, da, da. But for home defense, it really still is kind of hard to go wrong with a shotgun in many instances. And that should not be ignored.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  You know what else shouldn't be ignored?

• 19:43Robert Evans?

  Huh.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  It's our obligation to pivot to advertisements about every 15 minutes on this show.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  All right, we're back. Carl, you've mentioned that you think a shotgun sometimes can be more effective than AR-15. Especially another thing I will add is you're in a state like California, the laws regarding

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  semi-automatic centerfire rifles are incredibly confusing. It's extremely easy to buy something on Amazon, slap it on your gun and render it a felony.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I would generally say like in most situations, an AR, if you're new to shooting, it's going to be easier to figure out, they're very simple, easy to upgrade and modify. But like, yeah, in California, in a state, New York is similar. It's very easy to commit a felony with an AR-15 and not know that you are. And you don't want to find out that your gun is a felony when you have to use it in self-defense, right? This is an instance in which the good old man, again, I'm not trying to, I'm not on, I'm not on team shotgun here. But when it comes to cross all state lines, I mean, sure, there's an exception somewhere. But for the most part, a manually pump-activated shotgun. Yeah. Is likely to not run afoul of the law anywhere.

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  Additionally, there's a good chance that if you were to, and we have to consider all realities, there's a good chance that should you need to use it, that when you're in court trying to defend yourself for using this lethal weapon, a shotgun doesn't seem to evoke the same concerns, let's say, from courts and from judges that an AR might. An AR, you know? Regardless of how common they are and how much they proliferate society, there's still those scary rifles. A shotgun does not tend to evoke that same kind of response. It is most likely legal almost anywhere. And the diversity of ammunition you can use in it really bridges the gap from one yard to 100 yards or more. But a lot of people that are new to guns will think, well, shotgun, I don't need to aim. That is incorrect. Shotguns need to be aimed as much as any other long arm.

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  They're just very effective when they actually connect. Yeah, it's one of those, I think, because I, because I do change like what I am taking with me based on where I go. And like when I'm in California, I generally like if I'm going camping or something, I'll make sure I have a 12 gauge in the car. Right. Because I'm not going to try to get whatever this month's gun laws are, right? Like, that's just not practical to me. That said, I think, because there are a number of people who will be very frustrated us talking about shotguns. One thing that they are right about is there's a different type of training that's necessary with the shotgun. And they are in some ways more complicated to use than an AR. In part because for every shot, well, unless it's a semi-automatic, like for every shot, you're pumping it, right?

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  And like, that is a, that is, there's muscle memory that has to be built there, right? And it's, it's harder, you know, maybe a little bit slower to get up to a level, or at least you have to train differently with it. Right. The other thing about it is that like it loads very differently. You know, a shotgun is a completely different kind of ammunition than an AR has, which all goes back to the whole like, you have to be willing to train with whatever it is you're going to use. Well, fair enough. Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  See, ideally, like, if you're, if you're in this position of thinking, if you can find a friend or failing that a range that will allow you to try different guns. I think as a novice, you're going to pick up, if you've never shot a gun before, I probably wouldn't pick up a 12 gauge shotgun and start pewing away because the recoil will be quite profound and noticeable to you. So don't start there. Start with something else.

• 23:23Robert Evans?

  There's smaller shotguns, a 20 gauge, you know?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  And those are fine, especially if you're a smaller statured person, even a 28 or 16s are hard to probably buy defensive ammunition for. But I think if you can, when you begin that journey, like I've done, I see people say with handguns, find one that fits your hand. You probably have no idea what fits you and feels good if you're just starting out.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Finding someone who is local to you, ideally who has some experience, who can help you along that process, I think. And someone who you trust, right? Like, I've been, like, I have to train, I have a concealed carry weapons permit in California. The last time I went to take a course, like from the outset, I got like xenophobia, homophobia, like jokes that I guess the guy who was instructing the course thought that everyone was in on, just like they made me feel unwelcome. And I'm a cis het white guy.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  But I think maybe we should address that, like, if you're thinking of getting started, what kind of instructions should you look for? Where should you look for it? And, and like, what would you recommend? Maybe other sources too, Carl, like your YouTube channel has been a great resource for me.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  This is, this is where, where in the firearms, owning a thing doesn't make a community. So there's always this phrase, the gun community, it's not a thing. Owning, owning a thing doesn't make a community. A community is a group of people that bond together over mutual beliefs and hopefully care for one another. So there is no firearms community. But that said, the broad scope of people that have been interested in the topic for the longest duration of time has been mostly seceded to a group that we would not find ourselves aligned with or comfortable with being around. And so this is where the community building thing is real, because the more we build communities and we're behind in this regards in terms to alternative voices in the firearm space, but the more we build that community, not only online, but amongst one another,

• 25:11Robert Evans?

  the more we're going to have safer, better spaces for us to work together to learn how to use these things safely and efficiently. And that is a challenge. If you walk in sight unseen to a place that is probably foreign to you in firearms land, sadly, at this type point in time, there's a pretty good chance it's not going to be something you're going to be comfortable with. Quite honest, just like you mentioned, James, like it's going to be that kind of stuff. There's probably going to be Trump stuff on the wall. There's probably going, you're probably going to hear some jokes that are just jokes, but you know, they're really not. Yeah, that's the kind of space that that's filled with. And so when people come and say, well, who can I go to to get this training with? I'm like, that's challenging. There's some options online. There's like Operation Blazing Sword. There's a, there's, um, there's, uh, the, the Liberal Gun Club

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  has some training options as well. But what's better is finding people and interconnecting with people of like mind around you, if you can, and working together. And then actually building a real community that isn't a gun community. And that's where we're going to find solace and the ability to get better at this stuff together. Not a great, not exactly a strong answer, but it's the truth. But if you're going in, if you're going in just unhindered, you're going to expect it to be a place that you're probably not going to be happy with. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think that's a really good point. I'd like, can we talk a little bit more about training options? Like not just, uh, because you, you mentioned Operation Blazing Sword. I'd like to hear a little more about them, but also where people could go for like reading and videos

• 26:39Robert Evans?

  in order to kind of find more information on how to develop proficiency. Yeah. So, okay. So YouTube University doesn't teach you how to actually like effectively hit targets with something. You can, you can't, there's no way to learn that besides doing it. But in terms of general firearms, understanding, learning some of the history, learning about how guns work. There are some YouTube resources out there. Tactical Girlfriend, you already mentioned, has four years of a legacy of content on her site that a lot of it is focused on beginner style content. In fact, she just posted a playlist. She has kind of stopped making videos in general. She mentioned that a while back, but she still has her content online. And she posted a playlist recently of all of her how to get going videos, 101 stuff.

• 27:23Robert Evans?

  And that would kind of be where I'd start with. Yes, absolutely. My channel, In Range TV, has some of that. I tend to focus a little bit on the more esoteric and like, uh, next level things. But that's not to say it's not there as well. So I'm not trying to self promote, but I would actually say her playlist is going to be better than some of my own, although we have stuff like that on In Range TV as well. If you want to open up that dark void called Reddit, the Liberal Gun Club has resources on it. If you go there, they have a list of people and local resources. You can also Google the Liberal Gun Club. I'm not even trying to say anyone doing that is necessarily identifying as a liberal, but they are, they have gathered lists of statewide resources, as many as they can, that are providing training in regional places that would be a good place to start.

• 28:07Robert Evans?

  Operation Blazing Sword is a subset of that. Blake, I can't pronounce them, Blake has been on my channel and you'll find him there in the Liberal Gun Club listing. When I think of that, I would say go to YouTube, hit up Tactical Girlfriend, go to In Range TV. If you want to see maybe not 101, but next level stuff, but a friendly space to you. And then check out the Liberal Gun Club, best I can say, because they do have a list of resources that they're gathering across the country. Yeah. And I think one thing that Tactical Girlfriend talks about that is a, because, because you, you're right. And I, I think this is an important point that like you have to spend time shooting and you know, that costs money in order to get better. But there is one thing that you can do that does not cost ongoing money to get better with a handgun.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  If you're again, looking to carry a gun, which is dry fire training, right? Which is a very useful process of building proficiency. You can do it. I mean, you could do it every day if you want. It will help. It does not replace needing to go shoot, right? But you can find guides, Tactical Girlfriend talks about it a lot, but you can find other guides online. And that is a way that you can kind of stretch your ammo budget and gain additional proficiency. There are even products designed specifically for that. One of them pops to mind and there are others like Mantis X. And you make sure your gun is safely unloaded and you're proficient with that part of it. You put these devices in and you can actually fire it. A dry fire is firing with no ammunition in the gun. Click, add a target on the wall and it'll teach you things about like, did you pull to the right? Did you push to the left? Did you dip the gun?

• 29:36Robert Evans?

  And those are very good products that you can use. Once you buy them, gets more money. But you can train proficiently in a safe place without firing live ammunition and improve your skills quite a bit. That's a good point.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah. I would say like another organization I would plug is Armed Equality, especially if like LGBTQIA people. A friend of mine, very nice people. Perhaps we should go back then to that, like Robert's mentioned dry firing.

• 30:00Robert Evans?

  Well, first, I think we need to go to ads, James.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  You're right, Robert. We should go back to Chumba Casino.

• 30:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So dry fire at the wall and think of Trumba Casino. Or just download an upgrade from Neuralink that you got from Elon. Yep, that's right. That's right. Our, our primary sponsors, the brain chip.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  All right, we're back. So we've had discussion about training, safe storage, and a little bit about like what to look at firearms wise. But I want to go back to that third one because you are marketed at so heavily when you're trying to buy a firearm, right? And the likelihood of you getting misinformation, right? We all know smaller statured people who have been given, yeah, a snub nose 38, a gun that's entirely inappropriate for them. Carl, what, like, if you could maybe go through like each major category, right? If we do handgun, shotgun, semi-automatic rifle, maybe one that is compatible with AR band states and one that's, you know, if you're in there.

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  Real America. There are some options like the Ares SCR that are basically AR-15s that are a lot easier to keep in compliance in a state like California, but they are also more than twice as expensive as like a budget AR-15, right? Like, which is not to say it's impossible to have a budget AR-15 that is in compliance with California law. It's just, I am not going to take on the responsibility of telling you how to do that legally. Because when I lived in California, I was only about 80% sure that I was in compliance with the law. If you're in California, my advice would be to go to a shop and buy the gun complete. Yes. Don't piece it together off the internet. That's good, good advice. Oh, well, if you're a new gun owner, don't piece anything together because the knowledge

• 31:58Robert Evans?

  to make something reliable that you've put together from bits and pieces is not a good idea. You want something that's got, I mean, literally, you want something from a quote-unquote reputable manufacturer, but has a warranty. Like, let's just be, don't even start with trying to put something together. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's just go ahead and start with pistols. So, the challenge there is like, of course, it would be very nice to be able to buy like four of them because you can train with a 22 and practice with this and, mm-mm-mm. But let's go with the constraint that we had earlier of this $1,000 and you're gonna buy a pistol and with it, you plan to train, get better, be proficient, but also maybe have to use it for self-defense. You really want to stick with a 9mm. I mean, there are smaller guns like 380s and such like that, but we're getting into specialist guns. Yeah. What is, what I'm gonna say here across the board when I recommend something, it's gonna be the opposite of specialist.

• 32:41Robert Evans?

  It's gonna be the most bland, boring, impossible thing. Yeah. And when it comes to that, and I know that everyone would like, "Ugh, but..." It's a 9mm, probably a Glock. Yep. The Glock 19 is a relatively reasonably sized gun. The 17's a little bigger. The 19's in this nice middle ground. It is carryable. It's small enough to be concealed should you have the right to do so, but it's big enough to be viable for being reasonably accurate with, with not extensive amounts of training, but enough training to be, to get good. Yeah. And it's a bunch around the 9mm magazine that just plain works. Yep. Yeah. Yep. If you're on a tight budget, I would say that cops are always, you can find trade-in police Glocks pretty cheap. Cops don't shoot very much. You can sometimes get some pretty good deals on those. Yep.

• 33:26Robert Evans?

  That said, I'm revealing a little bit of future history of what's going on in range. We're doing a video in a couple of weeks. There is a strange trade imbalance between us and, never mind the politics, Turkey, and they are making some really high-end, really well-made guns. There is a Glock clone from Turkey that I can't vouch for yet, but this is the kind of where we're at in the gun space. This thing is interchangeable with all Glock parts and the gun's like 250 bucks. Oh, wow. Oof, you can't beat that. We don't know yet. I'm not saying go buy that, but I'm saying we're gonna do a review of it. The point is, there are Glocks and Glock-like things that can get the price down. Yeah, right. And so, you're looking at, you know, if you get a budget AR for 500 bucks, you know, a

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  budget 9mm handgun, because even if with not counting that one, there are other budget options that are in the 300-ish dollar range. Yep. You just have to look around a bit. And I should also note, buying used with a firearm is not like buying used with electronics. If a gun is well-maintained, it will outlast you. Yeah. Right? There are some parts that will need replacing from time to time, right? Your springs and stuff are going to age faster than other things. And like barrels, you can shoot out, but it takes quite a bit of shooting to shoot a barrel, you know, smooth, right? So, it's never a bad to consider like finding, like you said, like a police tradin' or something like that. Like, that could be a great way to save money. Absolutely. So, when it comes to the pistol, we're talking about buying just one, pretty much boil it

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  down to a 9mm. Yep. That is probably a polymer frame gun, not some big, heavy steel thing. A Glock is the, is like the de facto, but there are others. I mean, there's those HKs, there's Rugers. Yeah. I like Sig's, but they're pricier. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The thing about Glock is Glock's been around forever. It's the standard. Finding, accessorizing, buying magazines, or even getting repairs done to a Glock is ubiquitous across the country. If you get a Glock, you'll be able to deal with it, fix it, do whatever you want to it, straight up. And what has helped me a lot in general is, you know, I have my carry gun, I have my, my home defense firearm, and then I have, I have bought, built a couple of firearms from the ground up.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  And I would, certainly as you said, I would never have started there, but because I had the extra money doing that means that has, has given me so much deeper of an understanding of what goes wrong, when things do go wrong. Yeah. With a gun and how to fix it. Like, I've, I've replaced every part on my carry gun at this point, right? Like, over time. And it's like given me a much deeper level of understanding of just like mechanically how these things function. You know, building an AR-15 was the same process and I'm really, I do find that valuable. Obviously, it's, it's throwing more money at the problem, too. Yeah, totally. So, the other, the other advantage of 9mm, which is reasonably cheap to feed and shoot, reasonably cheap to practice with, for those of you that don't know anything about guns,

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  you will typically practice with what's called FMJ bulk pack ammunition. Yeah. 9mm, 115 grain. It's just a bullet that's got a copper jacket on it and that's your practice ammo. And then for carry, should you be carrying it, you'll probably want to carry something that's specifically designed to be defensive ammunition. It'll be far more expensive per box, but once you get to the point of, yes, I am ready, safe, and capable to carry this, you're going to want to pick something gold dot, spear gold dots or a hollow point, designed to specifically be for self-defense. But make sure the gun you've chosen works reliably with that defensive ammo, because even though it works 100% with that FMJ, it may not work with the defensive ammo you might have to play with a little bit. Yeah. We should also note, when you are buying ammo online, which is not gonna be legal

• 36:58Robert Evans?

  in every state, but most people will be able to do this, it pays to be careful. There is a lot of stuff that is sketchier out there and there can be consequences. I have had a firearm, I have had like a handgun blow up in my hand as a result of getting ammunition that I had not shot before. This was in fact Turkish. I think it was because, I, I think it was a hot load, but it's possible that it was the result of a bullet be, a squib that then jammed in the barrel and then another round came in after it. I generally have been pretty good at checking to make sure there's a hole in the paper with each shot, which is something you should be making sure of, like, when you're shooting. Because if you get, if you shoot a round that like does not have enough powder behind it, right?

• 37:43Robert Evans?

  If you get a bad round, it can jam in the barrel and then the second round can cause the barrel to burst. This is also why we always wear eye protection. But when looking at ammo, if you think this looks like good ammo and it's cheap, look online, add like Reddit to the name, see what other people say about it, right? Like, see if you can find anything written about that. If other, usually other people, if it's like a less reliable manufacturer, will have said, "I've had a bad experience with this ammunition." Yep. Do your diligence, right? The first time you're shooting a new kind of cheap target ammo. That, that being said, like, there's a lot of names that almost anyone that's never owned a gun before will recognize, names like Remington. Right. Winchester. Yes. These, that's not to say that they don't make mistakes, too, but like, if you're

• 38:26Robert Evans?

  gonna go buy a Winchester bulk pack of ammunition, you are buying at least what is generally considered consumer-level reliable ammo. Yes, absolutely. If you're buying it from Crazy Bob's Reloading Shack? Right. You don't know what you're gonna get. And that, that was what, because it's, a lot of the sketchy stuff isn't even a manufacturer. It's like ammo that you may not notice immediately. It's like, "Oh, wow, this seems really cheap." And then it'll say in small letters, "remanufactured," right? Which means somebody has reloaded it, reloaded ammo. And like, you know, you can reload ammo and have it be perfectly good ammunition, but do you know who reloaded this ammo, right? I will tell you, as a person that shoots a lot and has been doing it for decades, I personally, even with all that, I will never fire remanufactured ammunition. I don't want to deal with Crazy Bob's weird Bad Wednesday.

• 39:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Crazy Bob's Bad Wednesday bullets. It's a great name for it, yeah. Yes. We've addressed the pistol, right? Like, I want to address long guns and then you mentioned a couple of things, Carl, which you should also address, which are like accessories. So, Robert mentioned eye protection, so ear and eye protection. Let me, let me add one more piece to the pistol and we'll move on. Yep. The, the thing now, the whiz-bang thing now is every pistol has a red dot sight on it. A red dot sight is essentially an electro-optical box that sits on the top of the slide and you look through it to aim and it projects a red dot, like almost like a laser dot, if you're not familiar with it, to aim with. For the most part, I'm not saying you shouldn't have one because they're cool, but for the most part, a person getting into this specifically for self-defense does not need one of those.

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  You don't need to spend $300 on a red dot. The iron sights that come on any of these guns should be sufficient for most purposes. So, don't get suckered into, "I need that." If that's something you want later, think about it, but it's not a requirement. Now, that said, if a gun has one on it, I don't agree with people who say like, "You can't learn to shoot on a red dot." I think that that's, now, you should, you will need to look up because it may not be sighted, how to sight it, right? Like, because it, like, red dots are a thing, like, you need to dial them in, right? And there is a way to do that. Again, you can find guides to this online, just like you can find guides to like mounting a scope on a rifle. These are complex mechanical tasks, a red dot less so than a scope, but you can't just

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  buy a gun with a red dot on it and trust that that red dot points out where the bullet's going to go. That's not how they work. Absolutely. My point being is if you gave me, you said, "This person here needs to be able to hit a target 15 yards away, you've got one hour." Right. I would not be messing by giving them a red dot. I would give them something with iron sights and just get them through the task. But that's what I'm, where I'm going with that. Yeah, I, I think that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah. I prefer, like, now that I know what I'm doing, to use my red dots and stuff, but I also pretty regularly shoot with iron sights, in part because I like it. Like, it's, it's enjoyable mechanically and it's kind of how I learned. Yeah. Or don't get me wrong, it is better. Yeah. But it also adds another level of complexity. And it's more to go wrong. Like, if you're installing that yourself, it's annoying and it's easy to...

• 41:26Speaker 02

  To mess up and then you're upset and yeah, yeah. Let's move on to long guns. Like one thing that we should mention that if you might buy an AR, specifically an AR actually, and find that it comes with no sighting systems at all.

• 41:42Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  And so that's a thing to build into your budget. So let's talk about like what to get for your budget in in the long gun category, Carl.

• 41:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, so when we go to long guns, we talk about rifles and shotguns. Let's stick with rifles for now, I'm assuming. So in that regard, this is, this is the thing where like, actually I have a video on my channel about the NFA, which is the National Firearms Act, which is what regulates a lot of like machine guns and stuff. But this also occurred across many gun control laws. They're frequently ableist.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Very much so.

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  And the things that they post the most restrictions on are the things that are actually most capable. And that means, that means AR-15s in their general guise with a pistol grip and a red dot sight, which we just mentioned for pistols, and a 30 round magazine is the thing that is going to be the most, I could get anyone, I tell you, anyone capable of hitting at a target at 50 yards within a four hour training session, with a red dot sighted AR-15 and a good magazine, it's a good ammunition. AR-15s are light, low recoil, they're loud because of the 556, but they're light, low recoil guns that almost any one of most body structure can handle. Now, there's exceptions, of course. If you have specific physical challenges, that's another discussion. But

• 42:54Robert Evans?

  if almost anyone, tiny to large, can handle a basic AR-15, and it is the gun that is most focused on for gun control, ironically, places like California, where they take away things that make it more functional, like the pistol grip, or reduce your magazine capacity, because they're trying to diminish the functionality of the gun. But the reality is, the reason they're doing that is because that is the gun that is most functional for most people, and it is therefore the one that almost anyone can handle pretty well with the smallest amount of training. Yeah, yes. And I, I think there's a good point there in if, if I were coaching someone who was buying an AR that has no, you know, does not have iron sights on it at all,

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  you are, it is much easier to learn how to sight in and use a red dot on an AR than learning how to adjust the sight, the, the iron sights on an AR-15, right? Like, not that you can't learn that, that you should, again, you have to, you can watch a video on it, but it's much more intuitive to, to set up a red dot in that way. This is actually where I would flip flop. If you're with the pistol, don't concern yourself too much with a red dot. If you're going with an AR-15, concern yourself with the red dot. Get a red dot. Do the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you were like in the Marines or something and you know how to, to dial in your irons, right? Like, and even then you're gonna have a better time with a red dot. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And you're once, and a red dot is very intuitive. So one of the things that people aren't familiar with firearms, but when you bring up a long arm,

• 44:20Robert Evans?

  there's multiple points of contact to the person shooting the gun. And you bring up a pistol, you probably have two hands on it and you're pushing your arms out, almost like you're like making a triangle. And you're using a long arm like an AR-15, there's a buttstock on your shoulder, your cheek is on the actual comb, which is the base of the stock. Your other hand, your support hand is holding the gun up on the front of it. You have a minimum of three points of contact. With a red dot, that makes it very stable and easy to get reliable hits. And the red dot means you can keep both eyes open. Don't need to worry about the idiosyncrasies of focusing on a front sight. Essentially, if it's zero, meaning the dot is regulated to where the gun hits, and you put the dot on the thing and press the trigger without doing something like jerking the gun, you'll hit the target. And so that's why that matters. Yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  So what sort of budget should people be looking at? And like, would you be comfortable recommending like even brands that they should look at?

• 45:13Robert Evans?

  I, it all comes down to cost when it comes to AR-15s. You can spend as much money as you want. The reality is, I have a video on the channel. Never mind if you like or dislike the company. They're one of the ones that really push the lower cost products out there. PSA stands for Palmetto, Palmetto State Armory. You can go there and get your branded Trump lower, but at the same time, you can get an AR-15 for like 400 bucks. Yeah. And like, in the gun space, you're not, you're not going to find someone to buy who is spotless and selling guns in large numbers cheaply. Yeah. Like, that's generally not. So like, so, so for 400 bucks or around there from PSA, you can get a traditional, what's called an M4, it's essentially a 16 inch carbine.

• 45:55Robert Evans?

  It won't have any sighting system on it. So expect to throw another 200 bucks ish onto a reasonable red dot sight on that. So for around the $600 range, you're going to get a gun that's going to weigh

• 46:07Robert Evans?

  seven pounds, but it's going to have low recoil. And you're going to have something that's for the most part reasonably reliable. Is it the best of the company? Is the best of the best? No, but it's reasonably lightweight. It is well manufactured. I've done videos about them on my channel. They've worked just fine. Um, and so four to 400 ish for the gun, or the 200 for the sighting system, couple mags, you could get out of the door for under $700 with everything, probably under that, maybe under 600, even if you're careful. Oh, but let me plug one thing. If you've got lots and lots more money, double that. You get a What Would Stoner Do carbine, which I designed, it'll be half the weight and super reliable from KD Arms, but I love mine. Doesn't bring any money to me. I'm just saying, the point I'm making here is you can get something good enough.

• 46:52Robert Evans?

  And if you've got more money, there is better out there that are lighter, more reliable guns. But you don't need to, is my point. I'm not trying to sell anything here.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. They are one of the few manufacturers who offer like a California compliant solution at checkout, which is nice for California people.

• 47:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. So that can be a really beneficial thing to you in terms of, you know, not having it be something that you're scared about. California compliant will probably mean no flash hider, no pistol grip and a fixed magazine, at least at this point in time.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  You can have, you can have the removable magazine if you don't have the flash hider, pistol grip and the collapsing stuff. So.

• 47:28Robert Evans?

  Okay. All right. Well, if you can buy it from them, ready to go. Uh, there's, I know there's also magazine capacity requirements or in, in, so maybe you have to buy like a couple 10 round mags or something like that. Yeah. Obviously 30 round mags are better than 10 round mags. And for mostly, if you live in a place like California, do not worry too much about that. If you get a little proficiency on that, a couple 10 round mags will do a lot. And to be honest, in self-defense shootings, the odds are low that you will be firing that many rounds, right? Now, if you're in a, a, a self-defense shooting where you do need more bullets than that, there's really nothing that can replace having those bullets, you know, available, but.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't get wrapped around the ax on it. Like it's not something you can change.

• 48:11Robert Evans?

  The, the fact that you only have a 10 round magazine does not mean that you can't become proficient. Yeah. And I don't want anyone here to think that I'm saying you shouldn't, you should be able to get a 60 round mag, as far as I'm concerned. Places like California that have these restrictions, have them. Statistically speaking, and I don't know if these, this data's changed, most self-defense shootings happen within three yards, three seconds, three shots fired.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Yep. I think it's really good to remember that when you're seeing some YouTuber tell you, you need to be able to have 30 rounds and fire 500 yards.

• 48:40Robert Evans?

  I don't go downtown without my backpack and my SBR 300 blackout with 630 round magazines accessible.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  I was a conservative man scared of cities.

• 48:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I carry an RPG and I take the little safety cap off because I like to live that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dangerously. No. My clothing is made out of det cord. I just wear nothing but det cord wherever I go. We're all going down.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  At least you'll take some people with you.

• 49:07Robert Evans?

  This whole city blocks done.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Self-defense martyrdom.

• 49:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, but let me say one more thing about long arms. Another thing you'll see from people that are new in the space, depending on like what they've seen or what they've consumed. This is going to get some hate. Don't bother with AKs. Just don't. This is the United States of America, and this country believes in the AR-15. And what that boiled down to is they're everywhere, they're prolific, the parts are here, the repair is here, they're well manufactured. When you stray from that course to something like an AK, you're, first of all, you're losing ergonomics, but that's a different problem. You're dealing with an un, an unknown quantity of problems. You get an AR-15, that's what's in this country. It's what's prolific. Yeah. If you were in, if you were in somewhere war-torn Africa, get your AK here.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  I'll say this about the war-torn AK countries, because I've, I've been in three countries where the primary arm is an AKM, right? Like a, a kind of AK, right? Syria, Ukraine and Iraq. In all three of those countries, every soldier who knew their stuff, who was proficient and had the option, chose an AR platform if they could. Yeah. Hundred percent of the time. They're just better firearms.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's been my experience as well.

• 50:16Robert Evans?

  They look cool, but, but, but don't go there. Just get an AR-15. Yeah. Like I love my AKs, but they're, they're range toys, right? Like, yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  So let's talk about accessorizing, which again is much easier with ARs and AKs. Like, what other stuff do you need to build into your budget? If you've not shot before, you might not know that you need AirPro, Ipro, sling, maybe holster.

• 50:40Robert Evans?

  Well, we'll start with the firearms accessories, right? So with the pistol, you're, first of all, we talked about safe storage. That's already off the table.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  A pistol, if you plan to carry it, you need a good reliable holster and a good reliable gun belt.

• 50:52Robert Evans?

  Good lord. Yes.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  It depending on how you want to carry it, that'll determine the kind of holster. If you want it outside the waistband, which means it sits outside your belt. That's one thing. If you're carrying it concealed, you're probably going to want an inside the waistband, which goes between your belt and your body. Again, another level of training there because when you're drawing from that, things can go wrong.

• 51:12Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  And that's where people tend to shoot themselves. So that's something you need to be very cautious of.

• 51:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  But with a pistol, typically you're going to want probably an extra magazine or two. It may come with one depending on what you bought. A quality gun belt and a quality holster.

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  Now, what, what about, what about a forty-four Derringer and an ankle holster on each ankle, right? Like that seems like the ideal solution. Anytime you're in danger, you just gotta squat right down there, you know?

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  Get, get real low.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  When, when you've been pushed, pushed onto your back by, uh, by the, by the mob. And you're there on that scene and you're pulling it out of your ankle holster. Yeah, right.

• 51:48Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. Just, just get a wire around the trigger and attach it to your toes so that you can squeeze your toes and fire the Derringer.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  What you need is the belt buckle revolver from the.

• 51:59Robert Evans?

  North American arms. Yeah, that is great.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, from that frigging movie, the vampire movie, Quentin Tarantino.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  Oh geez.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Dust till dawn.

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  Dust till dawn. God, yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  No, but for the pistol belt, a magazine or two extra, it might come with them and a quality holster. Now, the obvious question is, what's a quality holster? And the obvious answer is there's too many out there to be able to offer you that answer right now. Probably something polymer, if it's going to be outside the waistband. And this will be another one that'll get people fired up. Generally avoid the Serpa holsters unless you really want to have a lot of training. Serpa holsters are one that have a little button on the side that allows the gun to come out. If you're not trained well or have the wrong gun in it, it also allows you to accidentally shoot yourself quite easily as well.

• 52:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, best avoided. That's, that's a very good point. And also, one thing I will note is there's a danger that a lot of people aren't aware of with leather. Which is that leather holsters. Now, there are some leather holsters that have like a trigger area reinforced with Kydex, which is, you know, a rigid plasticky substance. But if it's not in time, those can start to like get weaker and worn in such a way that it can also cause it to press the trigger. When you holster it, like that's a thing that has happened to people. So I, I generally think you, you want whatever, you want the trigger guard to be rigid and not something that's going to like warp and be malleable around the trigger, right? Like the whole point is that it stops the trigger from firing.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Yes, you want to avoid that. How about with the, uh, with the long guns? Like, what are you gonna need to budget for those? And then other things like for shooting generally that you'll need if you don't already have them. So when it comes to the long arm, we already said, if you're going to get an AR fifteen, you're going to want to stick some sort of red dot sight on it. The lowest cost ones that are the unbelievably bomb proof are a Chinese company called Holosun.

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  I have a Holosun from twenty seventeen that is still works just fine.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  I love my Holosuns. Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  My Holosun's been bounced down an asphalt road and it still works fine. So.

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  It's the opposite of a fail sun, a hollow sun.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  So you can pick up a red dot Holosun, those can go in, you can get those sometimes, sometimes at low is like a hundred fifty bucks.

• 54:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  So you'll need a red dot sight. A sling is nice, not required, especially if you're going to be using it within the premises of your property. You probably don't need to worry about that. It also slings can cause issues like get caught on things or on things in your house or even tangle you up. So that's a training issue. So sling is iffy, an extra magazine or two. And if you're planning on needing to use this for a defensive purpose inside of your home or structure or at night, it's not the worst thing in the world to throw on a flashlight.

• 54:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Mm hmm. Yes. Uh, um, especially if it's like a defensive firearm, like, uh, it's your home defense gun or a carry gun, like a flashlight. And also if you're, I, I think it's generally a good idea if you're going to carry a, a carry firearm with a flashlight. Have another flashlight that's not on a gun because one thing you should never do is use your gun flashlight to look at just random shit that you need a flashlight for.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  When you come home at night, it's dark, you forgot, you forgot. You can't find which key is the right key. You're using your gun to illuminate your door. Don't do that.

• 55:13Robert Evans?

  Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  It's a pretty good list of accessories. Uh, make sure you have a lot of ear and eye protection as well. So that's where we're gonna go. On the safety side of things, you need proper shooting glasses. That means not the glasses that you picked up for readers at Walgreens. Their shooting glasses can be as cheap as nine bucks, all the way up to hundreds of bucks. You can get them at the sporting goods store. But they're designed with the kind of plastic to be able to take shrapnel or hits from pieces of fragments that are high velocity. They're meant for that. So ten dollar shooting glasses.

• 55:45Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  Hearing protection. Those can be squishy earplugs you put in your ear or they can be over the head muffs. Do not ever shoot guns, except in the most critical conditions or situations.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  Without eye protection and hearing protection.

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  That's the kind of stuff where you lose an eye and every time you fire that gun, you're losing hearing every time.

• 56:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And like for the, I really, because the, obviously most, like it hurts to shoot a firearm without hearing protection. Like you can get away with shooting a gun without eye pro every time but the one time, right? Which is why I really emphasize eye protection. It's easy to convince yourself, I don't need to have it on, right? Now you do.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Cause that's the day that it does the thing.

• 56:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Guns do fuck up, for lack of a better term. And you really don't want your eye unprotected if they do.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's a bad day. Absolutely. And so, but you, on the safety side of, of eye protection and hearing protection, it can be as cheap as ten dollar shooting glasses and a bottle of, of, of squishy earplugs. You're gonna be in there for twenty bucks. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be expensive. Make sure you have it and make sure you use it. But you know what? Before you do any of this, you know what's a smart thing to do? Go take a class from Stop the Bleed and learn how to use tourniquets and medical gear.

• 57:03Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Have that around anyway. Before you ever buy a gun, go do that.

• 57:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  That's the most important thing you could do for anyone.

• 57:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yes. That, and that, that, as you said, should be a priority before getting the firearm. And if you have the money to get and train a gun, you have no excuse for not having an individual first aid kit, an IFAC and the, the knowledge of how to use it, right?

• 57:24Speaker 04

  And I think Stop the Bleed classes are usually free. You can look it up at StopTheBleed.com or dot org. Google it. Uh, take a class. It's easy how to use a tourniquet, use how to use a bandage, have an IFAC, as was just mentioned, which can be a pretty simple kit.

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  And like you, as you said, Robert, if you can afford a gun, you can afford that.

• 57:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  And have that with you on the range anytime you're shooting. Cause as you said, guns can fuck up. They usually don't. But if they do, you're gonna want that IFAC. And that IFAC and that training might just help your neighbor one day when they get in a car accident or whatever.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  I regularly make the decision not to carry my gun with me places, right? You know, I'm gonna go out and get drunk tonight. I don't need if I have a firearm on me when I'm drunk. But you know what I always have is the IFAC, right? Every single time, you know, because number one, drunk with an IFAC, I'm no, I may, I'm probably less effective, but I'm not going to endanger anyone.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  You're just like, hey buddy, I think you need a tourniquet. He's like, no, I don't.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  Google said this goes around the neck.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  But, but once again, a Stop the Bleed class and an IFAC is more likely to serve you or your community more than any gun ever will.

• 58:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great place. I would say that if you are going down this pathway and you're looking to join openly leftist gun organizations. There are several, right? John Brown Gun Club, Socialist Rifle Association. We've had those people on our show before. Be cautious when you're doing that and keep an eye on things because that, that could be something that, that might get you into, into trouble in, in the long run. So it's something.

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  To be aware of.

• 58:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it might be good to just put a holder on joining a new organization until we're a few months into this thing coming up next year. Maybe have an idea about what kind of things might be safe and what kind of things might be less safe.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Definitely. No, but none of that stops you from using signal, building community and learning how to use a firearm properly.

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  Right. It, meeting people, yes. And like training with them, you know, or, or, and taking, getting training, getting, building proficiency. Absolutely. All of that is legal and will remain legal. Just don't start, i- i- if anyone ever talks to you about, let's make a militia.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  Don't do that.

• 59:31Robert Evans?

  It's time to leave that conversation, right? Because among other things, at this point, there's a good chance they're the FBI.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  If you live in Michigan, do not.

• 59:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  This podcast brought to you by Co-Intel Pro.

• 59:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's great. But I mean, it's a tough challenge. And so the other thing you can do is also, once you've got your basic proficiency up and you know that you are safe in terms of handling things, let me throw this out there, too. It doesn't have to be any specific one, although remember, you're going into a space that may not be politically your comfortable place. A good place to build up skill is to go shoot matches, competitions. Yeah. For the most part, it's business oriented. You'll see, you'll hear some stupid comments here or there, depending on what match you're at. But the reality is, you're not there for that. You're there to get better with your gun on a course of fire that they put up for you. Pay your 10 bucks or 20 bucks, learn how to shoot better in those conditions. And that's another space to, once the basic training's out of the way, don't go to a match to be training. Use the match to help increase your skill after you've gotten training.

• 1:00:33Robert Evans?

  But those matches can be a place to really help you out a lot. And there's a lot of them around, and those are easier to find than almost anything.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Yep. Practice score is where you can look them up if you're into that kind of thing. Excellent. Thanks very much for joining us, Carl. Do you want to very briefly plug your YouTube channel? Where can people find you?

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  Well, sure. And thank you for having me on the show. It's always a treat. I really appreciate it. It's always great to be able to just to hang out with you both. It's should do it more often.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  You can find my work, it's In Range TV. You can find my website at inrange.tv. I'm distributed, decentralized across multiple platforms, a predominant one being YouTube. Cover everything from civil rights, history, human rights, to firearms, to from old west flip locks up to the most modern machine guns across the channel. Some of it is instructional, some of it's history. And I've got a cool video dropping tomorrow, in fact, well, tomorrow, based on when we're recording this, on the Opium Wars and how Britain and China's firearms technology discrepancy caused Hong Kong to be owned by Britain. That's the kind of stuff I do on my channel. So check that out. And if you want to find matches that are going to be a place that is truly an inclusive space, we do run matches called Brutality

• 1:01:41Robert Evans?

  Matches. You can find them at brutalitymatches.org. They're not monthly. We have run a couple of them across the country. But I can guarantee you that's a space you will feel comfortable because we make it that way. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Cole.

• 1:02:00Robert Evans?

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• 1:02:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:48Robert Evans?

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

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

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

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:03:33Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

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

• 1:03:45Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. 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 van. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 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.

• 1:04:27Robert Evans?

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

• 1:04:31Speaker 06

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04:37Robert Evans?

  Last week, two major news networks, CNN and CNBC, partnered with the so-called prediction market, Kalshi, an online political betting platform, to use Kalshi's real-time betting data in TV news segments, online news content, and, as Kalshi announced on X, the Everything app, quote, "to integrate prediction markets into CNN's global newsroom", with Kalshi threatening, quote, "A new era of media is here." This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Regular CNN viewers may have noticed

• 1:05:17Robert Evans?

  this integration has already been happening for some time. This past election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in place of and addition to polling data to weigh the likelihood of candidates winning elections. CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enton, Nate Silver protege, who used to work for 538, trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories earlier this year. Kalshi praised Enton by name in their announcement of the CNN partnership, quote, "Enton is an expert at translating what data and polling are saying on any given issue. And through this integration, he can tap into real-time prediction markets

• 1:05:58Robert Evans?

  data to better inform and fact-check his reporting," unquote. Here's an example of this reporting in a CNN segment from October 2025.

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  If you go back six months ago, you go back to April, Kate Baldwin, what were we looking at? Well, we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear shot of taking control of the US House of Representatives, according to the Kalshi Prediction Market odds. We saw them in an 83% chance. But those odds have gone plummeting down. Now we're talking about just a 63% chance, while the GOP's chances, up like a rocket, up like gold, up from 17% to now a 37% chance. So what looked like a pretty clear, likely Democratic win in the House come next year has become much closer to a toss-up at this point, although still slightly leaning Democratic.

• 1:06:45Robert Evans?

  Harry Enton never clarifies how these quote-unquote "odds" are formed or what they really are. To a viewer who just tuned in, or maybe isn't paying that much attention, it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually from a gambling website. They're just big percentages displayed on screen, the way you would see polling data or legitimate information used in a newsroom. This short section, using the Kalshi Prediction Market odds, was then followed by three minutes of analysis using selective midterm voting data from 2017 to 2018 to support the movement in these gambling odds. The gambling odds

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  themselves were the load-bearing piece of information in this piece. Kalshi's main competitor, another so-called prediction market, called Polymarket, partnered with X, the Everything app, and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their prediction data into online news content. Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated have also both launched deals with the prediction market platform, Galactic. So what exactly are these prediction markets, and how do they function? On Polymarket and Kalshi, users can bet yes or no on the outcome of a question relating to world events, which is called a market. As more

• 1:08:12Robert Evans?

  money is wagered on either side, the odds of the outcome change. Currently, top questions include various predictions for Time Person of the Year, will the US strike Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of the Epstein files, and who will be the next president. Kalshi has Trump's chances at 6%. Here's Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland explaining on 60 Minutes.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  You make money if you're right, you lose money if you're wrong. And as a result, it creates this information that's really useful for people.

• 1:08:45Robert Evans?

  These companies would like you to believe that the ratio of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome of world events is somehow useful or reliable information for the general public to forecast the future, whether that's through betting on the likelihood

• 1:09:03Robert Evans?

  Of an upcoming recession, the winner of a sports game, which days of the week Israel will bomb Gaza, or what movie will win best picture? Almost $50 million is currently being wagered over a potential Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in 2025. Production markets currently have $3 billion in weekly trading volume. I do need to note, these companies argue that hedging outcomes of world events legally is not gambling, because that would be illegal. Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which suppressed the early prediction markets of the 2000s.

• 1:09:48Robert Evans?

  But Kalshi is regulated as a platform for trading financial derivatives, rather than securities trading or straight-up legalized gambling. And this determines what entity they have to register with and what regulations they're subject to. Kalshi launched in 2021 with a federal license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And after a years-long battle, in October 2024, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Kalshi, allowing online prediction market betting on US elections, rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the practice was illegal gambling, and their concerns that prediction market betting could undermine election integrity.

• 1:10:32Robert Evans?

  Former CFTC Chairman Rostam Benham made a statement in May of 2024, reading, quote, "Contracts involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience of participating in the democratic electoral process. Allowing these contracts would push the CFTC, a financial market regulator, into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise," unquote. A week before his dad took office in January 2025, Donald Trump Jr. became a strategic advisor at Kalshi. Polymarket launched in 2020 without registering with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,

• 1:11:16Robert Evans?

  and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022 for operating as an unregulated exchange, and was henceforth prohibited from allowing bets from US-based users, though the Polymarket CEO sees it a little different.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  It was a $1.4 million fine, and also It was a settlement. And you could not have customers in the United States. Yeah, we had to go and geo-block trading in the US and move certain operations offshore. And it wasn't, hey, you're banned from trading in the US, it's like, until you're licensed. I mean, it was breaking the law. I mean, people say, breaking the law, it's like, which law, you know? So, if anything, it's incompatible. It's incompatible with the law. Yeah, with the regulatory matrix that existed.

• 1:11:57Robert Evans?

  The past two years, Polymarket has found to be facilitating illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France, the UK, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, Romania, and Australia. Most of these bans just require geo-blocking users, which can be easily circumvented through the use of a VPN. And since the financial transactions on Polymarket are all done through cryptocurrency, it's not clear that Polymarket is taking any steps to enforce these bans beyond geo-blocking. In the midst of facing regulatory hurdles and bans from across the globe, Polymarket

• 1:12:38Robert Evans?

  still exploded in popularity last year, attracting investment from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users, primarily driven by betting on the US presidential election, speculation on whether Biden would drop out of the race, and who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the platform technically being banned in the United States. After the first presidential debate in July 2024 around the attempted assassination of Trump and the RNC, Polymarket gained 60,000 new accounts. The year prior, Polymarket averaged 2,300 new accounts per month.

• 1:13:19Robert Evans?

  August 2024 saw 70,000 new accounts, September 90,000, October 300,000, the month after Trump's second inauguration, 400,000. Currently, Polymarket has over 60,000 daily active traders and hundreds of thousands of monthly traders since October 2024. To give another example of their recent growth, in April 2023, Polymarket's monthly volume was about $3 million. A year later, it was $39 million. In November 2024, it was $2.5 billion. Last month, it was $3.7 billion.

• 1:14:03Robert Evans?

  In summer 2025, Cash Patel's FBI and the CFTC under Trump dropped investigations into whether Polymarket was illegally allowing US users to place bets using VPNs. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm invested in the platform, and Trump Jr. himself joined Polymarket's advisory board. Curiously, a few days after Trump Jr. joined Polymarket, the Commodity Futures Trading

• 1:14:46Robert Evans?

  Commission announced it was going to allow Polymarket to operate in the United States after acquiring another company that held a US license. This past October, Trump's own Truth Social announced it was partnering with Crypto.com to launch "TruthPredict," quote, "A revolutionary prediction market backed by President Trump for enhanced decision-making," unquote. When Barry Weiss's 60 Minutes did a puff piece on Polymarket with its CEO last week, Anderson Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading. Polymarket's CEO Shane Kaplan seemed to think that a little bit of insider trading might

• 1:15:30Robert Evans?

  be good, actually.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  Predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information. Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them, and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn, and like, sort of ethics, and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it, and, you know, people will adapt.

• 1:15:56Robert Evans?

  The CEO did not elaborate on what Polymarket's practice of curating insider trading looks like and where their, quote-unquote, "stringent" line is drawn, because in reality, it doesn't seem this line exists. They essentially encourage insider trading through these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement. From the point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their prediction markets more accurate, so it's a net positive. And if it fucks over some users on the other side of a bet, that's just the cost of business. Last week, an alleged insider trader won over $1 million for bets on Google's 2025

• 1:16:39Robert Evans?

  year in search rankings, listing 22 out of 23 in the correct order. This user has made a series of early bets related to Google the past year, like the exact release date of Google's Gemini 3.0, which they won $150,000 on. But because this Polymarket user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to stop this behavior. And Polymarket can't reverse these trades because they run through the blockchain, not that they would even necessarily want to. Professional gambler, political data analyst, and Polymarket advisor Nate Silver was also

• 1:17:22Robert Evans?

  asked about insider trading on the China Talk podcast two months ago.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Are you worried about insider trading with this, um, with all this political betting? I mean, there's an aspect of like, look, these are all crypto, uh, you know, you get on these markets with crypto, and like, like, there were markets, like, which way is Suzanne Collins going to vote? And, you know, the sort of, the like, you know, like, the tail outcomes for, like, a legislative assistant in her office are, uh, you know, you can make 10 times your salary in, like, a minute, right? Uh, what's your, what's your think on, think on this? For, for sure. I mean, look, I think there are a couple of qualifications, though. Like, first of all, I think people on the inside often aren't as well informed as they

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  think, and/or there are some downsides to having an inside view and an outside view. You might drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, right? You might be in a bubble. Um, yeah, look, I mean, we've But I mean, there are ones where it's like, you can literally, I mean, there's been a, lots of group chats, people talking about, like, very, very sketchy trades, uh, and one-way bets that are being made in the stock market of, like, what's going to happen with a trade deal. I mean, you can literally be the person who decides, right, and be betting on the side on it. It's kind of weird. If there are incentives to make money, in a world of 8 billion people, many of whom are very competitive, and all of whom, not all of them, most of whom have access to the internet, right, people are going to find a way, a way to do it, right?

• 1:18:53Robert Evans?

  Let's pause here for a sec. What do you think Nick goes on to

• 1:18:58Speaker 06

  Just as a comparison to political insider trading as like an unfortunate, but somewhat inevitable consequence of our evolving system of finance.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Like in the crypto space, we've seen like increased number of like crypto kidnappings, right? Well, I mean, that's one of the consequences if people are worth vast amounts of wealth that isn't very secure. It's just, it's just gonna, gonna happen until you up security or have better solutions or whatever else. And so like, you know, I don't think there's necessarily any more or less insider trading on like polymarket than there might be for in sports betting sites. We've seen a lot of sports betting scandals or for regular equities, you know, I, I believe the literature says that like members of Congress achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios. I'd have to, I'm sure there's some debate about that. I have to like to double check that, right?

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  It's fine, bros. It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping. It's fine, actually. So Nate goes on to say that prediction market insider trading isn't that different from congressmen doing insider trading on the stock market or like rigged sports betting. But he really neglects to emphasize that those things are also bad and should be aggressively clamped down on. That shouldn't be allowed. And prediction markets intentionally skirt regulation. They currently have far less legal protections for users against unfair practices. And with crypto, they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors. And now

• 1:20:33Speaker 06

  news companies are legitimizing, turning everyone's phone into a corrupt casino for world events, whether that's Israel starving Palestine, or how many tweets Elon Musk is gonna publish this week. The day before, Kalshi announced their partnership agreement with CNN and then CNBC, CBS aired a 60 Minutes puff piece on Polymarket anchored by Anderson Cooper.

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  When we met with Copeland last month, more than $3.6 million had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, would be out of power by the end of the year. Polymarket users didn't think so. They gave it only a 23% chance. And if you buy no on that, and you're buying it at 78 cents, and at the end of the year, he's still in power.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, you get a dollar per share.

• 1:21:25Speaker 04

  So you've made a profit of.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  22 cents per share.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  I can see why this would be, I mean, I don't want to use the term addictive, but it would be compelling. I mean, maybe it is addictive, but I don't know. It's certainly compelling.

• 1:21:36Speaker 06

  This is how I see it. If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and try and get an edge. Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly Kalshi partnered CNN as well as CBS's 60 Minutes, is so hesitant to call this clearly addictive practice addictive, quote unquote, compelling. Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland explained the platform earlier in this piece. It's a site where you can basically bet on current events, some sort of question about the future, like an election. And as a result, when a ton of people are betting,

• 1:22:18Speaker 06

  you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  And how accurate is it?

• 1:22:25Speaker 06

  It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of a super crystal ball. Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO, quote, "may be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely on to something," unquote. In explaining how Polymarket users attempt to seek truth and gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how in 2024, an anonymous French user made over $80 million on Polymarket by betting on Trump winning the presidential election. And to bolster his bets, he contracted YouGov to conduct private polls in swing states. People thought he just liked Trump. And he had actually commissioned a ton

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  of private polls. He did something called neighbor polling, which is you ask people who they think their neighbors are likely to vote for. For scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to saying you're going to vote for somebody and people feel some sort of social awkwardness. And what he noticed was there was huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the normal polling. And the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously. He thought Trump was undervalued. If this guy was not able to make 80 million, but rather able to make $80,000, he would have never gone through the hassle. But when you get markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for people to go above and beyond to try and find truth. What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer scale of money being wagered

• 1:23:47Speaker 06

  creates incentive to quote unquote, "find truth." In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this specter of objectivity around the gamble odds, which obviously the CEO of Polymarket has a personal incentive to encourage. But Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of capital T truth, even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction market odds back during the 2020 election, which had his chances of winning that election far higher than what pure polling models showed. Kalshi claims that prediction markets can help journalists quote unquote, "fact check," but doesn't explain how "fact"

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  can be determined from speculative gambling markets. Where is the fact in gambling? Well, we will find out after these ads.

• 1:24:53Speaker 06

  To quote from Polymarket advisor Nate Silver's blog, The Silver Bulletin, quote, "It's basically good when people are more exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized. But of course, I also analyze polls and build probabilistic models myself. In that capacity, I strongly disagree with the notion that prediction markets can serve as a good substitute for polls. These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by the prediction market companies themselves, including Polymarket, to be fair. One minor pet peeve is that both reporters and readers often confuse probabilities for poll results," unquote.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  As Nate goes on to explain, if Trump is up 55 to 45 over Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's not saying that Trump is expected to win by 10 points. It means that 10% more users on the website favor Trump winning, which is pretty close to a toss up. This confusion is a huge problem, which is bolstered in both how prediction market companies market their platform, but also how journalists use gambling data in news stories. If you see a social media post, an advertisement, or a random news segment showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians in a race, without context, those betting numbers

• 1:26:20Speaker 06

  could be interpreted in a number of ways and influence someone's perception of an election, and maybe even their choice on who to vote for, or even whether to vote at all. In an October speech, Zoran Mamdani referenced Kalshi billboards predicting a Cuomo victory in the Democratic primary. When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me. And when we strode into Times Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed Cuomo's chances of winning at nearly 80%,

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  we knew that the so-called experts were set to get it wrong yet again. Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable. When you see the Kalshi odds that have our chances of victory in the 90s, know this, you are reading the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he went to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory was promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.

• 1:27:35Speaker 06

  Kalshi excitedly shared the latter half of that clip, proclaiming, "Breaking, Zoran Mamdani references his Kalshi odds onstage. Kalshi is mainstream," unquote, despite this clip demonstrating how prediction markets often suffer from inaccurate bias. Last week, discount Steve Kornacki, former 538 analyst and now CNN's data expert, Harry Enton, shared this segment about the Tennessee District 7 special election on X, the Everything app, with the caption, "Odds."

• 1:28:10Robert Evans?

  Dems will come within 10 points of a win, if not outright win.

• 1:28:16Speaker 06

  I would say if you had to look at the congressional map, any district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, you would say, you know, you've got like nearly a 100% chance of winning if you're running for Congress there. But what are the prediction markets saying right now? Yeah, what are we talking about in terms of the prediction market odds? Look, the Democrat has a 15% chance of winning in that race. Okay, a 15% chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points. But here I think is the key nugget on this side of the ledger, and that is a GOP win by under 10 points. There's a 68% chance of that. So there is a more than two thirds chance that the Republican candidate, yes, they win, but they win by a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump. We're talking about double digits, smaller.

• 1:29:01Speaker 06

  We're talking about a huge, huge shift to the left. We're talking about when you add these two together, we're talking about a more than 80% chance that there's a clear double digit shift to the left and a 15% chance the Democrat actually wins in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points. That just shows you how bad the environment is for Republicans right now, that the Democrat has any sort of a chance in this district.

• 1:29:25Robert Evans?

  He's just authoritatively rattling off complete speculation on a Democrat victory as big screens display percentages in huge text with Source Kalshi in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. Ordinary polling showed that this was a close race that leaned red by two to eight points, and the Republican did end up winning by nine points. To quote the Broken Clock Nate Silver, quote, "Without having polls to look at, the prediction markets would probably kind of suck at making election forecasts. Translating polls into probabilities is considerably more complicated when there are many correlated races at

• 1:30:09Robert Evans?

  once, such as in the battle for the Electoral College or control of Congress. Prediction markets had a strong 2024 in this regard. They leaned toward Trump when our model had it at 50/50. I don't think this was because of any special modeling insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls again. So give the markets credit for that. These sorts of soft, quote, "intangible intuitions" can be valuable, though you'd need a lot of data to determine whether they add or subtract value in the long run."

• 1:30:52Robert Evans?

  As Nate himself acknowledges, someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical model would show. A contention I have with Nate, one of many, is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds, they are not actual probabilities. These odds aren't based on objective mathematical principles like flipping a coin, the three door problem, or even something like blackjack. These odds are created whole cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data informed guessing, but still primarily through people's intuition, which is susceptible

• 1:31:36Robert Evans?

  to group impulses. Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous controlled data that's needed to form a probability, like that which is applied to legalized sports betting. This is quite evident in the betting odds around the last papal conclave, which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions. There was no existing probability to support the election of an American Pope, a first time occurrence. With prediction markets, people can still do research to make an informed bet, but it's not really the case that X candidate is mathematically expected to win an election 80 out of 100 instances.

• 1:32:19Robert Evans?

  A hive mind of users have formed that statistical division through the power of money. 80% of users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur. So the problem isn't just that, like Nate says, people are confusing probabilities for polls. It's that they're confusing prediction market betting odds for mathematical probabilities. It's this difference that allows betting on sports outcomes via Kalshi and Polymarket, even in states that ban typical sports betting, because you're not actually betting on fixed odds, you're betting against other investors. And now news companies are not just manufacturing consent

• 1:33:04Robert Evans?

  and normalizing political gambling, but are actively encouraging the use of these platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets. Anderson Cooper calls it the quote unquote wisdom of crowds. But we already have methods for learning group consensus, like polling, which may have problems, but frankly, far fewer problems than gambling on world events. Beyond the moral qualms of betting money on human suffering, prediction markets are susceptible to not just personal bias, but group bias based on the current ratio of odds. This in-group consensus can be influenced by short-lived

• 1:33:46Robert Evans?

  trending topics, and these platforms cater to a hyper online point of view. Prediction market users provide a very non-representational sample variety, pulling from a very specific type of guy who regularly uses these platforms. To quote from Kalshi's CNN partnership announcement, quote, "Kalshi has become the definitive source for staying informed about the future and is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall Street and Main Street. It recently called the New York City mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media. It's because of this accuracy that Kalshi's data will serve as a powerful compliment to CNN's reporting.

• 1:34:30Robert Evans?

  Journalists can more easily surface credible information to their audiences about the real time probabilities of future cultural and political events." In practice, this reporting mixes gambling data and actually reputable or credible polls in a confusing way, like this recent CNN segment, which cites Kalshi odds on whether Trump will send tariff stimulus checks, as well as CBS, YouGov polling data on if tariffs lower prices, back to back in the same segment.

• 1:35:05Speaker 06

  Do they think that the tariffs, that these rebate checks are actually coming? And at this point, no, no. I mean, Trump tariffs, the tariff stimulus checks are sent to Americans by August of 2026. It's a 25% chance. That's a one in four, so that's not nothing. But the American people right now are craving, craving some relief, and at this point, it doesn't look like it is coming. Although I will note, John Berman, this 25%, it is greater than this 6% who say that tariffs decrease prices or that 5% back in March, which are just, you never see one, two, three, four, 5%. So look, 25% ain't nothing, but at this point, it's low. Yeah, it's interesting. The prediction markets think that only one in four

• 1:35:50Speaker 06

  chance that'll actually happen there.

• 1:35:52Robert Evans?

  Is this really what the future of political forecasting is going to be? Maybe, maybe not. But there are four horsemen of this political gambling apocalypse. Nate Silver, via his gamification of election predictions based on his time as a professional gambler. Sports betting, especially since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada in 2018, resulting in almost 40 states subsequently legalizing some form of sports betting, which has facilitated the accessibility of gambling to grow dramatically across the country the past 10 years through the spread of online sports betting apps. The third horseman is Trump, or the Trump administration,

• 1:36:35Robert Evans?

  through their removal of regulatory hurdles facing prediction markets. And finally, that CNN guy, Harry Enton, a Nate Silver protege, who trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories the past year. These four horsemen, Nate Silver, sports betting, Trump, and Harry Enton, have created the cultural and political conditions for political gambling to spread like wildfire, which hey, is also something you can bet on. During the LA fires, prediction market users could bet on how many acres would burn. So what is the end game of this? This gambling apocalypse that seems to be inching its way closer and closer?

• 1:37:18Robert Evans?

  To answer that, here's a clip from Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansur.

• 1:37:24Speaker 06

  The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. We are living in a world where like we, we have an abundance of information, but there's a lot of noise and like, we don't really understand what's real from what's not. And prediction markets are an antidote to that. They do a very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people. And you're seeing this sort of massive shift where like people are using them whenever they think about questions about the future, you know, whenever they're debating about anything. And I think that trajectory is going to keep going. That's a new consumer habit that I don't think is going to be undone.

• 1:37:56Robert Evans?

  This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting. This financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion, creating new addictive consumer habits. These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports betting to everything, where everyone gets to be their own little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino in their pocket, getting addicted to gambling on speculation of world suffering. And CNN is complicit in this. CNN and others.

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  Have decided to partner with platforms that enable the people who decide when to drop bombs around the world to win millions of dollars by betting money on the choices they themselves are making at the expense of the rest of the world. And these companies think this is a good thing because the betting odds can serve as a potential heads up that something is likely to happen. Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non-existent, are just not enough. Congress needs to be far more involved in regulating online betting, and in the case of political events, it should just be completely banned. It is detrimental to a healthy society.

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  It incentivizes corruption, cruelty, and erodes public trust. Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely, but it should return to being time and location locked. Go to Las Vegas like a fucking adult. Currently, there is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets. Only the federal government can, and Trump's federal government certainly seems like it's not going to, considering the president's son works for both of the main platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket. And while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are now working as their

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  own news aggregators, specifically Polymarket's social media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account, because that drives traffic back to their website where people can bet on the news stories that Polymarket is sharing, even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up. On December 5th, Polymarket posted, quote, "Just in, suspected J6 pipe bomber's legal counsel projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon of those involved in January 6th," unquote. This claim subsequently spread all around the internet, parroted by people of a variety of political orientations.

• 1:40:35Speaker 04

  But if you read closely, the original post says, "Suspected J6 pipe bomber's legal counsel projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon." Polymarket is just spreading gambling information as if it is news content. Quote-unquote "projected" just means that Polymarket users are betting on this. But these projected posts are mixed in with other posts just aggregating the day's news. So unless you are paying super close attention, which rarely people on the internet are, this becomes a Trojan horse of disinformation. When news companies use the term "projected" on election night, usually that indicates

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  with pretty clear mathematical certainty that an event is going to happen. When Polymarket uses "projected" in news tweets, it only indicates that internet gamblers are swinging around money in an effort to create truth, with once legitimate news companies not just complicit, but active participants in this process. That does it for us today at It Could Happen Here. See you on the other side.

• 1:41:57Robert Evans?

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• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you news 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.

• 1:42:47Robert Evans?

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

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

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

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:32Robert Evans?

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

• 1:43:36Speaker 06

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

• 1:43:44Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

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

• 1:43:51Robert Evans?

  It's raw.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

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

• 1:44:00Robert Evans?

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:44:01Speaker 06

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

• 1:44:12Robert Evans?

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

• 1:44:15Speaker 06

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

• 1:44:25Robert Evans?

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

• 1:44:36Robert Evans?

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where a bunch of incredibly convoluted and very silly financial instruments destroy the entire world economy. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me today is someone who does not spend all of her time deep in the bowels of arcane bullshit written by different Federal Reserve boards, and that is Molly Conger, who is the host of the absolutely delightful, I mean, okay, I guess this is a who is really winning here kind of question in terms of the things we research.

• 1:45:10Speaker 03

  You spent a lot of time reading stuff written by Federal Reserve guys? I read a lot of stuff written by guys who want to kill the Federal Reserve guys.

• 1:45:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  And you know what? I still don't know what the Federal Reserve is, and I'm not going to find out.

• 1:45:24Robert Evans?

  You know, I don't actually think knowing what the Federal Reserve is somehow.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  It doesn't change anything.

• 1:45:32Robert Evans?

  I don't think it's actually relevant to this app. I mean, it kind of, it's obvious, it's relevant to everything, but.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  But what Mia means to say is the reason I'm here is because I don't know what the economy is, and at this point, I'm afraid to find out.

• 1:45:44Robert Evans?

  And unfortunately, your worst fears are happening.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  Don't worry, by the end of this, I will not understand.

• 1:45:49Robert Evans?

  I am going to attempt to explain the economy, and by the economy, I mean, shadow banking, yeah. Also, before I go into this, though, you should listen to Weird Little Guys. It is, it's really good. I like it. All my friends really like it.

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:46:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's somehow a nice, comma, kind of relaxing show about neo-Nazis, so.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's got very chill vibes for a show about guys who are trying to, like, blow up school buses.

• 1:46:24Robert Evans?

  Yep. So, all right, you know, I'm reading this, I'm looking over the script, miraculously, this is an, oh wait, hold on, I think I cut the part where people blow up school buses. There was legitimately a segment in here that I might put back in, which one blows up a school bus, but.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  What a crossover event.

• 1:46:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy, the Saudis really good at that shit, turns out. Okay, okay, but let's get back to the topic at hand, which is, what is shadow banking, and why does it matter to all of us people who live in the normal, real world and not in fake finance world?

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  Does it have anything to do with shadow wolves?

• 1:47:04Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately, no.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  What about shadow facts?

• 1:47:08Robert Evans?

  Sadly, actually, there probably is a connection between the financing for the Lord of the Rings movies and shadow banking. I'm just too tired to work it right now.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  I have dragged us off track, and we haven't even gotten on track yet. What is shadow banking?

• 1:47:23Robert Evans?

  Okay, so the good news, the good news, this is the first, it's not the last piece of good news we're going to get this episode, but, comma, the definition used by most non-academics is actually not that bad. There's a pretty good, it's very wishy-washy because it's a congressional report, and so it's specifically not supposed to be taking a stance in either direction on anything, because it's the Congressional Review Office, and they're supposed to be neutral, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:47:51Speaker 03

  Allegedly.

• 1:47:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right, you know, and like, obviously, they're not, but like, you know, it's like, kind of fine congressional report on the subject, and they do the thing that almost everyone does, which is they go back to the definition created by the Financial Stability Board, and I'm just going to quote that because it's not that bad. Quote, "financial activities facilitated by institutions other than central banks, banks, or public financial institutions."

• 1:48:21Speaker 03

  So it's banking that doesn't involve a bank?

• 1:48:24Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  Cancelled. I'm out. I'm out already.

• 1:48:28Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  And they don't mean, like, me loaning you $20?

• 1:48:31Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  No, no, of course not. They just mean unregulated banking.

• 1:48:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  Which you can't legally call banking.

• 1:48:39Robert Evans?

  I mean, you actually can legally call it banking, it's just things get weird really quickly.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not a bank understander, but I know, at least in Virginia, you can't incorporate a business that has the word "bank" in the title unless you are legally a bank. Because it because that's like misleading.

• 1:48:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think they can legally call themselves a bank, but I guess you can call it banking activity.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  That's stupid and I'm mad already.

• 1:49:02Robert Evans?

  Yes. Oh, you're gonna get so much more mad by the end of this. So the base definition is it's not that complicated, right? It's something that does banking stuff that is legally not a bank. You know, and so we could talk about what what kinds of things is this, right? It's like private equity firms, it's hedge funds, it's venture capital firms.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  So it's like evil stuff that ruins the world for no reason, except for like 10 guys make money.

• 1:49:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but it's also, you know, pension funds. It's like insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, business development companies, repo markets, broker dealers, special investment vehicles, securitization vehicles, money market mutual funds, asset-backed commercial paper conduits.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Hey, here's the thing, bud. Most of those things you just said to me are fake and they make me upset.

• 1:49:49Robert Evans?

  It's really bad.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Sovereign wealth funds? Shut up. That's not it. That's not a thing.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  I still, you know, all these, all these things are just like different ways of saying like, you're poor and you're gonna die.

• 1:50:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is sovereign wealth fund is like kind of a less fake one in that it's like,

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  It's all fake.

• 1:50:08Robert Evans?

  Hey, this is like,

• 1:50:09Speaker 03

  It's all fake.

• 1:50:09Robert Evans?

  It's the, well, it's like this, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has pooled all of the money it's gotten from its like horrific crimes and put them together into one giant thing, and that's a sovereign wealth fund.

• 1:50:20Speaker 03

  Oh, so it's good, is what you mean?

• 1:50:23Robert Evans?

  No, I am a notable, there is, by the way, a camp of people who believe that sovereign wealth funds are like a socialist thing and that you could use them to do socialism.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  I'm gonna jump out the window.

• 1:50:33Robert Evans?

  I think this is so stupid. Yeah, I, this is, we haven't even gotten into the nightmare stuff. So remember I was talking about the Financial Stability Board definition in that congressional report, right? Where it's like, okay, this is a bank that does non-banking stuff, or a non-bank that does banking stuff, sorry.

• 1:50:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I guess we should say, I guess we forgot to say at the top, the reason you're explaining shadow banking to me is because we saw an article last week that what those not banks were putting a stop on withdrawals from their not banks. And I didn't know what that meant.

• 1:51:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's amazingly, this, this is so convoluted, we're not even gonna get to that this week.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  Right, but like, that's, that's why we're explaining this.

• 1:51:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's why, right, there was like, yeah, there was like, there was like a mini bank run going on with these like shadow banks.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  No stop banks.

• 1:51:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so we're gonna get into how that can happen and why, but before we get there, we need to talk about, all right, to get a sense of the complexity of this, right? The congressional report, like the accepted terminology for this is not shadow banks, it is,

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  Right, that can't be their official name. That's not their government name.

• 1:51:36Robert Evans?

  No, it's, it's non-bank financial intermediation? Now, what the fuck is that? And this is where this episode goes completely off the rails, because the components of what count as intermediation are so complicated, I am not going to try to describe it until literally the end of this.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  I mean, is it like, what is Venmo officially? Like, Venmo's not a bank, but it provides like financial services.

• 1:52:00Robert Evans?

  Actually, I, it might,

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Because it's, because that's like a financial intermediary, right?

• 1:52:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it might technically be a non-bank, I don't know what the regulatory structure is.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  It's not legally a bank.

• 1:52:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I think that technically is one.

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  Score one for Molly.

• 1:52:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but, okay, so this is, this is gonna get really bad. Okay, so when I first started researching this episode, right, the first thing that I click on is, is the Federal Reserve's chart of how the shadow banking sector works compared to the normal banking sector. Molly, you have seen this, because I posted it as a joke in our group chat. This chart, I have like a very, very large, like, it is like a big, normal-ass sized monitor that I like do my work on. I had to zoom in to 380% just to make out the letters that label the boxes on this chart. If you want to read it, you have to zoom in to 500%.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  That doesn't seem like a well-made chart.

• 1:53:02Robert Evans?

  No, here's the thing, it's actually really good, it's just this complicated. I, I learned later from a paper by Copenhagen Business School Professor Adney Helga-Dotter. We're gonna come back to Helga-Dotter's work a lot in this episode. But I learned from, from her, because she has also experienced seeing this same chart and going, what the is this fuck-ass chart? I found out that the Federal Reserve recommends that in order to have the diagram be legible, you are supposed to print this chart as a three-foot-by-four-foot poster?

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that makes sense, like meeting style, put it on easel, put it on easel.

• 1:53:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right, but like, again, this is, this is a diagram that is just labeling the parts of the system and making, and making like a line that shows how stuff moves through it.

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  I guess I still don't know what we're talking about.

• 1:53:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so this is what we're going to get into in a second, but first, we have to talk about something even more bleak, which is that, oh yeah, by the way, these like non-banking bank things, like these, like all these like venture capital firms, all these hedge funds, all these fucking weird, ghoulish banks that are not banks, uh, yeah, they have twice as many assets than the regular banking system?

• 1:54:17Speaker 03

  Oh, that doesn't seem good.

• 1:54:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's about to get worse, it's about to get worse, Molly.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  That's, that's like saying I keep 70% of the food in my house outside on the porch, like, no, it goes in the fridge.

• 1:54:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, oh, it's so bad, it's so bad. So, okay, there's a pretty good congressional report that I was talking about earlier that has this terrifying quote. Quote, "As of 2023, the broad-measured total financial assets and narrow-measured assets at," NBFIs, this is the shadow banks, "reached $85.7 trillion and $22.2 trillion, respectively, in the United States."

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  But that's more than our GDP.

• 1:54:59Robert Evans?

  That's almost three times our GDP.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  So that's a fake amount of money?

• 1:55:04Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  That's not real at all.

• 1:55:06Robert Evans?

  But it kind of is, right? These compare to total financial assets of $31.1 trillion at banks in the same period? So again, this is, this is almost three times our GDP in assets that they manage or control.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  So where does the money live?

• 1:55:24Robert Evans?

  In a whole bunch of unbelievably convoluted bullshit, like combinations of like loans and real estate and stuff like that.

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  So like, okay, imagine this is Schoolhouse Rock, and instead of the singing bill, you're like a dollar bill, like, where are you?

• 1:55:43Robert Evans?

  We are about to explain this.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  Where does the money live?

• 1:55:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so, okay, okay, we're, we are about one, two paragraphs away from getting to this, or like one paragraph. So the other thing that's very important about this, and this is something Molly was kind of touching on at the beginning of the episode, maybe I should have opened with this, yeah, these people, these are the people who blew up the economy in 2008.

• 1:56:07Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, because they're, they're making stuff up.

• 1:56:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so bullshit, Molly, you're gonna get so mad.

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  This is Calvinball, fuck you, I win.

• 1:56:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it literally is, it's nonsense, it's gibberish, they're doing fucking betting markets with the entire world economy.

• 1:56:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we can all do that now.

• 1:56:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fun, it's like, we now have the power to do the shit that destroyed the entire world economy in 2008? So the thing about shadow banking, and the reason why it's complicated to explain, is that it's a catch-all term for like a million types of institutions that do different things, right? The commonality they have is that they're all not regulated by the banking regulations.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  Right, it's like, we found a way to do financial crime that's not illegal, because they forgot to make this illegal.

• 1:56:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, you know, but the thing is, it's so embedded into the system that like, the US debt working is dependent on the shadow banks buying it, like,

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  Well, I don't believe in that either, so I'm good.

• 1:57:07Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's so fake, Molly, I'm not even gonna attempt to explain what an overnight repo purchase is to you, because it's the fakest thing I've ever seen, where they just, they make $1 trillion exist overnight, and then it stops existing at the end of the night. It's incredible.

• 1:57:21Speaker 03

  I love how much of the economy is based on guys just imagining stuff and agreeing on the thing they imagined, and then trading their imaginary tokens, like, this is fucking pogs, grow up.

• 1:57:29Robert Evans?

  Yep, this is, this, this, this is, this is unfortunately what our entire world is based on, it's so fun. Oh, God, okay, so what is actually shadow banking? I've given you like the broadest definition possible, which is like, and again, it's the, it's doing bank shit without being a bank. But let's go back to the beginning of the term, which is where most people tend to start or get to eventually, this is from an IMF paper, quote, "The term 'shadow bank' was coined by economist Paul McCulley at a 2007 speech at the annual financial symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson Hole, Wyoming." And basically, it's institutions that borrow money in the short term

• 1:58:14Robert Evans?

  through money markets to finance long-term loans, but they aren't banks, so they can't go through the Fed.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  They're financing loans with other loans.

• 1:58:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're gonna, so,

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  From, from, from a not bank?

• 1:58:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  But the big loan is from a real bank, and then the little loan is from a fake bank?

• 1:58:30Robert Evans?

  Give me,

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  And none of the money is real.

• 1:58:32Robert Evans?

  Hold on, hold on, okay, we're, we're going to get there, we're going to explain this in terms of burgers, it's gonna be okay. I believe in us.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  Perfect, perfect, yes.

• 1:58:41Robert Evans?

  But the other thing he describes is, is, and this is from Helga-Dotter, quote, "In the speech, he described shadow banking as the whole alphabet soup of leveraged-up investment conduits, vehicles, and structures." So what he's talking about specifically is, these are the guys who blew up the economy in 2008, like, these specifically, this is what he's talking about, right? These are the people who took a mortgage and then did a bunch of bullshit to it in what's called a securitization chain. They did a bunch of bullshit to it, so you could give the loan to someone else, so you could sell it to someone else. And this blew up the entire world economy, that's what he's talking about, he's talking about the banks that are not banks, the shadow banks, that did all of this bullshit to turn like someone's mortgage into a fucking thing you could bet on?

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  So selling debt is like selling the idea of future money?

• 1:59:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  And then sometimes that future money doesn't come?

• 1:59:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so,

• 1:59:33Speaker 03

  Or doesn't exist?

• 1:59:34Robert Evans?

  So, so, okay, I will say, you do not need to understand this yet, because we haven't, we still have not started the actual explanation.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  I'm never going to.

• 1:59:41Robert Evans?

  I, I believe in us, we can do this, it's, it's not that bad. Okay. I'm not torturing you on purpose. I'm just numb. It's okay. I, I, I believe in you. So I, I want to mention that I'm, I'm very indebted here to the paper I mentioned earlier from Copenhagen Business School Professor Adney Helga daughter, who wrote of, she, she, she wrote a very good simplified explanation of this in her review of international political economy article called Banking Upside Down: The Implicit Politics of Shadow Banking Expertise. But, okay, a, a, as you can tell by the fact that it's called Banking Upside Down: The Implicit Politics of Shadow Banking Expertise, this has been, when, when she's simplifying it, she's simplifying it from like economist down to like a political scientist or an anthropologist

• 2:00:26Robert Evans?

  can understand this. I am about to attempt to simplify this down to a regular person can understand this. So I'm drawing on a lot of her stuff for, for the first part of this explanation, but I am, I, I've turned it into burgers. So. I'll do my best. I'm, I'm being very brave. Okay. So a shadow bank, right? It's something that does banking shit. That's not a bank. So what do I mean by banking shit? That was my next question. Yes. I think we need to start with what is a bank? Yes. So, so, okay, okay. And this is, this is, this is where we're starting here. What does a bank do? I put my money in it and they hold it for me. So, no, actually, and this is the interesting part. No, they do stuff with it. Oh, yeah. They're holding on to the promise of my money.

• 2:01:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, okay, let's, let's just, let's just look at this for a second. So, okay, so regular people give them money to store in the bank. This is called a deposit. The bank takes your money and loans it out. Right. And uses that to make more money. This is how it pays you interest, right? Is that it's, it's taking your money and it's loaning it out to other, to other people. It's buying things with it. That part I understand. Yeah. And this is obviously a cartoon image, and I know there's going to be econ people who are going to be mad at me. Look, you, if, if, if you understand. Why are they listening to this? If you already know what this means, go away. This isn't for you. I'm not humiliating myself for your entertainment. Like, like for, for the political economy people here, when I say stuff that might,

• 2:01:54Robert Evans?

  that's like technically kind of fuzzy. It's for me, the podcast idiot. Yeah, like you, you understand this. Like I'm working at the level of hamburgers here. So like, we, we, we have to do some abstractions. So, okay, the, the important thing for our purposes, right, is that there's two things here, right? There's like the deposit, it's the money you give them, and then there's the loans. Right. And these operate on different timelines, right? You can take the deposit out at any time, at least in theory, but they can't get the money from the loan back at any time. Right. Now, this is like one of the critical things of what a bank is, is, is this timeline thing, right? It turns your, your money, which you can take out at any time, into a

• 2:02:38Robert Evans?

  different kind of thing, this loan, which can't be taken out immediately, right? And then they use that to make money. So this is called maturity transformation. This is a very simple concept they have made very complicated. This is one of the core aspects of that definition I was talking about earlier. This is one of the four things in it. But you now understand this. It's not that complicated. It's, it's, it's take short term, make long term, and we'll get to doing the reverse in a second. Oh, I don't think it works the other way. Ah, yeah. It's gonna go so badly. It's gonna go so badly. I don't know about bank, but just generally speaking, like in terms of time and like how like material reality works, I don't think it works the other way. It's, it's not great. It's not great, Molly. It's not great. Okay.

• 2:03:23Robert Evans?

  So, okay, there, there is however, a problem here, right? Which is what happens if everyone tries to get their short-term money back at the same time? Oh, you can't. Yeah, right. That's why you have deposit insurance. Yeah, right. Cause the, the, the banks aren't holding short-term cash. What they're holding is long-term loans, and those loans, like you can't pay someone a loan. Well, okay, actually, this entire, the crux of this episode is they found a way to do that. Yeah. Yes. And, and it blew up the entire world economy. But if I, but if I wanted $40,000 out of my, if I had a checking account with $40,000 in it, and they gave me my neighbor's mortgage as a prom, like, that wouldn't work for me. That wouldn't work for me. No. Fuck that. No, no, no. You need, you need, you need, you need something that

• 2:04:06Robert Evans?

  can buy a burger, and they're not giving you that. So, okay, this is very, very bad. If people try to do this, it is called a bank run. It is not good. It's bad. Yeah. And so this blew up, this blew up the entire world economy so many goddamn times that eventually we got financial regulation. Now, this, this regulation requires banks to have money that is like actual cash they can hand you, like right now, on hand at all times. And the government gets to, and this is, that's a little bit suffocating, but like, yeah, that, that, that's how it works, right? Like. And it's insured by the government. Yeah. The, the government will give you your money back if, if the bank goes under, up to like a certain amount, etc., etc. $250,000 FDIC insured.

• 2:04:49Robert Evans?

  Yep. This is, this, this, that's, that's what that means, right? The government will give you your money back. But also, there's, there's a trade-off to this. So this is a massive benefit for the banks, right? The fact, the fact that if they go under, all of their assets will be repaid by the government, it's, it's a massive benefit for them because it means that putting your money in the bank is like safe. Yeah, I love that for me. Right? Yeah, it's good. Now, the cost to the banks is that the feds get to see their balance sheet, right? The feds get to see what they're doing with their fucking money, and they get to make sure that these banks aren't doing insane shit. Okay, that makes sense. Cause they're insuring it. Yeah. And that, like, they're not doing like unbelievably risky, awful shit, and also that they're actually holding enough money to be able to pay people out. Right. Okay. So far, so good. I, I understand bank.

• 2:05:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, shadow banking boldly asks the question. Okay, but what if you did all of the banking backwards? No one had access to the books, and the government will only pay you back if the entire world economy looks like it's going to die? I feel like at that point, the government should just, just step back. Here's the thing. Here's the thing, right? I, I, I, yeah, like, I'm, I'm so down with this. Like, yeah, I don't know. Fuck it. Like, every single one of you motherfuckers is, is gonna pay this off by working as a barista for 30 years? Like, fuck you. But the government was like, nah, we want, like, we want capitalism to keep working. Make every hedge fund manager work at a Waffle House. Yeah. Fuck them.

• 2:06:28Robert Evans?

  Okay. I'm gonna say something, and then I'm gonna make a disclaimer. So, the kind of shadow banks that did 2008 work in the opposite direction. They start with debt. They take that debt and they turn that debt into like cash, right? Can I do that? No. Does that work for me at my house? No. So, okay. And I also want to mention, there's a bunch of other kinds of shadow banks. The, the kind of shadow bank that's going under right now is not really this. The, the kind of shadow bank that's like exploding right now is a kind of shadow bank that's like, what if, what if a bank that wasn't a bank gave a completely unregulated

• 2:07:09Robert Evans?

  loan with secret terms to a corporation? And that's the one that's going under right now. But for a long, long time, the kind of shadow bank that was really important to the global economy, and this is still like a massive portion of how all of the economic system works, is these ones where you're trying to take debt and turn it into something you can trade for cash. So, okay, you, you take debt, right? You start off with a mortgage. Okay. So these mortgages pay out over the extremely long term, right? But you want to be able to trade this mortgage for cash. Right. And this is a process called securitization. Turning this mortgage into something you can sell for cash is making it into what's called a security. So now, what happens, right?

• 2:07:53Robert Evans?

  When it's packaged into, into a security, when there's a securitization process, and then like the regular bank, the regular bank sends the mortgage to the shadow bank. And the shadow bank like does like, woo, stuff and turns it into a security. And now, what this means is that instead of you who paid the mortgage owing money to the bank, you own it to the shadow bank, or whoever the fuck the shadow bank sells it to, right? Okay. So the real bank is involved. The real bank is involved. Yes. Oh, yes. The real bank is making so much money off of this. This is, this is why 2008 happened. Oh, cause Wells Fargo did this with everybody's mortgage? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Cause I couldn't figure out, cause you said this was not 2008, and I was like, I thought Wells Fargo did that. That's a real bank. But the real bank was shadow banking.

• 2:08:36Robert Evans?

  The real bank figured out a way to sell their mortgages. And it's, it's gonna get much worse as we go through this, but that's, that's what causes this, right? Is like turning, is turning these mortgages into these like securities, and like these like collateralized debt obligations, and these like special packaged bullshit that you could sell to someone. So the, the way I would describe this is it's like, do you know how a bond works? Honestly, Mia, I do not.

• 2:09:05Robert Evans?

  Okay, we, let's, let's do this. We, we can do this. Okay, so the, the, the kind of bond that you are normally likely to encounter is a government bond? Yeah. Okay, so you, you pay the government money to buy the bond. And what the bond says is at a certain point in time, you hand it back to the government and they pay you more money. Right. It's like a promise for later. Yeah, right. So it, it, it, it's, it's basically a loan. But it's a loan in a form where like the government's technically like selling it. And you and and then the other thing about bonds, right, is if you hand the bond to someone else. Well, okay, I mean, this is technically bear bonds, but like you, you, you can then give the bond to someone else. And now, and now if they give it back to the government.

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  They get the money.

• 2:09:48Robert Evans?

  In like 10 years, they get the money, right?

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  Right, okay, I get that.

• 2:09:51Robert Evans?

  And and you can sell these things. And this is what these people are doing with mortgages.

• 2:09:57Speaker 03

  That's not as like secure as like a government bond, because if I have a hundred dollar government, like if I have a hundred dollar bearer's bond. I know for a fact that on the date on the bond, it's gonna be worth a hundred dollars.

• 2:10:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're gonna pay out, right?

• 2:10:08Speaker 03

  But if this is somebody's mortgage.

• 2:10:10Robert Evans?

  Why not?

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  The government's gonna pay it, but like the mortgage, the person who has the mortgage, that's not.

• 2:10:15Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:10:16Speaker 03

  That's not real, that's not money.

• 2:10:17Robert Evans?

  Nope, yep.

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  That's like, that's a, that's a promise, but like my hand is behind my back.

• 2:10:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's a shit show. And this whole process is the largest sort of, I'm not sure if that's actually the largest, I would need to actually like. Yet, I, I've never, I haven't seen in-depth breakdown sectorally, but like.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  None of this is real, you could just say whatever.

• 2:10:35Robert Evans?

  Um, this, this is one of the most important kind of shadow banks, because in, in order to turn this mortgage into a security, the moment you do that, you do this by creating what's called a special purpose vehicle, or someone else creates one. It's called a special purpose vehicle, yeah, it's, it's, it's a nightmare, it's a nightmare.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna put this mortgage on a roller coaster.

• 2:10:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous, right? It's a special purpose vehicle, it, it does a loop-de-loop. But the moment you create one of these, the, the moment you create one of these like, security mortgages, right? That's a shadow bank. You've, you've created a shadow bank.

• 2:11:07Speaker 03

  Right, because that's not real banking, that's shadow banking.

• 2:11:10Robert Evans?

  Yep, because, because you're creating another entity that is not a bank, that's doing the banking stuff.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  I thought that the banking and the shadow banking were like separate things, right? Because it's, because the shadow banking is like.

• 2:11:19Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  It's like, oh, they're doing non-bank stuff.

• 2:11:21Robert Evans?

  They're all in on it, they're all in on it.

• 2:11:24Speaker 03

  If the bank is doing shadow banking, I would, I'm stupid, but I would call that a crime.

• 2:11:29Robert Evans?

  This is, this is another thing that caused 2008, because a bunch of what was happening here was.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  Crime!

• 2:11:35Robert Evans?

  Because our country is run by the bourgeoisie, Molly, that, that's why it's not a crime.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

  You're just telling me this for the first time.

• 2:11:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's bad. So, so what, what, what happened, what happened in 2008, one of the things that happened, right, is so all of these regulators are supposed to be looking at the balance sheets of these companies.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  But they're hiding stuff off the books.

• 2:11:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they were hiding these things in these like special purpose vehicles, like in these like shadow banks.

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  They didn't open the trunks on the special purpose vehicles.

• 2:12:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so no one could see the fucking dead bodies in the trunks of the vehicles, because they weren't on the balance sheet that like the government had access to.

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  What's the point of the balance sheet if you don't put the whole balance on it?

• 2:12:11Robert Evans?

  I, I'm fucking, I don't know, I, and this is like legitimately, when, when, when, when you read the accounts of like why shadow banking has exploded, and by the way, it's exploded since 2008. Uh, it's like way bigger now.

• 2:12:22Speaker 03

  Exploded like in popularity, or like exploded as in like destroy?

• 2:12:25Robert Evans?

  Popularity. There's so much, there's so much more of it, there's so much more of it.

• 2:12:28Speaker 03

  Because, oh, because it went so well. It went so well in 2008 that now everyone's doing it.

• 2:12:33Robert Evans?

  Because here's the thing, a- after 2008, we got like a little tiny bit of banking regulation. And the banks lost their fucking minds, and so more and more money went into all of these unhinged shadow making things.

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  Okay, but so like when a toddler has a tantrum, you don't give them a billion dollars.

• 2:12:50Robert Evans?

  When these shadow banks went under, these things were not backed by the government, the government bailed them out anyways.

• 2:12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they didn't have to do that.

• 2:12:55Robert Evans?

  Nope.

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  So they really, they learned their lesson, they really learned their lesson this time.

• 2:12:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like they, they bailed out these banks and they fucking sold you out. And like, you know, like, one, one, one of the things that I think people have forgotten was there's this thing called robo calls during the Obama administration, right? Part of how the financial recovery happened was that all these banks would like go to courthouses, right? And they would just repossess mortgages en masse.

• 2:13:20Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:13:21Robert Evans?

  And they had like a robot that was like sign, it would just, it would just sign, like a blank check sign off on all these mortgages that were supposedly underwater. And they would just steal people's houses, people who were on top of their payments, people who like didn't know money, they would just take their houses. And this happened en masse, and this is like how the banks recovered, was they stole everyone's houses.

• 2:13:40Speaker 03

  And that's a crime, right?

• 2:13:42Robert Evans?

  It should have been a crime, but like it was illegal, it didn't matter though, because these people.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  Everything you're describing to me is a crime.

• 2:13:48Robert Evans?

  It's so nightmarish. Well, here's the thing, most of the stuff I'm describing is not a crime. This was actually a crime.

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  But why is nobody in jail?

• 2:13:56Robert Evans?

  Because Barack Obama went up in front of these people and said, I am the only thing standing between you and the guillotines? I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote.

• 2:14:03Speaker 03

  And why didn't he bring the guillotine with him?

• 2:14:06Robert Evans?

  Because, because he wants the capitalist system to continue.

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's a silly question, I know who Barack Obama is. I'm just upset.

• 2:14:13Robert Evans?

  It's not good. Okay, so, so let's, let's get you another question that you asked, which is why, why would you do this? Why, why would you do this?

• 2:14:20Speaker 03

  Oh, to make money.

• 2:14:21Robert Evans?

  Yes, but it's actually more complicated than that.

• 2:14:24Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:14:25Robert Evans?

  Okay, so on the one hand, the, these assets, you know, a mortgage does make more money than just putting your money in a bank. Right? That's like the basis of banking, is that they, they can use your money that's sitting in the bank and getting interest, and then they make more money by spending it elsewhere.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  But so they're just doing this because they hate us, not just to make money?

• 2:14:42Robert Evans?

  No, there, there, there is an actual explanation.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  There's a third reason.

• 2:14:46Robert Evans?

  So then why, why would you ever have your money in a bank, or like buy something like, say if like government bonds, you can sell really quickly, right? Why, why, why would you ever want that? And the reason why is something called liquidity.

• 2:15:01Speaker 03

  Right, you wanna be able to spend the money.

• 2:15:03Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Rather than wait 30 years for it to get paid back.

• 2:15:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, liquidity is just how easy is it to turn whatever you own into cash, right?

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  Into real money, because most of what we're talking about is not money, it's the idea of money.

• 2:15:15Robert Evans?

  Yes, so, so liquidity is, is, is literally, it's the burger test, right? Can you buy a burger with this?

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  Can I eat this?

• 2:15:23Robert Evans?

  Money is like the most liquid asset, right? Because you can, you can, you can turn this into a burger.

• 2:15:27Speaker 03

  Right, so liquidity is the only part of this that's actually money, everything else is not money.

• 2:15:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, liquidity is the measure of how money is it, basically? Like how easy is it to turn this into burger?

• 2:15:38Speaker 03

  Is, is this a special vehicle securitization? It's not real, Mia.

• 2:15:43Robert Evans?

  No, it's fake as shit, right? This is not that complicated, right? If, if you, if, if, it's like, like you can, you can buy a burger with $10, right? That's liquid.

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  Actually, you kind of can't these days.

• 2:15:54Robert Evans?

  I know, I, look, I

• 2:15:59Robert Evans?

  look, I, I, I, imagine a world where you can buy a burger for $10.

• 2:16:04Speaker 03

  Imagine, imagine a burger.

• 2:16:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, imagine a burger that's purchasable. Now, what you can't buy a burger with is like the 10 bucks that a guy you work with owes you for buying him a burger.

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  Depends on how well you know the burger guy.

• 2:16:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but that's, that's where things get bad.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Robert Evans?

  Right? Now, the thing is, right, like, so the, the 10 bucks the guy you work with, like owes you, not liquid. You don't have the money in your hands, and if you want to get it from him, you have to like go ask him for the money, and maybe he has 10 bucks, and maybe he doesn't, right? At which point you can't get your $10 back, until he has the money.

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  But that, but that $10 that I am theoretically owed is an asset that I have, not a debt.

• 2:16:47Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:16:48Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  This is stupid.

• 2:16:50Robert Evans?

  Now, loans, loans are not liquid assets, right? And they're not liquid assets because you can't get the money back, like immediately.

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  So I don't have $10 I can spend, but on paper, I do have 10 theoretical dollars.

• 2:17:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right, and this is also like most of what billionaire money is.

• 2:17:04Speaker 03

  Fake, right.

• 2:17:05Robert Evans?

  It's like, most of their money is like in like a stock or some shit, or like it's weird fake money.

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  Like theoretically, they could access this amount of money, but they don't have it.

• 2:17:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  It's not real.

• 2:17:14Robert Evans?

  Now, okay, so, but, but there is this question, so why, why would you keep your money in fake money instead of real money? And the answer is that it gives you more money back? Because say, say you're an asshole, right, and you're charging interest on your coworker for that burger loan.

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  Right, so that $10 is actually worth more than $10.

• 2:17:32Robert Evans?

  More money, yes.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  So the $10 that I don't have is theoretically worth $12.

• 2:17:36Robert Evans?

  Worth more, yeah, it's worth more than the money that you do have.

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  I can get cheese on the burger.

• 2:17:41Robert Evans?

  Yes, right?

• 2:17:44Robert Evans?

  And, and this is, this is like the fundamental thing of the banking system, like one of them is that illiquid assets? Or like assets that you, that aren't money are worth more than money?

• 2:17:54Speaker 03

  I guess like, when I put a small amount of my savings into a CD, that's what I'm doing, except normal style. They're doing it weird.

• 2:18:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, basically.

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  Because that's like an illiquid asset that I'm, I'm, I'm trading the ability to access that liquidity for the potential of more money later.

• 2:18:12Robert Evans?

  Wait, so when you say a CD, do you mean like a, like a physical, like a disc, like a CD?

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  No, a CD like at the bank.

• 2:18:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, like the, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  Like the investment product.

• 2:18:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, I was like.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  No, I'm not talking about buying compact discs.

• 2:18:24Robert Evans?

  I, I, I, I wouldn't sleep at 5:00 AM this morning.

• 2:18:26Speaker 03

  I'm talking about, I'm talking about investing, you ever heard of it?

• 2:18:29Robert Evans?

  Wow. There, there's, there's actually a really, an annoying thing researching this episode, because there's like, so CDOs are like a type of loan that we'll kind of get to in a bit, but there's also a tech position called CDO? It's like chief something officer.

• 2:18:44Speaker 03

  Chief dookie officer, who cares?

• 2:18:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, whatever the fuck, right? But like when you're trying to search for stuff, that's like about CDOs, right? The other one keeps coming up? Hate it. Okay, okay, locking in, locking in, right?

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  Lock and load.

• 2:18:58Robert Evans?

  Now, what if you both wanted more money and also the ability to buy a burger?

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  I guess I would, uh, probably break one of Carl's fingers. This is the guy that owes me the $10, Carl.

• 2:19:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but even then, it's hard to, even that's like, this is too hard for these people.

• 2:19:15Speaker 03

  I would go to Carl's house and kick him out of it.

• 2:19:18Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, so, but the other thing is like, you are not very rich.

• 2:19:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:19:22Robert Evans?

  These people, if you are really, really rich, I am talking like billionaires, maybe like high, high-class multimillionaires. Well, you can go to a shadow bank.

• 2:19:31Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:19:32Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 2:19:33Speaker 03

  You can get a loan based on the loan.

• 2:19:35Robert Evans?

  No, well, he's like, the, the, the thing is that you have money, right? But you want to turn your money into more money. Like you have like actual cash, right? Like you are, you are, for example, a pension fund.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  No, I'm not.

• 2:19:48Robert Evans?

  You have a shit ton of cash, or there, imagine, imagine a pension fund, right? I, I, this is.

• 2:19:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:19:54Robert Evans?

  This, this is also really hard, because it used to be easier to explain this, because like we used to live in a world where people had pension funds and had mortgages? And now we no longer have pension funds or mortgages?

• 2:20:05Speaker 03

  I live in an apartment, and I will always live in an apartment.

• 2:20:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, and so, so, okay, so like imagine, imagine a pension fund, right? You, you have a shit ton of money from your members paying into the fund. But it's cash. You need to turn that cash into more money, but also you're a pension fund. So you constantly have to take money back out in order to pay the people who are retiring. To pay old people, yeah. And this is also a thing that like, you know, if you're just like a rich person, sometimes you want your, a lot of times you want your money in assets that are like you can, you can turn back into real money, but also make you a shit ton of money. Right. They need to sort of revolve a little bit. They need to be like, Yeah. I don't know, like a Jell-O, like partially liquid. Yeah. And, and, and this is, this is what the shadow banks do, right? Because the thing that you can buy

• 2:20:52Robert Evans?

  is one of those mortgages they've turned into like a security, right? You can go buy someone else's debt. Uh huh. But because it's a magic security now, and these are called mortgage-backed securities. And again, if you're old enough to remember, yeah, anything, anything about 2008, that's what blew up the whole economy is, is these mortgage-backed securities. Yeah, I've heard of that because it was bad. Yep. Terrible idea. And so we're still doing that? Oh, yeah. Um, okay, good. I mean, it's, it's less, specifically the mortgage-backed ones are less bad. Also, they've started doing it with like commercial retail loans, which is incredible. Oh, great. So that's really fun. They, they're also doing with other unhinged shit that we're gonna do like next episode.

• 2:21:32Robert Evans?

  And, and what these people are really buying aren't just these like, you're not buying like one person's mortgage, right? Where they're like pooled and like bundled. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, they bundle them all together and then you, you buy the rights to a percentage of, of the pool. It's not like when you sponsor like an elephant in Africa or something and they send you a picture of like a specific elephant. Yeah. They don't send you, they don't send you a picture of the family you're harming. No. These are the Joneses. You own their fucking house. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a shit show. Um, no, well, I mean, eventually you might have to go figure out who that is because you like own whatever the fuck percentage of like the mortgages or whatever, but like, okay. So these are, these are just like someone else's debt that you're buying.

• 2:22:15Robert Evans?

  And, and the people who can do this are, you know, people who have billions of dollars. It's not you, the listener. By the way, if you, the listener, have billions of dollars lying around for some reason. Can I have some? Please, yes. Uh, please, please give me some of them so I can house like literally every trans woman and like trans person. I can, I can do it. Like, please give me your billions of dollars so I can, I can achieve this goal. But like, we're talking about, you know, like, like the pension fund of California. We're talking about mega corporations, insurance companies, the kinds of things that can actually buy these, like, you know? Now, this is where we get to one of the other problems, which is that these things are not insured. So, Yeah. what do you do in order to try to make it less risky? What do you get if you can't pay the loan back?

• 2:23:01Robert Evans?

  And this is what's called collateral. I don't know, a swift punch in the nuts? Oh. No, they take your house, right? Yeah. That's supposed to be the thing. So, okay, the way that like shadow banking loans tend to work is that they, they have collateral, right? So you, you give them something or, or it's either you give them something directly or You promise. It's like if you promise to give them the thing. Yeah. And giving it to them directly is like a repo market thing. We're not really going to get into those right now, but this, that's, that's also a kind of shadow bank. But there's a problem, right? Which is what if the thing that you're paying, you're paying as collateral, like what if your house becomes worthless? And what if, what if Molly?

• 2:23:43Robert Evans?

  Then it's completely uninsured and there's no way to fix it because I don't even have anything to give you. Now, now Molly, what if, and this is purely hypothetical, it could never happen in the real world, Molly, but what if somehow someone, someone decided to use the same house as collateral for multiple different securities? Well, that could never go wrong. What if Molly, they made a word for this that is so complicated, I am not going to attempt to read it on the show. What if Molly? What is it in German or something? No, it's like, it's just like this. It's like, it's like the length of my head. It's like hyper, hypo, something bullshit like, I, I refuse to say it because it is just like a completely like finance gold bullshit term they made up.

• 2:24:28Robert Evans?

  So, but the point of, the point of collateral is that you can use it Uh huh. to pay off the loan if you default on the loan. And so that literally won't work more than once. Because once I eat the burger, once I eat the burger, it's gone. Yep. And this is one of the things that happened in 2008. I can't prom, I can't promise 10 guys my burger. Now, Molly, here's the amazing thing here, right? Cause the, but the advantage for these companies, right? Is like, if you're the bank that has the mortgage, suddenly you can spin your mortgage off into like multiple securities that you can sell. Right. It's worth 10 times more and that's great for you. Yes. And comma, comma, we, we haven't even, again, I, I, I just, I just described the system where these people are promising the same house to multiple people.

• 2:25:13Robert Evans?

  Um, this isn't even the extremely unfathomably reckless and greedy shit. No, it is. Oh, it is, but it's not the worst of it. Oh, good.

• 2:25:32Robert Evans?

  Okay. So do you remember that quote from when I was giving the first definition of, of shadow banking, right? Like I gave, I gave, I gave this quote from the guy who invented the term where he called it, quote, "The whole alphabet soup of leveraged up investment conduits, vehicles and structures." Right. So we've kind of talked about the conduits, vehicles and structures, right? Those are all of the shadow banks that like make the things, right? I love the conduits, vehicles and structures. Yeah. All the acronyms. But what does leveraged up mean? Oh. Now, okay, in, in this case, it means that a bunch of these banks have taken out a shit ton of like risky, high interest loans in order to buy more of these fucking mortgages because they think they can make more money off of it.

• 2:26:16Robert Evans?

  So they took out, they took out loans to buy these unsecured securities. The regular ass banks were doing this. Yeah. They, they went into debt to buy more of these shitty mortgages. So they took out loans to buy what are essentially unsecured loans. Yep. Because I thought it would make them more money. But there's no money involved. Oh, oh, oh, Molly, oh, Molly. Hypothetical money. It is about to get so much worse, right? So I, I, well, okay. So sticking with leveraging for a second, right? You might've actually heard of something called a leveraged buyout. I have heard those words and then I stopped listening.

• 2:26:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So here's the thing, leveraged buyouts are something that actually happens in the real world that does fuck you directly, which is a whole bunch of companies that used to be like normal ass companies, like died because venture capital firms, who by the way, are also shadow banks. Oh. Did this, right? They came in, technically speaking, they did it through like risky bond purchases, but basically they, they did a bunch of high interest loans. And then they go buy a company. And then they like strip it for parts. And then they try to raise the stock price of the company. Yeah. And then they strip it for parts, sell everything and, and get out, right? That's what a leveraged buyout is. These people are sort of, are doing kind of a version of that, but like they're, they're taking on this debt in order to like buy fucking shitty underwater mortgages.

• 2:27:39Robert Evans?

  Cause they look like they're making so much money. They're taking on real debt to buy hypothetical debt. Uh huh. Oh, and it's about to get so much worse. That doesn't seem like a good idea. So it's about to get so much worse. So that's what like the leveraged part of that. I don't even know how you do that in burgers. I, I don't know. You're, you're, you're going into debt to like buy the promise of burgers in the future? So you can sell those future burgers? Yeah, but burgers are real. The thing, we're not talking about a real thing at all. Well, technically, technically speaking, somewhere at the bottom of this is mortgages. However, comma, we're about to get into a kind of asset where there isn't anything behind it.

• 2:28:19Robert Evans?

  And this is where the really, really truly unhinged shit starts. It hasn't. Which is that these companies figured out a way to bet on whether these mortgages were going to fail or not. That's so tight, Mia. I fucking love that. I love it. Yes. Yeah. By the way, I, I kind of emphasize enough how, how unhinged this is. The, the mechanism they're using to do this is called a credit default swap. Oh, I've heard that phrase. This was supposed to be how they did insurance. Their mechanism for doing insurance on all of these insane loans they were doing was originally like, Okay, I'm gonna, you, you, you're, I don't know, so you, you have, you have a bank, right? The bank has given out a risky loan. So this bank goes to another bank.

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  They shouldn't do that.

• 2:29:03Robert Evans?

  And they say, hey, if this person actually pays the loan back, I will pay you money.

• 2:29:08Speaker 03

  Okay, so the other, so their bank is like, taking a gamble here.

• 2:29:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so, so, so, so the other bank that's giving out the loan, right? Gets money if the loan goes under. So in theory, they're sort of like insured against the risk. They call it like hedging. They're like, so like, so theoretically, it's less bad for them because now even if the loan goes under, they still get money back from that other bank?

• 2:29:28Speaker 03

  So the other bank is just a bookie?

• 2:29:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and the other bank is betting that they are going to get it. So then, and, and if the loan does get paid, then that bank makes money.

• 2:29:39Speaker 03

  And this is legal for everyone to do?

• 2:29:41Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:29:42Speaker 03

  This is real banking or shadow bank? This is real bank?

• 2:29:45Robert Evans?

  This, this, no, this is technically, actually, no, this, this is actually both. Both of you do this. Technically speaking, the instrument, like, like the actual, like, credit default swap or whatever is made by the shadow banks, but then they're brought by the regular banks?

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  I'm starting to think that the banks are to the shadow banks. And that all of this is just fake and bad.

• 2:30:04Robert Evans?

  Like, so here's the thing, here's the, the, the, the thing about these systems, right? Is that like, a lot of the original literature on it was considering them separate, but it's like, no, like, the, the regular banks are making their own shadow banks do these things. They're all involved in these assets. They're also investing in the shadow banks? Which is the problem we're having right now?

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  Right, it's like, it's the same guy, he just like turns his chair around at his desk and he's like, now I'm shadow bank Todd.

• 2:30:25Robert Evans?

  Yep, well, and it's, sometimes it's that, sometimes there legitimately is just other entities they work with.

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  But yeah, but there's still, it's still the bank engaging, so it's like, oh, these are non-banking practices. Yeah, but the bank is doing it.

• 2:30:36Robert Evans?

  The, well, but here's the thing, the, the, the important part for that, though, is that like, the non-bank also can do this with other non-banks.

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  Even better. Even, yeah, right. I just, I just feel like, I just feel like, once we're, once we're talking about shadow banking, like, the real bank should not be in the room. Like, go home, Wells Fargo, you don't belong here, you're drunk.

• 2:30:52Robert Evans?

  No, but like, they're funding all of this, right?

• 2:30:54Speaker 03

  That, like, if the real bank is involved with the shadow banking, that means like, I can't opt out of being involved in this.

• 2:30:59Robert Evans?

  Nope.

• 2:30:59Speaker 03

  Because they have my money!

• 2:31:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you, you know, we were talking about that at the top, that like, uh, so some of these like, thank banks had to like, stop their withdrawals? Oh yeah, one of those, by the way, was JP Morgan.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  But that's a real bank.

• 2:31:09Robert Evans?

  Yep, but they're involved in the shadow banking shit, so, they, they are exposed to when they're like, fucking $700 million loan to like, a fucking, actually, wait, hold on, which one was the $700 million? I, I think a $700 million loan that went under was the one that was to a subprime auto loan company?

• 2:31:26Speaker 03

  That's a bad investment.

• 2:31:28Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, it's so evil, it's so evil!

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  Why am I trusting all of my money that I have in this world? I'm letting this guy hold on to it, who's obviously not good with fucking money.

• 2:31:39Robert Evans?

  Well, because the FDIC's insuring it.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Right, but it's like, why are you in charge, why are you in charge of having the money? You obviously don't make great financial decisions, because you invested $700 million in subprime auto loans.

• 2:31:51Robert Evans?

  So, Molly, this, this is the, this is the point where I, we, we need to bring debt the first 5,000 years back into this and emphasize the extent to which the financial class has always been deeply connected to the, to the military, and why it's always been deeply connected to war financing.

• 2:32:06Speaker 03

  I'm starting to realize that this is all very bad.

• 2:32:09Robert Evans?

  It's very bad, it's all very bad, and this is, this is to some extent why, right, like, part, part, part of what right-wing conspiracism about the financial system is, is that like, these people are like, like the right-wingers, like, these people are, there's, there's like a baseline level of antisemitism, like, in the US, right? Because it is a, is a Christian society that is just like, what fucking happens there? And these people are like, okay, we can channel all of the anger at like, oh my god, my fucking house got stolen by the bank? Because, because they were betting on the mortgage to fail? And-

• 2:32:43Speaker 03

  I still don't understand why that's legal.

• 2:32:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, all these right-wing conspiracists do is they, they look at that shit and they go, oh, well, it was the Jews. And it's like, no, like, fuck off, like, these are all-

• 2:32:52Speaker 03

  No, it was the bank!

• 2:32:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, and the other thing, and this is actually a really important thing that's not well-understood here, is that like, the actual people who run these fucking banks, the people who work at them are all fucking white, Christian dipshits. This is like a real, a really like, persistent issue that everyone fucking has, which is that like, one of, one of the great successes of antisemitism was like, creating the image of the banker as a Jewish person. And no, they're not, the ba, like, I, I fucking went to school with these people, they're all a bunch of fucking white frat bros. They're fucking white, Christian frat bros.

• 2:33:20Speaker 03

  Oh, right, you-

• 2:33:20Robert Evans?

  University of Chicago.

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  You have a degree in economics in the University of Chicago?

• 2:33:24Robert Evans?

  No, I, I, I have an anthropology degree, thank you very much, I took, I took a-

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I was gonna say, Mia, that's-

• 2:33:30Robert Evans?

  Not a fucking fake degree, like the stupid econ bullshit.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, that's actually so evil to study economics in the University of Chicago. You probably met some of the most evil people on this planet.

• 2:33:39Robert Evans?

  I was just like, in a dorm with them.

• 2:33:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:33:42Robert Evans?

  So-

• 2:33:42Speaker 03

  But you saw them.

• 2:33:43Robert Evans?

  I know all these people, yeah, and like, it is not, it is not a bunch of Jewish people, it's a, it's a bunch of Christian frat bros. Like, that's like the thing that's actually going on, there's actually a whole, one day, I will write the Behind the Bastards episode about leveraged buyouts and about how, like, there was like a Jewish guy who kind of, like, like, did a lot of the inventing stuff, but him breaking into the banking thing was like a whole thing? Because there was so much antisemitism, because all of the banking sector was run by all of the fucking like, weird dipshit, like, CIA, like, like WASP motherfuckers?

• 2:34:17Speaker 03

  I mean, the Mormons have a huge hedge fund.

• 2:34:20Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 2:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, the, what did I say, I read an article about it, the hedge fund that the Mormons operate, like, they have their like, best and brightest finance bros, like, you know, Mormons do their, to your mission? If you're really good at finance, your mission? That you don't have to go to South America and like, tell people about the Book of Mormon, you can work at the hedge fund as your mission.

• 2:34:37Robert Evans?

  It's, it's a nightmare.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  I'm doing hedge funds for god.

• 2:34:40Robert Evans?

  Yep, that's a, that's a shadow bank, by the way. Yep, it's great. So, okay, okay, uh, co- co- coming back to this, again, right? So we're talking about like, what, what caused this 2008, and how, how, how did these shadow banks like, do this? And the answer is that they've turned all of these mortgages into these like, fake securities they can, they can trade, right? They package them all together. And they find out something really crucial, which is that if they throw a bunch of loans that they obviously know are going to fail together, and send them to a regulatory agency, and by the way, all of these like, bonds that they're issuing have like, grades, based on supposedly like, how safe they are, and they figure out-

• 2:35:19Speaker 03

  I know about that.

• 2:35:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and they figure out that they can send a bunch of really shitty bonds, but if they package enough shitty bonds together, they could send them to the regulators? And the regulators would, would evaluate some of them as being good? And then you could sell the good ones to your pension fund? Because they thought it was a good bond?

• 2:35:38Robert Evans?

  And it made money?

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  That's just lying!

• 2:35:40Robert Evans?

  And then, and then, yes, and yes, and then, and then, behind the scenes, right? All of these fucking companies, all these shadow banks, all the regular banks, they're all doing these, they're all doing these credit default swaps, right? So they're all betting on which ones of these are going to fail.

• 2:35:54Speaker 03

  I'm putting all of these boys in timeout, like, I'm gonna put them in the bottom of a pit.

• 2:35:58Robert Evans?

  It's so evil. And, and they, they start, they start doing these, making these like, even more complicated instruments, right? Where now, what they're, what they're selling to you isn't just the package of mortgages, they're also selling you the credit default swaps with the loan. So theoretically, what's happening is like, they've created an instrument that regardless of what happens to the loan, you make money?

• 2:36:18Speaker 03

  That's not how anything works?

• 2:36:19Robert Evans?

  No, it's bullshit, it's so obviously bullshit!

• 2:36:23Speaker 03

  I made up this fake thing where no matter what happens, I get rich. That's cool, I would love to do that.

• 2:36:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and nobody was like, wait, well, I mean, some, a couple, some people were, but like, like, people didn't just be like, wait, hold on, no, obviously you can't make an asset that makes money regardless of whether the thing fails or not?

• 2:36:39Speaker 03

  I invented a money machine.

• 2:36:41Robert Evans?

  Like, that's fucking ridiculous. And then eventually, yeah, it was like, no, they ran out of fucking mortgages. You know, one, one of the ways that the blame for this was deflected onto regular people was that, they blamed the banks, or like, they blamed regular people for like, not being able to pay the mortgages. But the thing is, by the time you get to the point where you're like, packaging all the, you're betting on the mortgages, right? If you're a bank, even if you're the regular bank, you don't make money off of like, someone paying their mortgage back, you make money on betting on the mortgages. So, you're incentivized to just keep giving out loans you know won't happen, because you can sell those loans off to some other dipshit, and then you, and then you can bet on those loans that they're going to fail, and you can make money, and that's how you make your money.

• 2:37:21Speaker 03

  Cause you're, you're not a bank anymore, you're a bookie who's cheating.

• 2:37:26Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:37:27Speaker 03

  I don't think that's good, Mia.

• 2:37:29Robert Evans?

  No, thi- this was the entire fucking financial system. And we just let these people stay in power.

• 2:37:35Speaker 03

  And I'm just supposed to just continue living my life like this?

• 2:37:39Robert Evans?

  I don't know, like, I, looking at this, and, and then, and then learning that all of these people got fucking bailed out by the government, and none of them went to prison, and-

• 2:37:47Speaker 03

  Do they know they're cheating liars who are faking and making it up? Or are they like, so high on their own supply, they're like, they're like, no bro, no bro, this is totally gonna work, it's totally gonna work?

• 2:37:55Robert Evans?

  Well, here's the thing, some of them know, and some of them don't.

• 2:37:59Speaker 03

  Cause some of them believe that this is cool.

• 2:38:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, some, some of them legitimately thought that this was just going to work forever.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  Like, do they believe their negative money backed by other fake money backed by the idea of promises of fake money? They think that's money?

• 2:38:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yep, well, that was gonna work.

• 2:38:15Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 2:38:15Robert Evans?

  It's not, nope, and it turned out to not be any fucking money, and it blew up again, like, entire countries, countries were buying these, they went bankrupt.

• 2:38:24Speaker 03

  So like, this is less real than a bored ape NFT, and that's really saying something.

• 2:38:32Robert Evans?

  It's, it's astonishing.

• 2:38:34Speaker 03

  Because at least the, at least I can loo, at least I can look at the picture of the monkey, I can't look at this.

• 2:38:39Robert Evans?

  No, like, it, like, you can't look at the bet you're making on whether, on whether monkey go down, like, it's like, like-

• 2:38:45Speaker 03

  All, all my ape's gone.

• 2:38:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, and, but it's, it's depressing, because the entire world is just this now. It's the shit the banks were doing, where you're betting on whether the mortgage was gonna fail, but now it's you're betting on whether, like, what day we're going to drop a bomb on Iran.

• 2:38:57Speaker 03

  Like, nothing is real and everything is gambling.

• 2:39:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, and this is, you know, what, what, what I would call a sort of terminal crisis stage of capitalism, where like-

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  Cause everything is so divorced from any material reality, from any good or service.

• 2:39:12Robert Evans?

  Like, there, there is a limit to which you can run an entire economy that is purely based on gambling, like, there's just, there, there's a limit, and we're going to hit it really soon.

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  That's got, that's gonna break, right?

• 2:39:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's going to break, it's gonna break spectacularly, however, comma, I do have good news for you.

• 2:39:28Speaker 03

  No, you don't.

• 2:39:29Robert Evans?

  I do, I have good news. You now actually understand what non-bank financial intermediation is.

• 2:39:36Speaker 03

  No, I don't.

• 2:39:38Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'm gonna walk you through it, you actually do. So, I, I, I'm gonna quote the IMF's definition of non-bank financial intermediation. Quote, "All entities outside-" Side the regulated banking system that perform the core banking functions. Credit intermediation. That is, taking money from savers and letting it to borrowers. The four key aspects of intermediation are. Maturity transformation. We know this one.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:05Robert Evans?

  This is, this is what the bank does.

• 2:40:07Speaker 03

  The loan gets older.

• 2:40:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:08Speaker 03

  And then it gets paid back over time.

• 2:40:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, it's, you, you, you turn your short term thing into a long term investment. Or you do the opposite.

• 2:40:16Speaker 03

  Opposite's not good.

• 2:40:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're both kind of a disaster, but like, yeah, yeah, the little opposite is kind of how we got into this mess. There's liquidity transformation, which we know this too. It's, it's turned.

• 2:40:28Speaker 03

  Turning money into a thing that's not money.

• 2:40:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or turning not money into a thing you can buy burger with.

• 2:40:33Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:40:35Robert Evans?

  We got this. Leverage. We also know this, which is. You go into a bunch of debt to buy something else. And then there's credit risk transfer, which we know that one too. It's the betting market.

• 2:40:48Robert Evans?

  Where you're supposedly swapping the risk by, but both of you two are now betting on whether this thing is going to fail.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  So it sounds like even just like regular banking is kind of just gambling now.

• 2:40:59Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep. And, and, well, and it's fun too. So this is a thing that used to be talked about more and isn't now, but like. Most of like, like the world's corporations are also basically this now. Like, and this has been a thing for a while, but it's like the auto manufacturers don't make their money off of cars. I mean, they sort of do. They make some money off cars, but like most of what they make their money off of is like the Ford Finance Company. Which is like the auto loans thing.

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:41:24Robert Evans?

  And then the, the auto loans thing trades a bunch of like, does all of this other financial bullshit to make money? So like.

• 2:41:30Speaker 03

  I don't think that's a good idea.

• 2:41:32Robert Evans?

  That's, that's what capitalism is.

• 2:41:34Speaker 03

  So everything, everything is. Fully reliant on this like.

• 2:41:40Robert Evans?

  Stupid gambling bullshit.

• 2:41:41Speaker 03

  Emperor's wearing no clothes economy.

• 2:41:44Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 2:41:45Speaker 03

  And if anybody, if anybody points out that none of this is connected to a material reality, everything falls apart.

• 2:41:51Robert Evans?

  Well, here's the thing. The thing that stops everything from falling apart is that the one thing you can do with your money is turn it into gun.

• 2:41:57Speaker 03

  Now I'm listening.

• 2:41:58Robert Evans?

  And that's what stops it falling apart, right? Because.

• 2:42:01Speaker 03

  Now I'm listening.

• 2:42:02Robert Evans?

  And this is also a sort of Graburism, but it's like behind every like bank is a man with a gun. Because the, the, the, the reason that this money is even sort of real is that the bank can like. You like the police will come get you, right? Like men with guns will appear and like coerce you to pay shit, right?

• 2:42:20Speaker 03

  But what if, what if instead of burger, we bought gun?

• 2:42:26Robert Evans?

  You know, like this is what is broadly referred to as the social revolution. Um, it is, it is broadly considered a negative by the financial sector. It is broadly considered a positive by everyone the fuck else.

• 2:42:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:42:37Robert Evans?

  That's not true. It's, it's not considered a positive by like, I guess, the people who own regular businesses. And this is like the shit that like, you know, it was kind of less unhinged back then, but like, if you go read the people who were like doing this shit in like the early 1900s. If you read their writing, it's all them being like, oh yeah, no, by the way, like. A bunch of banks just like turned the entire Ottoman Empire into like a debt peon and now their entire economy is just dedicated to paying off these fucking loans. And this is like hideously fucking evil. Like they're, they're all complaining about the same shit.

• 2:43:08Speaker 03

  And the important lesson we learned from that. The important lesson we learned from that was to do it more.

• 2:43:14Robert Evans?

  More. Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, to invent increasingly more complicated ways of doing that.

• 2:43:21Robert Evans?

  Yep. And like, and this, this is, this is why the term third world is a slur. Because instead of being a political movement, because those, the countries in the political movement that was called the third world movement. All of their economies got fucking annihilated because they had these like loans whose interest rate could change. And the US jacked up all the interest rates. And so suddenly their loans were like. Like the amount you had to like pay on the loans, it went from like 20% or something to like 50 or 100 or some shit and. You know, and like, and these countries have never recovered, like Nigeria has never really economically recovered from the shit that happened to them this. This is why a whole bunch of Latin America is like this too. Like, it's like why there's so much sort of like riding systemic poverty is that.

• 2:44:03Robert Evans?

  Their economies were entirely transformed into machines to like pay back these fucking debts taken out by these dictators. This is the whole fucking economy now and. You know, there's other shadow banks that do other kind of completely unhinged shit, right? And I've been focusing this week on like specifically the kind that blew up the economy in 2008. But there's another kind that's like blowing up the economy right now, which is called private credit, which is, I, I mentioned this briefly earlier, but private credit is when. These like unregulated companies that are not banks give out unregulated loans with unknown terms to other companies. And then those loans go to shit and there's a whole bunch of ways that can blow up, including by the way, these companies are funding a bunch of the AI bubble.

• 2:44:43Speaker 03

  Oh, and that's a great investment.

• 2:44:44Robert Evans?

  It's great.

• 2:44:45Speaker 03

  You know, because much, much like a mortgage, there's a, a real physical thing, like a house involved, right? It's not just vibes.

• 2:44:52Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah. Oh, Molly, Molly, they, those motherfuckers, I'm going to talk about this a bit. I might have Ed Ditteron on for this part of it too, just because like. Ed does this all the time, but like those motherfuckers out there selling securities that are backed by fucking graphics cards.

• 2:45:07Robert Evans?

  Like at least the more, I can't believe I'm fucking saying this, but like. At least the mortgage backed securities, like there was a house you could steal to get your money back?

• 2:45:18Robert Evans?

  Graphics cards, Molly.

• 2:45:19Speaker 03

  All my apes are gone.

• 2:45:21Robert Evans?

  My graphics cards.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  All my apes are gone.

• 2:45:23Robert Evans?

  Like there's other ones that I like, it's, it's so bad. It's just.

• 2:45:31Robert Evans?

  But that, that, that's for another time because it is late as fuck and we are out of here. Molly, thank you. Thank you for sitting and enduring an hour of. You knowing what a shadow bank is now.

• 2:45:43Speaker 03

  I almost know what a bank is. I'm still working on the rest of it, but I think I'm getting closer.

• 2:45:48Robert Evans?

  I, I believe in you. I, I, I think we've made real progress today. I, I don't know. Now, now, now you can kind of understand what's going on when this thing sector explodes again in like two weeks.

• 2:45:59Speaker 03

  You'll have to explain it to me again then.

• 2:46:00Robert Evans?

  I will be happy to.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

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• 2:46:40Speaker 03

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

• 2:47:00Robert Evans?

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

• 2:47:06Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 2:47:09Speaker 01

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

• 2:47:13Speaker 03

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

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

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

• 2:47:32Speaker 04

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

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

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

• 2:47:45Robert Evans?

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

• 2:47:49Speaker 06

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

• 2:47:57Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 2:47:58Speaker 06

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

• 2:48:04Robert Evans?

  It's raw.

• 2:48:04Speaker 06

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

• 2:48:13Robert Evans?

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:48:14Speaker 06

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

• 2:48:24Robert Evans?

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

• 2:48:28Speaker 06

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

• 2:48:38Robert Evans?

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:49:05Robert Evans?

  In 2020, millions of Americans took to the streets to protest police violence. They were met with police violence on a massive scale. Shootings, vehicle attacks and assassinations occurred alongside these protests, often in defense of the police. And in total, at least 25 Americans died. We now know that President Trump repeatedly urged General Mark Milley to deploy US military forces to crack down violently on demonstrations. Milley claims that Trump told him to have his soldiers crack skulls, beat the fuck out of, and just shoot protesters. In the end, we were all lucky. Military leaders, including General Milley, resisted calls to use their men to suppress domestic dissent.

• 2:49:48Robert Evans?

  National Guard were called in to police several major cities. But in many cases, their behavior was tame compared to the militarized police who more reliably shot and beat protesters. For millions of Americans, 2020 was their first exposure to the violence the state will do to avoid change. And then Trump lost the election. He and his followers tried to carry out a coup but failed for now. And millions of Americans who'd taken to the streets mostly went back to their lives. Some were satisfied justice had been done. Others were furious to have stopped short of instituting real change. But at the end of the day, business went on as usual. A version of normal prevailed.

• 2:50:29Robert Evans?

  In 2021, the military of Myanmar, known as the Tat Madaw, overthrew the elected government in a coup. Hundreds of thousands of citizens, most of them young Gen Z and millennial men and women, took to the streets. Responded with tear gas, water cannons, and eventually bullets. The international community expressed its horror at the brutality of the Tat Madaw. But that's all they did. Over the course of several months, the military pushed protesters mostly out of the cities. And a protest movement against the military coup turned into a civil war. Now those same protesters, mostly kids who wanted nothing more than a normal life, have become revolutionaries. With homemade guns, 3D printed rockets and stolen rifles, they battled the Tat Madaw.

• 2:51:14Robert Evans?

  Some of them fight in the jungles, some of them fight in the cities, and some of them fight on the internet. This is their story.

• 2:51:25Robert Evans?

  We're sitting in a large suburban home in Mysat, Thailand, a small city on the border of Myanmar. The boys singing and playing music around us range in age from seventeen to twenty-two. Their existence in Thailand is a crime. If they are caught here, they'll be forced to cross the border into Myanmar, whose government executed their friends and sold the organs for profit. But tonight, they're playing music, we're drinking beer. Later, James Stout and I will play pool with them and get our asses just catastrophically wrecked.

• 2:51:59Speaker 04

  We met Andy, aged twenty-two and head of the family, through his Instagram page. That's not his real name, but for obvious reasons, we can't identify him. We first met when I sent him a DM asking if we could buy one of his photos for our first series on Myanmar. He was a bit skeptical, but I tried my best to get him to see we just wanted to give him money and promote his work. Over the next six months or so, we went from talking on the phone to messaging almost every day, to Robert and I booking tickets to Thailand, to sitting on the top floor of their house. It used to be his landlord's office, but now it's home to Andy and his partner Sarah. That's also not her real name, because she's a citizen of a Western nation, working in Thailand.

• 2:52:41Speaker 04

  The boys we talk about are his brothers, his cousin, and friends. They live in a small building across the garden, and in the daytime, they sit under a gazebo and play their guitars. The first night we met Andy and Sarah, we sat behind a bar in an unpaved alleyway. We drank beer out of sippy cups. Because selling beer is still banned under local COVID regulations, but apparently the cops don't check sippy cups. We drank far too much, in fact, and the next day, I woke up with a headache and a blurry photo of me, Robert, and Andy engaged in a pose which was half hug and half mutual support structure. We walked home, and according to my phone, at some point, we took photos of a puppy. And, in a hopefully unrelated incident, at some point, I started bleeding.

• 2:53:24Speaker 04

  It was immediately obvious that Andy needed the chance to blow off some steam. Over the last year and change, he has chronicled every stage of the coup and its aftermath. In early videos, we see joyous protests, moments of resistance and splendor in the streets of cities like Mewawali. Later, we see violence, death, and guerrilla warfare. Andy didn't have what you would call an easy childhood. Thanks in part to Myanmar's long history of revolutions being crushed by the army. People there, like people everywhere, want to be free and determine their own futures. And so each generation has its own uprising, and each generation has its own massacre, and very little progress to show for it.

• 2:54:06Robert Evans?

  I was born in two thousand, so, um, when I was seven, two thousand, uh, seven, there was a revolution. It's called Saffron Revolution. It's, it wasn't, it wasn't like this, you know, it wasn't like what happened now, but like, there were a lot of people that were involved in it, a lot of people got killed. Um, and a lot of people left Myanmar and came to the refugee camps in here. And we were one of the families that came to the refugee camps. Um, and In Mysat? Yeah, in Mysat, Thailand, yeah. Andy's mother is Bumma, the dominant ethnic group in Myanmar, due to their decades-long control of the military and government. His father is Karin, the ethnic group once used by the British government as soldiers. Since nineteen forty-nine, the Karin have fought a war in the mountains against the Tat Madaw.

• 2:54:50Robert Evans?

  Their name is often anglicized to be spelled just like the English name Karen, which, given present internet trends, makes explaining the conflict sometimes awkward. Andy primarily identifies as, and was raised, Bumma. His family left after the Saffron Revolution. They did not flee to escape political repression, but because the economy had collapsed. This put them in an awkward position in the camps, which were filled mostly with Karin people who had fled state violence. We weren't refugees, right? We were more like, um, how do you say, like, economic refugees? You know, we go because, not because our village has been burned down and our family has been killed, you know? So then, if we were to go back to Yangon, we still could find a job, we still could find, you know?

• 2:55:35Robert Evans?

  Um, but then for these Karin people, like, this place is the only place that they could exist at that moment, right? And probably still now too. So, uh, yeah, so they said that, but that, that education wasn't very good there. There's the, the life wasn't good, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was very bad, honestly. It was very bad. It was a lot of violence, a lot of hate, a lot of understandable, you know? Like, these people have gone through so much shit and so much trauma that, and nothing, no one is coming there to, but fix that. So, uh, they had a lot of anger, they had a lot of problems. Um, but my, my mom said, yeah, we're going back because the education here is very bad.

• 2:56:13Robert Evans?

  And, um, if you go back to Myanmar at least, you know, if you do, like, the thing that people do, maybe you'll get somewhere, yeah. Uh, in the future, here, there's no future. That's what she said. So we went back. Um, and I stayed in Myanmar for like four years. Andy had never been very political. His family was more or less neutral, tending to side with the military more often than not out of a sense of inertia. Myanmar tended to cartwheel between attempts at democracy and military dictatorship. So when the world media celebrated their first democratic elections in twenty-five years, in twenty fifteen, Andy was not particularly excited. Yeah, so, I, I mean, we, we did realize that there was a change in the country, right?

• 2:56:55Robert Evans?

  Because, um, we grew up in the military dictatorship. But then when Aung San Suu Kyi take over, took over, um, there were some changes. Like, the, the phones got cheaper, the internet got cheaper. And if you look back, then you can see big, big changes. But the thing is, it was never real democracy. And I think a lot of people in the Western countries thought that it was democracy when Aung San Suu Kyi took over. Aung San Suu Kyi came to prominence during a nineteen eighty-eight uprising against the military, which ended in bloodshed in the streets of Yangon, and she'd been a longtime democratic activist. As Andy noted, Westerners celebrated her election as the first democratic head of state for Myanmar.

• 2:57:39Robert Evans?

  She even won a Nobel Prize. But the agreement her party had made with the military gave the generals significant permanent control over the government. But I think most of the people in the country knew it wasn't real democracy. Because, you know, the military always had twenty-five percent seat, twenty-five seats in the parliament, right? Like, they were always, they were in charge of electricity, internet, all these, all these big things, weapons, army, like the military itself. They are in charge of all these things, and they make it very clear. And even with a Nobel Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi did not fight to stop the Tat Madaw from pursuing their decades-long wars against the ethnic armed organizations in the hills. Nor did she act to stop their ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people.

• 2:58:23Robert Evans?

  In fact, she and others in her party didn't even call them Rohingya. They called them Bengali and insisted they were illegally residing in Myanmar, despite mountains of evidence documenting a group by that name living in what is now the Rakhine State. I think most Americans, and Westerners in general, can empathize with the feeling of electing someone who promises change and then getting very little of what you'd expected. I think Aung San Suu Kyi used to be this hope that, that was like the opposition against the military. But I think when she got power, um, she couldn't do all the things that she promised to do. Or like, uh, you know, we, we looked at her, before, we looked at her as something, you know, something, a hope

• 2:59:06Robert Evans?

  for everyone, for, you know, for all the ethnic groups and for everyone in the country. But then, when she became in power, she mainly focused all these changes for the Bumma people, well, you know, the mainland people. Like, the military was still fucking killing people and killing ethnic groups. They, did they do something, you know, like, so then, for the ethnic groups, what's the difference? And so, while Andy was hopeful that his country might take a better path, he was not exactly convinced that things

• 2:59:37Speaker 04

  were going to get better. Conflict within his family eventually pushed him to make the decision to leave. My dad was very abusive, right? He would beat the shit out of my mom every day like that. It was fine, like it was fine when I, when we were younger, we couldn't do anything, you know, we just kind of watched it, right? But the older we got, the more we involved, the more we tried to stop it.

• 2:59:58Speaker 04

  But then we would fight with him too, you know, and that. So at some point it became too much and so I left my home. Uh, I think in twenty sixteen, uh, just by myself. And I was like, I've been to Messot, I will go back here, you know? So Andy lived across the border on his own for more than five years. He'd fallen in love, got in a home of his own and set himself up in the sort of odd jobs you can do without papers or legal residency. And that's where things were for him when the Taot Madaw carried out their coup in early twenty twenty one. Two thousand twenty one, February first, I was in Messot, I was here and um. Yeah, in the morning I woke up, called me my girlfriend and she said, the military just did a coup in your country. You should call your family.

• 3:00:42Speaker 04

  The military claimed voter fraud and used that as the pretext to stay in power. It's a situation that should be unsettlingly familiar to most of our audience. For a while, safe in Mesot, Andy watched it in horror as he texted with friends and family across the border. They arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and all the big leaders right at the top. So we were kind of like, okay, is someone gonna tell us what to do? And especially for us, we didn't have any experiences. We didn't know anything about any of this that I'm talking about right now. I didn't have any knowledge of that. But yeah, so after, I think, six day, the military cut off the internet. Like for like two days and I've lost all contact with everyone inside, my family, my friends. And that's the night I started planning it.

• 3:01:26Speaker 04

  Like I started thinking, oh, fuck, I should go back and like, and, and I saw the protest photos from Yangon. They looked amazing, right? And I'm like, I'm a photographer, I should be there and, you know, document that.

• 3:01:38Speaker 04

  While Andy was staring at the protest photos from the capital of Myanmar, Nape Dore, as well as Mewadi, and the largest city Yangon, wondering he should take his camera and document yet another rising for democracy in his home country. A young woman named Amira was in the thick of those protests in Yangon. When the coup started, Amira, aged seventeen, had just finished high school. She was looking forward to university and more pressingly, looking forward to playing footsaw with her friends. She liked to spend her days crafting, she says, making little things to gift or to keep. Like every other day, when she woke up, she spent ten minutes in medication before facing the world on the first of February. Aung San Suu Kyi was her hero, she says.

• 3:02:22Speaker 04

  In our interview, her boyfriend translated for her. We'll get to their story later. But when the coup began, they lived a world apart, but they joined their whole generation in feeling enraged by Taot Madaw trying to rip the freedom their parents had fought for from them. Amira took her rage into the street, someone gave her a bullhorn.

• 3:02:42Robert Evans?

  Because of her voice and then she became the leader, you know, with the

• 3:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, the bullhorn?

• 3:02:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:48Speaker 04

  What kind of stuff would you say to the bull, through the bullhorn?

• 3:02:51Robert Evans?

  Hello, Ba Zha Gali, you're gonna live in a, you know what? Uh, you know what? But I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

• 3:03:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, she's saying, uh, this is unfair and then, uh,

• 3:03:08Speaker 04

  This is what?

• 3:03:09Robert Evans?

  Uh, the, the, the arresting Aung San Suu Kyi is unfair. Not fair.

• 3:03:15Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah.

• 3:03:20Robert Evans?

  And then, and then she believed that, uh, uh, she believed in what the Aung San Suu Kyi said. Like, uh, everything is possible and, uh, we haven't do anything, we haven't studied yet and then, but the, when we study and then we, we can finish it. Uh, so everything is possible. So, so that's what she believe in. So she, she went on the road and then she protest.

• 3:03:48Speaker 04

  Across the city from Amira on coup day, Meowk's girlfriend woke him up with the news that the government they'd voted for had been arrested. We're calling him Meowk here because that's his name in the revolution. Everyone has one. Amira's his baby because she's so young, yet so fierce. Meowk, if you're wondering, means monkey. These revolutionaries who have risked life and limb for each other, didn't know the legal names of the people they call their revolution family. Because it's safer that way and we don't either. Meowk had spent the night, well, I'll let you hear how he phrased it, actually.

• 3:04:23Robert Evans?

  I was just like, I was chilling with my A, A's girlfriend, you know, I was chilling and we were, you know, Netflix and Chay, Netflix and Chay. Like, thirty one, thirty one January, Netflix and Chay, I think it's a Sunday, I think it's a Sunday, Netflix and Chay. Uh, we, we sleep together.

• 3:04:41Speaker 04

  If you didn't catch that, they were Netflix and chilling.

• 3:04:44Robert Evans?

  You know, I was literally not wake up by any louder show, I was so asleep. But, but at the four AM, there's a phone, phone rings and I, I suddenly wake up, this phone rang from my girlfriend. Uh, her auntie called, called, called, called her and she said, there's a coup d'office. Oh, uh, and she wake her, uh, she told me, there's a coup d'office. I, I didn't, uh, you, you know, I, I don't believe it, I believe it, I didn't believe it. So other than I, I checked the social media, oh shit, oh, Meowk actually do this. And I'm so angry and I'm so angry, you know, I was go to down, downstairs and I told to my family, there's a coup d'office, everyone's angry.

• 3:05:29Robert Evans?

  And I do stand, the, the internet, they cut off.

• 3:05:32Speaker 04

  The next revolutionary we're gonna meet is a fellow we'll call Doctor Wonder, because that's his revolution name. When the coup started, he was just waking up after a twenty four hour shift at the hospital in Yangon where he worked. Doctors were some of the earliest and most visible dissidents in the protest. Their rarity and therefore their relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol of the pro-democracy movement. But as Doctor Wonder made clear, many older medical professionals were not at all certain that resistance was a right move here.

• 3:06:03Robert Evans?

  At the morning, I saw the news, that bad, it was really, really bad news for us. It was, uh, how could I say that? Uh, they broke, you know?

• 3:06:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:06:18Robert Evans?

  They broke our future.

• 3:06:20Speaker 04

  Doctors were some of the earliest, most visible dissidents in the pro-democracy protests. Their rarity and relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol of the pro-democracy movement. But as Doctor Wonder made clear, many older medical professionals were not at all certain that resistance was a right move.

• 3:06:40Robert Evans?

  On that morning, we go back to our, uh, our society, our, our hospital. We are Xian guys, you know, uh, all professors, all concerned us. They not much interest about that. Because they told us, um, you know,

• 3:07:01Robert Evans?

  whoever rules our country is not our business. It is one of our seniors, doctors from our society, from our department, who was like that. But we reply him, no, it should be last time.

• 3:07:18Speaker 04

  If you didn't catch that, he said it should be the last time. The last time kids had to die in the streets. They didn't want another generation to have to go through the same thing. So they got together a proposal, a sort of manifesto for peaceful, nonviolent resistance. And they submitted it to their seniors.

• 3:07:36Robert Evans?

  We negotiated with our, uh, you know, young resident, our society, and we discussed about that. And we plan to start with our, one of our, our prior movement before, since this, we have got a red, red one movement. Because, uh, because, uh, we wanna try peacefully on the media. Okay, we started like that.

• 3:08:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:08:02Robert Evans?

  And then, uh, some of our seniors from our society, they, they were from Mandalay Hospital. Okay, they accept our proposal, yes. Because, uh, our generation has already passed that difficulties before. But not your generation shouldn't accept that.

• 3:08:25Speaker 04

  Three days before the coup, TK got off a plane in San Francisco. He's from Myanmar, but he lives in the Bay Area now. Before you ask, he says that the Burmese restaurant there is not as good as stuff back home.

• 3:08:39Robert Evans?

  It's only three days.

• 3:08:41Speaker 04

  Fuck me, three days before.

• 3:08:43Robert Evans?

  Three days before, I, I, I went back to the, to the United States and I, I wish I, I'm stay in a Yangon and then doing the revolution and I participate in a, everywhere that I can. But I couldn't do, uh, from the, from the long distance, you know, so, so that's all I can do for now.

• 3:09:04Speaker 04

  TK had just been in Myanmar. He had connections to many people on the ground there. His friends were there, his family were there. When the government cut off internet access, he remained able to get good international reporting on the situation in his home country. Slowly, he found ways to communicate with his friends and a growing core of the protesters taking to the streets.

• 3:09:26Robert Evans?

  I, I was a keyboard fighter. I have no idea about the politic. I have no idea about the military stuff.

• 3:09:37Speaker 04

  This is a single most common sentiment we've heard across all the revolutionaries we've met. None of them considered themselves to be very political prior to the coup. They started marching in the street because a military coup was obviously bad. But they stayed there because the violence dished out by the state was so horrific.

• 3:09:54Speaker 01

  Safe at their house in Mesot, we talked to the boys and his brothers and cousins, all of whom were living in Napador when the coup kicked off. It didn't take him long to try and join them.

• 3:10:05Robert Evans?

  Then I went in, I went to Miyawari, which is across the border in Myanmar side. And I was there for a week and it was, it was something else. Like, I've never been to protests and I've never been involved in any of this thing. And I never thought I would be, you know, like, I, I, I don't know. I always thought like I wasn't going to be a part of it. But when I went there, the first day I arrived, there were 200,000 people on the street protesting. And then it's like, and if these big group of people walk in streets after street and everyone coming out of their house and we have this symbol, like three fingers from Hangar Gang, I think.

• 3:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so that's like our symbol for democracy now, our, our movement now. And everyone come out of their house doing that. And you know, like giving us water, food, all, all, everything. It was beautiful, like it was, it was something else. It was something else. And then from that day, I was like hooked. I was like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do now. I'm gonna be a photographer and I'm gonna, and this, you know, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna take photo of these people and their stories and I'm gonna share it. And that's, that's my part, that's my rule.

• 3:11:14Speaker 01

  Soon, he found friends among the protesters. Within a few days, he was feeling a feeling that so many people felt in 2020. It's a feeling you felt if you've ever been in the thick of a crowd of people filled with righteous anger and facing down overwhelmed police or soldiers. It's a sensation I can't really describe to you. You haven't experienced it, but I can say that there's no time that I've ever felt more empowered than the times I've been crushed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, toe to toe with state violence and watch cops break and retreat. It's incredible, it's addictive. And if I'm honest, it's probably why Robert and I booked a flight to visit a stranger I've been DMing on the gram.

• 3:11:53Robert Evans?

  Um, I think after three days, I, I met this group of people, young people, like students trying to be lawyers and stuff. And I figured out that they were the ones trying to organize these big protests, like 200 people, 100,000 people. They were the ones that's making that happen. So I started kind of following them, trying to get close because I wanted to get stories from them. And then they became, they, and they realized what I've been doing. They've been watching like, and so they were like very welcome and they took me to this hideout that they go to. And then we will have discussions, meetings about what we should do the next day, dah, dah, dah, dah. But then, kind of, it's because it's a small town, right? Slowly, I think, police and military started realizing that we are that group too.

• 3:13:03Speaker 01

  So by now, you're probably wondering what that cover of dust in the wind here is.

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  It's a song the boys learnt when they first took to the streets, but it tells a story of a previous revolution, one that didn't succeed.

• 3:13:20Speaker 04

  That's pretty good, guys. Yeah.

• 3:13:23Speaker 04

  Can you tell us what that song's about? Like, do you know what the lyrics are and stuff in English, man?

• 3:13:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, we, we can try.

• 3:13:29Speaker 04

  I heard the word democracy in there, I'm pretty sure.

• 3:13:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like all the lives that we lost in fighting for democracy.

• 3:13:38Speaker 04

  Do people use it for the Spring Revolution as well as 88? Yeah, yeah. Because it's the same thing, right? We can use it.

• 3:13:46Speaker 04

  Tell the world, and that's the name of the song. Tell the world, it's called? Yeah, like tell the world. Tell the world, yeah.

• 3:13:55Robert Evans?

  So basically, the song is like, um, yeah, they sang it in the, back in the 88. And then it's like, we used it quite a lot when, when we were in the protest too.

• 3:14:07Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, and the lyrics are, we'll keep fighting until the end of the world for the sake of history and revolution in our blood and of the fallen heroes who fought for the democracy. Oh, our dearest heroes, this is the land of, uh, like heroes. Like, yeah.

• 3:14:26Robert Evans?

  And yeah, it goes on and then.

• 3:14:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, basically saying like something like that history went wrong along the way, but we have to fix it. Yeah.

• 3:14:41Robert Evans?

  Like the country has shed its blood and how could they commit such violence to its own people, you know? Um, yeah. And yeah, like they say, like the, the blood on the roads and the streets are not dried yet. Um, and for the sake of these people who have died for the democracy, for fighting for democracy, uh, for the sake of them, we have to keep fighting, basically, yeah.

• 3:15:09Speaker 01

  Now, in their exile, they keep singing it to remember the first day of the revolution, when the fights were in the street, not the jungle, and before they lost so many of their comrades.

• 3:15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And then there was a night protest in front of the police station.

• 3:15:27Robert Evans?

  Candles, yeah.

• 3:15:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, this is, they're singing the song they're singing. Yeah.

• 3:15:38Robert Evans?

  It got very, very heated.

• 3:15:40Speaker 01

  The protests our friends were just talking about occurred in Miyawari, but the song popped up all across the country.

• 3:15:45Speaker 04

  When you played it in Nyingon, you all sing it?

• 3:15:50Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah, they, they, in Nyingon, it wasn't one guitar, it was a whole band.

• 3:15:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:15:55Robert Evans?

  Like, we'll be have like protesters sitting down and then there's a group of people who are playing this and repeatedly there are a bunch of songs that will play. And then there was like words that we would say and yeah, like slogan and stuff, yeah.

• 3:16:15Robert Evans?

  Beam down. And you'll see from the footage how it's, yeah.

• 3:16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. How did it make you feel singing it now? It's scary, you know, it's like, yeah. The, the song is.

• 3:16:26Robert Evans?

  The song is very real. So like at, at first, um, um, we didn't want to play the song. It's too dark, it's too, um, it's too intense, right? Yeah, like, yeah. But it's not like, the lyrics are there, like, you can see, you know, it's like, because we go, we've been through it too, so it's very intense. And yeah, I think the first time I heard it, like I heard the song, I remember that weird feeling of, yeah, still have it, like every time we're singing now, like, this is not one of the songs that we usually sing. It's not a fun song. But yeah.

• 3:17:41Speaker 01

  On the next episode, which you'll be able to download tomorrow, we'll talk about how the hunter began to clamp down on the protests and how the protesters decided this struggle was too important to abandon and decided to fight back.

• 3:18:02Speaker 01

  Hi, everyone, it's James here. I just wanted to note that lots of the words in this script are Burmese or Karen or Thai, and we've made every effort to make sure that we pronounce them correctly, but we're sure we've obviously made some mistakes along the way. That's not out of a lack of respect or out of a lack of rerecording on my part, but we did want to note that where we've made a mistake, we're very sorry for doing so.

• 3:18:25Robert Evans?

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• 3:18:52Speaker 03

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

• 3:19:13Robert Evans?

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

• 3:19:19Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 3:19:22Speaker 01

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

• 3:19:26Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 3:19:35Speaker 01

  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

• 3:19:44Speaker 04

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

• 3:19:50Speaker 03

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

• 3:19:57Robert Evans?

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

• 3:20:02Speaker 06

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

• 3:20:09Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 3:20:10Speaker 06

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

• 3:20:16Robert Evans?

  It's raw.

• 3:20:17Speaker 06

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

• 3:20:25Robert Evans?

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 3:20:27Speaker 06

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

• 3:20:37Robert Evans?

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

• 3:20:41Speaker 06

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

• 3:20:51Robert Evans?

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

• 3:21:03Robert 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 it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans, with a special segment by James Stout. This episode, we're covering the week of July 15th to July 22nd. On Monday morning, someone poured gasoline in front of an entrance to the Federal Immigration Court in New York City and lit the gasoline on fire. A 43-year-old Army vet was arrested outside the building and has been charged with arson. The man brought a sign reading "ICE off our streets" and also allegedly launched a bundle of fireworks and fired pellets from an airsoft rifle. Three US service members were killed this week on an airbase in Jordan

• 3:21:48Robert Evans?

  as a result of Trump's war with Iran. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration has tried to obtain phone

• 3:21:55Speaker 04

  and text records from New York Times journalists and their families to uncover the source of leaks regarding the security capabilities of the new Air Force One, courtesy of the Qatari government. Cash Patel is overseeing this investigation. This is a huge First Amendment breach.

• 3:22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22:13Speaker 04

  After multiple failed election campaigns, Katie Porter has announced she is leaving politics to become a book influencer.

• 3:22:21Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 3:22:21Speaker 04

  And has rebranded her Instagram account to Katie Porter Turns the Page.

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  What? Okay. I mean, bold move to be like, you know what the growth industry of the future is? Books. I can't fault the desire there, but I just don't think history's gonna really work that way. Katie?

• 3:22:42Speaker 04

  Secretary Kennedy has announced the Trump administration is pausing more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota due to, quote, "suspected fraud and noncompliance." Play a short clip here. That includes more than $867 million for California and over $200 million for Minnesota. If those states want that money, they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate. This will seriously harm, if not kill, people.

• 3:23:17Speaker 01

  Huge numbers of people.

• 3:23:18Speaker 04

  This is just a billion-dollar cut to Medicaid citing, quote, "fraud."

• 3:23:24Speaker 01

  It's aimed at blue states that the administration sees as enemies, you know?

• 3:23:28Speaker 04

  Let's move on to our first main story, and it'll be kind of a through line this episode. As I briefly mentioned last week, on Thursday, July 16th, Marco Rubio and the State Department held an international conference on the scourge of left-wing violence and Antifa terrorism. This is just the latest escalation, following Trump's designation of Antifa as a, quote, "terrorist group" last year and the emboldening of law enforcement's targeting of left-wing groups, the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number Seven. According to the State Department, this international conference was attended by representatives from 66 countries. Over 60 senior ministers were invited, but only 17 ministers actually

• 3:24:12Speaker 04

  were in attendance, though other, quote, "political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials traveled to DC for the event, including the senior chief of the Hellenic police from Greece." According to a reporter from the La Hornada newspaper, Mexico was invited to the summit, but the president declined to attend because the conference seemed, quote, "more political than really related to combating criminal groups."

• 3:24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Amazing. Imagine that.

• 3:24:44Speaker 04

  And before the conference, Washington Post reported that many senior ministers were confused as to the purpose of the event and why they were invited to the conference, with two European diplomats telling the Post, quote, "We don't have Antifa," and, quote, "Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country."

• 3:25:04Speaker 01

  Because it doesn't really exist yet to us.

• 3:25:08Speaker 04

  So this international summit put on by Marco Rubio was titled "The Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism."

• 3:25:16Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 3:25:18Speaker 04

  Very serious.

• 3:25:19Speaker 01

  Completely leaving out the right, and also, as we'll talk about later, blaming a lot, basically the entire modern left on Cuba. Because it's a mix of Marco and everyone trying to pander to Trump, a lot of these are grievances either rooted in the 70s or like a four-month period in 2020.

• 3:25:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:25:35Speaker 01

  Right? Like, that's their entire conception of the left.

• 3:25:39Speaker 04

  To open the summit, Rubio told this story of a civilizational threat posed by leftists, Marxists, and anarchist political violence, violence that has laid dormant since the 70s but has now awoken. Rubio applauded our counterterrorism strategies in taking down, quote, "radical Islamist extremism," but while our focus has been on ISIS and jihadism, law enforcement and the counterterrorism apparatus has been unable or unwilling to go after left-wing violence. Let's hear from Rubio. For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot, a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today,

• 3:26:23Speaker 04

  the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It's treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference, in spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics. One of the main tactics employed by Rubio, Stephen Miller, and others throughout this conference was the subtle conflation of mass casualty incidents from the far right

• 3:27:04Speaker 04

  with instances of property damage, or in the most extreme cases, targeted assassination attempts against political figures attributed to the far left, which people on the far right also do, by the way.

• 3:27:17Speaker 01

  Much more often, yeah.

• 3:27:19Speaker 04

  Rubio said, quote, "A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is, but a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that's just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but

• 3:27:51Speaker 01

  its ends were virtuous and just," unquote. No one's ever said that. No, no one's said it. No one in US politics has ever said that. You can find some maniacs who've said anything about anything, but like, that's simply not a discourse in America. CVE researchers generally would not describe Marxist bombing plots as virtuous and just. I've never heard a bombing plot described as virtuous. The only act of what you could call terrorism I have ever seen in the recent days, people call virtuous, is, you know, what happened to that healthcare executive? Which Rubio does talk about. Yes. And that is definitely, a lot of people cheered that on, but I can't think of a single instance in which a bombing has ever been cheered on. Also, like, Marxist bombings, it's like, wait, when was the last time a Marxist,

• 3:28:36Speaker 01

  like, actually said, like, this is not a real thing? It is in that what Rubio is talking about is a spate of left-wing affiliated bombings that occurred from 1971 to 72. He talks about this in the Cuba. And that's what he's saying. That hasn't happened, like, whether underground has been above ground for, like... That's entirely what all this is based on. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, it's not a thing now. Yeah, is what old people remember about the left in the 70s. Yeah. You know? It's not directly referenced, but I know the DOJ did make a big hubbub about foiling a, quote, "far left," or it's kind of like an anti-imperialist, like Maoist bombing plot in California late last year. Also, a confidential human source who was

• 3:29:18Speaker 01

  working with law enforcement was involved in the planning of this operation, which was stopped by law enforcement before they could ever carry out the attack. And that's the closest thing to, like, an actual, like, Marxist. That is the closest recent thing, yes. Like, that's it. Like, in the last, like, very long number of years. Now, Rubio claimed that, quote, "An extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talk about political violence and extremism, to the point that this prejudice has become the neutral and objective baseline, quote, 'so entrenched in the mainstream.'"

• 3:29:53Robert Evans?

  Conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. For an example of this, Rubio mentions the protests against the murder of George Floyd.

• 3:30:05Speaker 02

  Many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause. It is why during those George Floyd, so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America's great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image, maybe you all recall this, of a news anchor

• 3:30:46Speaker 02

  from a very prominent agency, a news anchor, standing in a neighborhood, consumed in flames. Meanwhile, the crayon on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful.

• 3:30:58Robert Evans?

  Can't even say Chiron right? My god.

• 3:31:00Speaker 02

  This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused, it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.

• 3:31:11Robert Evans?

  A protected class unto itself, protecting their ability to light trash on fire in the middle of a street. That's what happened. There weren't thousands of arrests and prosecutions. That is the other thing, is that the Trump administration did that a little bit, but this was at the end of 2020. The Biden administration did tons and tons of like federal arrests with people involved in these protests, people who are still in jail. Meanwhile, the January 6 people are out of jail and have had pardons. Yeah. Rubio referenced instances of political violence in Europe from recent time, like a firebomb attack on the home of a Greek politician that killed that politician's mother earlier this month.

• 3:31:54Robert Evans?

  Rubio did not mention that four suspects have already been arrested and that this firebombing was the first time in over a decade that someone was killed in an attack targeting a politician in Greece. Rubio also referenced a five-day blackout in Berlin last winter caused by a power line sabotage, people claiming to be responsible for the attack associated themselves with a far-left eco-extremist group. Lastly, Rubio mentioned that in February of this year, quote, "A French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs." This 23-year-old was a neo-fascist quote-unquote activist, that's what he's referred to in

• 3:32:35Robert Evans?

  local news coverage, who died two days after being brutalized in a large street brawl during a far-right protest outside of a university event featuring a Palestinian lawmaker. Eleven anti-fascists were arrested for this. Rubio tried to connect the current emerging threat of far-left political terrorism to historical Marxist struggles in the 20th century and particularly the 1970s. Rubio name-dropped urban guerrilla groups in Central and South America, FARC, the National Liberation Army, the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas in Peru, as well as European groups like Italy's Red Brigades, the Red Army faction in Germany, Marxist extremists in Greece, and in the US, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

• 3:33:20Speaker 02

  And today we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40% in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80% of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean. An all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes, a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray,

• 3:34:03Speaker 02

  his gun marked with slogans like "Where is your god now?", a healthcare executive executed in cold blood in the streets, multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president, and the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation.

• 3:34:21Robert Evans?

  So there's a lot there. Anarchist violence certainly isn't new in Greece. No. And again, in the American context, this little speech by Rubio conflates mass casualty events with property damage and isolated targeted violence. He references vague quote-unquote "all-out assaults" on immigration officers, as in big protests in Minneapolis. He references a one sniper attack by a suicidal man who was not very political and leaned libertarian in Texas. He references a transgender shooter who also was not politically motivated in the traditional sense and initially planned to shoot up an LGBTQ music venue.

• 3:35:03Robert Evans?

  The United Healthcare CEO assassination is arguably the closest thing here to like left-wing motivated violence. It's definitely politically motivated. Even that suspect wasn't particularly like left-wing politically. No. Belief in some political ideology was not the driving force behind that assassination. It wasn't ideologically motivated, but rather materially motivated, based on interactions with our inhumane healthcare system. Trying to understand every public act of violence, whether that's a shooting or an assassination, just as existing in between this left-right binary is a very limited way to actually try to understand public acts of violence.

• 3:35:46Robert Evans?

  Because not all shootings have an obvious ideological driver, public acts of violence can be downstream of someone's personal experiences and material conditions. As for the Trump assassinations, two have been from people who were largely moderate liberals, not leftists, and the first attempted assassination did not appear to have what we would traditionally consider to be a political motive, again, from someone with a conservative background who was closer to what we would describe as having like a school shooter mentality. I'll talk about this a little bit later, but I think it's really important to understand that just because the target is a political figure does not mean it is political violence. The attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan is a key example of this.

• 3:36:31Robert Evans?

  And investigations into the first Trump assassination found that the shooter, Thomas Crooks, searched online for a variety of events to commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting, he did more than 60 internet searches related to Biden, Trump, and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions. Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to take place in the right place at the right time. And for someone who's just trying to do a high-profile shooting, it might not even matter what the outcome of that attempted shooting is. These public acts of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for self-annihilation,

• 3:37:11Robert Evans?

  while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a violent act. This kind of public suicidal violence can be a sort of final attempt of communing with the world. The AP summarized a report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found that left-wing terrorist attacks as of July of last year had surpassed those from the far-right for the first time in more than 30 years. But a closer look at that data showed that the uptick reflects a very low starting level and a concurrent drop on the far-right.

• 3:37:51Robert Evans?

  Quote, "There was an average of 0.6 left-wing incidents annually from 1994 through 2000, compared with an average of 20.6 on the right," the report shows. From 2016 to 2024, there were an average of four per year on the left and 22.7 per year on the right. Those numbers have dropped dramatically on the right as of early July 2025, with only one incident. Meanwhile, there had been five from the left. So, yes, left-wing attacks in 2025 did outpace what that report as of July categorized as right-wing attacks, but that's because there was a big drop-off in right-wing attacks. Once Trump came into office and a very small increase in attacks attributed to the

• 3:38:36Robert Evans?

  left. And that is the sort of statistics that Rubio is using to make this push. Yeah. And, you know, like, it's worth noting, it's like, okay, so why have there been less of these sort of like, right wing political terrorism events? And it's like, well, because ICE is just doing them instead. Yeah, the state's doing the violence for them. Yeah, like, it's the same reason that you can look at the period in which sort of like, jailhouse lynching suddenly like collapses. And the reason they collapse is that, you know, the US government just starts executing those people. And, you know, this is like, a very explicit deal that's made between the state and, you know, the specific kind of lynch mob is like, we'll just carry out death, like, penalty sentences against these people if you stop storming prisons and lynching them in there. So, you know, that's like, what's happening here, right? Is like, you have people with mass shooter

• 3:39:19Robert Evans?

  profiles who are, you know, ICE officers, shooting like immigrants in the streets now. Yeah. One thing that was really common throughout Rubio's whole speech and some of the follow up remarks by like, Miller and Besid is like, a big thing that was undergirding their rhetoric was this assumption that if the target of violence is viewed as a right wing, then the attacker must be left wing. And any attack that goes against what they would consider like, a right wing symbol, whether that's ICE, whether that's the president, whatever, then whoever is attacking that symbol must be coming from the left wing or have some left wing motivation. And that's the way that they're trying to frame a lot of this. One of the old categories of violent extremism is called anti-government violent

• 3:40:00Robert Evans?

  extremism, which is a very broad category, which can encompass some people who have explicit ideological drivers, but also can include people who are doing public suicidal violence, who will target the government or political figures as an expression of their own political and societal alienation. Someone who does this kind of public suicidal violence can often lack a recognizably coherent political philosophy that can be easily grafted on to our Democrat Republican binary, with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across the left right spectrum. But now that Trump is in office, any attack against the federal government can be used by the Trump administration as an example of left wing

• 3:40:45Robert Evans?

  terrorism attacking a right wing government. Take, for instance, the sniper attack in Texas, targeting an ICE facility and vehicles, although actually shooting multiple immigrants. This shooter was described by his friends as being largely apolitical, but leaned libertarian. This shooting also had a suicidal aspect in that he did kill himself after the shooting. With Trump in charge of the federal government, nihilistic and self-destructive attacks against American society may take a form which can be characterized as left wing violence. Another example of this is the plot against the UFC Freedom 250 event, where self-described

• 3:41:29Robert Evans?

  Christian patriots who saw themselves as aspiring revolutionaries tried to start the Second American Revolutionary War by targeting high level politicians and public figures at the UFC White House event. These people are not on what I would consider the left wing, but in the conservative coverage of this attack, this was framed as an anti-capitalist attack targeting Trump's cabinet. Towards the end of Rubio's speech, he started talking about this like, international strategy that they want to develop to handle this emerging threat. Quote, "This is an international conference because we are facing an international, transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected

• 3:42:11Robert Evans?

  networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission." I'll play one more clip from Rubio here.

• 3:42:29Robert Evans?

  Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other's attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds. And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iranian proxy networks, who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime's sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere. And it remains inextricably linked to the

• 3:43:13Robert Evans?

  far left groups and movements across and beyond the West. Today's far left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country. They can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. A thing that we've never seen happen. This is complete fiction. A thing that's never, ever happened. This is like- Not once. Where are they training, Marco? Cuba? This is like a Tom Clancy novel. That's, he does think they're training in Cuba, actually. I shouldn't ask that, yeah. The only thing that functions like this is the Central Intelligence Agency. Yeah. Like, nothing else works like this. Well, that's not entirely true. Like, the global far right does to a degree work this way, right?

• 3:43:58Robert Evans?

  That's true. Yeah. Like, there's an element. Now, I wouldn't even describe it that way, because that's more elaborate than I've ever seen the global far right do, honestly. But- Yeah. Their versions of that do occur, where people are like, traveling to one country for armed training or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you could look back at the old, like, World Anti-Communist Networks. Exactly. Like, League Networks, where they would do that. But like, this- I mean, I wonder if they would consider stuff like, traveling to like, Rojava, right? A leftist traveling to Rojava or traveling to like, you know, see like, Zapatistas, right? If that's kind of what he's thinking of, or if he's even thinking about it in like, a real literal way. I can tell you specifically what he's thinking about in this. I mean, he's thinking about two things. He's trying to directly draw a comparison for political purposes to the influencers who went over to Cuba recently. But the thing that he is actually

• 3:44:40Robert Evans?

  thinking about is the way a chunk of the global far left worked in like, the 60s and 70s. Gaddafi trained the IRA, right? Like, there were a lot of like, well, not all of them, but like, there was, people did travel from left wing groups to other places and then carried out attacks in other countries. That was a thing that occurred during what is often called the Golden Age of Terrorism. This is, a lot of this is just more Marco not leaving the 70s behind. Like, even though, again, it's 50 years since that kind of shit's been going on, almost. And Gaddafi's dead. Like, the IRA isn't exactly active anymore, either. We'll return to talk more about far left transnational terrorism after this ad break.

• 3:45:34Robert Evans?

  We are back. There's one last part about this Antifa far left terrorism summit that happened at the State Department that I want to hone in on. And that is the remarks made by Stephen Miller. So brace yourself for a short clip of Miller here.

• 3:45:51Speaker 04

  President Trump issued a directive in our parlance, it's called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM, NSPM 7, to be exact, that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. There's no point at which the left wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains and ceases progressing. Inevitably, left to run its course, it always

• 3:46:31Speaker 04

  becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering, in order to establish complete and total control, control through psychological and physical and actual terror.

• 3:46:54Robert Evans?

  We must disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists, or else they will turn the country into a gulag-

• 3:47:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:47:03Robert Evans?

  And conduct the mass imprisonment of political enemies-

• 3:47:06Speaker 04

  Sure, man.

• 3:47:06Robert Evans?

  And establish total psychological control.

• 3:47:09Speaker 04

  It's just that we must do the genocide before they do the genocide against us thing.

• 3:47:13Robert Evans?

  And that is a lot of how Miller and the Ambassador for the Counterterrorism Bureau talk about this. So like, we need-

• 3:47:19Speaker 06

  To stop this before it gets bigger. We know it seems kind of small right now. But by the time that everyone realizes this is a huge threat, then it's already too late. Then we've already lost. We have to end this thing right now as it still is like an infant. Like, we cannot let this thing grow up. That is very much how he talks about it. And he is really frustrated about the way that attempts by the Trump administration to do this have been curtailed or have not been able to really be followed through on to the extent that he wants. And he has a specific thing that's been happening that he's really upset about. And it's a little term that some people in the audience might be familiar with called jury nullification.

• 3:47:57Speaker 06

  There's a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists, but who support left-wing violence will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition. So, to be specific, we've seen in some of our nation's cities in America, like Washington, D.C., and New York City, something against an American term, but it's known as jury nullification. This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime, but the juror, because they're ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to the crime which they've obviously committed. We've seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing

• 3:48:41Speaker 06

  organizations who've committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement who've been brought to court where clear evidence has been presented against them that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons. When you've reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society.

• 3:49:01Speaker 04

  According to a new report in Just Security, quote, "Nearly half the cases nationwide brought against protesters and immigrants for assault against a law enforcement officer were dismissed by judges, withdrawn by prosecutors, or resulted in jury acquittals. In at least 18 publicly reported instances, grand juries have refused to indict. At least 16 grand jury subpoenas have been blocked or withdrawn, and judges have dismissed or prosecutors have dropped at least 79 cases relating to ICE protests or federal law enforcement surges across D.C., Chicago, Minnesota, and Los Angeles. In a period of two months, the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. dropped more cases than it had in the previous 10 years combined," unquote. And that also shows the scale in which they're bringing these cases against protesters.

• 3:49:45Speaker 04

  This is something that Miller is really upset about. This is something that is severely prohibiting the administration's ability to go after, quote-unquote, "left-wing terrorism," what they view as left-wing terrorism. And he's really frustrated about this. Here's one last quote from him, quote, "One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization," unquote.

• 3:50:29Speaker 04

  And Miller and Rubio went on pretty lengthy rants about how the threat of left-wing violence really is this civilizational threat against what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural. It's a quote from Miller. Against this, like, ugly hatred that fuels the left. This sort of, like, resentment for, like, failing at life. And now they want to attack those of us who, like, succeed, those of us who, like, build. Very fascist-like stuff at the end of both their speeches. Very, and also very Ben Shapiro stuff, to be honest. The whole builders and takers thing. I mean, he didn't start that, but it is interesting to see. There's so many old throwbacks to this, because you can tell these are guys who got started in right-wing politics before the current era, because they keep harkening back to stuff

• 3:51:13Speaker 04

  that's just, like, not as big a part of, like, the modern vernacular, which is always interesting to me, like, how stuck a lot of these guys are in the past. At a post-conference, press conference for foreign press, the coordinator and ambassador at large for the Bureau of Counterterrorism reiterated that the U.S. counterterrorism strategy is still focusing on three main types of threat groups: narco-terrorists, Islamic or jihadist terrorists, and far-left terrorists, and that they need to, quote, "identify terror actors and plots before they happen." He calls far-left terrorism "a resurgent threat with a clear upward trend," and that they are, quote, "committed to addressing it before it metastasizes," that they want to halt this scourge before it grows into something larger, more unified, and more

• 3:51:58Speaker 04

  deadly. The ambassador outlined three concrete outcomes from this conference. The first was on designations and accountability. And like Rubio, he promised that additional foreign terrorist organizations and specially-designated global terrorist designations for, quote-unquote, "far-left groups" are under active review and are going to be incoming soon, following the four designations of Europe-based groups last year. So there's going to be more left-wing or Antifa-related groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Uh-huh. Secretary Besant talked about how legitimate nonprofit and charitable structures are being, quote, "exploited as a mechanism to conceal the movement of illicit funds to support political terrorism."

• 3:52:43Speaker 04

  And the ambassador talked about how international partners are discussing prospects, quote, "align their own legal frameworks to ensure that these networks cannot simply relocate across borders. As a part of these terrorist designations, the Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will take steps to dismantle the funding which sustains these groups." And the State Department's also offering payments at up to $10 million for information disrupting far-left terrorist financing. The second outcome of the conference was on operational coordination, like deepening information sharing between partner agencies and coordinating on travel restrictions, and strengthening the protection of critical infrastructure like transportation and energy systems. It was also announced that Germany would host the next, quote-unquote, "counterterrorism workshop."

• 3:53:26Speaker 04

  The last concrete outcome of this event was new visa restrictions, quote, "targeting members of far-left terrorists and aligned groups." For more on that, let's throw to our colleague, James Stout.

• 3:53:42Speaker 04

  Hi, everyone. It's James, coming at you with the second attempt to record this. I find myself traveling every Wednesday at the moment, so apologies for missing out on the callings with everyone else. I will be back next week, I promise, and we will return to our usual shared conversation. But I did want to check in with everyone this week, because I want to talk about a couple of things. Last week, for the first time in its history, the United States government attempted to remove someone through the use of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. This is something that was first published by Seamus Hughes at Court Watch. I want to give credit where credit's due. Seamus spends an ungodly amount of time looking at Pacer and other court documents and found this. Some background on this court, right? It's established in 1996 by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

• 3:54:26Speaker 04

  That law allows the Attorney General to designate someone as a terrorist and use this process if Title II removal would be a threat to national security. Now, the hearings in the ATRC, I will say they fly extremely close to the sun with regards to constitutional rights and the concept of a fair trial. There are lots of provisions in this law for classified evidence, for strict restrictions on the things that the defendant can obtain by discovery. The law also says, quote, "An alien subject to removal under this title shall not be entitled to suppress evidence that the alien alleges was unlawfully obtained." That's great stuff. It's just worth noting, 1996 is before the start of the global war on terror, and it

• 3:55:10Speaker 04

  therefore predates the existence of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. The United States had a base at Guantanamo Bay, but the large-scale extrajudicial torturing of people, what they called enhanced interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, had not begun in 1996, right? I'm not saying that they were not doing extrajudicial things in 1996. I'm just saying that, like, the Gitmo, as we understand it today, for those of us who have grown up with it as a political reality for most of our adult lives, didn't exist in that sense then. But I'm not saying that there were not people detained there. There probably were. I'm not saying they did not do extrajudicial things in pursuit of, quote-unquote, anti-terrorism. I believe they did. Boesberg mentioned this court. Judge Boesberg, right? We remember him from the El Salvador Secot cases, when he told the government that there

• 3:55:55Speaker 04

  was a procedure for someone accused of terrorism, because the government basically said, "Oh, well, these people are terrorists. Look at that. We put them on a plane, send them to a death camp in El Salvador," essentially, right? A prison that very few people leave. Eventually, most of those people did leave in this case, but it was very unusual for someone to leave that camp. And what he said was, quote, "So, if there's a national security concern with having these hearings, whether via habeas or otherwise, you can always go to the ATRC," which will be a first, but that's what it's there for, right? So, at the time, he's pointing to it, saying, "If you can't put the evidence for these peoples, the need to remove these people out in public, that's why we have the ATRC. Why don't you use that?" Trump administration said, "We can use that. That does not mean we have to use that." And that was their argument, right?

• 3:56:40Speaker 04

  The court is open not just to people engaged in terrorism, it's also their families, it's also people accused of things like soliciting others to engage in extraterrestrials or raising funds. It also appears that once a person, they've submitted an application for removal through this court, they can detain a person. The court has this crazy website, like, it looks like it was very hastily created. It's not a usual website for a court at all. Usually, court websites look like they were made in the late 1990s. They are very difficult to navigate, and they have a huge amount of data that is hard to find. That's why a lot of us like to use Court Listener or some other website rather than going directly to the court pages, which can be very hard to navigate. This page lists the judges, where each of the judges comes from a different U.S. circuit,

• 3:57:25Speaker 04

  and it has the two documents that the court has made available so far. One is pretty much all blanked out, and the other one is a court order in which the court's chief judge asserts that, quote, "The government could benefit from an opportunity for more thoughtful consideration." So they've made an application to remove someone by this court, and that is the response of the court at this time, right? Obviously, this is very concerning, right? Immigration court, to begin with, I think, is getting closer and closer to being something that is sort of openly flouting the Constitution and people's rights there. You know, immigration judges are not judges in the sense that you understand judges-to-be, even though some of them have worked hard to give people due process, and many of them

• 3:58:07Speaker 04

  are now being removed, wanted to demise because of them. But if we look at this in addition to the United States adding groups in Mexico and Europe to the FTO list, foreign terrorist organizations, for those who aren't familiar, it's especially concerning, right? And it's especially concerning when we look at another announcement this week, which explicitly--

• 3:58:27Robert Evans?

  Cited NSPM seven, which we've spoken about lengths on this show, limiting visas for people it calls anti fascist and far left terrorist groups. The announcement began, going to quote from extensively here, right? Far left terrorist and aligned groups use sophisticated organized networks to perpetrate violence as a political tool, seeking to implement an extreme political vision through intimidation and coordinated campaigns of terror. It is a strategy that explicitly aims to undermine the political foundations of free and self governing societies, utilizing bombings, assassinations and other forms of terrorism to silence speech, limit political opposition, change policy outcomes and sabotage political processes. This announcement also said that it's, quote, targets members of far left terrorists and

• 3:59:09Robert Evans?

  other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism, supported violent criminal activity, participated in economic sabotage, finance, recruited or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by far left terrorists and other aligned groups, and/or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorists and other aligned networks for the purposes of violent action. Some of these are pretty broad, right? Economic sabotage, normally I would say ludicrous to suggest that like that could include BDS, but I think given where we are, it's not crazy to think that, right? Some of these facilitating the convergence, right? Is that like holding a big summit is like the logistical support for violent or criminal actions? Does that mean bail funds?

• 3:59:51Robert Evans?

  All of these things, cash bail, I guess is less, less of a thing outside the US. Does that mean people who have done jail support, right? That kind of thing? This is super concerning. The State Department explicitly cites section two, 12 subsection A, part three subsection C of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which deals with the inadmissibility of aliens. The section begins, quote, "An alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible." So that's a very, very broad category, right? Notably, it is not subsection B, which deals specifically with terrorism, which terrorists are inadmissible.

• 4:00:34Robert Evans?

  This is a different one, which deals with this very broad power given to the Secretary of State to decide whose admission would be bad for the United States foreign policy consequences. They've used this before, right? This is a favorite of this administration, but again, right? This is an example of a law which gives massive leeway to, in this case, part of the executive branch, Secretary of State, and it is therefore, he's using that leeway, right? To do this. I think that we should be especially concerned when we combine this with some of the other things that we're seeing, right? We are seeing social media surveys of applicants, right? People have to submit their whole social media before they apply. We're seeing phone searches at the border more and more frequently, right?

• 4:01:17Robert Evans?

  Famously, the J D Vance meme, but it's not uncommon to see these phone searches at the border now. We have also seen this week, the elimination of duration of status for a number of visas, F ones, being probably the most numerous, F one being a student visa, right? Also some foreign journalist visas, other visa types as well included there, but I want to focus on the F ones because I think that will be the one that impacts the most people. So generally with a F one visa, once you maintain status, i.e. once you are still in school, you could keep your student visa, right? Now these include like a time limit on the duration of the visa. For some people, this will be a serious issue. If you are entering, for example, to speaking from experience here, if you are entering

• 4:01:59Robert Evans?

  a program in the United States in the humanities and you are entering with a bachelor's degree, right? Not a master's degree. You will then have to advance to candidacy, right? Complete the requirements for your master's degree and demonstrate competency in two languages. Let's assume you are not someone who is multilingual. That could take a while, right? Like depending on how strict the testing is at the particular university you go to, then you will have to research, then you'll have to write, then you'll have to do your dissertation. These time limits on the F one visa are less than the nominal time to degree at some institutions. And that means that it's going to be very hard for graduate students, especially to come to the United States to do those degrees.

• 4:02:42Robert Evans?

  That combined with this denial of visas thing is going to have an impact on the way campuses look in the United States. It's going to have a broader impact than that, of course it is. But this is a thing that I have direct experience with, right? F one student visas are numerous. I've taught dozens, if not hundreds of F one students. I came on a student visa when I did my PhD. And like, one of the reasons that people come here, and this is something that I've heard from so many people, is that like this country has a bill of rights and the very first amendment to the constitution guaranteed freedom of speech. And that isn't the case everywhere.

• 4:03:19Robert Evans?

  And that is a thing that is good, but it is more and more and more under attack, especially for foreign students, right? We've seen this right from the very beginning of the Trump administration. And I believe that this will be part of that same attack, right? When we look at all these things together, these are the clearest signposts we have seen yet to the new McCarthyism, right? We can talk about what Rubio said about Cuba. We can talk about this Antifa summit, which I will talk about soon in more depth, but it is not hard to draw a line from, for instance, the prosecution and the persecution outside the legal system of Lincoln Brigadiers, right? People who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain to what is happening today.

• 4:04:03Robert Evans?

  And it is sad, but not shocking to see yet another shameful aspect of this country's history resurfacing and then becoming policy again. So I guess I'll just finish up by saying if this has impacted you, if you are someone who's recently had a visa refused, if you are somebody who was trying to get in on F one visa and is now finding, shit, I don't think I can do my degree in that much time. What do I do here? I always want to tell stories about people, not just about government announcements. So you can hit us up, [email protected] if you'd like to talk about that. Thanks and I'll be back with everybody next week.

• 4:04:41Robert Evans?

  We will discuss tariffs and even more far left terrorism after this ad break.

• 4:05:00Robert Evans?

  We're back. So earlier this week, the US State Department put out a 100 page report, this would be on Monday, about Cuba's history of trying to overthrow or manipulate US politics via left wing activists and quote unquote, left wing militants, going back to the 60s. When they say going back to the 60s, basically what I mean is pretty much exclusively the 60s and 70s is almost everything in this document that relates to the US directly in any way. The document, which is basically, this is, just to give you a little bit of background, this is all Rubio, right? Not just what, what Gare has been talking about, but particularly trying to drum up fear and panic around Cuba and justify an invasion or regime change in Cuba.

• 4:05:42Robert Evans?

  That's been his whole fucking life goal for a very long time. There's a pretty good Guardian article from last year with the title Marco Rubio nears goal of toppling Cuba's government. And I want to read a brief quote from that. "The campaign against Cuba's government is the culmination of a personal pursuit spanning decades. In a video released on Cuban Independence Day this week, Rubio said in Spanish that a US embargo was not the reason for the country's privations, telling Cubans that currently the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country. All roads have been leading to Cuba for Rubio, said a person who has known Rubio since his time as a local politician in South Florida. He has wanted this for a long time, and now he finally has the authority to reach that goal." Now, Trump has made a couple of comments that make people believe he is in the process

• 4:06:26Robert Evans?

  of planning to try and force the government of Cuba out one way or another. Last Thursday, he told reporters, "Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years doing something about Cuba, and it looks like I'll be the one that does it. So I would be happy to do it." Now, hard to say if that actually means anything. Trump says a lot of stuff that doesn't come true, but there's been real world reasons to believe that he seriously intends to do this. I mean, first off, what happened in Venezuela, right? Where we used our special operations forces to take out and extradite a legally elected, well, to extradite the president of a sovereign country, right? This is something that like, you've had like a lot of planners in the Pentagon talking about for years is like, well, we could use these guys to just deal with problems at the top, right?

• 4:07:09Robert Evans?

  And for Rubio, there's a lot of speculation that Venezuela was kind of a proof of concept for him, right? That we could in fact use a very small footprint force, get the current ruling regime out of there or enough of them that they're not willing to fight back anymore. And that might be something that the US military is capable of doing. I don't have a great sense as to Cuba's defensive capacity or how functional they would be at doing this or how much support the regime would enjoy in the event that the US tried this or how much that support would matter. It kind of depends on the weapon systems they use. At the moment, we know that the US Nimitz and its strike group have recently been brought into the South Caribbean Sea as part of an ongoing military buildup. And there have been some other signs that the regime is planning to act.

• 4:07:52Robert Evans?

  Axios recently published an article that cited administration estimates that Cuba now has some 300 military drones, quote, "and was considering using them to attack a US base at Guantanamo Bay, US ships, or even targets in Florida." Miami, your days are numbered. Now, folks, I'm going to walk you through some stuff. First off, we don't actually have hard evidence that they bought any of these drones. There was some earlier reporting, and I'm sure they have been talking with Iran, and I know that they have ongoing defense agreements with Russia, and I wouldn't be shocked if they had bought like 300 of these like Shahed style cheaper suicide drones. Here's the thing, the night before we recorded this, Ukraine launched a major attack on Moscow using 400 drones.

• 4:08:34Robert Evans?

  If Cuba does have 300 Iranian drones, that is roughly enough to carry out an offensive against US forces for two to three seconds, perhaps a little more, maybe more like 15 to 20.

• 4:08:44Speaker 06

  You know, but it's not an invasion force. It's not really a defensive force. And we also don't know that they even have them. Right? It wouldn't be weird if they did, but this isn't any reason to believe there's any kind of a threat coming from Cuba. The fact that they're trying to really hype up 300 drones. It's 2026. You can run through that in an afternoon.

• 4:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, like, I just want to be very clear. Cuba is not planning to launch strikes on the United States. Come on.

• 4:09:10Speaker 06

  Like, you look at the last 60 years of history. Right? We had one big dust up with them over the fucking Bay of Pigs. And obviously, the Cuban government funded and sent soldiers and doctors and other stuff into a variety of countries. And that led to conflicts in places like Africa with the US. But there's never been any direct aggression from Cuba towards the United States.

• 4:09:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:09:30Speaker 06

  We're not in danger from them. One of the most ridiculous things you could do today is watch the celebrated Aaron Sorkin movie, A Few Good Men, which is entirely about how, well, you know, you don't understand how difficult it is protecting America from Cuba. You know, we really, we gotta be extra crazy to keep the Cubans off the walls of the United States. Like, it's fucking nonsense. And it's Marco is number one. Marco comes from a Cuban-American background. His whole family hates the Castro government. He has wanted and seen himself as ordained to destroy the communist government in Cuba for his entire life. That doesn't mean that there's any kind of realistic threat here or any real reason to feel like any kind of actual danger. And you can see that in the report itself. Right?

• 4:10:14Speaker 06

  There's even some bits here where they almost admit it. Right? I'm going to read one segment. "The Cuban campaign against America is unique. It is irregular and covert. Even at the peak of its military power, Havana never possessed the capacity to defeat the United States in a conventional armed conflict. Instead, the Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself." Did Cuba do that? Did Cuba turn America against itself? And also, if they've perfected a war of attrition, why are they out of gas? And like, the United States is the healthiest economy in the world. I mean, it's because we stole a bunch of shit. But there's no evidence that Cuba's done some sort of horrible damage to the US. And in fact, all of the damage says otherwise, that we've continued to fuck over the Cubans

• 4:10:58Speaker 06

  for goddamn no reason for decades. It's incredibly frustrating. And again, the more you read this, the more you realize, unless he's talking about like shit that, because he does periodically talk about like fucking South America and some of the different like Cuban, like state involvement there. But when he's talking about acts that can be traced to Cuba that involve violence in the US at all, it's just shit from the 60s and 70s. Right? Which is like back when Cuba's economy was functional and they had the backing of the USSR. And also, like, none of it ever came close to doing serious damage to the United States as like a national, like as a nation. Right? None of, that was never in the fucking cards. You know? It's very frustrating to have to even take any of this serious, but you do because they are going to try to blame and try to punish and imprison people based on this fucking

• 4:11:43Speaker 06

  fantasy. Right? And one of the things, you've seen a lot of quotes, like when Marco came up to talk and give a speech about this report, he accused Iran and Cuba of funding both Antifa and the DSA. Right?

• 4:11:55Speaker 01

  Like, come on.

• 4:11:56Speaker 06

  And he'll make these comments in his speeches. The actual report isn't even willing to go that far because when you get to the meat of the report, Marquito doesn't even have the guts to call the DSA a Cuban op. Quote, "The DSA was not founded as a Cuban intelligence or influence front. It was born in 1982 as a fusion of socialist organizations and movements for both the old left and new left factions." And, you know, like, they're right that people in the DSA are very angry about what the US is doing to Cuba because they're out of fuel and starving and being continually harmed by our completely pointless boycotts and trade fucking wars. Like, there's not much more than that for most people to it. There's some weirdos out there, but.

• 4:12:34Speaker 01

  It is really interesting how carefully the report talks about DSA. Because like, DSA is mentioned a lot. DSA is mentioned very frequently.

• 4:12:43Speaker 06

  But there's no direct connection.

• 4:12:44Speaker 01

  DSA is mentioned 24 times in a 100-page document, but they're very careful to be like, DSA is can be sympathetic to the Cuban government, but DSA is not a result of Cuban influence necessarily.

• 4:12:57Speaker 06

  No. And I think the argument they are making is that you had a split between the old left and the new left, and the Cuban government founded a bunch of new left factions. And because the DSA is a fusion of old left and new left factions, that means that they're partly a result of Cuban operates.

• 4:13:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:13:16Speaker 06

  That's what they're trying to argue. Right? It's nonsense.

• 4:13:19Speaker 01

  Or build some sort of historical justification to if they go after DSA people or activists who have gone to Cuba to deliver humanitarian aid.

• 4:13:27Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely.

• 4:13:27Speaker 01

  That builds some sort of framework to criminalize people who are sympathetic to people living in Cuba.

• 4:13:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think that's precisely what's happening. And one thing that's kind of telling is even among news sources that are like sympathetic to the right and to the administration, no one's pretending that this paper isn't just Marco, like pushing out his own personal vendettas. Like, I found a Washington Examiner article that summarized the report as Marco Rubio accusing the Cuban government. Here's an exact quote from the Washington Examiner. "Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the Cuban government of running one of the most sophisticated infiltrations of US politics, in part using the Democratic Socialists of America." So even with a lot of these articles, they're like, yeah, this is just Rubio fucking spouting off. Right? Like, this is mostly old Marco. And among some of like the crazy, like, anti-communist sites I've been reading, they're still like, well, there's nothing new in this.

• 4:14:19Speaker 06

  They didn't, because they are reading like, well, nothing past like the 70s involves the US directly.

• 4:14:25Speaker 01

  Which isn't to say there's not real danger here, right? There was.

• 4:14:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, huge danger.

• 4:14:28Speaker 01

  One of the main activists that Code Pink, which was this organization that, that co-organized some of those aid trips to Cuba, is under federal investigation right now. And this indicates that despite how much of this is just Rubio having fun with his little pet project, this does show where the targets of the administration are.

• 4:14:46Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:14:47Speaker 01

  And that can be the DSA and people doing humanitarian aid trips.

• 4:14:52Speaker 06

  And it's specifically because of that humanitarian aid trip. Right? Like, that gave Rubio a really good, like, you know, honestly, more than anything, I think just pissed him off because he hates the Cuban government more than anything. And the idea that anyone would want to like bring aid to the people in Cuba is like infuriating to him. Now, again, we know that Trump is in the process of planning to try and force the government of Cuba out one way or another. That doesn't mean he actually will. Right? He hasn't committed fully to that yet. But given what happened in Venezuela and given what's going on in Iran, I think it would be foolish to say, I don't think he's going to try. Right? Like, I think that's not the smart, if I'm making a bet, I certainly hope he doesn't. I hope they get scared. I hope shit with Iran is bad enough that they chicken out. But I think it would be foolish to assume they're not going to try and unseat the government of Cuba. Right?

• 4:15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:15:37Speaker 06

  I don't think that's the rational way to look at this. Right? And whether this is all bluster or not, you know, is going to be seen. But as I said, the US Nimitz and its strike group have moved into the South Caribbean. And there's a lot of talk about like, oh, we think the Cubans are planning an attack on Guantanamo. Last Thursday, Marco Rubio repeated his claim that Havana has weapons they acquired from, quote, "Russia and China," and that they host Russian and Chinese intelligence in the country, which is also interesting, that he, he's so stuck in the Cold War, he has to keep bringing Russia into it. Now, there's a big debate as to like, how committed is Trump actually to unseating the Cuban government? And that's always hard to tell because when he does talk about it, it sounds like, oh, he wants that feather in his cap. But you also get the feeling, this is a thing where whoever he talks to last, as

• 4:16:22Speaker 06

  in a lot of cases, is going to heavily set his agenda. And Senator Chris Murphy, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, said something like that. Quote, "I do think that as Trump gets older and he spends his days sleeping and worrying only about his ballroom, he's increasingly susceptible to dangerous people around him with dangerous agendas. And there is a crowd of Cuba hawks who have always wanted us to invade and who think they might be able to take advantage of an increasingly checked out old man. And I just think we have to be prepared for that." And honestly, I think Chris, pretty much that, like, that, yeah, is more or less right, Chris. I think that's, that's, that's basically the, the accurate summary.

• 4:16:53Speaker 01

  Sadist man in the room.

• 4:16:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. That sounds right to me.

• 4:16:59Speaker 01

  Let's turn to the midterm elections before we close. In Florida, the Groypur candidate for governor, James Fishback, who I did an episode about a few months ago, is not going to win that election. But he is polling double digits, which is bad. And worse, he is dominating youth polls. He has 51% in youth polls. That's ages 18 to 34. Really, a really dark look at a future of the Republican Party. Fishback is like barely even like a crypto.

• 4:17:33Robert Evans?

  Fascist, he's barely even hiding it. I mean, he plays with dog whistles, but also just openly says a bunch of like antisemitic stuff and very racist attacks, all with a sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge in that classic Groypur charisma style. But there's another aspect of the Fishback race I want to briefly mention is that there's been a lot of AI ads targeted against Fishback where it has like AI generated video, you know, deep fake style of Fishback with like the Squad and Russia and Putin and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaab, foreign generals, Muslim leaders in the Middle East with hijabs.

• 4:18:15Robert Evans?

  Basically, he's like welcoming all of these people into his home and they cut up an anti-Israel cake. And that's the ad. It, it looks, I mean, like someone like me can tell it's AI. A boomer might not be able to. And this is something that Thomas Massey, since losing his race, has said that he, he believes through talking with, with voters, specifically older voters, that many boomers and older voters believed the AI ads against Massey, that Massey was in like a throuple with like AOC and someone else, Ilhan Omar, I think, that he actually got calls, his office got calls asking if this was true. So these sorts of AI ads are a real problem.

• 4:18:57Robert Evans?

  Obviously, the fact that these are against Fishback, I'm not being sympathetic to Fishback here, but this is a more general societal problem. Moving on to another governor's race in Wisconsin, democratic socialist Francesca Hong is ahead in the polls, but many people are still undecided. In a Wedgewood poll from mid-July, Francesca Hong is up 38%. Mandela Barnes is 30% and David Crowley is 9%, though undecided or supporting another candidate is polling at 23% in that poll. So there could still be upwards of like 20% of people who are undecided.

• 4:19:38Robert Evans?

  There's been some other polls in the past few days that show Francesca Hong about 15% above everyone else. So that is a good sign for her. I know there's been some organizers from New York and across the country going into Wisconsin right now to help with this last leg of the campaign. This is a very important race, looking at what the future of the viability of democratic socialism is going to be in swing states. This past week, David Crowley re-entered the race, which may split the moderate vote, which could help Hong win the primary. It's another thing to keep an eye on here. In Maine, Troy Jackson is set to be the Democratic Senate nominee after organizers and volunteers

• 4:20:22Robert Evans?

  secured the vast majority of delegates for the nominee replacement convention. I've mentioned Jackson a few times on the show because he ran for governor with the endorsement of DSA and Bernie Sanders. He was the only person to receive the endorsement of DSA. Platner did not. Jackson's a former state lawmaker, a five-generation logger, very pro-labor, like the most like legitimate working-class pro-labor candidate. He's polling a little bit ahead of Collins right now, like about 3%, but this is going to be a very close race. This is going to be very tough. Another really close race right now is the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan with corporate and AIPAC-backed Haley Stevens going up against left-wing populist Abdul

• 4:21:07Robert Evans?

  El-Sayed. There has been a ton of outside spending the past few weeks with multiple attack ads smearing El-Sayed as quote unquote sexist. And these are all just for him like criticizing female politicians, like criticizing Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, like not attacking them for being women, but doing very, sometimes actually very soft criticism of like their ability to improve the world as political actors. But the playbook that Stevens and that larger campaign has been using has been trying to smear El-Sayed as a quote unquote sexist podcast bro. This is the sort of last, last line of defense this style of liberalism has had, this going

• 4:21:48Robert Evans?

  back to this sort of identity reductionism when they are faced with, you know, vast actual economic and policy differences between two candidates. The only thing they can do is, oh, but Haley Stevens, I am a woman and this man must hate women. AIPAC is helping with this. They have already spent at least $15 million with other corporate PACs, helping Stevens with another $12 million. As of July 1st, there's already been over $46 million in ad spending, 74% of which supports Stevens. And there's a lot of money going in since that July 1st date as well. One of the pro-Stevens ads has manufactured a fake Obama endorsement using old clips

• 4:22:30Robert Evans?

  of Obama talking about Haley Stevens because she worked with him like 15 years ago. Now Obama has declined to comment on this sort of manufactured fake endorsement, which is effectively just letting them do that. If he's not going to say, no, I haven't actually endorsed in this race, then basically he's allowing them to lie about him endorsing Stevens in this race. Meanwhile, El-Sayed is on the news almost every week, getting grilled about why he doesn't support Israel enough. And Israel has been a very important part of this race. This is in Michigan. Michigan was a big part of the Uncommitted movement and Stevens is a ridiculously pro-Israel

• 4:23:10Robert Evans?

  candidate who has voted to send tens of billions of dollars in unrestricted aid to Israel, has stopped the Lebanon War Powers Resolution, has banned the State Department from citing Gaza Health Ministry death tolls, and Stevens also sees Israel in her dreams.

• 4:23:26Speaker 03

  And in the United States Congress, I will continue to fight for the people of Israel. I will continue to fight for Israel's existence. Israel comes to me in my dreams. I see Israel's future.

• 4:23:46Robert Evans?

  Meanwhile, El-Sayed wants to abolish ICE, fight for Medicare for All, and cut off all aid to Israel. He's certainly running a downstream of Zorin Mamdani-style campaign with his videos. He has declined to explicitly call himself a democratic socialist, but there's a lot of similarities in his platform to some other DSA candidates like Zorin. Though El-Sayed is not endorsed by DSA, but he is running with backing of the UAW and the Working Families Party. Speaking of elections, let's close out by talking about election security because on Thursday night, President Trump delivered what was promised to be a very important address to the nation on election security.

• 4:24:30Robert Evans?

  The speech started out as a basically mini-version of his last State of the Union before he announced the release of heavily redacted CIA documents on how China tried to influence our past elections, intelligence reports on possible vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure, and finally claiming that 250,000 non-citizens are registered to vote, with no further details or evidence of that number. Basically, this whole speech was a big ploy to try to pass the SAFE Act to restrict mail-in voting and disenfranchise voters with heightened ID requirements. Trump also talked about how China had stolen election data.

• 4:25:13Robert Evans?

  What actually happened was China downloaded publicly available voter data in 2022 that the Trump admin now claims could be used by foreign countries to fraudulently vote in our elections. And of course, China was looking at possible influence operations as many foreign countries do. Russia has done foreign influence operations. That's not changing vote tallies or hacking into voting machines. That's doing disinformation campaigns, which, as we've seen with tenant media, Russia has certainly been involved in recently. And according to some of these documents, China was looking into if they wanted to run

• 4:25:56Robert Evans?

  influence operations for the 2020 election, and they actually declined to. After Trump's address, reporters questioned John Solomon, a former right-wing journalist.

• 4:26:06Speaker 04

  Who Trump brought on to his election task force to investigate possible voter fraud. And Solomon clarified that there's no evidence that any foreign power tampered with US voting machines or manipulated the vote count.

• 4:26:21Speaker 04

  You acknowledge that there were no votes changed in 2020? All I can acknowledge is what the intelligence shows, right? I only know the intelligence committee has zero evidence that someone has flipped, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 22, or 24. And you have no, you're able to We're not through all the documents. You're able to acknowledge that Venezuela has not tampered with voting machines in the United States? No, the intelligence is very clear. They did it on their own machines. Why is it important that they did it on their machines? Their machine protocols are the same as America. Why? Because for a long time, they did it exactly. And so the 2020 election was, in fact, the results as we, the American public saw. I'm still researching. So let me, let me, this is the first But there's no intelligence. Not yet. Guys, you gotta go. There is no intelligence that the election would have sent Donald Trump with.

• 4:27:09Speaker 04

  On Friday, the day following Trump's address, DHS Secretary Mullen announced that regardless

• 4:27:17Speaker 02

  of if the SAVE Act passes, he will institute mandatory changes to election security, including scrubbing states' voter rolls.

• 4:27:27Speaker 04

  We are going to make our second, our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to work or to run federal elections, they're going to have to implement security issues.

• 4:27:48Speaker 04

  Just security issues. We're not trying to get into anything else, but we're saying that the machines had to be secured and that your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed. If this actually happens, this could possibly lead to many people thinking they are registered to vote, who are actually not come election day, and then be unable to vote. This is a voter disenfranchisement tactic. Secretary Mullen later directly contradicted what John Solomon said the night before, saying that, quote, "We know for sure that foreign adversaries have vital pieces of our voting machines and the, quote unquote, key to the backend of these machines." We know that they can change voter

• 4:28:31Speaker 04

  registration and your vote. We know it's possible. There's not a question, it's not even for debate. Finally, on Wednesday, the House advanced a bill to stop insider trading, except Republicans added SAVE Act-style measures into this bill to pass new voter ID requirements to please Trump. And part of why they put those SAVE Act-style measures into this bill is so that they could attack Democrats in upcoming elections for voting against a bill to stop insider trading. Literally seconds after this bill was voted on, the White House Rapid Response Accounts started posting, quote, "Disgraceful.

• 4:29:14Speaker 04

  198 Democrats just voted against banning members of Congress from trading stocks while they're in office. They are corrupt." As you can see, very transparent ploy to manufacture a vote to be used in elections to attack Democrats for being corrupt. This, quote unquote, insider trading bill will now go to the Senate with those SAVE Act-style voter ID measures included. All right. Thank you for that, Gare. And last, but certainly not least, we've got one more edition of the tariff song, and then talking about tariffs after it.

• 4:29:50Speaker 01

  All right, let's talk tariffs. So, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, which is to say really, truly not that long ago, we did an episode on the hideously illegal tariffs Trump imposed under the, quote unquote, "authority" of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. These are the ones that are based on this completely manufactured crisis about the US facing a balance of payments crisis, a thing that cannot happen and is not happening. Now, these tariffs, which is just a general 10% tariff on all goods, are set to expire on Friday, July 24, quite possibly the day you're listening to this.

• 4:30:31Speaker 01

  So, on Monday, July 20, Trump took the most dramatic tariff action he has taken since the Supreme Court found he was illegally using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to apply tariffs in February. By the time you are listening to this, presumably, he is going to have unleashed a wrath, you know, I was originally going to say raft, but wrath actually works too, of new tariffs. But as of the time of recording, the one that has been revealed specifically is that he is imposing a 50% tariff on goods imported from Canada, or some goods imported from Canada. Now, I'm going to get into what that tariff is actually going to do in a second, but the important thing here is not the specific tariff itself, but the legal

• 4:31:16Speaker 01

  authority Trump is using to invoke it. He is invoking Section 338 of the so-called Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. If the name vaguely rings a bell, it's probably because Smoot-Hawley is best known for exacerbating the Great Depression to the extent that it is in basically every, like, every history textbook of the United States you will read in, in high school will have this in it. This act, Smoot-Hawley, is the final frontier for tariff authority. It is the tariff big red button. It is a power that has never been invoked before, even by its creators, and I genuinely don't know if it even still exists. This is the tariff Rubicon, and Trump has just crossed it.

• 4:32:00Speaker 01

  Now, before we get into this more, let's talk for a second about Trump's nominal 50% tariff on Canada, which is actually much less of a big deal than it looks. The tariffs are supposed to take effect on August 19 and has about a million carve-outs for, you know, different kinds of Canadian goods, including, for example, things like energy products, which is a huge amount of what we import from Canada. So, this is only going to apply to about 5.2% of Canadian trade with the US. I mean, obviously, that is still kind of a big deal for that 5% of trade, but, you know, there's a good chance that these tariffs aren't going to go into effect at all, and that this is sort of a piece of trade leverage for negotiations with Canada.

• 4:32:44Speaker 01

  These, you know, even if they did go into effect, aren't going to be the biggest deal. I'm also going to briefly mention that we finally got the long-awaited pharmaceutical import tariff. And when I say long-awaited, I have literally been waiting for these tariffs to be announced since the beginning of the administration, to the point where I literally stopped covering the announcements that they were coming, because they just never did. Apparently, they are also kind of a joke. They impose a 100% tariff on pharmaceutical imports, which would be a massive deal, except it starts in 2028. It eventually rises to 200% and like, okay, yeah, sure, Donald, whatever you say, that's not happening. None of the specifics of the tariffs matter at all, or matter much at all. What is significantly more important is Trump invoking

• 4:33:29Speaker 01

  338 of Smoot-Hawley. Now, the reason he's doing this is pretty clear. All of the other avenues he has to impose tariffs legally actually have restrictions attached to them. Section 122 tariffs, as we've mentioned, are only supposed to be when there's a balance of payments crisis, and you can only impose a flat rate. And once he imposes them, they have to be renewed by Congress, and that's just not happening. So those are expiring on Friday. We've talked about the Section 301 tariffs a few weeks ago. Those are the ones that nominally are about forced labor, but those also have limits and can only be imposed after a long and slow process of trade investigations. Now, obviously, the way that Trump has used both of them is illegal, but even trying to use them illegally,

• 4:34:14Speaker 01

  they have definite limits. Section 338 of Smoot-Hawley has basically no limits. And the one limit that's relevant for our purposes is a 50% maximum tariff rate. Otherwise, it lets the president impose tariffs on whatever country he wants for the extremely nebulous reasoning of that country having placed, quote, "the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared to the commerce of any foreign country." Trump can, you know, say any country is doing this for any reason. We are back to Calvinball nonsense. This nominal legal authority allows Trump to do whatever he wants trade-wise up to a 50% tariff. Now, again, it is widely expected that by the time you're reading this, we're already going to have seen

• 4:34:59Speaker 01

  more tariffs. I'm expecting something akin to a smaller-scale version of liberation tariffs. By the time you're listening, you will know more. Now, the reason I'm talking about Section 338 of Smoot-Hawley, and the reason I've described it as like the big red button of tariffs, like, it's the tariff Rubicon, is because not only has it never been used before, right? You know, the Section 122 has also never been used before, but this one specifically, Section 338, there is a real question as to whether it's even still in effect. Now, the argument you will most commonly see is that Section 338 has never formally been repealed and therefore is still on the books. This is a law that was passed in 1930. The Trump administration is making the argument that

• 4:35:44Speaker 01

  because it has never formally been repealed, it is still on the books. However, the problem is that there exists a thing called superseding statute, or a, quote, "implied repeal." This is the argument that I've seen, that this law is not still on the books. I've seen various versions of it. The one that is kind of spreading around now, for better or for worse, kind of for worse to some extent, is from Philip Zelikow, who is a Hoover Institute guy and a history professor who's writing in Reason magazine. So like, you know, these are not the people I would normally turn to in terms of getting legal analysis on everything, but I actually think there's A kind of a decent argument that they might be right.

• 4:36:26Speaker 01

  And their argument is that, okay, because of the way that, you know, laws can supersede other laws, right? If you write a second law that is about the same thing as the first law and it covers explicitly the same thing, it can repeal the first law. It's sketchy. The courts don't like it functioning like that, but it does technically work like that. And, you know, Zelikko argues that a whole train of statutes ranging from the Trade Expansion Act of 1916 to our old friend, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, cover exactly the same things and therefore have repealed the statute. I think that's actually plausible, and this is, you know, part of the reason why no one

• 4:37:09Speaker 01

  has ever actually tried to use this stuff, because there have been subsequent legislation to describe these exact powers and describe what you can do with them. So whether it even still exists is extremely dubious. Now, this is probably not going to survive a challenge in court, but until the legal challenge actually winds its way through the courts, Trump is going to be free to do his Calvin ball nonsense. And we're back to, you know, 2025 era Trump just declaring a tariff is happening in a country every morning. Now, on a broader level, right? What's happening here is that the way the Supreme Court has been doing shadow docket decisions have allowed Trump to simply keep breaking the law and seizing more illegal

• 4:37:54Speaker 01

  power and then using it until the Supreme Court gets around to taking that power away. Now, obviously, this is not true of everything he's been trying to do. With tariffs in particular, he's been extremely successful in simply applying the tariffs and then keeping them into effect until the legal challenges go through the courts. That looks like what's going to happen here, which is going to give him probably another, I mean, it's going to give him at least half a year, probably, of the ability to just do whatever bullshit tariff policy he wants, which means another year of completely unhinged economic instability for the entire global economy. It means another year of all, you know, of supply lines being degraded, of prices increasing, and of all of us getting absolutely stripped.

• 4:38:41Speaker 01

  Okay. Put a trans goal on your couch. We reported the news.

• 4:38:47Speaker 03

  We reported the news.

• 4:38:52Speaker 03

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the 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.

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  There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything.

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

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