It Could Happen Here Weekly 245

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. The Gen Z Protests that Shook India's Fascist Government GlobeCon: The New Liberals Take on DSA GlobeCon: Can Technocratic Neoliberalism Save Us? Um no wtf? How Ken Paxton Became the Most Corrupt Man in Texas Politics Executive Disorder: Flock Sabotage, Tariff Refunds for Corporations, Wisconsin Election You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! Sources/Links: The Gen Z Protests that Shook India's Fascist Government https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-human-toll-of-neet-11-reported-suicides-after-paper-leak-forced-retest-101781771406022.html https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readings/aoc_print_2004.pdf https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/surya-kant-parasite-remark-unemployment/article71041381.ece https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-do-indias-gen-z-protests-mean-for-modi https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3l9gp7go https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260806-india-youth-protests-highlight-mistrust-in-lapdog-media https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/26/come-back-my-son-indian-exam-leak-leaves-trail-of-death-despair-anger https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/27/india/india-cockroach-protests-what-next-intl-hnk https://frontline.thehindu.com/politics/cockroach-janta-party-gen-z-politics/article71065447.ece https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/indias-youth-protests-puncture-modis-063558309.html https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g43l251vyo https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68282270 GlobeCon: The New Liberals Take on DSA\ https://cnliberalism.org/posts/nlas-2026 https://nlas.cnliberalism.org/schedule https://www.politico.com/newsletters/massachusetts-playbook/2025/01/14/auchincloss-take-on-the-tiktok-case-00198039 https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-oddities-israel-massachusetts-11b4dc6e42afd2d68be28dedf86fd25a https://www.newtonbeacon.org/protesters-call-out-auchincloss-on-palantir-executive-donations/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/08/neoliberals-millenials-genz/ https://www.cjr.org/covering_the_election/center-new-liberalism-cnl-jeremiah-johnson.php https://cnliberalism.org/posts/press-release-greg-schultz-joins-center-for-new-liberalism-as-senior-advisorhttps://www.progressivepolicy.org/release-young-neoliberals-link-up-with-ppi/ https://cnliberalism.org/posts/new-website-newish-name https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/upshot/poll-democrats-times-siena.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/us/mamdani-nyc-voters-election-demographics.htmlhttps://dockish.com/analysis.html https://www.cnn.com/election/2025/exit-polls/new-york-city/general/mayor/0https://www.michaellange.nyc/p/the-mamdani-coalition-goes-national?r=e53xe&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true https://www.michaellange.nyc/p/the-mamdani-coalition-goes-national?r=e53xe&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=truehttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/us/politics/michigan-primary-election-results-what-next.htmlhttps://x.com/BayAreaNewLibs/status/2020215361573122556?s=20 GlobeCon: Can Technocratic Neoliberalism Save Us? Um no wtf? https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-new-liberal-podcast-30949602/episode/the-crisis-of-liberalism-338635572 https://cnliberalism.org/posts/nlas-2026 https://nlas.cnliberalism.org/schedule https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/30/bennet-loses-colorado-governor-primary-00983357?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/30/bennet-loses-colorado-governor-primary-00983357?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://cnliberalism.org/posts/press-release-greg-schultz-joins-center-for-new-liberalism-as-senior-advisorhttps://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.progressivepolicy.org/release-young-neoliberals-link-up-with-ppi/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/upshot/poll-democrats-times-siena.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/us/mamdani-nyc-voters-election-demographics.html Executive Disorder: Flock Sabotage, Tariff Refunds for Corporations, Wisconsin Election https://www.glo.texas.gov/about-glo/press-releases/dont-tread-texas-commissioner-buckingham-orders-federal-contractors-cease https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2026/07/us-nears-full-withdrawal-iraq-bases-kurdistan-region-face-attacks-iran-proxies?gift_code=PxC6sQpYfa47Ebi2ruPAcNozYz0https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war-troops-punish? Date=20260803&Profile=CNN&utm_content=1785734410&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/politics/us-military-iran-war-troops-punish? Date=20260803&Profile=CNN&utm_content=1785734410&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/politics/exclusive-splc-fraud-cfo-charges https://apnews.com/article/trump-press-secretary-leavitt-dc3753a957b05ef554bf277221d9cf46?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://apnews.com/article/trump-press-secretary-leavitt-dc3753a957b05ef554bf277221d9cf46?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/10/spacexs-earnings-show-elon-wiped-out-two-thirds-of-twitters-ad-business/ https://crimethinc.com/2026/08/12/the-border-is-an-open-wound-a-tree-sit-in-lochiel-arizona-halts-border-wall-constructionhttps://stateofsurveillance.org/news/axon-license-plate-reader-flock-replacement-surveillance-2026/ https://www.kwch.com/2022/11/04/kechi-police-lieutenants-arrest-puts-flock-technology-under-scrutiny/ https://azmirror.com/2019/07/08/arizona-police-agencies-gather-share-license-plate-data-but-few-ensure-rules-are-being-followed/ https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/aurora-police-detain-black-family-after-mistaking-their-vehicle-as-stolen https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs https://www.winonapost.com/news/crime/all-of-wpd-s-flock-cameras-stolen/article_9c61aa25-411b-4f2f-a5cd-ca02942f5f9f.html https://krocnews.com/stolen-flock-cameras-winona-mn/ https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html https://www.military.com/air-force-engineer-accused-of-cutting-down-13-police-cameras-says-they-are-unconstitutional https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/justice/2025/12/16/timeline-the-brief-troubled-history-of-flock-cameras-in-eugene-springfield/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-startup-flock-thinks-it-can-eliminate-all-crime-in-america/ https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-cameras-destroyed-nationwide-ice-backlash-2026/ https://ngscinc.com/history-license-plate-recognition https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/automatic-license-plate-readers-legal-status-and-policy-recommendations https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/patrol-cars-poles-alpr/ https://www.thedailytimes.com/news/state-house-hopeful-arrested-in-flock-fiasco/article_2bb9aca2-5ede-4f42-9329-a8754aad7350.html https://www.facebook.com/MontereyCountySheriffsOffice/posts/pfbid0YWZxSJqZSBJu2BDQiQQnWUqzNiYEoHxQEgF88NBRjRXfDwQxMtqfNyHoiry5m3Mel https://www.wlky.com/article/attorney-lmpd-flock-camera-scandal/69895783 https://www.alxnow.com/2026/07/14/alexandria-man-arrested-for-allegedly-destroying-multiple-license-plate-readers/ https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/flock-camera-sawed-old-braeswood-22370015.php https://nypost.com/2026/08/02/us-news/flock-safety-cameras-vandalized-on-long-island-after-accusations-cop-tracked-lover/ https://nypost.com/2026/07/29/us-news/flock-cameras-vandalized-in-monterey-county/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2026/08/04/down-with-the-flock-florida-man-uses-simple-trick-to-combat-flock-cameras/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/crime/2026/08/03/police-flock-safety-surveillance-cameras-getting-pushback-florida/90915780007/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.226137/gov.uscourts.mnd.226137.42.0.pdf https://www.highereddive.com/news/court-blocks-in-state-tuition-for-undocumented-students-in-illinois/826417/ https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-files-complaints-against-new-york-connecticut-and-vermont-challenging https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rb28dkl0zanl3idfd6gk7/2026-35259.pdf?rlkey=n7tj1ii329fwx5syadydk0ve4&st=5dt4p4uf&e=1&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rb28dkl0zanl3idfd6gk7/2026-35259.pdf?rlkey=n7tj1ii329fwx5syadydk0ve4&st=5dt4p4uf&e=1&dl=0 https://www.cga.ct.gov/2015/fc/2015HB-06844-R000875-FC.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixi9_cciy8w&t=43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixi9_cciy8w&t=43s https://apnews.com/article/vaccine-research-autism-trump-kennedy-rfk-d10f81f221c4ae9f5b2f83dd0ee98b29https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/delivering-gold-standard-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-for-americans/https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10/health/executive-order-vaccines-what-it-means https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrchttps://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tariff-refunds-split-companies-as-consumers-demand-share-of-166b/ar-AA29jzkB https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/us-sent-back-334-billion-in-tariff-refunds-in-july-as-total-payouts-surpass-100-billion-190357854.html https://x.com/FrancescaHongWI/status/2087228416101699813?s=20 https://www.instagram.com/p/DbrKW3GAQjG/?img_index=3 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-primary-elections/wisconsin-governor-results https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/us/politics/wisconsin-democratic-primary-governor-polling.htmlhttps://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/08/11/wisconsin-minnesota-south-carolina-connecticut-elections/wisconsin-election-tv-ads-01035024 https://program.dsausa.org/ https://archive.is/FVnx0#selection-1275.0-1281.109 https://aviationsourcenews.com/air-farce-one-the-exorbitant-cost-of-refitting-a-qatari-boeing-747-8/ 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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• 0:32Speaker 02

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• 1:15Speaker 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.

• 1:30Speaker 04

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

• 1:35Speaker 03

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

• 1:53Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

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

• 2:03Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 2:04Robert Evans?

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

• 2:09Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 2:09Robert Evans?

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

• 2:13Speaker 01

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

• 2:17Speaker 05

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

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:26Speaker 07

  Call Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Welcome to A Could Happen Here, a podcast where sometimes the here is the world's largest democracy. And that I think, I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it. This is in fact, India, a very basic fact about democracies around the world.

• 3:07Speaker 07

  I mean, if you're calling either the US or India, the world's largest democracy, you gotta put an asterisk or a couple of them in there. Either way.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  We'll get to that in a second.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  So.

• 3:19Speaker 07

  Land of asterisks. Age of asterisks.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, with me to talk about the age of asterisks and maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans.

• 3:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, asterisk on that too. Why not?

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Oh, boy, and I'm Mia Long, I guess asterisk there too.

• 3:35Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I don't know. I got nothing. I got nothing.

• 3:38Speaker 07

  Well, what are we talking about today, Mia?

• 3:40Speaker 04

  We are talking about the fact that a couple of weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that is unprecedented in the 12 year reign of Indian Prime Minister and enemy of the show, the Butcher of Gujarat himself, one Prime Minister Modi.

• 3:57Speaker 07

  Narendra Modi, thank you very much.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Yep, hate him, Jesus Christ.

• 4:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  The entire time he has been in power, no one has successfully been able to manage to force him to make a cabinet member resign.

• 4:10Speaker 07

  No.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  And protesters just did this.

• 4:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is the first, it's not the first, because there was the most recent set of elections didn't go great for him, but this is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen since the Modi regime kind of clanked into place.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and to understand sort of what that means, we need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisk, that's a democracy. I'm both this in the US.

• 4:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Which is that, so Modi's ruling party is the BJP and I would classify the BJP as the world's largest fascist party. It has a horrifying 140 million members.

• 4:50Speaker 07

  Jesus H. Christ.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, not good, very bad.

• 4:54Speaker 07

  Boy, yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's also like not the only ultra right wing Hindu nationalist party in India. There are also others, so.

• 5:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  Great, great things happening here.

• 5:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims and other non Hindu groups and chunks of India over the Modi years.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they've been in power like effectively uncontested. I mean, they didn't do great in last elections, but they held on to power and they've been in power for 12 years now during which they have both transformed Indian politics and also just continued to get more and more right wing.

• 5:26Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  There's something I think is worth mentioning with the BJP, which is that it's not like most political parties, even fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political party that like developed a paramilitary, right? The BJP was developed as the political wing of, you know, a very, very far right, anti Muslim, like Hindu nationalist, parabilitary group called the RSS, which was responsible for a whole bunch of absolutely hideous crimes, even before the BJP took power or even existed. So again, like this is a ruling party that is like the political wing of a paramilitary, not the other way around, and it's been running India for 12 years.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  And as Robert sort of mentioned before, the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've also faced large scale protest movements before, most notably sort of the farmers protests in 2020 and then 2024, which were about attempts to implement right wing market reforms to India's like agricultural markets. But they've successfully been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to dismiss government ministers in the face of protests until now. So what has actually been happening?

• 6:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  So these protests have been rallying under the banner of, I guess, kind of a meme organization or meme.

• 6:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, it started as a, as a joke, right?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's called the Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after these comments that were made by India's Chief Justice of like the Indian Supreme Court.

• 6:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Calling young unemployed people, quote, parasites and cockroaches.

• 7:03Speaker 07

  It's a little bit of a reversal of like the Hillary Clinton deplorables comment, where this, this person in politics uses a derogatory nickname to refer to a group of people he's opposed to, and they kind of take it on as a badge of honor.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and because it's fascist, right?

• 7:16Speaker 07

  Right, it's also, yeah, fascist.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  The Chief Justice Supreme Court is calling them cockroaches. Jesus Christ.

• 7:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  This party is like, obviously a joke. It's like CJP, like cockroach instead of BJP, et cetera, et cetera. The, the main focus of these protests are a series of scandals in India's education system. And it feels kind of redundant to say like, oh yeah, like what kind of education you get has a huge amount of, you know, sort of determinants in like what your life turns out to be and what your economic conditions turns out to be in a sort of more intense version of like the way that American standardized testing works. But there are a bunch of these standardized tests that you take that can determine a whole bunch about what your future was going to be. And I think mostly, there have been a couple of big scandals recently,

• 8:06Speaker 04

  but the most famous one is called the NEET scandal. A NEET and E E T is, is basically, it's, it's India's like pre-med exam, basically.

• 8:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's this huge exam that everyone who wants to go into pre-med has to take and get a certain grade on, as I understand it, basically.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 07

  So it's one of these, especially for kids who like, aren't rich. It's like a massive barrier that you have to get past if you want to like have a better life, basically.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. And these tests, and specifically the NEET in particular, I mean, this is just the one, if you want to become a doctor, but like, you know, there's a huge number of people taking these tests. I'm going to quote from Al Jazeera, nearly 2.3 million test takers across India and at examination centers in Doha, Dubai.

• 8:49Speaker 07

  Singapore at Camp Mandu appeared for the neat this year on May 3rd battling out for less than 130,000 spots in medical colleges. So a very small percentage of the of these of these 2.3 million people who are taking this test can even possibly get a score good enough to get them into a very small number of spots in these medical colleges. And then it turns out for this year's test that the answers to the test had been leaked ahead of time and were being like sold on a telegram channels. Oh, yeah. And this turns into a massive scandal and the government forces the students to take the test again. And this is a complete disaster. 11 students died by suicide as a result of it.

• 9:34Speaker 07

  Good God. It's really bad. Cause it's like a mix of everything you've heard about, particularly in Southeast Asia. You've got a lot of like pressure as a kid to do well in exams like this because there's not both for cultural reasons and because there's not other ways legally to like get those jobs if your family's not rich. And also the people whose families are rich like often can pay to get the answers ahead of time, which is what the leak of this shows, right? Like the fact that it leaks out is because people's rich kids are getting these. Yeah, well, and also like if you're rich enough, you can send your kid to like a private college, right? Right, that's that too. You know, but if you're, if you're a working class kid, it's you cannot afford one of these, one of these private universities. Yeah. And so your only way in is through these tests. Exactly.

• 10:17Speaker 07

  And these tests are also, you know, they're like, they're like a huge sort of extraction engine inside of the Indian economy where like, you know, one of the things that Al Jazeera talks about is the story of this 21 year old kid who is one of the people who died by suicide, who in order to get through these tests, you have to go through these like massive, extremely expensive coaching centers effectively in order to study enough for it. And these things are, these things are really expensive to the point where this kid's family like sold their ancestral lands in order to be able to pay for test coaching. So this kid could become a doctor and she had passed the test after like not getting high enough scores like the previous two times, and then he had to take it again.

• 11:02Speaker 07

  And there's, there's stories like this all over India and it's just a nightmare. Yeah, so much of this too shouldn't be separated from the broader issues Jinzy and Jin's Alpha are having all over the world, right? Yeah. Like this is part of that, like this is we are fucked. We have no way of making it in the economy you've left us. And one of the tiny slim slippers of a way to get ahead is just a scam too. Yeah. I get it. They should be pissed. Yeah, and like it's, it's particularly intense in India because there was a story recently that CNN was talking about where there's a study that showed that there's a 40% unemployment rate for graduates under the age of 25. Good God. That is nightmarish.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  That's end of civilization kind of shit. Like, yeah, any sane government would be worried about a revolution in these conditions. Those are the kind of unemployment levels that got you the Arab Spring, right? Like, yep, that's, that's how this stuff happens. And Facebook. Yeah. And Twitter, I guess. Yeah, well, yeah, Facebook playing both sides on that one. Russia, Iran, yeah, a variety of foreign intelligence agencies from all over the world, a lot of things like, yeah, a lot of things. Yeah, and speaking of things that have a lot of problems, the education system as well, like there's other issues with it, right? The BJP, again, they've been in power for 12 years. So they've installed a bunch of RSS guys like in the Department of Education.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  And so you get this curriculum that is something that I think is very familiar to Americans, where you're just getting all of this right wing nationalist bullshit, just like attempting to be pumped into the education system. They're doing that too. Yeah. And conditions over this are bad enough that, yeah, people take to the streets. Yeah, as they should and did, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, like a lot of the stuff reading this, it was like, oh, I've like, I've like been in this protest, like, so, so originally these, originally the protests are not that large in scale, but there's, there's a big march on like July 20th. That's, you know, like a march at the parliament and there's a giant police attack on it. That's an attempt to crush the movement entirely and it doesn't work.

• 13:16Speaker 07

  It does exactly the opposite. It has, you know, a very, very familiar pattern of a bunch of people watch like a bunch of like actual literal children who are protesting, like the answers to the test got sold to a bunch of rich kids, then they get the shit beaten out of them. This suddenly like accelerates the protest massively and massively increases the number of people who are in the streets. And, you know, this eventually does the unthinkable, which is force the government to make the Minister of Education resign. And they're also able to get some reforms. The Modi government in theory says it's going to address like some of the kind of like bureaucratic things around why it's so easy to get these questions.

• 14:00Speaker 07

  They also promised not to arrest any of the protesters, a thing that is never true. They, they're every single time you are promised this, they are always lying. Oh, yeah, yeah. But is also the thing that a government does when it is scared. Yeah, it's a sign that they know they can't start talking about cracking heads from the jump. Yeah, yeah. And I think we're going to get a bit into more of the reason why the government was so alarmed about this later, but one, one of the things where I think this probably unfortunately was good strategic timing by the government is that these were, these protests were sort of like crystallizing into these more general like anti Modi protests. And by sort of heading it off at the past year over an issue where like in theory, the BJP also wants the tests to work normally, although obviously this does beg the question

• 14:45Speaker 07

  like, okay, so if, if, if it's government officials who are selling the answers to the tests, like who is running the government? Yeah. Which is, you know, another part of this. And another thing that is a part of this is these products and services, Robert. Oh God, I love a good product and a good service.

• 15:17Speaker 07

  We're back, we're filled with the bounty of products and services and we're ready to hear more about the cockroach Janta. Yeah, so again, kind of very familiar to a lot of protests that we have seen over our lives. These are very, very social media driven protests in a way that's also similar to a lot of the protests that have been happening in, actually particularly in neighboring regions, protesting like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, if, if, if you watch any of like the Instagram reels or whatever from these, God, I don't know, it's, it's so just depressingly familiar in a lot of ways where it's, it's very funny reading people talking about this because they're like, ah, it's

• 16:01Speaker 07

  these like irony meme driven, you know, like kids making these like irony meme driven things about like getting the shit beaten out of them by riot police and like, you know, it's like people doing fit checks and then like getting like beaten with batons. And it's like, oh yeah, okay. We've all been there. Yeah. I've been having a very like, I'm feeling old moment just watching these because it's like, oh God, I remember these from like 2013 when we were doing the same shit and. Well, that's one of the tough things too, as you get older is both, you know, and this is less the case when we're talking about a foreign movement because I don't think I have any ability to influence that. When you're talking to like younger activists, it's a mix of wanting to like let them know about the pitfalls and problems that previous generations have encountered when you see

• 16:46Speaker 07

  them, you know, kind of heading in that same direction and also not wanting to be like, well, just because I'm burnt out, doesn't mean you should be. Doesn't mean I should, yeah, like you shouldn't be excited about this thing just because I can't get excited anymore. Yeah, and it's like, you know, and that's always the thing with these kind of protests. It's like, sometimes you win. Yeah, and sometimes you win. And there's, there's never, oh God, David Graeber had this quote, I, I forget who. Yes, I know the one you're talking about where he's, he's talking about like the dealing with like the surprise of victory. Oh, I was, I was actually going to do a different one. Oh, okay. But that one's also good, but um, he had this quote with a revolutionary in Egypt, like from, from the 2011 like uprising there. And, you know, she had this quote where it was like, you do these protests all the

• 17:31Speaker 07

  time and sometimes 30 people show up and you're depressed and sometimes 100 people show up and you know, you're really happy. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of forgot that could happen. Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 07

  And that's kind of what this is, right? Where it's like. Yeah, that's, that's exactly how it goes, right? It starts as like a bit from a dude who's not even in India at the time, right? He's at a school in the US and he, but he, and so he just makes this kind of meme page and it takes off. Yeah, and then suddenly, you know, you actually have, and part of this is also like weird stuff about how algorithms work, but like part of what's been happening here too, is that there's been a huge shift in the regime in India's ability to control social media, which is something they've been very, very good at up until this point. They've been really good at controlling both sort of online discourse and also have taken almost complete control over just the regular mainstream media. And these protests and like the way that people are just sort of casually being like,

• 18:28Speaker 07

  hey, fit check, going out to a protest and like the way that the stuff spread algorithmically and the way that, you know, you have people going out for protest stuff, but that also mixes with just, you know, people who are going out just to film it for like their Instagram reels and it, but all of them, all of them end up like in the streets. And you get the situation where like the mainstream media is just like absolutely refuses to talk about the protest whatsoever. But then, you know, if you're like on Instagram, you're on any social media site, it's the only thing you're seeing. And this kind of weakens the control that the BJP has been able to maintain over all of these spaces. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that like they've, you know, lost control completely, you know, the BJP is like kind of in their counter attack phase right now.

• 19:13Speaker 07

  And you get a really bleak look at how like right wing governments with longstanding sort of right wing online bases and media bases work where. Yeah. They do these like harassment campaigns against women who went out protesting. They sure do. Yeah, it's, it's like, it's all the stuff that you're familiar with, right? Like they'll show clips of people like on news channels and then people will like dox them and like start stalking them and they get threats and. Yeah, I've heard people.

• 19:39Robert Evans?

  Had to like hide and stuff.

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  Especially like female activists while they were during the protests. Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it's also, you know, it's like, it's like large scale threats of sexual violence are

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 19:50Speaker 07

  A very common part of this. And that's

• 19:52Robert Evans?

  God, yes.

• 19:52Speaker 07

  You know, that's like how these people are able to maintain power. But even as this sort of visual counterattack is happening, and it's extremely brutal, and it's really a mess. The control of the mainstream media is also slipping. One of the things I learned like reading about this is there's a term that I guess generally kind of like opposition people are using with the protesters also use where they call, they call the like the mainstream press like Modi media. Which is like, it's like lap in Hindi. So it's, it's basically like calling them like lapdog media instead of being watchdogs. Which I love. I don't know. I liked it a lot.

• 20:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I do too. That's great.

• 20:30Speaker 07

  It's like, it's good. I don't know. I, I, I don't, I don't know exactly how to steal that for us, but I love it. It's great.

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We should be thinking about that.

• 20:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, but part of the problem with, with having, you know, this kind of like incredible degree of like media centralization. That, that the regime has been able to pull together is that you know, a- after being in power for so long, having their narrative be like completely hegemonic for so long. They're, they're running into like the cracks. You know, these sort of cracks forming in their nationalist messaging because like they're running into the fundamental problem that you can't eat national pride. And so if, if literally the entire media all the time is trying to ignore that these protests are happening and then also was telling you that your country is great and like Modi is great. And you're such a world, great world leader.

• 21:22Speaker 07

  But then, you know, you can't feed your family. That, that's an actual problem.

• 21:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 21:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. And like, and like normally the way that nationalists would sort of deal with this is to be like, yeah, you're, you don't have jobs and your economy sucks because of like some either immigrant group. Or in this case, it would sort of like BJP probably be doing this with Muslims. But they've been in power for so long that it's like kind of hard to do that because it's like, this is your country now, right? Like you have taken control of it. And yet.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  And this kind of feeds into this, you know, question at a broader level about what these protests are actually about. Because on a very basic level, they're about education reform and they're about these tests and they're about the education system as a whole. But on a broader level, it's more complicated because these protests, as you know, protests often do. Function as a sort of aggregator of different kinds of struggle with, you know, different beliefs and motivations. You get a whole bunch of different kinds of people in the street. I, I want to read this quote from an interview Frontline India did with the guy who was the founder of the CJP, which is to say, just like the guy who made the meme that went viral.

• 22:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. That is how he got the job, so to speak. And he's, he's done a really good job, by the way. Like, I think he's been really responsible.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:39Robert Evans?

  He could not have anticipated this happening, but he's, he seems to be really dedicated to the cause.

• 22:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I, I want to quote him here, talking about what the ideology of this party, if it existed, would be. "The ideology of the CJP and many of our young people are also very progressive, liberal, secular, will be secular, democratic and socialist, and we strive for social justice." And he also mentions three people that he's, you know, he's, he's inspired by. And two of them, I think are kind of not particularly surprising, given this kind of like, this is kind of what like secular, progressive, democratic-y politics look like, which is, he mentions Gandhi and Nehru. But what's interesting and what I haven't seen literally at all in any other coverage of this protest is that the third person that he mentions is Ambedkar. Which

• 23:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 07

  I assume you having been there and spent a decent amount of time in India, I'm assuming you know who Ambedkar is?

• 23:36Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, I don't. No.

• 23:37Speaker 07

  You don't? Interesting. Okay.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  Not in a meaningful way. No.

• 23:40Speaker 07

  This is actually kind of a good proxy. I assume people listening to the show know who Gandhi is. You've probably at least heard of Nehru.

• 23:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 07

  Who was the first Prime Minister of India.

• 23:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 07

  Ambedkar is a lot less well known. He's another one of the very important sort of independence era figures in India, but he is the guy around which like the anti caste movement rallies.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  Was it, was he in the 50s or 60s?

• 24:02Speaker 07

  No, he like first starts this in like the, like the 20s and 30s and then he's alive through independence.

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay. Really? That era? Yeah. Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. He's, he's around like in, in the era of like revolutionary struggle against the British.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  Pre-deindependence. Yeah. Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. And then he, you know, he like survives through independence and gets to see some of that.

• 24:19Robert Evans?

  The partition of India and all that good stuff. Yeah. All the fun things happen.

• 24:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. And, and this is a period, you know, if you look at like the 1910s, 20s, 30s, this is a period both about the anti-colonial struggle and then also like what the struggle is going to be, right? Like whose, whose vision of India is going to come out of a post-independence world, if there is one. And Ambedkar's thing here is, yes, like we want, like we want independence and we want socialism because, you know, a lot of the people, like Nehru is technically is like a kind of socialist, right? Like a lot of, a lot of the independence activists are. But he's also in a position of, we need to get rid of the caste system. Because he sees it as like correctly, as like an incredibly powerful sort of force of oppression in Indian society.

• 25:04Speaker 07

  And he thinks that that's not something that they should like wait until independence to deal with. And so he's a very, very important like leader in the anti caste movement. He's probably, I think he's probably just like their best known intellectual. I, I would really recommend reading his book, The Annihilation of caste. Well, I say book, it's like not that, it's not that long.

• 25:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 07

  Like it's probably like my favorite thing I've read and from the writers of that era. It's an address that he's making basically to both. I guess you'd call it like more conservative, pro-independence activists, and then also to the socialists. To be like, hey, you should also talk about caste at the same time you're talking about British oppression and also class.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  The CJP founder like mentions this because he's from a low caste background. And he goes like, yeah, like, no, like I, I wouldn't have been able to go to school in the United States and like have the successes that I've had in my life without Ambedkar. I thought this was really interesting because it's not mentioned in any other reporting. Even though it's, it's like in an interview, he's said. And also I think this is a, a dynamic here that is like not well understood in most places that like this is a still operative system of oppression. That people are still fighting against. And that is, you know, relevant enough to be like one of the things that gets mentioned by the guy who starts this movement. And that's not to say the rest of the movement like necessarily is exactly this focused on it.

• 26:38Speaker 07

  Which is one of the parts of this movement that's both why it succeeded and also one of the kind of messy parts of it, right? Is that on the one hand, this has become a really powerful vehicle for these sort of like broadly secular, like pro-democracy, like anti Modi, anti dictatorship students. And there's always been like a fairly large like cohort of, you know, sort of like young left-leaning or leftist students. I mean, there, there was a whole, I don't know what you'd call it, like social panic slash government purge. Against this idea of like quote unquote urban naxals. Which is supposed to be like, oh, there's like these like urban versions of like the naxal like communist guerrillas that are in the universities, which is, you know, in a lot of ways very similar to, but a significantly more advanced and repressive version of

• 27:23Speaker 07

  the stuff that like you see the Trump administration doing in the US education system and the sort of like witch hunts over, you know, Palestine and stuff like that. So, you know, you, you have that group of sort of like center-left and leftist students who were a lot of the people who started the protest movement. But also there's also just like BJP kids.

• 27:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 07

  Who are in the streets because they're like, yeah, like we all got fucked in our tests.

• 27:46Robert Evans?

  Because it's bullshit.

• 27:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, it's the same reason how you've got a decent chunk, at least like a third of the 20 or something percent of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 are more people who'd voted for Biden or for Hillary a few years earlier, right? They're people who maybe they went for this guy, but as soon as it stops working for them, as soon as like the fascism isn't delivering what it promises, they'll get pissed. They'll get, wind up in the streets.

• 28:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 28:12Robert Evans?

  You don't have to like them to recognize that as a phenomenon.

• 28:13Speaker 07

  Phenomenon. Yep. Yeah. There, there's a kind of like third phenomenon too, which is as these protests go on, you get more and more of different kinds of like both rural and urban workers, right? More urban workers and rural workers, but this, but this is, you know, the thing about education protests at their core is that this is something that cuts across like rural urban divides to an extent in the sense that like both poor rural kids and poor urban kids are still getting fucked by this, you know, by, by the exam system. But then, you know, you get workers starting to join it who also have these, I, I think, I don't know. The, the, the way that commentators talk about it is that they're unconnected.

• 28:56Speaker 07

  I think they're a lot more connected than that. But, you know, you get, you get, you, you get these workers with these like cost of living crisis concerns who, who are also joining this protest. And I guess part of this is a girl who spent a lot of time studying and writing about Tiananmen. But thi- this is kind of the exact class composition of Tiananmen and how those protests unfolded, where you have its origins in like this, in this specific student movement thing that has kind of specific student movement grievances that then, you know, goes into the streets around their specific demands, and then everyone watches them get the shit beaten out of them. Yeah. And that brings more and more people into the streets who have their own kind of specific demands around like the economic conditions they're in.

• 29:41Speaker 07

  And this is a very common like composition for, for revolts. I mean, it's, it's the basis of everything from like, I mean, God, like it's, it's part of the basis of the French Revolution. You can look at like May 68. Yeah. Like, you know, some of the revolts against Pinochet, like, I mean Occupy is like a lot to a large extent, like this class base, right? If you have a bunch of students who are very concerned about debt, and then that brings in a bunch more working class people who are like not students anymore. But that's also what makes it dangerous. It, it's a very old kind of alliance and it's a kind of alliance that can always materialize because students and poor workers are some of the first people to feel when the economic ties are shifting.

• 30:25Speaker 07

  And that like constantly creates these kinds of uprisings, right? And, you know, they're, they're dangerous enough that if you look at the last 30 years of Chinese politics, a whole bunch of, of the politics of modern China are about specifically making sure that this exact coalition doesn't form again. So, you know, when the old working class is sort of crushed with the, like, remains of the welfare state in the 90s, like there, there's a very deliberate attempt to buy off the students at the same time to make sure they never make common cause. And like anytime you've seen sort of student worker actions since then, there's this massive crackdown on it because the Chinese government understands that this is, this is a very, very dangerous political coalition.

• 31:05Speaker 07

  And it's a political coalition that has outlasted, I mean, literally like a lot of the like working classes that were originally in these uprisings, like the, the French revolutionary like artisan class, like that doesn't exist anymore, right? Like the industrial working class in like France or like Italy in, in the 60s, like that also doesn't exist anymore. But you still see this like specific configuration of classes doing, doing these protest movements. Yeah. There's obviously always a lot of different motivations and conflict against the state tends to be the thing that can like solidify a kind of identity that allows you to do any kind of mass movement, right? Like, this is like one of the few things that can, you know, fighting the police and having, having the state

• 31:50Speaker 07

  repress you and then having the state as, as a force you can fight against concretely that just appears when you oppose it, like is, is one of the things that like makes these kind of protest movements work. And then also underneath that, the economy is broken in a lot of the ways you saw, like in like 2018 and 2019, which is like, I think the last big cycle of these mass protests where you have this economic instability. Right. And what I think is particularly similar between now and like 2018 was that technically speaking, if, if you look at the economy in India right now, as long as you ignore the youth unemployment rate, it looks like the economy is growing. Things are good. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the same thing as the US where it's like, well, I mean, the economic indicators have been getting

• 32:33Speaker 07

  worse, but like, you know, technically speaking, it looks like the US economy is growing. But if you're living under it, it's like, no, it's not. And there's all of these sort of cracks and ripples in the global economy. And 2018 was like this, where like the American economy was like doing fine and a lot of like the major economies were in theory doing fine, but then, you know, there was a series of currency like crises and like they were like these economic collapses. Yeah, there's like this hyperinflation in Turkey, you get these things in like Chile. And then, you know, you start seeing these protests, you get like Haiti, you get the yellow vests, you see like Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq, God, like Iran, for the first time of this giant cycle of protests in Iran. Myanmar, like even like Russia briefly goes up.

• 33:19Speaker 07

  And I'm bringing this up to say that like, one of the things about a protest like this, right? And there's been several other ones, there were very big protests in Indonesia, uh, over the last couple of months. These protests often A recur and B are in some ways an early warning signal before like there's going to be another giant round of these kinds of protests. Yeah. I mean, hopefully, right? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a decent chance of it because like, you know, the economy still hasn't like hit rock bottom yet. No. In the way that like, you know, you saw that in 2020 where like, yeah, the, the bottom finally fell out of the economy with COVID.

• 34:01Speaker 07

  Furthermore, maybe this is putting it a little bit too strongly, but like the people who do not like the regime, particularly the activists have like tasted a little blood now. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's really hard once people win, once a movement wins for it to not try to keep winning, right? That's kind of the natural instinct. Yeah. And, and, and the BJP is, is, you know, obviously doing its best to do, to suppress this. Yeah, to suppress or co-opt. Yeah. Yeah. But the, the problem that they're facing is, is the fundamental problem of all of the regimes everywhere, which is that like, it, it's a lot harder to maintain one of these kinds of regimes when you have been in power for a long time and suddenly the economy implodes.

• 34:42Speaker 07

  And that's coming for India, the same way that's coming for the rest of the world and also in very specific ways of like, you know, and we've talked about, I've talked about on this show elsewhere, the, the effects of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been devastating in India in a way that it hasn't been in the US. Yep. And, you know, you also have like heat waves that are also, you know, both economically and just like living devastating. There was an expression in the Hong Kong protests that they were drawing from a Mao quote, but also it's way older than Mao as like Mao says in the thing where he says it, but the Hong Kongers had this line that like a single spark can start a prairie fire. Yeah. And the thing about the Indian economy is that it is throwing sparks off everywhere. Sure.

• 35:27Speaker 07

  And that doesn't mean that every individual spark is going to be the one that starts the fire. But it means that as, as you continue to get more and more sparks, the odds that you see another one of these revolts increases. And hopefully the odds that one of these protests and one of these movements can finally knock off the fascists and yeah, fundamentally transform Indian society rises. Yep. Or at least get Modi out. Yeah, just at, at a bare minimum. You know, I'll, I'll take the minimum if that's what it is. Uh, God. Okay. Well, thank you, Mia, and uh, thank you, the cockroach Janta over in India. Good work. Hell, yeah. Y'all, that, that is actually really nice to see. Fucking rocks. Give them hell. Proud of you.

• 36:20Speaker 02

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• 37:45Speaker 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.

• 38:02Speaker 05

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

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

• 38:11Speaker 05

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

• 38:17Speaker 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.

• 38:36Speaker 04

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• 38:48Speaker 03

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

• 38:55Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

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

• 39:07Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 39:08Robert Evans?

  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.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 39:15Robert Evans?

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

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 39:25Robert Evans?

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 01

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

• 39:39Robert Evans?

  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.

• 39:49Speaker 05

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

• 39:53Speaker 01

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. The past few weeks, I've been covering the midterm primaries and the battle between the left and the establishment for the future of the Democratic Party. As evidence, just this month, in Michigan and Wisconsin, left populism continues to be on the rise. A few weekends ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois. I did not attend the Socialist Summit because instead, I wanted to check in on the other side of the aisle.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  So, last month, I went down to Washington, DC to attend the New Liberal Action Summit, or as it's affectionately referred to by attendees, GlobeCon, named after the blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter, symbolizing globalism, free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration, and Yimbi-ism. The New Liberal Action Summit was a three-day event with one main conference day, filled with panels featuring policymakers, fireside chats with liberal politicians, and networking opportunities for young liberals who share a passion for center-left policies. I went to eight of the 14 panels.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  One of the first panels was on energy policy, featuring two former politicians turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Byer spoke about the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors discussed why, quote-unquote, "slapulous" tax proposals are stupid. Representative Richie Torres promoted abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting back against DSA. And I listened in to a live recording of Francis Fukuyama's podcast. "Abundance" was probably one of the most frequently used words at the conference.

• 42:04Speaker 07

  There was a big focus on building housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti-tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly, most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zora Mamdani's reign thus far, but still very oppositional to stuff like wealth taxes, the rent freeze, populism in general, DSA as an organization, and their other candidates. About 300 libs attended the summit last July. They mostly ranged between their early twenties to late thirties.

• 42:47Speaker 07

  These are econ, poli sci, and law students, young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks, and aspiring policy wonks. Just as the use of the blue globe emoji online was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the red rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind it is a response from young-ish liberals to rising populism in the United States, and especially the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party. The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an organization called the Center for New

• 43:31Speaker 07

  Liberalism, or CNL. CNL is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) quote, "digital-first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age it is most under attack," according to their website. At the summit, they were giving out CNL stickers, which they sell on their website for $5. One of the stickers reads, quote, "We believe in economic growth through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment, immediate criminal justice reform, a tech-optimist society, attacks

• 44:13Speaker 07

  on carbon, freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion, or sexual orientation, pragmatism over populism." CNliberalism.org/join. The Center for New Liberalism claims to have about 11,000 members and 50 local chapters in cities across the US, though, according to their website, CNL's private Slack channel has just about 700 dues-paying members of the organization. In contrast, DSA is about 120,000 dues-paying members. During the summit, I spoke with CNL's Deputy Director Tobin Stone, and he told me that

• 44:57Speaker 07

  the Center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as a counterweight to the DSA. Stone said that the populist right has their own little organizations, like TPUSA, the populist left has the DSA, and the Center for New Liberalism wants to be both a political organizational force, as well as a social body for young, center-left liberals who believe in, quote-unquote, "lowercase l-liberalism" to meet with each other, organize, and advance their ideas. Stone did admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular, and voters are expressing all these things around

• 45:39Speaker 07

  affordability, but moderate Dems have failed to seize this moment. There is a big window open for Democrats, and really, the only people taking it are the DSA.

• 45:50Robert Evans?

  What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no, we can be center-left moderate, whatever you want to call us, but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying. Because none of these, a lot of these current moderates, like, in some ways, we'd rather have them than a DSA person, but at the same time, like, the moderates can't just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to, like, be willing to take on the fights, like, fight the NIMBYs and build more housing, because young people can't afford housing anymore. So that's what we're trying to do, is like, be a counterweight and offer a real alternative.

• 46:21Speaker 07

  About two years ago, CNL Deputy Director Tobin Stone told the Columbia Journalism Review, quote, "We're Hillary Clinton Democrats, basically." Now, that was two years ago, but last month, I asked Stone, what kind of politicians does CNL want to see taking power?

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  Say federally, like, you see people like Jake Ockingloss. I think when people hear him talk, it resonates, like, he's incredibly smart, and he knows how to talk to people about the issues that they're mad about.

• 46:50Speaker 07

  Jake Ockingloss headlined CNL's opening reception on the first day of the summit. Ockingloss is a congressional rep from Massachusetts and a former Marine. After Zora Mamdani won the Democratic primary last June, Ockingloss wrote a blog post on Substack, reading, "Neither democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom. I propose a 10-word agenda for financial freedom for the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt, and save Social Security," unquote. Earlier this year, his reelection campaign accepted over $25,000 from Palantir, including

• 47:32Speaker 07

  $7,000 from Palantir's CEO, Alexander Karp. In January 2023, Ockingloss was the first congressman to read an entirely ChatGPT-generated speech on the House floor. This speech was in support of a bill to create a joint US-Israel AI center for the development of AI research. And last year, Ockingloss told Politico that it's, quote-unquote, "readily apparent" that TikTok's algorithm is, quote, "amplifying anti-American, anti-Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency."

• 48:13Speaker 07

  Stone told me, quote, "We need more people like Jake Ockingloss, and not all of the electives in this room, but like, a lot of the folks here." But also, what we're trying to do, and eventually want to do, is like, have our chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates," unquote. Stone also pointed to State Rep Jasper Martis, who became friendly with CNN through the organization's anti-tariff advocacy. We want to see what we can do as an organization to help elevate voices like him, who can be young, charismatic, and without offering an agenda that we think would do more harm than good. Do you see a point where you will not

• 48:57Speaker 07

  just have to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA is offering, but like, but in primaries, like specifically kind of like, like, like counter them like directly? Yes, that is like part of what we want to do. We have always been and will continue to be willing to get directly into those primaries, whether it's supporting someone we already know and work with, like, like to be up here today, or if someone tries to primary Jake Otten class, our boss in chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors to support him, especially if it's a DSA candidate. But then also, like, again, long term, we would love to be able to be the group that can identify the candidates who can run against the DSA. We want to do the work to find those young, charismatic candidates and get them to run against the DSA candidate and offer that real alternative. We really just want to see

• 49:42Speaker 07

  like, our organization, the five-year-olds be even bigger. We want to not just be like doing this conference here in DC, but then go over like all over the country and say like, we can go in Denver and host a whole conference in Denver with all of our members of a chapter and talk and about the work we need to do to elevate the pragmatic politicians in Colorado, or New York, or wherever, like, as long-term a role. The Center for New Liberalism's annual impact report for the election year of 2024 claimed that the organization made $5,500 in, quote, "successful campaign contributions" and gained 186 new members. That's 186 new members during the year of

• 50:25Speaker 07

  a highly impactful presidential election. DSA gained over 7,000 members in just the two months after the 2024 election. And since then, DSA membership has more than doubled from 50,000 to 120,000 members. Just 10 years ago, DSA had only 5,000 members, before Bernie Sanders' first presidential campaign, which breathed new life into the organization. But in order to fully understand CNN, you have to understand their deeply online origin, because they essentially internet troll themselves into something resembling a real political organization. Center for

• 51:09Speaker 07

  New Liberalism can be traced back to r/neo liberal on Reddit, where after the 2016 election, a new team of moderators tried to grow the subreddit as a place to discuss liberal policymaking and free market economics in response to online conversations about politics being dominated by populism, whether from MAGA or the rejuvenated socialist left following Bernie's 2016 campaign. These moderators turned the subreddit into an online community of policy wonks discussing economics, as well as neoliberal shitposting in an attempt to compete in the arena of internet politics and make center-left liberalism cool and memeable.

• 51:54Speaker 07

  And I don't know about you, but when I think of cool, the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit memes about liberal free market economics. In 2018, two moderators from this subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah Johnson, started to consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called the Neoliberal Project. They started a @neo liberal Twitter account and launched the Neoliberal Podcast. All of this neoliberal branding was sort of a troll. At the time and still now, the word neoliberal is mostly used as a pejorative in current political parlance. So the Neoliberal

• 52:37Speaker 07

  Project's use of the term was almost this form of slur reclamation, a tongue-in-cheek, semi-ironic, but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies. To quote a 2022 article in the Washington Post, quote, Carl Nielsen, a 24-year-old aerospace engineer who leads the DC chapter, told me his brother turned him on to this neoliberal community a few years ago, and he was immediately smitten. Quote, "I was like, dude, this is it. This is where we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a neoliberal shill bracket, which is a Twitter tournament where you vote to determine

• 53:21Speaker 07

  who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was really easy to get excited about. So I jumped right in." Unquote. The neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March Madness-style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists, or influencers are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year. This basically amounts to standing figures like Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver, and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described the organization as being on, quote, "a quest to bring market-friendly moderation into the age of internet meme

• 54:04Speaker 07

  politics." Unquote. In 2020, the Neoliberal Project was absorbed into a centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement, Will Marshall, the president of PPI, said that the young liberals, quote, "fill a vacuum in our politics for a pragmatically liberal alternative to right-wing populism and democratic socialism." Colin Mortimer, the Neoliberal Project's executive director, is quoted in the announcement, saying, "Over the last several years, we have built the Neoliberal Project into an online community of politically engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological extremes that put our

• 54:47Speaker 07

  country in peril. Now we are proud to join one of the most storied think tanks in the country as we develop and advocate for a radically pragmatic agenda for change our country so urgently needs." Unquote. A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute. PPI was founded in the late 80s by the Democratic Leadership Council, when the word progressive referred to center-left pragmatism, as opposed to the modern connotation of the term as used by left-wing progressives today. In the 90s, PPI functioned as the idea factory of the Clinton administration, and was a big part of the shift in the

• 55:30Speaker 07

  Democratic Party away from New Deal, Great Society, redistributive liberalism towards the neoliberal politics of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era. Soon after joining PPI, the Neoliberal Project rebranded into the Center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive unpopularity of neoliberalism, and that it might actually be pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner. CNN co-founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New Liberal Podcast, told the Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal

• 56:14Speaker 07

  is a great word to use, quote, "when what you want to do is get in fights on the internet, but it turned out to be less great for recruiting congresspeople to their cause." Two years after joining PPI, the Center for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal Action Summit. 2026 was the fifth year of Globetcon. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2024 that the Center for New Liberalism is, quote, "Biden's fighters in the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his brand of politics trendy again." Unquote.

• 57:04Speaker 07

  The past few years, the Center for New Liberalism has tried to legitimize itself beyond its Reddit shitposting and humble Twitter troll beginnings. Earlier this year, CNN brought on Greg Schultz as a senior advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential Primary campaign and general election strategist. One of the aspirations for the new liberals is helping to secure a center leaning candidate for president in 2028. One of our big goals is definitely to influence who our next president is. And maybe that there ends up being a more compromised candidate, or I don't think compromised

• 57:47Speaker 07

  is the wrong word, but like you're seeing right now, like a lot of people are gravitating towards Ossoff if he does end up running, like people like, but we would rather not see like a further left candidate. We also want to see that the platform that we run on in 2028 is not, we understand that sometimes you have to have a little bit of optimism, but it's kind of like sloppy living that you see right now, where it's like, oh, cut everyone's taxes. Like, we want to see like a real, concrete platform that doesn't over promise, can be enacted, and can maybe repair people's hope in government again. Senator Bennett talked about it earlier, or alluded to it, but like, people don't feel like government works anymore, so we want to make sure that the agenda in 2028 is one about making government work again. Obviously, we have to workshop that message and figure out what's going to appeal to

• 58:32Speaker 07

  the American people the most. It's part of, it's like, obviously, we're fighting the DSA. We're aware we're going to exist in America, like, they are a part of the people climate. We don't want to take them away. We also like, think it will be extremely harmful if they're in the driver's seat. They should absolutely have input, but like, if they're in the driver's seat in the presidential election, like, we're going to lose again, and we want to make sure that we win, because obviously, if we lose again to Donald Trump, or whoever his heir is, like, it's not going to be great for America or the rest of international, or international institutions. I mean, I think some of those DSA people would look at centrists candidates going up against Trump in like 16, 24, or like, you know, more center leaning.

• 59:16Speaker 07

  And I would be very hesitant to call either of those centrist or even center left. Like, if you look at the exit polling data from 2024, 24, everyone thought Kamala was much further like from the center than Trump, which is, personally, Trump was good at marketing, but like. Yeah. Kamala was not center. Like, you ask anyone in this room who's worked for, we all work for a center left model organization, we all saw Kamala was not center left. There's a reason we lost since Clinton, our voters thought we were too far to left, or, I mean, too far to left, but too, too out of touch. I think that's a good way to frame it, like, very out of touch. I think it's really important to understand that too far left and too out of touch are vastly different things.

• 59:59Speaker 07

  And secondly, what is considered quote unquote "left" is not at all clear. Does "left" refer to left wing economics, wealth redistribution, or like the sort of performative liberal woke-ism that was completely captured by corporations and the elite before being quickly dropped as Trump took back power? Because the recent batch of left wing populists are running on economic policies to make life more affordable. Their focus on uplifting workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of large swaths of marginalized populations, way more than corporations posting black

• 1:00:42Speaker 07

  squares, academic language policing, White House pride events, and Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole as a scarf. A New York Times poll from May of 2026 found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat leaning independents do not want the party to move to the center on healthcare or economic issues, and should embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, 63% of likely Dems said our political and economic system needs major changes, and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely.

• 1:01:22Speaker 07

  88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans. 74% of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel. Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. 91% had not heard of abundance. Only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent, and 49% said they were favorable to socialism versus 22% unfavorable. Only 20% of respondents said the Democratic Party was too far to the left, and respondents were evenly split on whether the party in general should move to the center.

• 1:02:04Speaker 07

  But most said that the party should move to the left on things like healthcare. A frequent topic of discussion at the New Liberal Action Summit was how the Democratic Party can win back quote unquote "working class voters," and spoiler, they think it's by moving to the center. Something we've been talking about that we've been at for a long time is leaning back to support of non-college voters, working class voters. We have a report coming out soon that showcases how Senate election candidates are doing much better in that regard than their progressive counterparts. We do a lot of polling of non-college voters, working class voters, if you will. Most of our data says that the people that voted for Zara tend to be heavily college

• 1:02:45Speaker 07

  educated, whereas it was people without degrees that voted for Cuomo, which, the best way to glimpse for working classes is not, I think, is just, it has a college degree, does Dom have a college degree? The new liberals believe that DSA is out of step with the working class, and by working class, they mean voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to high profile races like Zorran or Abdul al-Sayed, where the more center leaning candidate often quote unquote "wins" the non-college or low income demographic. Now, these wins are often in the single digits.

• 1:03:28Speaker 07

  In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo quote unquote "won" the under 50K a year income bracket by eight points. Cuomo also won the highest income bracket, $250,000 and over, by 11 points, while Mumdani dominated the middle income brackets. Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul al-Sayed versus Haley Stevens primary in Michigan. Left wing populist candidates are doing so well with college educated voters, in part because they are just driving such high turnout, especially among millennials and Gen Z.

• 1:04:08Speaker 07

  But center left liberals will often use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college graduates to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote unquote "real working class," which, again, to them means a voter without a college degree. And while income level or education can be an indicator of class, just defining working class as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really make sense, nor does it tell you anything about the class interests of voters, because it doesn't actually point

• 1:04:51Speaker 07

  to anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point to what your income is, which is itself kind of a flawed way of understanding what working class means, which, in a Marxist sense, refers to whether you live off selling your labor for a wage, that is, being a worker, or if you own private property, like a business, and make your money off of controlling other people's labor. But all that matters to these liberals is voters' proximity to higher education based on looking at election data where DSA type candidates do very well with college educated

• 1:05:34Speaker 07

  voters, and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized as a non-college educated or maybe sometimes a low income voter, even if the difference is only a few percentage points. The liberal analysis of class simply being whether or not a voter has a college degree offers no insight into why a middle class of educated workers are moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of democratic socialism, and are voting for policies that benefit people largely more poor than them, instead of just supporting the center left Democrat who would advance elite interests.

• 1:06:17Speaker 07

  To this point, I talked with Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, about why class analysis is important.

• 1:06:26Robert Evans?

  It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be regarding, you know, the politics when it comes to how should the economy, how should our society be oriented? If you are a worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal. If you are an owner, your interests are going to be geared oppositely. They're going to be geared towards capital, towards ownership of private property and the making of profit being protected against the interests of labor. And so this is the conception of class.

• 1:07:03Speaker 07

  That I think paints a much more lucid picture of the world than one that just sort of treats, you know, the poorer you are, the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that the base of the working class is always the poor, relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working class is its source of power, and it's the better paid workers who, while, you know, they are in a theoretical sense in the working class, they often are the ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being compensated fairly well. But again, it's a kind of analysis that can't comprehend, the liberal view cannot really comprehend how college-educated people who may be securing somewhat, you know, decent, middle-class jobs, they can't understand how they are

• 1:07:47Speaker 07

  also a part of the working class and respond to the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy, when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that it just squeezes the whole of the working class. Yeah, and there's these certain moments with like technological advance, like you're seeing with like AI that lead to the de-skilling of certain workers, right? The past 20 years, adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Yeah. Work in tech, this is like the last growth area of the economy, learn coding, and now those skills are not as useful as they used to be because AI can do it. And there's this like proletarianization of tech workers happening that just this like liberal

• 1:08:32Speaker 07

  model, the working class, then can't really understand why these people are going to maybe turn against liberalism. Yeah. Capital produces its own gravediggers, Marx writes in the manifesto, right? That, you know, the socialist project sees that there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production. Not only in that capital appropriates, exploits workers, the capitalist class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker that's fundamental to the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out of their positions of property, but also out of positions of skilled labor into, you know, having to move down into proletarianized positions where you

• 1:09:14Speaker 07

  are not going to be paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building a class that goes against it. It's the socialist project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and it is the liberal project that is utterly blind to them, that just to the liberals, no, capitalism is good. It increases GDP, right? It leads to economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent that you can show them to them. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are fundamental to the capitalist system. And so they have no answer to this. You can see how these people who are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants

• 1:09:56Speaker 07

  to the liberal institutions, they perceive like, well, if you're smart and you have the right policies and you believe the right things, you'll get taken care of. It's a very different experience from, I think, a lot of college grads who have tried very hard to do the right things and who do not have a place in the economy or a very limited place with very limited power and very limited resources. While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mumdani among the lowest-income voters in the 2025 Democratic primary, come the general election in November, that ceased to be the case. In the general, Mumdani won low-income districts by 11 points. To quote the New York

• 1:10:37Speaker 07

  Times, quote, "Mumdani largely expanded on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods across the city. He swept communities of every income level, save for New York's wealthiest enclaves, where his top opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best," unquote. In the November general, Mumdani also won districts where less than 20% of the residents have a college degree by 13 points, though a CNN exit poll of less than 5,000 voters showed that Cuomo did just 5% better than Mumdani with voters

• 1:11:18Speaker 07

  without a college degree. I think it is also worth reiterating that 1 out of 10 people who voted for Zoran in 2025 also voted for Trump in 2024. That's something that liberals never talk about. And something else they never talk about is just how much these non-college, low-income statistics graph onto age more than anything else. Both Mumdani and Abdul Al-Sayed overwhelmingly won with voters aged 18 to 45. Young people who are low-income, who maybe have not graduated college or are in college or maybe just graduated college,

• 1:11:59Speaker 07

  but are still low-income, those young people are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election. The sort of low-income voters that are going towards either these incumbents or more traditional moderate candidates are generally older voters. And if we want to have a real discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters, maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters, then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had. But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract low-income voters is just completely not true. Many low-income

• 1:12:42Speaker 07

  people without a college degree are old retirees who tend to vote more conservative, even if they're registered Democrats. Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending. Abdul Al-Sayed was outspent 11 to 1, and that is going to have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural areas and districts with low information or less engaged voters. This same general trend happened in the June 2026 Democratic primary in New York City. That election was not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that skewed whether someone was

• 1:13:26Speaker 07

  backing the incumbent or the DSA was age. By and large, younger voters, whether they were middle-class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates like Clara Valdez, while older voters backed the incumbents, the moderates, and the establishment politicians that these voters were maybe more familiar with, that maybe has been representing their district for anywhere between 5 to 30 years. But what makes this whole college-educated, working-class debate so absurd to me is that most of the city-based Center for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested in trying to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking.

• 1:14:10Speaker 07

  Like, if the DSA can only appeal to the people in college, jury, that's 70%, 60, 70% voters that we are missing, and we need to do better than that. Do you think that the liberals should be going after like a totally different voting block than what DSA is trying to go after? I don't know if that's our role. Like, most of our chapters do operate in cities where it is more college-educated. Things that are our role, we view as like trying to give into college-educated people that we have the better ideas and the more optimistic vision. Whereas then it's other groups. Like, if we have a chapter in a certain district, obviously that's our role. But like, our chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on, like, not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, I think there are groups in the state that should be doing that. I don't know if it's our role.

• 1:14:55Speaker 07

  So, CNN has already foreclosed themselves to really only going after college-educated voters, despite insisting that their ideas are what actually can appeal to the working class.

• 1:15:20Speaker 07

  In evaluating the political potential of the Center for New Liberalism, one must keep in mind how their online shitposting origins still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNN describes itself as a quote-unquote "digital-first grassroots organization." And on their website, they claim, quote, "Our work reaches upwards of 60 million people a month." That number seems to be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account on X, the everything app. These are Twitter views. So as much as CNN likes to

• 1:16:02Speaker 07

  put on their little impersonate networking events, per their own metrics, the organization is essentially a glorified Twitter account. And I could just go through years of bad or offensive tweets. And many people at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made by DSA candidate Darielisa Avila-Chavier, but rather than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with the actual substance of their politics. And how CNN is trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the DSA in part because of how much it's

• 1:16:43Speaker 07

  focused on online edgelord, contrarian liberalism. For whatever reason, be it their upbringing, class position, or type of education, these liberals- Liberals have not hopped on the populist train, but still feel left out from the rest of their age peers who are all having fun with DSA. And so they have decided to define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in the Democratic Party. So in effect, their new liberal politics largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against

• 1:17:27Speaker 07

  popular, left-wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that left-wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class. It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online in an attempt to make center-left liberals cool again. I went to a bar after the summit with a few of the attendees, and a law student was passionately trying to argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency and just have states pay for their own disaster response so that, quote unquote, "my tax dollars" won't have to go towards idiots in Florida. And like, both myself and a writer from

• 1:18:10Speaker 07

  the journal Liberal Currents had to explain from like first principles, why it's good to care for poor people and care about a general public good. That's what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter of the New Liberals were involved with that pro-billionaire march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of California's proposed wealth tax. And stunts like this March for Billionaires is another perfect example of CNN's overly online, irony-poisoned politics, which still display a deeper sincerity. Before I interviewed Professor Porter,

• 1:18:54Speaker 07

  I had him listen to a recent episode of the New Liberal Podcast, hosted by the co-founder of CNN, Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism is in crisis, but because there is no more great struggle in America, basically, the economy is doing too good, and that's triggered a sort of postmodern crisis of meaning, resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to feel something. And confusingly, CNN's co-founder proposes a centrist neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis.

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and how one of the central liberal, you know, programs of like a revived liberalism has to be like kind of, you know, technocratic politics and a renewed like faith in technocratic politics. And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting because, you know, the point that like, you need technocrats to do good policy, to do good governance, is a bit of an odd one, because absolutely you need technicians to do good policy, like, you know, complex social institutions at the scale of like, you know, a city or a state or a federal government in today's world, you need people who know how to run systems and who are trained. You need intellectuals, you need

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  technicians in a general sense, right? You need specialized people. What's interesting is that the whole thing elides like the crap part, like techno-crat, the idea that, well, those with technical capacities also rule this way in which it's, it just completely conflates the idea of technical expertise and decision-making at the highest level, right? That it doesn't even think that those are two separate realms. It literally is the people who can technically do the job are also the people who should make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do, how the whole system functions, right? Which essentially rests on this like notion that there is only

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  one game, right? That, you know, in the podcast, you hear it a lot, is essentially, you know, the unspoken aim, and for them, it doesn't need to be spoken, because as they conceive the world, it is the only real game to be played, is economic growth, right? Is just growing the GDP machine. Capital growth, capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what kind of a society do we want to build. Their main drive is GDP growth. And so everything else is just sort of, how do you technically do that best? Right? How do you improve productivity? How do you grow the economy best? They have no concept of like, that there's any kind of like political battle at the heart of that. It's a view of politics without politics.

• 1:21:46Speaker 07

  Many of the attendees at the New Liberal Action Summit were aspiring technocrats, often self-described as such. I think the main tendency among these overly online, center-left liberals is to confuse technical knowledge for politics, for the ability to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority, not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority of what is true or useful knowledge. To the contrarian liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad, but it's actually evil, because it disrupts the market, it unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's

• 1:22:30Speaker 07

  all these studies proving this, right? In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may have trade-offs, that yes, rent control might negatively affect the class of landlords and for-profit developers. It might alter supply, but it might be still worth doing as a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of trade-offs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to serving the market, to just acting on what studies say is true. The liberal technocrat thinks that

• 1:23:12Speaker 07

  politics is just the application of technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible. History did not end in the 90s. What is politically possible changes over time, and politics is about responding to different opportunities in history.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  They're missing the part of history, which is class struggle, right? It's the case that we're in a capitalist world, and that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain a competitive production on the world stage and internally as well. Totally true. But that does not follow that, you know, you just pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just completely left out by these people is the notion that in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth, how that's distributed, distributive politics, these people, they don't seem to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I think he,

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  literally, he says something like, you know, the biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle, like it literally just, it conceives the world as like, there aren't really any problems, things are fine. They're, big citation needed on that one. He's just sort of like, you know, things are, things are fine. If you look at it, things are fine. Which is just, I mean, it's just an insane thing to say. Wages haven't risen in like 40, 50 years, you know? Inequality has exploded. Life has stagnated for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are most workers. So the idea that there is actually a realm of politics that revolves around class struggle, around, you know, how wealth is distributed and

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  how we gear our economic growth, to them, that's a, that's a separate category. And so their entire politics is a politics of technocracy. And in that, you know, I'll, I'll give it to them. I think that they probably are pretty good at the, the, the technical expertise of governance stuff. I mean, one would expect liberalism has been in power in the United States for most of its history. So yeah, I would expect that they would be good at technical expertise. Their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing, it's that they, they have totally jettisoned politics, the, the deciding, what do you do with that expertise? How do you gear the economy? How do you consciously control where it's going, how distribution happens, who is empowered in government and in the economy, right?

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  This is all to discuss class, right? Which these people basically never do.

• 1:25:55Speaker 07

  This limited view of what politics is then determines what the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on, and what they view as being impossible. Like how they view Medicare for All as this impossible goal, whether that's because they think voters will never support switching away from private healthcare, or that a single payer healthcare system might even hurt the economy, and therefore we should oppose it. Their extremely narrow view of what is politically possible is the main reason why this sort of young, new liberal organization will never succeed in rivaling DSA, because the whole

• 1:26:38Speaker 07

  better things aren't possible mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass Medicare for All because X, Y reason. A rent freeze is actually evil because X, Y reason. I don't know how that kind of messaging Is going to attract anyone except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the entire makeup of CNL as an organization. After the summit, an elected member of CNL's Leadership Steering Committee got drunk at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better

• 1:27:19Speaker 07

  when certain types of fathers are incarcerated, because some study proved that the type of father who gets charged with a crime would be a bad influence on his kids.

• 1:27:37Speaker 07

  That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project. This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment to cold, emotionless, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to what's socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk, fully aware that what they're saying is morally detestable, while self-assured in appealing to the authority of technical knowledge, right? This tendency to fall back on the pretext that a study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that there may be alternative solutions to the base problem here.

• 1:28:20Speaker 07

  When your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration, then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's GlobeCon 2026. Next episode, I'll be doing a deeper dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising populism.

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  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

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

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  Stories of survival.

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

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

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:58Speaker 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.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:31:21Robert Evans?

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

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  It's real.

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  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.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 1:31:37Robert Evans?

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

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:31:47Robert Evans?

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

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:00Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:32:11Speaker 05

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

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:32:21Speaker 07

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last episode, I detailed my experience at GlobeCon 2026, or the New Liberal Action Summit, a three-day convention for young liberal professionals to socialize and listen to panels about zoning reform, energy policy, and broad-based taxes. The summit is put on by a nonprofit called the Center for New Liberalism, a digital advocacy organization that promotes center-left policies and neoliberal economics. The Center for New Liberalism, or CNL, basically started as a group of policy wonks on Reddit and Twitter

• 1:33:05Speaker 07

  making political memes during Trump's first term. But in 2020, CNL was brought into the Clintonite think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Since then, CNL's been doing yearly summits and more IRL political engagement in hopes of filling in the role of something like the DSA, but for more technocratically aligned, moderate young libs. The 2026 New Liberal Action Summit took place in the backdrop of an ascendant democratic socialist and left-wing populist movement winning congressional primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and now Michigan,

• 1:33:48Speaker 07

  beating the more moderate establishment-type candidates. A few days before the summit in DC, the New Liberal Podcast released an episode about the current crisis of liberalism, where CNL co-founder Jeremiah Johnson talks about why he thinks people are, quote, "abandoning the idea that liberalism can help them" and are turning to populism, whether from the right or the left.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  The clear trend over time is that we are getting more and more extremely progressive members of Congress, representatives, et cetera, that we are getting more socialists and more DSA-aligned candidates, and that the far left is simply out-organizing and out-hustling the moderate wing of the party, or the liberal wing of the party, however you'd like to say it. And this is troubling.

• 1:34:52Speaker 07

  Jeremiah Johnson cites the M'Amdani DSA sweep in New York last June, where socialist candidates beat establishment incumbents. And this episode came out about a month before the populist wins in the Michigan Democratic primary. But Johnson does bring up the Colorado primary, where one of CNL's favorite politicians, Senator Michael Bennet, just lost his primary for Colorado governor to the state attorney general, who, to quote Johnson, quote, "frankly, was not even necessarily more progressive than him, but simply rode the wave of, I'm the populist, anti-establishment, I'm more angry, et cetera, et cetera."

• 1:35:36Speaker 07

  Michael Bennet is an interesting case. In 2020, he ran for president as like the most centrist candidate of that entire bunch and only qualified for the first two debates. He used to be like one of the least populist senators in the country, like a very CNN-type politician, who, weeks after losing his primary bid, opened the New Liberal Action Summit with a 45-minute fireside chat with CNN's deputy director Tobin Stone. Senator Bennett's remarks earned a very tepid response from the attendees.

• 1:36:16Speaker 07

  Bennett blamed the Democratic Party for losing to Trump because they had no ideas. He talked about the need to build housing and transit from a bottom-up approach that helps regular people, not just those at the top, how his constituents in Colorado can't afford to live where they grew up, and how people in their late 20s and 30s can't get a real job. He often mentioned, quote, "working people" and, quote, "affordability," and referred to Bernie Sanders as his, quote, "friend." The whole talk felt kind of Bernie-light, which was especially odd because the summit

• 1:36:56Speaker 07

  schedule said that this fireside chat was going to focus on the threat of the ascendant populist left. But to the extent that Bennett targeted populism, it was the Trumpian, right-wing authoritarian variety. And like, don't get me wrong, Michael Bennett is still very much a moderate. But if even a longtime ultra-centrist like him feels like he has to make overtures to progressives or populists, even when he's speaking to the completely wrong audience, then the libs must be really feeling the pressure. On that New Liberal podcast, CNN co-founder Jeremiah Johnson asked his listeners to

• 1:37:38Speaker 07

  consider, if things continue on their current course, what the socialist movement could look like in 10 years.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  But just ask yourself, you know, is this type of candidate winning Democratic primaries more or less often than they were five years ago, than they were 10 years ago? And five to 10 years from now, do you expect that they will have more energy or less energy? Because I think any honest appraisal of where we are at right now is that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has the energy and the momentum. Their organizing infrastructure is far better, far more serious than the moderate or the liberal wing of the party.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  They have more people who are out there willing to do the work, knocking on doors, phone banking, posting on social media. That is where the grassroots energy of the Democratic Party is. And we can talk about whether or not the voters are there yet, but the voters ultimately follow elite opinion.

• 1:38:48Speaker 07

  Voters are not just mindless sheep that follow elite opinion. See here the 2016 and 2024 elections. They can be influenced by the power of capital, but voters do evaluate their material conditions and compare that to how different candidates promise to change or not change those conditions once in office. There may be an elitist side of the academic left, but the unspoken assertion here that the DSA is uniquely representative of the elite, as opposed to the centrist Democrats who do not represent elite opinion and are more in touch with voters?

• 1:39:31Speaker 07

  That's patently absurd, and CNN's new senior advisor agrees. Here's Greg Schultz, Biden's campaign manager and general election strategist, who spoke on a GlobeCon panel about winning back Maha voters. I think part of the reality is the Democratic Party is a self-righteous, know-it-all party, and voters can feel that and they can see it. We think we know what's better for you and your family than what you know is better for you and your family. So one is we are increasingly a party of academic elite, academicly still elite, who I don't think actually talk for the world there and understand the real concern.

• 1:40:11Speaker 07

  So while Greg at least admits among friends that the Dems are an elite party detached from the concerns of voters, CNN co-founder and podcast host Jeremiah Johnson remains somewhat confused as to why people just don't support the smartest policies, as defined by him, and are instead turning to populism.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Any honest appraisal of where we are at says that liberals are losing ground to socialists in the Democratic Party. To some degree, the establishment has done this to themselves. I think it would be wrong for any analysis to leave that out. But having said that, in America, living conditions are still quite good.

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  Even in his explanation of why liberalism is failing, he still insists that things are actually fine. He talks about how real median income is, quote-unquote, "as high as it's ever been," which doesn't actually mean that things are going great. It's barely keeping up with inflation. But Johnson relies on this narrow batch of macroeconomic statistics to insist that, quote, "America is still thriving. Life is still good." Last week, I forced Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology at the City University of New

• 1:41:34Speaker 07

  York, to listen to this whole crisis in liberalism podcast and then discuss his thoughts.

• 1:41:43Speaker 05

  The mainstream capitalist order, which is to say the liberal order, as its political correlate, is breaking down, is failing. So you would expect to see political moves away from it. There's a very famous graph of worker compensation to productivity. So worker compensation, that's wages, basically, how much of profits, more or less, is going to the workers, right? So how much are workers compensated, tracked with productivity, which is to say, how much are firms producing relative to inputs, right? Input to output productivity, over time. And this is over the course of the 20th century.

• 1:42:22Speaker 05

  And what you see in that graph is that for basically the whole of the 20th century, wages, worker compensation, tracks very closely with productivity. So as firms, industries, produce more and more stuff, or more and more efficiently producing, are creating more and more wealth, workers' wages are going up and keeping pace with that. So the share of wealth between the owning classes, the bourgeois, and the workers is staying about level, right? As there's more made, workers are getting some of that, right? And they're getting an even piece. And around 80, 81, you know, the collapse of the labor movement in the 70s and especially with Reagan, right?

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  You see worker compensation flatline, and it basically has been inert since the 80s, since the beginning of the 80s. Productivity has continued to go up about the same rate. So we have been producing more and more wealth in this country, right? This is what capitalist production does. It's basically almost always growing in productivity, right? We've been producing more and more wealth, and the share of that wealth that the workers get has flatlined. You cannot spin that as things are basically fine. That has all kinds of major effects. One of the big ones is, you know, inequality, even if workers are not being paid starvation wages.

• 1:43:51Speaker 05

  Living in that profoundly, in a profoundly unequal society, has all kinds of effects, socially speaking, right? It does for the middle classes, too. People who are, you know, comfortable, who are doing well, who have captured a bit of that growth, because it gets worse the further you go down the line, that when you look at like wages for the lowest-paid workers, they've often even decreased, right? But even for those middle-class professionals and such, who may very well be comfortable, and many of them, we should stress, are not, I think that when you go through and you look at the data, there's a lot of indicators of all kinds of ways in which people might not be comfortable. But even those that are comfortable, you know, they still have to live in a society

• 1:44:32Speaker 05

  that is profoundly unequal, that is letting the bottom strata just rot, right? That is just letting, like, people die on the streets? That has an effect. Anyone with a soul, with a conscience, is, you know, affected by that.

• 1:44:49Speaker 07

  Having foreclosed the idea that there is anything economically or structurally wrong with society, Jeremiah Johnson is left to conclude that this, quote, "crisis in liberalism" appears to be a crisis of confidence, a crisis of storytelling. So to Johnson, it's simply that the liberal story is no longer as compelling as the alternative populist narratives. Johnson mentions two potential explanations for liberalism's decline.

• 1:45:22Speaker 07

  One coming from the right, the other from the left, neither of which he finds convincing. Johnson says that the right wing is promoting a "cultural explanation" for liberalism's decline, arguing that liberals have moved too far to the left on cultural issues and lost voters. While the left wing offers a "materialist" explanation, claiming-

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Living conditions have actually deteriorated, and your statistics do not capture this. And people can tell when their lives are getting materially worse, when things cost too much and they don't have as much income. And that is why people turn away from liberalism, towards alternate explanations.

• 1:46:05Speaker 07

  Of course, in this entire 52 minutes of podcast, Johnson never talks about wealth inequality as a real problem in society. Because someone from his self-described neoliberal economic worldview just does not believe that skyrocketing wealth inequality is actually a real problem in and of itself. But then he has to pretend to be confused as to why more and more people are falling for this "materialist" explanation of why there's a crisis in liberalism and why people are not convinced by the "story" that liberalism is telling them with macroeconomic statistics.

• 1:46:47Speaker 07

  The stock market is booming, unemployment is low. Things like that don't actually indicate what types of jobs are available. Service industry or gig economy work is crushing and offers no path for a sustainable future. Buying a house seems impossible. Rent keeps skyrocketing. Energy costs are ballooning, all while the rich get even richer. Even if, on average, the median wage has kept up with inflation at about 3.5% per year, there are, of course, many people who are not seeing that wage growth. And even if they are, that 3.5% is far below the 30% rise in the price of groceries over the past few years

• 1:47:32Speaker 07

  or the 25% jump in residential electricity rates. And of course, minimum wage workers are not keeping up with inflation, let alone the massive bumps in housing, education, and healthcare costs. A New York Times poll from last May showed that among Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters, only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent. 88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans. 63% said that the political and economic system needs major changes, and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely. But Johnson would have you believe

• 1:48:15Speaker 07

  that the "materialist" explanation is without merit. Because DSA candidates actually get a lot of support from middle-class workers.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  The people who tend most to be sympathetic to this leftist story tend to be the people with the most education and the highest incomes.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  If you look at the demographics of Zoran Mamdani's win in New York, he won the highest income brackets. And this is despite having an "eat the rich" persona and very, very DSA-aligned politics. And this makes me doubt the "materialist" explanation.

• 1:49:07Speaker 07

  As we discussed last episode, this is just patently untrue. In both the Democratic primary and the general election, former Governor Andrew Cuomo performed best in the city's highest-income districts and with voters who made over $200,000 a year. But no, it is actually the DSA who are truly representative of the elite. And the richest of the rich are Zoran's main base of support. Johnson needs that to be true because, as we will learn after this ad break, he contends that liberalism might actually be suffering from its own success.

• 1:50:00Speaker 07

  Welcome back. CNN co-founder and New Liberal podcast host Jeremiah Johnson doesn't buy into either of the populist explanations for liberalism's decline. The "cultural" one pushed by the right or the "materialist" one argued by the left. Johnson thinks that, if anything, these explanations should be reversed. He discounts the right-wing "cultural" explanation because the places where those progressive cultural advances have gone the farthest are in deep-blue districts that are still deep-blue. And as for the "materialist" story told by the left-

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  If you look at the places that have actually suffered, potentially, under the liberal era of the last 40 to 50 years, I think the places you could most point to authentically, that you could make the strongest case for, would be the rust belt towns, small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and so forth, where the decline of manufacturing, the decline of the auto industry or of the steel industry or whatever may have hollowed out the local economy. Now, this is a very left-leaning explanation.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  But the people in those towns have not bought into the left explanation. They've turned into Republicans, is the thing. The "materialist" argument pushed by the left is actually most applicable to the areas that now vote for Donald Trump.

• 1:51:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's the whole point. It's the economy, idiot. Just flatly dismissing any materialist analysis on the basis that such analysis, as argued by the left, is actually even more applicable in places that are voting for Trump rather than Democrats, is completely missing the entire point of the left's analysis. Trump ran as a populist, a right-wing populist. But that is evidence for what the left is arguing. That is the left's explanation why those places, which used to be Democrat, working-class, union districts, why they have gone to Trump.

• 1:52:28Speaker 07

  It's because he's offering a populist solution. Now, is Trump's right-wing populist solution actually going to be a real solution to the base problems? No. Because instead, he's going to do economic nationalism. He's going to do tariffs. He's going to scapegoat immigrants as the reason for why housing is expensive, why the job market sucks. So he is offering a populist solution, but not a good solution. While campaigning, he was addressing the poor economic conditions, price of eggs, as opposed to the liberal assertion that things aren't great, actually, or something as tone-deaf as "Bidenomics is working."

• 1:53:10Speaker 05

  Here's a better explanation for that is just paying attention to the actual history. I'm from the South, right? The South is so much of it is the core for a reactionary, right-wing, cultural politics. The South is also where the labor movement, the unions, were just decimated. I mean, it's brutal there. Union density is in the shitter and has been for a while. And so, one way of explaining this is like, yeah, people in these places, people in the South, often gravitate towards a kind of cultural reactionary, confused politics, precisely because there's no other option. They don't have a coherent socialist project. And so, they go towards these other things.

• 1:53:55Speaker 05

  Where there's more of a labor movement, where it has held on to some degree, somewhere like New York, for instance, there is an alternative route, right? And it took us a while to get there. This is a relatively new trend of the rise in socialism. But I don't know whether this is cynical or if he just genuinely does not conceive of how- Well, yeah, it may be that these are real material stressors and pressures that are then interpreted through cultural lenses for all sorts of reasons. The idea that it must be one or the other, that if people favor a cultural explanation, then there must not be material problems. It's also the whole thing is just fraught.

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  I mean, the idea that the only places suffering from deindustrialization or dried-up economies are just Republican states and cities. That's just not true in any sense. There are lots of places where a dying economy is responded to with very left, materialist analyses. Nor also the idea that, again, I mean, just very hand-wavy, like, just citation needed, we're moving back. Things are fine. Outside of a limited, deindustrialized- States, you know, where things maybe are a little bad. Everything else is fine. Like, is the idea that in major coastal cities, everything's fine and just completely ignores that, like, service workers in the lowest rungs of workers in these places are being crushed

• 1:55:24Speaker 05

  right now, many of which have to then leave the cities they're in. And then, you know, people who may be able to maintain a comfortable income and comfortable there is, you know, a little strained. I mean, gig work is on the rise. People are having to work all sorts of strange hours at beck and call of their employers. Alienation from their kinds of work and the ability to choose one's job is really profoundly wrong. Incomes for college graduates have dropped. So professionals, while they may be able to maintain a somewhat comfortable income, are often still declining in that capacity. Enfranchisement in people's worlds, both in their economic world and in saying how they labor, how they work, but also in the wider political world and getting a say in

• 1:56:10Speaker 05

  how government is happening. People are feel totally disenfranchised. They are disenfranchised from those things. So it's just a very thin patina of things are fine that falls apart upon any examination. Ironically, these people represent the whole project of things are fine because we maintain full control. The other side of the coin of things are fine is we need not empower anyone else. Just let us, the technical experts, run everything.

• 1:56:38Speaker 07

  So instead of a cultural explanation or a materialist explanation for the current crisis in liberalism, the Center for New Liberalism seems to kind of embrace this sort of liberal affluenza, as if people are actually suffering from affluence. For this, Johnson turns to Francis Fukuyama.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Fukuyama, in his book, The End of History and the Last Man, very famously said that he believed man needs struggle, essentially. You know, in the 20th century, we got the great struggles of World War I and the Great Depression, World War II, and then the Cold War. And liberalism flourished under these conditions because it had an identifiable enemy to fight. It had a struggle that, you know, men and women could throw themselves into, you know, that we could defeat the Nazis, we could defeat the communists.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  And then he predicted that if history really did end, in air quotes, that men might struggle just for the sake of struggle. They would struggle against the very system that created this prosperity just for the sake of having something to feel, of having something to feel useful for.

• 1:58:06Speaker 07

  The idea is, now that liberalism has conquered the globe, people don't actually require anything materially different, but will still desire for self-worth, dignity, and recognition. This is a sort of postmodern crisis of a struggle for meaning totally divorced from a materialist desire.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  But Fukuyama argues that while modern liberal democracies can provide peace and material wealth, they leave people feeling alienated by not delivering that sense of higher purpose. And that that is what leads people to nationalism, or populism, or identity politics, because people want some sort of recognition.

• 1:59:01Speaker 07

  To Johnson, ultimately liberalism is struggling because, quote, "there is no more great struggle."

• 1:59:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, there is no real struggle, that this is all made up. It's all smoke and mirrors. Like, everybody's fine. I mean, if you pursue it to its logical conclusion, it's the most condescending politics there is. It's literally just, you don't really have problems. You are just rebelling against us because things are so good and you don't have meaning other than opposing us. It literally, I was listening to that and I was like, this sounds like bourgeois revolutions of early modernity, right? This is like how the monarchy reacted. To so many times you get like, you know, absolute monarchs just saying like, well, the people, there aren't really problems. You're fine. It's fine. Just chill out. Like, I'm your king. We're doing fine. It's all good, right? And of course, that worked out brilliantly for them. Yeah, it's the same politics. It's just, well, there's basically no struggle.

• 1:59:54Speaker 05

  People are mad because, you know, they don't have enough meaning. I just, I don't know. How that plays out to anyone is insane to me. The idea that, you know, all of the struggle and strife in the world today is just, it's not real. It's somehow a made up pretend we're all doing is ridiculous.

• 2:00:15Speaker 07

  Johnson's contention is that things just got so good under neoliberal technocracy that it created a postmodern crisis of meaning, resulting in people struggling against the very system that provides for them to gain a new sense of purpose. Basically, self-sabotaging by electing bad populist candidates, which then do make economic conditions worse. But then Johnson's solution to this problem is just to put neoliberal technocrats back in power, but this time be even more cynical and also more patriotic.

• 2:00:56Speaker 07

  In contrast to the United States, Johnson points to Canada as an example of where liberalism is currently succeeding. And he credits this to, quote, "technocratic ability, cynical maneuvering, and liberal nationalism," adding, quote, "we need technocrats more than ever." I introduced the idea last episode that one of the main tendencies among these so-called new liberals is the belief that politics is just the application of technical knowledge. You know, conflating having technical knowledge with the ability to govern well and do decision-making

• 2:01:39Speaker 07

  at the highest level, a view of politics without politics.

• 2:01:44Speaker 05

  The technocratic point of view sort of works like this. It understands that, like, okay, there's technical expertise. Let's say you're trying to, you know, reform tax policy. Tax policy is very complex. The way that taxes work, the way that, you know, government revenues work is very complex. So if you're going to rearrange that, yeah, you are gonna need some people who understand how that works, who are intellectuals, you know, who have the technical knowledge required to make your policies work. That's a crucial part of any politics. You absolutely need that. Any political faction that seeks to have a chance of a successful governance needs a level of technical expertise. Absolutely. But that is an entirely separate question from what does one choose to do?

• 2:02:29Speaker 05

  Your technical expertise is a key part to successfully doing what you set out to do. But politics at the highest levels, right? At the level of like, party line, of like, what party strategy, is about what are you trying to do? The technocratic view basically thinks that that question is already decided. To them, it's obvious what you should do. What you should do is grow the economy, maximize economic growth, because in their view, that's good for everybody. You know, rising tide lifts all boats. That's good for everybody. There is no conflict here. And so if there is no conflict here, then that's the obvious pick.

• 2:03:13Speaker 05

  And then the only difficulty is just getting people in to do that job well. And so for them, politics is just about, okay, well, our team has the people who know how to do this job well, and the other team doesn't know how to do the job well. And they have trouble sometimes even conceiving that, in fact, no, the debate would be about what we're choosing to do.

• 2:03:37Speaker 07

  Johnson explains that liberal governance has to walk a dangerous tightrope. If you lean too far to the left, you stifle the economy and feed radicalism and extremism. Johnson points to Europe as an example of this. But if you lean too far to the right economically, people will revolt if they don't share in the prosperity.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  If you don't successfully walk this tightrope, then you risk entering a kind of doom loop where, you know, oh, everything seems really bad, we're all dooming. And so people are going to choose an illiberal candidate. And that illiberal candidate is going to do stupid things that make things worse in society, and that's going to make people even more illiberal.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Even more tilted towards extremism, which will lead to worse candidates, who will make things even worse than before, and so on, et cetera. There is real risk of entering that kind of doom loop. And that's why it's important to actually have smart, technocratic leadership.

• 2:04:47Speaker 07

  The doom loop theory glosses over the fact that Trump came after Obama. The sentiment that this technocratic leadership wasn't working didn't just come from the right. Bernie Sanders also rose to prominence by arguing this from a left wing perspective. And the capitalist class were more threatened by Sanders. So they mobilized to take out the threat of left wing populism, even if that meant Trump's right wing populism would win. Because they know that the left wing version is the one that could actually empower labor against the interests of capital.

• 2:05:29Speaker 07

  Johnson also claims that Joe Biden had big goals, but, quote, "his technocratic ability wasn't there." Meaning there was too much red tape prohibiting his policies from having an impact because he, quote, "went about policy in a stupid way." Now, Johnson knows that calling for a technocracy isn't an election strategy. For that, he proposes more, quote unquote, "cynical maneuvering," and that liberals should get more, quote unquote, "ruthless." In terms of running elections, he says Kamala Harris should have forcefully distanced herself from Joe Biden,

• 2:06:12Speaker 07

  or the party should have pushed her out for being too compromised due to her association with Biden. Of course, Johnson does not acknowledge that the party is very capable of cynical ruthless maneuvering when it serves their interests and the interests of their donors. Once again, consider the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and the concerted efforts to take down Bernie Sanders. Something that quite possibly lost the Democrats the 2016 election. But Johnson also talks about the need for cynical maneuvering in implementing policy.

• 2:06:52Speaker 05

  The main things he talks about seem to be flatly at odds with each other. Because he says, well, you know, we need technocratic politics, which is to say, you just need the right policies. You need the ones that are correct to do the job well. Again, what the job is, what we're trying to do is totally like not on the table. That's, that's a given, right? And then you just need the people who can technically do that well. But then he also says, you need some cynicism. You need to be able to just be ruthless electorally and operate politically in order to win, which seems to directly contradict. It's like, well, what should you do? Should you pick the policies that are correct? Pursue technocracy regardless of whether or not it's popular? Whether it can win elections, right?

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  Which is his whole contention is that the right policies are somehow, somehow not popular among the people? Or should you, you know, be electorally ruthless and try to appeal to the masses and win elections by perhaps? I mean, he gives an example with the carbon tax, where he says, like, I think this policy is great. I think this is the technically correct policy. But you have to abandon it. Again, I'm sure if you asked him, he would say, well, you have to strike a balance between the two. But a strategy that's useless, right? It's like, well, how should you ride a bike? Well, you don't want to lean too far left, but you also don't want to lean too far right. You want to kind of stay right in the balanced middle. Okay, that tells us nothing. You should pick the right policies, but not so much. You need to also be ruthless and be able to win elections.

• 2:08:22Speaker 05

  Pick the right policies and win, win elections. Don't see Stoll, take it immediately.

• 2:08:27Speaker 07

  Johnson argues that the final necessary step in exiting the populist doom loop is, quote unquote, "liberal nationalism." Basically, the idea that liberals need to become loudly more patriotic and reclaim and be proud of the progressive parts of American history. But liberal patriotism isn't enough to win elections. And the Harris campaign already kind of tried this.

• 2:08:59Speaker 01

  Liberals have got to be better at telling a story of how America is great. Liberalism made America great. Liberalism is why we're all rich and successful and awesome.

• 2:09:12Speaker 07

  This is the massive contradiction at the heart of their project. They want to say, we're all rich. The economy is great. Living conditions are fine. But the newer liberals do have at least some awareness of material problems. Because most of the conference panels were about affordability, especially in relation to housing and energy costs. So are there massive economic factors driving voter behavior or not? How can you pretend that everything is great, actually? And then also put on a whole conference focusing on how housing and energy are way too expensive? You, you do know that there are material problems. What's actually happening here

• 2:09:57Speaker 07

  is that you're frustrated that people aren't buying into your neoliberal solutions to the problems caused by neoliberalism. But to the technocrat, it can't be the policies that are wrong. So instead, it must be that we are not telling a strong enough story.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  We need to be able to figure out a pro-growth, patriotic, muscular liberal message that works. Because people respond to two things in the end. They respond to material conditions. If the material conditions are bad enough, they will get mad at you. But they also respond to stories. And it's hard to identify the story that liberals tell today.

• 2:10:43Speaker 07

  At the very end of this podcast, Johnson finally admits that people do, in fact, respond to material conditions, but only if things get bad enough. But he also believes that the economy is good. We are rich. We are successful. So the problem has to be something else. And that something else is stories. Liberalism just isn't telling the right stories. Again, it's not material problems. It's storytelling problems. And Johnson says, quote, "The story we should tell should be rooted in two things. A return to history and a vision of abundance."

• 2:11:25Speaker 07

  Johnson truly believes that this is all about stories and not actually about politics. And this is where the technocratic version of politics hits its own massive limitations. This is where it runs up against its extremely narrow view of what politics is and what is politically possible.

• 2:11:49Speaker 05

  They're totally whipped by capital. Like, that's the thing is like, capital sets the agenda. Because, you know, they, as I said, they've, they've ceded the territory of like, political decisions, properly put, right? They concern themselves with the technical administration of the system, but are totally uninterested in the commanding heights of the system of like, how, how is the economy structured? But ceding that territory doesn't mean it's, it's neutral. It just means that like, yeah, capital gets to call the shots then. And so capital basically says, well, here's what's possible and here's what's not, right? Based very much on capital's interests, right? In order for us to maintain our profitability at the levels we would like and the ways we would like, these things are not possible.

• 2:12:32Speaker 05

  And the technocrats, they just accept that, right? Like, it's a real belief for them. It's, it's not cynical. You know, there, there is a, a time where with shrewder and more aware liberals, liberals who are aware of like class struggle, I think, and who, who were throwing in on the side of capital. Like originally, like the, the classical liberals, as well as liberals in throughout the 20th century, right? When they really, when they had to contend with like real socialist politics. They knew, like, they were self-conscious about, well, we are on the side of capital, right? That's the biggest difference between sort of the past ages of liberalism and this, you know, upstart young liberals. They're so in the pocket of capital.

• 2:13:16Speaker 05

  They're so at capital's bidding that they don't even really know it's there anymore. And so they just perceive this as like, again, what capital wants is basically just the natural state of the world. What is possible, period? With, you know, like, just such an impossibly narrow historical focus on like, what is possible? And I just don't know how anyone like, looks at the past, you know, 100 years of history and feels they can conclude very solidly what is and is not possible. But they just feel that what capital says is basically the natural constraints of what's possible in society. And so, given that, which they take as a given, the only question is competent administration. It's a fall from previous liberals, you know, who argued for like, no, we want to empower capital

• 2:14:02Speaker 05

  over labor to a certain extent, right? Or we want to achieve a balance between these things, usually with capital leading in some way.

• 2:14:10Speaker 07

  It's time for one more ad break. Before we learn how Jeremiah Johnson believes that a quote unquote "brightness loop" might be the key to solving The crisis of liberalism.

• 2:14:34Speaker 07

  Welcome back. Johnson proposes the way out of this populist doom loop is what he calls a brightness loop, or basically like a positive feedback loop, which will be achieved through technocracy, ruthless politics and liberal patriotism, embracing America and our history and loudly proclaiming.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  We are rich and we are successful and we are awesome. America rocks.

• 2:15:03Speaker 07

  I wonder how that's gonna go over with voters who are struggling to pay bills and household expenses every month. Might they turn to another candidate who actually addresses the fact that maybe things aren't so great for everyone? The limitations of the technocratic mindset is a big part of why center-left candidates are losing to left populists in very high-profile races. I really don't know how CNL expects to grow their organization and build momentum among young people to advance their own candidates, to claw back the Democratic Party away from

• 2:15:43Speaker 07

  the socialists, away from the populists, from the progressives, when their political project is calling for technocracy, cynicism and liberal nationalism. How do you think that will attract and then mobilize an actual energized, motivated base? Because the only people I can see that appealing to are those who aspire themselves to be technocrats. And true to form, that is who attended the new Liberal Action Summit last month in Washington, DC. It was a group of people who identify with and submit themselves to the mainstream neoliberal

• 2:16:24Speaker 07

  order and who understand themselves through identifying with the base structure of capitalist American society. That's where they get their self-identification and in many cases, their jobs and their income. This is people who want to work in politics, who want to work as a consultant, a campaign manager, a lobbyist or a congressional staffer. In contrast, a lot of the people in DSA don't have an actual interest in politics as an industry. In fact, they might have a frankly aversion to electoral politics and they're kind of involved in DSA somewhat begrudgingly, in a sense.

• 2:17:06Speaker 07

  Most DSA members that I interact with would not want to work in politics as their job, but they are doing this because they believe in it and because there's material forces that are driving them towards wanting this sort of change versus the CNL approach of trying to base all your on-the-ground mobilization on like other aspiring technocrats and professionals whose lives are built very materially around these politics, around doing politics. And so their efforts to promote neoliberalism could be interpreted as a form of class reproduction

• 2:17:47Speaker 07

  and attempts to maintain their particular position within a class dynamic. Now, of course, the socialists do have their own flock of aspiring professionals and intellectuals who are seeking roles within civil institutions and political positions of authority. The difference lies in what political project you are a part of, what kind of class politics you're tied to, what class you're trying to empower, are you intending to maintain or alter class relations? And ultimately, what does political success look like? Just growing the GDP as much as possible, increasing the total amount of wealth?

• 2:18:28Speaker 07

  Or is it economic equality and democratic control of society and production? In their attempts to claim liberal history, right? The new liberals will associate themselves with, you know, FDR, the New Deal, maybe if they're Schroeder, the Great Society. One of the most frustrating parts of the conference for me was hearing these lobbyists talk about, you know, the great legacy of FDR while in another breath strongly arguing against wealth taxes, against taxing the rich. At the end of the Crisis in Liberalism podcast, Johnson says, quote, "The populist left says

• 2:19:12Speaker 07

  that you don't actually need to have any form of economic growth as long as you can categorize people into good and evil groups and tax the evil ones and give all their money to the good ones," unquote. And I just don't think that is how they would describe New Deal or Great Society-era tax rates. They would never describe those tax rates and the reasons for why they were instituted as like, "We decided there are good and evil groups and therefore we must punish the evil ones and give all their money to the good ones." The new liberals have to play it both ways because they still want to associate themselves

• 2:19:54Speaker 07

  with the sort of heights of liberal democracy in the United States, which they point to these eras as, but they're both fundamentally opposed to what these eras actually are, the economic policies and tax base that made those policies possible, and also vehemently opposed to the organized labor apparatus that fought for those policies. So they want to claim the legacy of those things for liberalism, but shorn of all content. They have to completely ignore both the substance of those politics and the forces that drove those politics, which was chiefly the labor movement and socialists were a huge part of that.

• 2:20:37Speaker 07

  But neoliberals don't want to acknowledge or promote labor because organized labor runs contrary to the interests of capital and because they know they can't compete with DSA if you're gonna play that game. In somewhat breaking from Ezra Klein, CNL's strain of neoliberal abundance explicitly blames unions for why it's so hard to build housing and infrastructure. They think labor unions are bad for the economy and thus are evil and that the general public are stupid children throwing a temper tantrum, sabotaging the greatest country ever

• 2:21:19Speaker 07

  by electing populists because liberalism made the world too good. There's no more struggle and liberals just have to tell the sheeple a better story so that neoliberal technocrats can stay in power, that those with technical knowledge can rule.

• 2:21:37Speaker 05

  It's a profoundly undemocratic politics. You pursue it to its logical ends and it is literally, well, the people do not really know what their interests are and in fact will go against them just for the sake of having meaning, I guess. So it's up to us, those who do know what the right politics are, to be in charge and to basically call all the shots. And who has the authority to say that we have the right politics? Well, us, of course, right? It's why, you know, these people exist at the whim of capital. Without capital, they're nothing, right? They have this idea that they produce their own authority by having the correct policies. They know the world and that's where their power comes from.

• 2:22:23Speaker 05

  They exist at capital's whim, right? And if capital decides to move in a different direction, they have no authority, they have nothing. It's capital or labor. You either get your source of authority and political power from the economic powers that be, the property owners who control production and have an enormous amount of power in that sense, or you get it from the masses, from the people, the laborers who actually power society and power all production. Those are the two forces. This idea that correct knowledge in itself supplies authority is not only obviously undemocratic, but it's, I mean, just profoundly confused. It's completely oblivious to political reality. It doesn't believe in politics. It doesn't think there is a realm of politics.

• 2:23:08Speaker 07

  With that, though, you are forgetting that we're rich, that we're successful, that we're awesome.

• 2:23:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, we are, we are rich, we are successful, we're awesome. America rocks. America rocks. God, what a, yeah. He pairs that one with talking about like, you can't be a depressing nerd and talk about what America has done wrong. I love the idea of like trying to set yourself up against like nerds, being like, don't be a nerd and then being like, America rocks, we're rich, we're successful, we're all, that is like the nerd line. It's like.

• 2:23:37Speaker 07

  I mean, this is a whole nerd conference. This is like the most policy wonky, like Will Stansell, Matt Iglesias, like nerd central.

• 2:23:45Speaker 05

  Well, maybe you're on the football team, but I have an A in math. Like, it's literally that. It's the, well, we're rich, we're successful and we're awesome. We, we've won World War II.

• 2:23:57Speaker 07

  We beat the communists.

• 2:23:58Speaker 05

  We beat the communists. It's just very, yeah, it's. It's hollow, too. I mean, I'm a red-blooded American, you know, there's a lot to like about the, the American society, but this, like, America rocks. America is awesome. Like, I don't know. Maybe there's a reason people aren't really feeling that one right now, you know? Just shouting it into, into the faces of, of the misery of the masses is not the best move.

• 2:24:24Speaker 07

  You, you don't think that's going to go over well with voters who are maybe not rich and who are struggling?

• 2:24:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know, man. Look around. It's been a pretty bad ti- like, yeah, no, I don't, I don't. I think this got a, god, we're awesome.

• 2:24:36Speaker 07

  As much as the new liberals are upset and confused why the political momentum is with DSA and not them, the Center for New Liberalism will never be able to build an organization of young libs capable of rivaling DSA because technocratic liberalism categorically rejects mass politics. So while CNNL and the new liberals make a big show online, ultimately, they are just a front group for PPI, the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist think tank that convinced the Democratic Party to abandon the working class of the 90s, abandon redistributive New Deal liberalism,

• 2:25:16Speaker 07

  and embrace deregulatory, free-market neoliberal economics under Bill Clinton. So while the blue globe emoji people will continue to post prolifically online, I suspect that is where their political impact will largely remain. Here is a final note from sociology professor Ben Rose Porter.

• 2:25:39Speaker 05

  I mean, look, economies are hard to figure out, but I think it's just worth saying, like, what are you growing the economy for? Right? The whole point is to provide people with better lives, you know, raise their wages, give them more power and control over their lives and their society. And they just seem to have it very reversed, where the point is to, to grow the economy at whatever cost.

• 2:26:13Speaker 07

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And in this case, the here we're talking about is Texas, and the it we're talking about is one of America's most corrupt and evil politicians, Ken Paxton. And I, I'm using corrupt and evil in like, an objective scientific sense. I need you to understand, this is not a matter of opinion. The Vatican convened a series of scientists who, who did confirm that Ken Paxton has the evil equivalent of midichlorians in a concentration never before seen in an American politician. And to talk to me about Ken Paxton and say things that are real and accurate and not nonsense

• 2:26:54Speaker 07

  is a guy who actually reports on Ken Paxton directly as part of his professional job as a real journalist, Robert Downen. Robert, welcome to the show.

• 2:27:03Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me, and thank you for that incredible introduction.

• 2:27:09Speaker 07

  Got to have a little fun with Ken. Okay, Pax?

• 2:27:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:13Speaker 07

  First off, you want to introduce yourself? Put up your plugs up front here.

• 2:27:16Speaker 05

  Sure. My name is Robert Downen. I'm a writer at Texas Monthly. I've been in Texas for almost a decade now, where I've kind of covered, I guess, you could say, religion, the convergence of far-right politics and religion, extremism, et cetera, which is to say, you know, now I basically just cover the current Texas GOP because they are kind of the incubator for a lot of policy that goes national, so.

• 2:27:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, it is like the, the breeding warren at the center of the fever swamps in a lot of ways.

• 2:27:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:27:46Speaker 07

  You and I met a couple of years ago now at the RNC during 2024, which was a lot of fun. And I'm, I'm kind of curious, because I don't know that I actually asked you then, when did you start kind of covering Ken Paxton? Do you remember, like, when you first, like, really became aware of him in a meaningful way?

• 2:28:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know if you remember this. I think we were actually in the middle of talking about it, and we were at some steak joint, and I looked to my right and recognized a very large, uh, Rambo-esque bodyguard sitting next to us, who happens to be Ken Paxton's bodyguard, and realized that Ken Paxton was sitting right next to us. So I don't think we were finished the conversation.

• 2:28:20Speaker 07

  You're right. I don't think we did. Fucking, the RNC, guys. It's a wild time.

• 2:28:26Speaker 05

  Yes, and then I met Roger Stone. It was great.

• 2:28:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, fucking Ted Cruz walked in. What a day.

• 2:28:32Speaker 05

  I started covering Ken Paxton probably officially in 2022, 2023. Before that, I had kind of covered, you know, Southern Baptist stuff. I was really focused more on the religion side of stuff. So like, he's always been in my peripherals, but never, you know, been a sole focus. And then about, you know, five years ago-ish, well, I guess four years ago-ish, I started really focusing on this far-right movement in Texas, the billionaires behind it, um, who, you know, for, for that movement, Ken Paxton is kind of the tip of the spear. So he's been not a primary focus of mine, but, you know, someone who I'm paying very frequent attention to for quite a while, so.

• 2:29:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, so Ken is, he's not a Texan by birth, obviously, which, which doesn't matter to anybody but some Texans. But he was, he was born in North Dakota, if I'm remembering correctly. And he first kind of comes on the scene politically in like, 2003, when he's a, he's, he's a state representative, right?

• 2:29:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:29:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it, it is kind of the first really notable moment in the Ken Paxton saga, in your opinion. Like, when you go back to like, where, where does this guy start to differentiate himself from everyone else?

• 2:29:41Speaker 05

  I think you really, to kind of understand Ken Paxton's rise, and especially the political climate of Texas right now, you have to go to this 2009, 2010 period where Texas really was on the forefront of what would become the Tea Party movement. We started to see, you know, this huge influx of billionaire oil money in particular. These two dudes named Ferris Wilks and Tim Dunn, who I'm sure we'll get to in this conversation.

• 2:30:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:30:06Speaker 05

  You know, they kind of coalesce around this strategy in the Texas House in particular, where they're going to basically just accuse anyone who's not sufficiently far-right enough for them as being a rhino, and pump all of this money into a media and political ecosystem, you know, network, that kind of just becomes almost like this, this way that they are holding people's feet to the fire, to the point where, you know, they, they are, you know, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to primary opponents, uh, for incumbent lawmakers. A lot of these, you know, these candidates are, you know, dead on arrival. They have no actual chance of winning a primary, but the whole point is just kind of like, brews up these lawmakers to plead their campaign coffers and kind of make them second-guess

• 2:30:48Speaker 05

  anytime that they're thinking about defying this political network in the next session. And so Paxton really emerges out of that, I guess, kind of movement. You know, you start to see around 2012, 2013, these groups that are funded by Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilks really start to hold him up as this taxpayer champion. And then in 2014, he launches what was kind of thought to be a, uh, long-shot bid for Attorney General. He ends up winning against, um, a little bit more moderate Republican candidates with key help from these billionaires, and that kind of, you know, is off the races from there, so.

• 2:31:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this is a really, as you bring up, a really interesting thing that starts happening to Texas politically. It starts like, right as the Bush years are coming to an end. Because obviously, George W. Bush was not just the governor of Texas, but he was kind of the governor of Texas who, his victory sort of heralded the defeat of the Democratic Party in Texas in a way that it, I mean, it still hasn't recovered from. Uh, at least, you know, that's kind of the way I, I often see it. And you have, you have Bush come in and then obviously become the president, but because of the unpopularity of the neocons, Texas also winds up becoming kind of this incubator of the backlash, the conservative backlash to Bush, too.

• 2:32:07Speaker 07

  And Paxton embodies that to some extent, because he literally defeats a Bush as part of his, his rise to power, right? Like, much later on, but it, that is interesting to me.

• 2:32:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think the way to really understand the Texas GOP is, for the longest time, it was this coalition of, you know, big, big business interests, specifically oil. But then, you know, uh, you had the evangelical cohort, and they kind of existed in harmony with each other for a while. Um, you know, there were obviously rough patches for the party, but, you know, overcoming, you know, the, the Democratic establishments that had ruled the state for so long, I think, kind of, you know, it's, it's much easier to stick together when, when everyone's winning. But then, out of this, out of the Obama years, in the post-Obama years, you have this Tea Party movement that is, you know, really led by Ken Paxton, these billionaires to many degrees. They turn their sights on those in the party.

• 2:32:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Speaker 05

  So again, you have just this really, really ugly early days of what turns into a full-on civil war within the party, where, you know, people who, in most other states, would be considered, you know, the most far-right member of the legislature, are being branded like rhinos and traitors. And this is, you know, this is in the pre-Trump era. Before that was kind of the, I guess, you know, animating philosophy of, you know, kind of, you know, borrowing from this no enemies to the right framework. That, that was something that was really, I think, defined all of what's happening in Texas first and now nationally.

• 2:33:28Speaker 07

  And do you, do you have a sense personally of when Ken's sort of ultra-right beliefs begin? Is this something that's always a thing for him, or is this something that he adopts opportunistically? Is it becomes clear that that's the future of the party?

• 2:33:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's a really tough question and something I think a lot of us have spent a lot of time trying to figure out. He almost is so emblematic of the direction of the Texas GOP in, in general, that it's almost impossible to differentiate whether, you know, he always harbored these beliefs and then translated that into political momentum towards them, or if the political momentum drove him toward, you know, it's, it's a chicken and egg situation almost. But I will say that, you know, starting, as soon as he becomes Attorney General, he really starts to use that position to aid the political objectives, both on social policy, but also on campaign finance reform, you know, all these other issues, really start to push the state and the state party towards the, I guess, policy positions of this far-right billionaire network.

• 2:34:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. Now, when it comes to Ken himself, his first big scandal is kind of like a bribery allegation, right? As I, as I'm recalling?

• 2:34:39Speaker 05

  Uh, yes. So in 2011, he, when he is still a state rep, he meets at a Dairy Queen with the CEO of a software company.

• 2:34:48Speaker 07

  Very Texas.

• 2:34:49Speaker 05

  As we continue this conversation, you're going to notice there's a lot of fast food.

• 2:34:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:34:52Speaker 05

  This man loves a fast food joint.

• 2:34:54Speaker 07

  You know what? North Texas, born and raised, well, not born, but raised, so I, I do get that. Yeah.

• 2:35:00Speaker 05

  Anyways, so he meets this guy at a Dairy Queen. And again, this is all allegedly, um, this court case was, uh, you know, settled, I think in 2024, but basically the allegation from the SEC, which later indicted him was that he was offered a hundred thousand, uh, shares in this new company. Ken Paxton claims that he tried to pay the CEO for the shares and the CEO was like, no, God told me to give this to you. Uh, you can't give me any money. And then so Paxton allegedly goes on and sells something like, you know, almost a million dollars worth of, uh, shares in this company to people without allegedly telling him that he was also an investor. So he gets indicted in 2015 on felony security fraud.

• 2:35:43Speaker 05

  And that charge is kind of hanging over his head for the next almost 10 years. Um, and as we'll get into, it is kind of like just looming off in the distance for all of its political rise, but also plays an important part of his impeachment. But there's one other scandal that, you know, wasn't criminal that kind of predates the impeachment, which is that in 2014, as he's running for attorney general, he is at a courthouse, uh, in the Dallas area. And there's a video of this, um, a guy in front of him in the security line leaves a thousand dollar monclon pen in the, in the. Yeah, yeah, this is my, one of my favorite K-Pax tales. Yeah, there's this little video of Ken Paxton just kind of plucking it out there and putting it into his pocket. And yeah, so. Saw something he liked and he took it.

• 2:36:30Speaker 05

  Pretty funny. Yeah. Oh God, that is beautiful. And we have a lot more beautiful Ken Paxton stories to come, but first some ads.

• 2:36:49Speaker 05

  And we're back. I guess one of the things that occurs to me, just kind of as I've, every time I've looked over Ken's background is how much of his election history is ran unopposed in the primary, ran against a Democrat who had no chance of victory, right? Like, once he gets in, this isn't totally the case, but once he gets into office, a lot of his elections are almost like a rubber stamp pro forma so to deal. Kind of, yeah. I mean, I think that I'd have to go back and look at the actual margins, but I think that he is actually historically kind of lagged behind, you know, as far as the margins he's winning by have always kind of lagged behind what other top Republicans are winning by. Yeah. In 2018, you start to see some cracks. Yeah. And then in 2020 is when you start to see, you know, the quote, quote establishment,

• 2:37:34Speaker 05

  Texas GOP, starting to fund his opponents. And ultimately that doesn't work and that lays the groundwork for, I guess, the kind of conspiracy theories around his impeachment, which I'm sure we'll get to. It is interesting that Ken has never been a great campaigner. He's benefited from the Republican Party's dominance in Texas and like the amount of funding and whatnot that he's able to raise as a result of that. But as you said, he's like lagged behind other Republicans in terms of like his, his electoral performance. And he has had some real close squeakers in the past too, which is one of the reasons why like this current election is so interesting. But what do you think the Republican Party, the state party starts to turn against him? What is it that does that?

• 2:38:17Speaker 05

  Is it just sort of the weight of scandals that this guy accumulates? Cause we've only talked about a couple of them. Or is it something else? I think that, again, he becomes very emblematic of this far right flank of the Texas GOP that is funded by Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilks. Like, there's this moment in 2017, 2018 ish, where the Texas House, the Texas Legislature has just gotten out of this brutally, you know, controversial session, uh, where they were, you know, doing early versions of the bathroom bill. There was really just acrimonious within the party. And there are these quotes of these, I guess, you know, we would call them more moderate Republicans, but again, still very right wing in any other state. Yeah. But they come out, you know, there's a famous quote from then, you know, the man who became the House Speaker, where basically he says, you know, we're done bashing the gays.

• 2:39:03Speaker 05

  Basically trying to move the party away from these, you know, I guess for lack of a better term, culture war issues, um, that really the far right flank is, is trying to coalesce around. Yeah. And I think that Ken Paxton is, is very much seen as a, as a kind of, you know, emblem of that flank that for a while looked like it was, you know, on the verge of being on the outs of, of Texas politics. I mean, if you go back to that summer before his impeachment, there are so many different things that happened in the lead up to that, where you're like, oh, this Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilks network looks like, you know, this is a death rattle moment for it. And instead of dying, it becomes more powerful than ever and starts exporting all of its stuff nationally. Why, why do you think that is?

• 2:39:46Speaker 05

  Like what, how the fuck does this guy, sorry, how is this guy though, the one who manages to like reincarnate himself at this moment that should have been his end? Uh, I think. I know that, yeah, there's not an answer to that, but I guess I'm, yeah, your feelings on it. Yeah. So before we got on, I just was like, I need to almost refresh myself on everything that happened with his impeachment. And at, at the time I was covering it, like turn of the screw, like wall to wall coverage every single second of the impeachment hearing. And I don't think unless you were paying that much, you know, intimate attention to everything that was going on, people are fully capable of understanding just like

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  how wide ranging and, and frankly insane the entire episode was. And I think because of that, it was really easy for Ken Paxton's defenders, both in the impeachment hearing and, you know, just outside in the political realm. It was much easier for them to take this complicated scandal and turn it into just a, oh, this is a witch hunt. They're going after you, Ken Paxton, because they can't get to you. It's worth also backtracking here. Yeah. There are a significant number of people because of this Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilks operation that believe fundamentally that the Texas Legislature and state has been under the control secretly of Democrats for more than like 20. I mean, this is, this is how successful this is. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:41:11Speaker 05

  It's, it sounds insane, but it's the truth. And so, you know, when Ken Paxton gets impeached, it, he becomes again, this stand in for everything that these people, you know, fear about this supposed Democratic Rhino Cabal. And I think that that coupled with just like the complexity and often absurdity of the impeachment charges more broadly, really insulates him in a way that turns him into a folk hero once he survives the impeachment. Great. I mean, yeah, that, that's, that's, that's as much sense as I think can be made of the Ken Paxton story. Sure. Yeah. I, that, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, it's this whole thing, you know, and, and I've noticed this even just in my time covering Texas politics is there used to be a moment where if we wrote a negative

• 2:41:54Speaker 05

  story about someone, there were maybe not consequences, but like people cared. And now it's not only that people don't care, it's to be attacked by the quote unquote, you know, liberal media is in a, in and of itself a badge of honor that like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that he really exemplifies that. They're waiting for it. Yeah. So how would you describe Ken Paxton as an attorney general? Which is kind of, because obviously he's a state legislator too, before that, but like he's most known and has been most influential as the AG. How would you describe his, his work? I think that he has done a remarkable job of advancing a once not explicit, but

• 2:42:38Speaker 05

  now explicit Christian nationalist movement that is a very far right in its views on immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, um, and basically every other social issue. I mean, he has used his office as, you know, at times a, a pretty blunt instrument in this, I guess, for lack of a better term, culture war. Has used it to investigate political groups, uh, on the left, um, has used it to advance 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories. I mean, he named something within the hodge, you know, the hodgepodge of right wing kind of culture war issues. And I guarantee you, he has used his office to do things. Yeah. There's some, uh, questionable decisions that attorneys under him have made about, uh,

• 2:43:21Speaker 05

  some specific relevant cases, including a pedophile. That's one of the biggest, like most recent scandals against Ken. And I talked about this on the ED that we did a week or so ago. And one of the things that you have to like encounter, looking at him is that throughout all of these horrible things that he and people have done kind of as part of his office, none of it has knocked him out. Like, and you get interesting quotes from different people who have run against him that are all variants of like, well, I had all of these opposition files, but also we had to make a decision of like, how much to talk about it? Because there's so much out here and like, what more do you say about Ken? If you're trying to run against him, that could matter now. Yeah. I mean, I think that he has a similar, you know, ethos as Trump where it's like, people

• 2:44:04Speaker 05

  have heard so much about him for so long that they just kind of, you know, at least amongst, amongst a lot of the Republicans, they've been able to just tune it out entirely. I mean, going back to his impeachment, which, you know, that, that is an episode unto itself, everything that happened. But the, the people who were, who brought about Ken Paxton's impeachment were top deputies in the OAG's office. One of them was almost confirmed for a federal judgeship in like 2019, but was deemed too anti-trans at the time to, to survive a Senate confirmation hearing. My God. Another one of these guys went on to be a vice president at Alliance Defending Freedom, the group that, you know, has been kind of the tip of the legal sphere in the Christian nationalist movement. Yeah. So not the wokes. No, arguably some of the most right wing people, not arguably, some of the most right wing people in, in the world at this point.

• 2:44:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, they would argue some of the most right wing people in the world. Right. And I mean, we're talking, you know, like the platonic ideal of a Texas Ranger, like people who by all extent and purposes should be people who are taken very seriously by the Republican voters in Texas. And yet. Yeah. He again, because of, you know, just, there's something about Ken. I don't know. Man, that's so fucking weird. There's something about Ken and there's also something about the sponsors of this show, who we're going to go back to for a minute and then we'll return.

• 2:45:33Speaker 05

  All right, we're back. So Ken Paxton is currently running for Senate. He just defeated John Cornyn for the primary and he's running against Democrat James Tellerico. And I, I brought this up on ED last week, but it's.

• 2:45:47Speaker 01

  Close, and at least according to one poll currently, Talarico is ahead. One poll has him ahead by a good bit. Most of what I've seen has them like pretty much neck and neck. There's a few big differences with this election so far and all of Ken's previous elections. One is that he does not have a gigantic advantage in funding. And in fact, Talarico currently has a lot more money on hand. And the other is that at least per some of the most recent polling, Talarico is actually beating him with non-college educated voters. That's the heartland for Ken Paxton. So yeah, it's, it's very unclear what's going to happen. Again, I would say it's smarter to say this is a neck and neck race than Talarico is ahead, but yeah. How did we get here?

• 2:46:29Speaker 05

  I mean, I think a couple of important things. One, James Talarico has, I think that he has done a good, and maybe this is just the religion reporter in me. I think he has done a good job of finding palatable messaging around Christianity in ways that like can appeal to the, you know, Republican leaning, white, Christian voter of Texas. That coupled with his kind of, you know, campaigning frequently on, you know, it's, it's not left versus right, it's top versus bottom. That kind of stuff I think is, is playing really well here. The other thing about Paxton though, is that, you know, we've, I've mentioned Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilks in this conversation a bunch of times because they really are crucial to this story. They both have basically entirely pulled out from supporting in the Senate.

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. That is really interesting.

• 2:47:14Speaker 05

  Ferris Wilks, as a result of some very long story, but in 2023, there was some reporting I did about their network having, you know, meeting with Nick Fuentes and having a bunch of ties to other pretty avowed white nationalists. There was a big fallout in that network and that, from what I understand, drove Ferris Wilks out of politics entirely. And in the same time, Tim Dunn was adamantly opposed to Ken Paxton running for Senate from everything that we've heard. And so it wasn't until literally, I think on Monday, Tim Dunn's, one of his super PACs spent $100,000 to send out text messages against Talarico that we saw any kind of movement from Tim Dunn or Ferris Wilks in support of Paxton. And I think that that does actually kind of speak to their level of concern that, you

• 2:47:57Speaker 05

  know, they have sat out all of this for almost two years now and suddenly with three months to go are getting engaged, so.

• 2:48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's really been, yeah, kind of stirring to see. I'm not resigned, as I usually am in a Ken Paxton election to like, well, clearly at some point, he's just going to like leapfrog ahead of this fucker and wind up back in office, as he, and maybe that'll happen, but it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like that's the only thing that could happen, I should say.

• 2:48:25Speaker 05

  Right. And, you know, to be fair, there's this kind of myth that Texas is secretly blue if it's just a voter turnout problem. That's not true.

• 2:48:33Speaker 01

  It's not, no.

• 2:48:34Speaker 05

  Texas is solidly red.

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:48:36Speaker 05

  In order to win statewide here, like, there's a reason why Beto, when he ran here, he went to every single one of our 254 counties.

• 2:48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42Speaker 05

  And it's because you have to really turn out rural voters.

• 2:48:47Speaker 01

  And try to make personal connections with them.

• 2:48:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Because of that, it's easy for Republicans in the state to wave away any kind of momentum from a Democratic statewide candidate. But if you look at the polling in this race between Talarico and Paxton, like, Talarico has been polling way ahead of where Beto was, where any, you know, comparable Democratic statewide candidate has, has been over the last, you know, 30 years. And I think that that kind of, you know, disbelief amongst Republicans that this state could ever elect a Talarico or flip blue, I think has potentially left them kind of asleep at the wheel and made a lot of them much more willing to support someone like Paxton despite his many flaws as a candidate, so.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  So I guess as we close out here, is there anything else you wanted to say about Ken? Anything we didn't get to that you, you think is really important to talk about?

• 2:49:43Speaker 05

  I mean, do we have 45 more minutes? We can talk about his impeachment, but.

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, gain a little bit.

• 2:49:49Speaker 05

  You know, I'm just gonna read my notes, just, just a few fun things.

• 2:49:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:49:53Speaker 05

  Fast food joints in all capital.

• 2:49:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:49:56Speaker 05

  Walter Jr. from Breaking Bad was somehow involved. Uh, there's a lot there. Not directly involved, but his family.

• 2:50:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:50:07Speaker 05

  My point being, it was insane and yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 2:50:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:50:11Speaker 01

  Oh man, is there, is there any reading you'd recommend to the, to the listeners on the Ken Paxton impeachment?

• 2:50:15Speaker 05

  Honestly, there's 4,000 pages of, of court documents. I think that's it. I mean, someone's gotta do a story about it, I mean.

• 2:50:21Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, well, maybe we'll, maybe we'll hire you to do that if we can.

• 2:50:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'll get Walter Jr. on it, so.

• 2:50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I, I did want to say, cause it, it's very wrong when people think that Texas is like a secret blue state, but it's also not red in the way, most of the red in it isn't necessarily red in the way that, that people think of it. Cause like, I think back to my family who are like, were like solidly red and would never vote for a Democrat. But like, my mom didn't own guns and didn't really think they should be legal and was very much like pro-abortion. She was culturally a Republican. And that's like an important thing, like that, it's not just a belief system, it's that, that is your culture and your team. And so much of the difficulty is there are a lot of people in Texas whose values personally certainly do not align with a man like Ken Paxton. But breaking rank is not a doable thing for a lot of them.

• 2:51:14Speaker 01

  I don't know how else to describe it. Like it's, it would be like getting someone who was born and raised rooting for the Packers to like, support the Dallas Cowboys in a game against the Packers or something. Like, it's that fucking kind of mindset in a lot of ways.

• 2:51:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the other thing about it is kind of the ethos of Texas politics for the longest time has been this real antipathy towards, you know, DC. Like, one of the things that it's, it's always been kind of, you know, we are not DC and like, kind of, the circus of it all, it plays here differently. There's circus here, but it's a different circus, I guess. So what you have is like, a lot of these people, again, the other thing about Texas is it's just so damn big. Like, there are parts of Texas that are closer, like, there's a part of Texas, a candidate's closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso. And I think that like people.

• 2:51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:00Speaker 05

  Really don't understand what that does to the politics here as far as just like making people view politics as this really far off thing, off in the distance that like, it's like a libertarian, almost like you don't, don't, don't mess with me and I won't engage with you kind of ordeal. And as I think that the state has become more DC-ified, for lack of a better term, I think that that's starting to really test some of these, you know, some of that kind of mentality you were speaking to. And then you add on, you know, the fact that the schools here are just really in bad shape, we're doing school voucher legislation, all of these things that like are actually rural issues are being kind of flipped on their head. And I think that that has the potential, maybe not to flip those voters, but if enough of them stay home and you see enough energy in the cities, like, that is enough.

• 2:52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:44Speaker 05

  So.

• 2:52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is enough. And like, as individuals, some of those people can flip on a candidate. You know, they, they might not flip party-wise, they're certainly a lot less likely to vote for like a Democrat for president. That may be completely out of the question, but you might be able to get him to vote for a senator or something like that. Like, that's not impossible for everybody. And it certainly looks like, I think he's, he's got about four or 5% of Republican voters voting for him right now.

• 2:53:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, he's got a lot of crossover.

• 2:53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is a good amount of crossover, by the way. Like, that's low and objective numbers, but it's pretty good for a candidate in Texas.

• 2:53:18Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 2:53:20Speaker 01

  Cool. All right, well, that has been a brief version of the Ken Paxton story. We'll have more about KPAX in the future and hopefully we'll have Robert back as well. You have anything you want to plug before we end here?

• 2:53:31Speaker 05

  Just, I'm on Blue Sky at Robert Downden. Subscribe to Texas Monthly for $25, you can get two years of print magazine and digital editions, so the best deal in journalism.

• 2:53:42Speaker 01

  Awesome. Check that out, please do sign up. And yeah, we'll be back probably tomorrow. Anyway, go do something else now.

• 2:54:04Speaker 07

  This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what this means for you. I am Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Kiljoy. Ooh, I'm a correspondent. Hi. For some small things, White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt will be stepping down to spend more time with her family. At 27, she was the youngest person ever appointed to the position. Now, I don't comment on women's age or an appearance. And yeah, I don't comment on that.

• 2:54:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I do, I do want to mention that when we say stepping down to spend more time with her family, this is the first time I've ever seen this where that is actually true. This is true. She did, she, she did have a baby. Actually, actually legitimately doing that and not.

• 2:55:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just assumed y'all were speaking euphemistically about like basically fired.

• 2:55:05Speaker 07

  She did have a baby. Not a euphemism, actually. Trump seems to really like her. Yeah, unfortunately, she sucks. But yeah, just, just, just to clarify, not a euphemism, actually doing that. On the ninth anniversary of the Unite the Right Rally, a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested on fraud charges for payments to informants within white nationalist organizations. We talked about the indictment against SPLC, the organization, a few months ago. This is the first charge against a specific individual. For some other small items, let's throw to James Stout.

• 2:55:49Speaker 07

  I'm gonna start by saying some small things. The Texas Land Commissioner has sent a cease and desist to CBP, Customs and Border Protection, claiming they illegally cleared state land to begin border wall construction. Quote, "Texas sovereignty will not be infringed by failure to follow."

• 2:56:05Speaker 05

  Establish protocol, said Commissioner Buckingham. Quote, my office has a proven track record of strong border enforcement and I applaud efforts to protect our border. I am committed to maintaining a positive relationship with CBP, but we will not allow rogue actors who breached our agreement to undermine the incredible work we do for Texas. The second quotation I've included there was oddly missing from lots of people's commentary on this. Because I think the people who make money from clicks or just have a relationship with clicks, which is not healthy or good for them, wanted to portray this as like Texas is going woke and fighting Trump and uh, no, they're not. Uh, don't be silly. Read the thing. It's in the press release.

• 2:56:45Speaker 05

  Secondly, Al Monitor reported that the United States was withdrawing its last forces from a bill uh amidst Iran's campaign strikes on the region. The United States has a pre-agreed withdrawal with a deadline of September 30th. But another source told the New Arab that they had not left and that they had relocated them closer to the consulate. So the United States will be withdrawing from this region probably relatively soon. But it, but it seems that at the time they didn't leave as people had feared, but they relocated. Keeping with the theme of the United States war in Iran, uh CNN reported last week that the Pentagon was looking for outside the box thinking in its war with Iran.

• 2:57:29Speaker 05

  Quote, we are looking for new and creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran. An officer in the United States Central Command's Intelligence Branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. This is fucking spectacular, right?

• 2:57:45Speaker 07

  It sounds like a San Francisco startup trying to make like AI powered coffee or something. It's like, we need to shake up the coffee industry.

• 2:57:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can we disrupt the bombing Iran market, guys?

• 2:57:58Speaker 07

  Move fast and break things in the, in the regime of collective punishment.

• 2:58:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:58:02Speaker 07

  This is what we're doing now.

• 2:58:03Speaker 05

  Except that moving fast and breaking things was kind of plan A. So God knows what, what will come out of this. Uh, but I, I can't wait to see. I'm sure it'll be exciting and fun. I received news from the PAK, that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party. Different party from PGA K, the Kurdistan Free Life Party. They let me know that an assassination attempt was made in a bill against Mukri Yozdanpana. He's the son of their leader, uh, the leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, right? Um, he was injured and he's currently under medical care in a hospital. They didn't want to make a formal statement about this, uh, other than clarifying that that had happened. It appears someone tried to shoot him in a bill.

• 2:58:44Speaker 05

  A bill, if you're not familiar, is the capital of, uh, the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. Then this is not the first time that I'm, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that this is an Iranian state linked assassination attempt. I think that's a reasonable assumption to make. Not the first time that this has happened in a bill. And it is pretty clear that this is the Iranian government continuing its attempt to punish eastern Kurdish parties for the United States aggression, right? Which we can draw a line all the way back to the reporting we did late winter, early spring of this year on people who were suggesting that there was going to be a Kurdish ground component to the United States war in Iran, which as of yet, there has not been.

• 2:59:30Speaker 05

  This is continuing to have consequences for these parties, right? And then finally from me, I want to talk about these two executive orders. The president has written a pair of executive orders this week aimed at reducing the number of people eligible for citizenship by birthright. And basically what they've done here, and I would suggest that people wanting more context than I'm able to give here, go back to our Supreme Court special episode of ED that we did a few weeks ago, uh, where I talked at length, uh, about the 14th amendment and the Wong Kim Ark case. They've taken the exemptions I outlined there and they've tried to kind of stick a crowbar in there and leave them open as far as they can, uh, would be the way that I would describe it, right?

• 3:00:10Speaker 05

  And particularly they've looked at the exemptions for foreign diplomats and for invading armies. So there's one for vessels in United States waters. Perhaps the most significant one is the one that is meant for invading armies. And when I say invading armies, I want to be clear what I mean. This is like Mexico decides that 1848 wasn't the end and they want some of that land back. So they decide to invade the United States. They push up into San Diego, right? They say they're in, uh, they've liberated Cardiff by the sea. And one of their soldiers gives birth. Uh, well, they're here. That baby would not be a United States citizen because that person was engaged in an invasion of the United States, right? What the Trump administration here has gone for is adding, quote,

• 3:00:55Speaker 05

  either parent of that person is an alien enemy defined to include any member of a designated foreign terrorist organization under AUSC 1189, or especially designated global terrorist. Now, we have to remember that they have added a number of groups to the FTO list. And they have attempted to define people as members of those groups using absolute bullshit criteria like having a tattoo, right? That is the one that might be what they are going for here. If I had one where I suspect they will try and use this en masse, it will be that one. Using that same criteria that they earlier used, uh, to send people to Secod, right? You know, Salvador. They also added a broader way of people who have worked to work for foreign governments.

• 3:01:36Speaker 05

  Um, they also add, quote, the person is born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute. That refers to American Samoa. Now, we're covering this next week, actually, in an episode with, um, Carlos Berrios Polanco. But just very briefly, there is actually a bill to remove birthright citizenship from people in American Samoa. It's not going to go anywhere, but it just, it's a signal of where the right is at on this, which is they're trying to remove this access to being American from as many people as possible, United States American. The second executive order takes a swing at what the right calls birth tourism, right? Birth tourism has been a thing on like, the V there tendency has been obsessed with this for a long time.

• 3:02:20Speaker 05

  I know it talks about it a lot, but you can go back to an episode in November 2024 that I did with Sophie and Robert. And you can hear us talking about the right's concern with this. That the phenomenon they're talking about represents generously, we define it a fraction of a single percent of babies born in the United States every year. It would already be fraud to enter on a tourist visa with the intent of delivering your child here so that they could be a citizen. But nonetheless, this is kind of a bugbear for the right. And so they're attempting to clamp down on, um, specifically like they believe that there are these giant companies sort of shipping people in to deliver their children. Um, it's worth noting, some people do come to the United States to deliver because the United States has very good medical care compared to some other parts of the world, albeit also very expensive medical care.

• 3:03:03Speaker 05

  So people who might have the, the means to access that might choose to come to deliver. Or, uh, simply, let's say you reside in Mexico, but work in the United States and have health insurance in the United States. You might come here to live your baby, right? There are reasons why people might do that. Nonetheless, it is a very limited phenomenon. Uh, but it is a thing that the right has been talking about for some time. And it's not shocking to see the Trump administration going after this again. Uh, these will both be challenging court. We will see how it goes.

• 3:03:31Speaker 07

  In other news, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is under 300 million barrels, which is the lowest level it has been since the US started filling it in the 1970s. It was created in response to the 1970s OPEC embargo. The Trump administration has been draining the strategic reserve in order to attempt to stabilize the price of oil as a result of his war in Iran. Now, the administration has stated that it will be refilling the strategic reserve next year. However, paired with Trump's statement that, quote, we are low keying it. We are only semi negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.

• 3:04:11Speaker 07

  It is unclear how the reserve would be refilled because the war does not seem to actually have a way to end. It is also unclear whether the US will succumb to likewise having no money and huge inflation in the meantime. That seems bad, low keying it. It's not great. It's not great. One of the things I should sort of mention is that part of the reason the economy is still functioning is that the analysis from places like JP Morgan, from the financial sector has been based on the fact that this war will end. And every week that it continues and every week that there seems to be no potential way for it to end increases the likelihood that the bankers will figure out that this war is not going to end and that everything is just like this now.

• 3:04:55Speaker 07

  So that is a financial collapse warning. I feel like that's been like, everyone has just been trying to figure out like, why has this not collapsed the economy yet? And so I'm always curious your take on why hasn't this collapsed the economy yet? Cause everything points to this should collapse the economy. Yeah. But it keeps stumbling on. I mean, energy prices are skyrocketing. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, basically it's because it's not in the interest of the people who have money to believe that it will. So they're still behaving as if eventually it's going to end and eventually the prices are going to come down. And eventually everything from, you know, petroleum to fertilizer that comes through the trade of produce is simply going to be available again. And the moment they realize that it's not, the pyramid collapses.

• 3:05:38Speaker 02

  Speaking of money, Robert? So yeah, uh, for my little thing today, I mean, it's a little thing in terms of how I guess important the story is at this point, but it's a big thing in terms of the amount of money being discussed. Because y'all remember back when Elon Musk bought Twitter and

• 3:05:56Speaker 07

  He what?

• 3:05:56Speaker 02

  He, he, yeah, he, he shared it. There used to be a website called Twitter Garrison. It's before your time. It's what X became.

• 3:06:03Speaker 07

  Oh, X. Yeah. No, I love X.

• 3:06:04Speaker 02

  The everything app, the everything app. Yeah. So when, when Musk bought Twitter, he promised that he was going to take for like $40 billion. He was going to take the company's ad revenue for about four and a half billion dollars, which is what Twitter made in ad rev in 2021 to $12 billion by 2027.

• 3:06:21Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 3:06:21Speaker 02

  And also there'd be billions more in subscription income, right? Now, given that it is currently, last I checked, pretty late in 2026, actually, we're like more, most of the way through the year. You would expect Twitter's ad revenue to be pretty close to $12 billion, right? Like, if I'm extrapolating from four and a half billion in 2021 to 12 billion in 2027, we should be somewhere around nine or 10 billion right now, maybe, you know? That's not where we are. And there's a really good article in Tech Dirt. But and the reason why we know all this is because once, once Musk bought Twitter, it stopped being a public company, right? So you don't have any fucking knowledge at all about really what's going on inside a private company, right? In terms of it's like revenue and stuff.

• 3:07:01Speaker 02

  But because Musk recently folded X into SpaceX and his AI company, he had to include a bunch of revenue information.

• 3:07:10Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 3:07:13Speaker 02

  This came out in what's called their 10-Q filing. And Tech Dirt has, uh, has done an analysis of it that I'm going to quote from now. All of X's revenue is now misleadingly labeled AI revenue. But even then, the reporting has to admit ad revenue took a big hit, dropping 160 million compared to the first half of 2025, which is already way, way lower than when Elon took over the site, going from 870 million in 2025 to 710 million in the first half of 2026. The company tries to claim this decrease in ad revenue is because they transitioned to a new advertising platform, which impacted ad sales for a short period of time, which is a curious explanation, given that on the analyst call, CFO Brett Johnson credited that very same overhauled ad tech platform for the very slight quarter-over-quarter uptick in ad revenue.

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it, depending on which direction the number was moving.

• 3:08:05Speaker 02

  And yeah, so within the second quarter of last year to this year to where we're at now, ad revenue has dropped from 426 million to 367 million year over year. And in no way, shape or form is Twitter anywhere close to the numbers that Elon Musk claimed they would be in right now. Uh, in the second quarter of 2022, which is the last full quarter before Elon bought the company, Twitter brought in about $1.8 billion in ad revenue. Uh, by the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million.

• 3:08:35Speaker 05

  Is that bad?

• 3:08:36Speaker 02

  That is a reduction of $713 million a quarter. In other words, from Tech Dirt, Elon has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter's ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he'd nearly triple it.

• 3:08:50Speaker 05

  Just incredible stuff.

• 3:08:51Speaker 02

  That's just fun. That's just a good time.

• 3:08:54Speaker 05

  I wonder how much like the, the recent drop off can also be attributed to like right wing political content getting much less engagement following Trump taking office than what it was, you know, 2023, 2024, when that was, you know, driving a lot of traffic to the site.

• 3:09:09Speaker 02

  That's gotta be part of it. Part of it has to be also that, uh, AI slop has reduced the value. Cause we're seeing this in Facebook too.

• 3:09:17Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 3:09:17Speaker 02

  This across the board, like all of them are seeing reductions in like in user engagement because people don't like the slop very much.

• 3:09:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:26Speaker 02

  So I, there's, this isn't one thing. And well, I honestly, as funny as it is, you can't even just blame it on Elon, although you can blame it on things Elon has championed pretty much entirely, right?

• 3:09:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:37Speaker 05

  100%.

• 3:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, just a fun little story.

• 3:09:41Speaker 05

  Sweet. I, I have one short piece that I brought today, which is in a story of, of good stuff, of people doing cool stuff against bad stuff. There is a tree sit that is currently blocking construction of the border wall in Arizona.

• 3:09:56Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 3:09:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, I'm really excited about it. To quote a write-up from crimethinc.com about it, quote, "Two weeks ago, one protester decided it was time to block the machine that was about to destroy the last of our four ancient cottonwood trees that stood in the way of the wall's construction. A sheriff arrested him. He was released 12 hours later with no charges filed. This arrest galvanized the community. Less than two days later, friends installed a platform in the tree." End quote. And it's, it seems to be ongoing as of this recording. And if you want more information about the group who is stopping construction of the border wall, you can read the whole piece on crimethinc.com, which is entitled, "The Border Is An Open Wound."

• 3:10:40Speaker 02

  Speaking of open wounds, or I guess I'm gonna call you our crime correspondent, positive Margaret has another story about things that are open wounds in the face of our society.

• 3:10:50Speaker 05

  I did pitch that if y'all ever need someone to come on and talk about crimes that I approve of, I am always happy to talk about crimes that I approve of. And this week, I can bring you really positive news, really happy news that you can file under direct action gets the goods. Because today, as we record this, August 12th, 2026, two days before you're listening to it, the police in the town of Winona, Minnesota, have given up, uh, not entirely. They announced that they will not be replacing the eight flock license plate reader cameras that were stolen last week. Because on or about August 3rd, well, on August 3rd, the police department in Winona, Minnesota, reported a terrifying loss.

• 3:11:34Speaker 05

  In just one night, every single one of their eight flock cameras, their automated license plate readers that tracked every single person who came in and out of the city that were set up in pairs along all the ways in and out, all eight of them were cut down and stolen. I said on just one night, but the cops don't actually know when it happened. It happened sometime between July 29th and August 1st. And they only noticed when eventually the cop was like, "How come our cameras aren't talking to us anymore?" So they only noticed a while later. Each camera and its pole cost about $3,000. So there's a total of $24,000 in theft. The crime wasn't noticed for days. The WPD also said that some flock cameras in Buffalo County,

• 3:12:17Speaker 05

  which is a Wisconsin county just up from or across the river from there, were also cut down probably on July 29th. And when the police reported this theft to social media, over 900 people commented on the police's post, which takes more nerve. I don't comment things on politicians or police departments posts personally. Not very often. And when I do, I delete it and call my lawyer. And so 900 people commented on the post, almost universally in support of the action as reported by the Winona post. One commenter put it, "It's almost like people don't want to be watched 24/7." And so today, Winona Police Department declared surrender.

• 3:12:58Speaker 05

  They put out a press release saying how important the cameras have been for solving crime. But even more important to them than solving crime is building community trust, which they clearly have lost. And so they will not be replacing the cameras. Flock Safety is a brand name of automated license plate readers, ALPRs. At this rate, flock is probably kind of becoming the generic.

• 3:13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:21Speaker 05

  Like I'll run across headlines that say flock-like cameras that will be talking about something from, uh, Axios or other places. Axon, crap, I don't remember.

• 3:13:30Speaker 02

  Axon.

• 3:13:31Speaker 05

  Thank you. It'll probably become the generic. I'm working on a longer piece about the revolt against these cameras, but it is getting hot this summer. Red state, blue state, people just fucking hate the idea that they're being tracked everywhere they go. Cop after cop has been caught using them to stalk their exes.

• 3:13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:49Speaker 05

  And it seems very likely that if we stay a democracy, this style of surveillance will be found to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment because similar technologies keep getting found to be violations of the Fourth Amendment. You know, eventually they're like, oh, you actually do need a warrant to look at someone's cellphone data, that kind of thing, you know?

• 3:14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:06Speaker 05

  But here is a highlight reel among dozens or hundreds of other acts of vandalism against these cameras. In June, a 40-year-old man named Marcus B. in Monterey, California, is alleged, most of these people have not been convicted yet, or will never be convicted, uh, is alleged to have destroyed three cameras with his truck. He's on camera doing this. They allege he simply ran down a bunch of these cameras. He has bull bars on the front of his truck. So he just was like, I got a big old pickup truck and bull bars. And he just knocked them over. Possibly another one, he attached maybe a toe strap or a chain and yanked it up out of the ground with his truck. Also in June, a 21-year-old in Alexandria. I'm just gonna present the opposite kind of person doing this probably.

• 3:14:48Speaker 05

  In June, a 21-year-old in Alexandria, Virginia, on the opposite coast, is accused of climbing atop a Subaru Forester to smash a flock camera with a baseball bat on a day where at least five other cameras were destroyed in the area. The suspect was caught by flock cameras. Houston has seen a rash of vandalism. One night, four poles were cut down and left lying in the grass with their cameras still attached, but all during July, cameras have been spray painted and smashed and cut down in Houston. Last year, Eugene, Oregon, wound up canceling its flock contract after only about six months of the cameras being up due to an absolutely massive public outcry that includes lawsuits, statements before city council, and at least six cameras being destroyed.

• 3:15:32Speaker 05

  At the scene of one of the crimes, the vandals left a note that read, "Ha, ha, ha, get wrecked, you surveilling fucks."

• 3:15:41Speaker 02

  I love these people.

• 3:15:42Speaker 05

  Maybe the most public case is that in Suffolk, Virginia. Suffolk? I don't know. Where a 41-year-old US Air Force engineer named Jeffrey S. Sovereign is facing felony charges for the destruction of 13 flock cameras between April and October in 2025. It is alleged that he used vice grips to take apart the two-piece poles and then took home the solar panels and the batteries, possibly to use for camping. That's what he said later when the cops raided his house and found solar panels there. His truck was tracked by other cameras near the scene of one of the crimes. The police put a GPS tracker on his vehicle, which is another thing that the Fourth Amendment eventually, they, you actually have to get a warrant to put GPS trackers on people's cars now. His house was raided by the police. They found solar panels and batteries.

• 3:16:26Speaker 05

  He is very open about being opposed to flock cameras and refers to them as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but he has pleaded not guilty to the actual destruction. More recently,

• 3:16:35Speaker 07

  An independent candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives, a 37-year-old man named Adam Lee Heimerman, is facing felony charges for allegedly shooting down four ALPRs, Automated License Plate Readers, in two counties between July 14th and July 22nd. One of the cameras he is alleged to have shot down was like during church services. He allegedly went out into the parking lot and there was one within shooting distance, so he just shot it from the church parking lot. A GoFundMe was set up and bailed him out of jail. Police in Long Island report that all summer cameras have been run over, spray painted, or simply had their wires unplugged or turned around to no longer face the street.

• 3:17:18Speaker 07

  Oh, and there's also a guy in Florida who's just holding up signs that block them. He's retired. He's like a 77-year-old retired Republican guy. So he just sets up lawn chairs and sits there with the signs on 10-foot like painters' poles and just blocks the cameras. And when police or news report on these incidents, the posts are flooded with supportive comments, including those that indicate that people should look into jury nullification. But of course, as cities cancel their Flock contracts, many of them are simply signing with other ALPR companies, like Denver, which ended its contract with Flock in February, but by March had signed up with another company, Axon, for 50 cameras. So it's working, but people gotta keep up that pressure legally or whatever. Do whatever you want.

• 3:18:02Speaker 07

  It seems like these cameras have kind of mobilized this coalition of like the kind of leftist people who generally hate these things, different kinds of like civil libertarian from both kind of, I guess, like the contemporary civil libertarians who tend to be on the left and then the kind of old-school Republican, like why is the state watching me people? And then it also seems important that these are like supposed to be license plate readers, which means they've pissed off like just people who drive cars. Yeah. It's like you've declared war on motorists. Yeah. Which is demographic people that... I was reading this, 88% of Americans drive a car on any given week. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:18:42Speaker 07

  This and data centers are the most red-blue movement that just has everyone being like, no, wait, I don't like that. Yeah, it seems like the general tech surveillance complex is just extremely unpopular right now. And people are doing stuff about it. Yeah, which is good because it's been going on for a while. And I'm really excited that people are doing something about it. And yeah, I'm really, really proud of Winona for canceling that contract. Like I know of people who've been convicted and done time for this. And you know, it's wider than what's being reported on. I think definitely the massive movement we're seeing around or against Flock right now is one of the biggest positive downstream impacts of Stop Cop City,

• 3:19:26Speaker 07

  which was one of like the first movements to really put Flock into focus because Flock cameras were being first tested out on the site. Flock is an Atlanta-based company. The first kind of articles you started to see talking about Flock were often in relation to, to reporting around Stop Cop City or you know, activists discussing Flock as this like a new emerging threat like years, years ago, way before the public kind of realized that there's now these cameras cropping up in like every, every city. I think you're right. And I also think that the Stop Cop City method of being both direct and also showing up at city council. Sure.

• 3:20:08Speaker 07

  You know, I think nothing is more effective than when those two groups support each other. Yeah. And you know, the fact that when the cop says, don't worry, we're, we're gonna catch whoever did this. And everyone's like, nah, they were fishing with me last weekend, you know? But yeah, I think, I think you're right about Stop Cop City, building a lot of the framework with which to understand this kind of thing. Let's go on an ad break and then hear from James again.

• 3:20:47Speaker 07

  And we're back. So this week I want to talk about a couple of immigration stories not getting as much coverage. I thought I would start by talking about some training materials for immigration judges that Matthew Hopk obtained by Freedom of Information Act request. They're in a Dropbox, which I will link in the show notes. It appears from these documents that the quote unquote judges, they are not judges in the sense that other judges are judges, right? Immigration judges are effectively civil servants. They receive 12 weekdays of training. What? Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Before this, many of them will have never seen an immigration case, right? And like as someone who has covered immigration for... Oh, my God.

• 3:21:31Speaker 07

  A decade, like this is a topic of Byzantine complexity, right? Immigration law is very complicated. I'm not going to do the thing where you like compare their training to barbers or something because I don't think that's particularly useful here. I think all of us can understand that 12 days of training is not very much training to be making decisions which are life or death for people, right? These can directly result in people, as we saw recently with a couple who were found tied up and shot after being deported. Yeah. And there will be many more cases of that that we are not able to directly report just because no one has published them or in places where people fear to publish them, then they won't have got out, right?

• 3:22:11Speaker 07

  But we should be under no illusion that deportation and asylum cases are life or death. Seven very complicated policy memoranda are packed into the last hour of the second day. So the FOIA has the schedule, the day-by-day schedule, right? The entirety of asylum, withholding of removal, and the Convention Against Torture are covered in a single day. And it's not the whole day. There's other stuff in that day. The materials also show that they provide templates to judges for making decisions, and they contain some errors and contradictions regarding the law as it stands today. The important context for this is that more than 200 immigration judges have been fired since 2025 and 250 have been hired.

• 3:22:54Speaker 07

  So this, there is a whole-scale change in the immigration justice landscape, and it is being repopulated with people who have very little training. They do get a slide. I was looking through the slide presentation. So they do get a slide on judicial independence. But the nature of their employment is different to a regular judge, as I said earlier. And in their first two years, they're basically on like a probationary period, and they have very little right to appeal if they're fired. This is another example of things that the Trump administration is doing that will take years to remedy, even if the next government is amenable to trying to do so, right? Like these are the people who are making decisions for thousands of people that are life or death.

• 3:23:37Speaker 07

  The second thing I want to talk about is a DOJ lawsuit against New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. The DOJ says it is, quote, "challenging state laws that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens." The DOJ claims that, quote, "these laws unconstitutionally discriminate against US citizens who are not afforded the same reduced tuition or scholarships, create incentives for illegal immigration, and reward illegal aliens with benefits that US citizens are not eligible for, all in direct conflict with federal law." Now, they have been going after this for a while, right? The DOJ has been doing these suits since last year. In some Republican states, Texas is one I can think of, I think Kansas maybe as well, definitely Texas, in some Republican states, state officials joined the DOJ in asking their policies to be vacated.

• 3:24:21Speaker 07

  So they obviously had success with those, right? In Illinois, not a Republican state, the DOJ won a case and had the in-state's benefits declared unconstitutional based on a federal statute that reads, quote, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state or political subdivision for any post-secondary education benefit, unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit in no less amount, duration, and scope, without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident." So I would attempt to simplify that and explain it to people.

• 3:25:03Speaker 07

  But as we are about to find out, the very nuances of that text matter. I mean, this sort of law is often complicated, but I was having trouble following what that means exactly. Yeah, that's a fuck, like if somebody wrote that sentence in a writing class I was teaching, I wouldn't be happy about it. It's a sentence that requires you to like do circular breathing to, to read it. Yeah. So in Minnesota, there was a case like this. But because Minnesota uses attending a state high school to determine tuition fees, this is therefore not a residency test, right? So the residency part of that massive sentence matters.

• 3:25:48Speaker 07

  They also argued that the law says unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit, it does not say all citizens of the United States are eligible for such a benefit. And so Minnesota was able to show that a non-Minnesota resident who did attend a Minnesota high school, went to University of Minnesota, was eligible for in-state tuition. So a US citizen would be eligible. All US citizens would not. And so they were able to hang their hat on those two things, right? It's not about... Residency per se, a citizen could receive those benefits.

• 3:26:31Speaker 07

  I was looking around for residency requirements and it seems that some of these states may be able to make a similar case to Minnesota. Others will not, right? Some of them require residency in the more traditional, like domiciled in a state. Yeah, perhaps driver's license, registered to vote, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And so it will be more challenging for some than others. Eventually, I imagine this is one of those things where we've already seen different decisions, right? And that's because different states have different laws, but I'm sure this is one of those things that will eventually find its way to the Supreme Court in the next couple of years. Regardless, it's an attempt to drive undocumented people further into the shadows and create an underclass of underpaid labor without rights.

• 3:27:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. People on the right constantly talk about assimilation. They used to, I think now they just straight up do more racist shit. But the act of assimilation will be much harder if people cannot access education. Right? I am sure I have had hundreds of undocumented students come through my classroom. I'm not gonna be like hands up if you're undocumented, right? I'm not gonna, there's no need for me to know that. But I know that the universities I teach at do a great deal and provide a great deal of resources to undocumented people. Our universities are better because of that. They're like having a diverse range of experiences and opinions in the classroom makes your classroom better. It will make it easier for people on the right to make these arguments that they're like stealing working class jobs, right?

• 3:28:00Speaker 07

  Because people will not have the qualifications they need to do other jobs. They will end up being underpaid and exploited. These policies, I should add, were relatively bipartisan when they were passed into 2010s. And even for the last quarter of the last century, true heads will recognize this from a show I did in 2023. Yes, my name is David Grossberg and I'd like to know, do you think that children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools free? Or do you think that their parents should pay for their education? Who are you addressing that to? I think you're first in this. He was looking right at you. I said he was. Look, I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so

• 3:28:42Speaker 07

  sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up. But today, if those people are here, I would reluctantly say I think they would, they would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors. But it has, the problem has to be solved. The problem has to be solved because with, as we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law. And secondly, we're exacerbating relations with Mexico.

• 3:29:22Speaker 07

  The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools, it seems to me. I don't want to see a whole, if they're living here, I don't want to see a whole, I think, a six and eight-year-old kids being made, you know, one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals. These are good people, strong people. Part of my family is Mexican. That's wild. Yeah, that is a famous woke immigration advocate, George Herbert Walker Bush. That's really kind of mind-blowing. It's genuinely remarkable, isn't it, to look back? This is not that long ago. Yeah. None of us were alive then, I guess, but like, you know, these are people who people

• 3:30:07Speaker 07

  still look to as like contemporary political people who they admire, right? This is to the left of a lot of Democrats right now on immigration. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of Democrats would be scared to talk about Yes. immigration that way. Yeah, to say part of my family is Mexican, to say that like I would never want to leave these children as an underclass like that, like. No, it's insane. Yeah, like, I mean, this coupled with like the, the public charge rule, the concerted effort to increase this war on like the poorest, most marginalized people Yeah. in our country and criminalize them and push them out of public life compared to, yeah, George H. W. Bush in the 80s is, is wild.

• 3:30:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, like it's remarkable that we have come so, I'm not saying that things were great in the 1980s, to be clear. No, that's part of what makes it so, so wild. Yeah.

• 3:31:06Speaker 07

  These people did a bunch of really terrible shit, but like Reagan and Bush would both be on the very progressive flank of the Democrats with some of their policies on immigration today. I guess the way I would like to finish this segment, if we can come that far, that far, then we can come back a long way pretty quickly too, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It does take courage, especially from politicians, because as Garrison said, like, a lot of politicians feel like they're gonna lose the, the center, when in fact, like, like that position was a centrist position in, in many voters' lifetimes. I think it, it just bears remarkable on how far we've come and how quickly we've got there. Yeah, geez, I'm, I'm still just kind, kind of in shock. I mean, my, my whole life, I feel like the way I've heard debates around immigration,

• 3:31:50Speaker 07

  certainly on the Republican side, but also largely on the Democrat side, it's just pitting like workers against each other. Yeah. And just hearing a Bush talk about how, no, we should like care for these people. They should be educated. Like, why, why would we want to have these people who are living here be not educated, not able to actually live like a, a meaningful life? Yeah. It's, it's a level of like humanity that I just have not really experienced in, you know, politics in my kind of living memory and certainly on the Republican side. Yeah, yeah. I mean, George Walker Bush spoke Spanish, right? Was it, was Walker his middle name? George W. Bush spoke Spanish. And his W is his middle name, I think. It's a sea change since even then, right?

• 3:32:35Speaker 07

  Like, I, we can draw a pretty straight line from Obama's massive deportation campaign to today, for whatever people think of Obama, he deported a shit ton of people. Yeah. The, the reason they called him the deporter in chief, but like Yeah. nine 11 and then the war on terror and then the Syrian civil war, that certainly changed the discourse in Europe, right? And I think Yeah. I mean, once we had little babies washing up dead on beaches and politicians realized that that wasn't going to trigger people to get in the streets and fuck things up. Yeah. They knew that they could do an awful lot and not acknowledge, not acknowledge the humanity that George H. W. Bush acknowledges in that. The other thing that's really interesting to me about this is like this is, this is 1980, Reagan is on stage here. Yep.

• 3:33:19Speaker 07

  And how much of this, this is also like a pretty determining fork in the road in, in, in some ways and like leading to like neoliberalism totally taking over, how state capacity gets completely, completely reduced. And then you see this in like, you know, the next Bush era and Obama and this getting accelerated with Trump, that their only solution to the problems caused by neoliberalism is not actually fixing neoliberal economics, but it has to be turning workers against each other. Yeah. That, that is the, that is the last thing that they can do because they still serve capital, they still want to do neoliberal economics, but that system has completely stressed itself and has sabotaged the economy, wrecked housing and jobs.

• 3:34:01Speaker 07

  And so now, no, we should not actually fix those things or have the government care for people, but it is, it's these other people who are, you know, even, even more poor than you that, that are causing all of these problems. Right, like this pivot to scapegoating. Yes. As opposed to like doing anything useful with it. I mean, even Reagan, right? Reagan buys the IRC, it was a massive amnesty, like, like two, 2.6, 2.7 million people, something in that range. Yeah. Were effectively like legalized by the Reagan administration. And to vault from that to where, as you say, like to vault from like the state trying to make any meaningful difference in making working class people's lives better to scapegoating one group so the other group doesn't complain about their own situation.

• 3:34:46Speaker 07

  It's very obvious. And every day for the past like month, Fox News had a segment about the, the DSA's like amnesty for all immigrants plank on their platform, right? Yeah, I'm not alone in pointing out that like Reagan did a similar thing, I think, like Yeah. I'm sure lots of people have, have like tried to dunk on him that way, but yeah, I heard like a, a right wing metal song about like Oh my god. 2023 outdoor detention, someone sent it to me today, one of the funniest fucking things, but yeah, it, for some reason, it talked about the DSA amnesty, which is a hard thing to, to, to shoehorn into a metal song, but I did it, so I guess like Jesus Christ. Well done. Congratulations.

• 3:35:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, it, it, that has become like the boogeyman of. Right wing politics from people, I guess, like, I know I talk about this dude law. I would love to hear from this dude. I would love to talk to this dude. The dude who was walking around Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretti was killed with a sign that said, what would Ronald Reagan do? And he was at the anti ICE march, right? Like, yeah, huh. Seriously, genuinely, if anybody knows who that person is, please put that person in touch with me. Oh, yeah. Like, I think that is a type of person who we need to talk to right now. Yeah, yeah. And like, not make that person feel like they can't grow in other ways, hopefully, you know, but, oh, I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe there was just an ironic sign. Anyway, I'm fascinated to talk to that person.

• 3:36:13Speaker 07

  It's always real sad to me to look at these things and just be like, you know, like, it's, it's not that long ago that this was a very bipartisan issue. And like, now, once again, I guess bipartisan in that there is complete agreement that people who tried to come here without passing through a port of entry should die in numbers that are large enough to dissuade people from doing it. And if those numbers have to increase, then so be it. And that migrants should be treated as humans without rights. Like, the Biden administration absolutely did that, too. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it sucks. You know, if, if, if, if you want to look at what the actual policy disagreement is about, it's, should you use the state to carry out a full on ethnic cleansing?

• 3:36:56Speaker 07

  Or should you use the state to simply commit heinous acts of violence? Yeah, it's should the basis of this purge be some arbitrary line along the line from like, full legal status to no legal status, right? Or should the basis of it be, as it is now, anyone we can get out, we get out? Like, yeah. Unless you're on that DSA like amnesty point, when I guess like, uh, that's a different point, but it is not one that like the DNC is making as a whole. No, that is, that is, uh, it is, I think it's useful to hold those things in distinction. Yes. At this point right now, I mean, will that change over time? Uh, maybe we'll introduce its, its own contradictions over time, maybe, but we will deal with those when they get there.

• 3:37:42Speaker 07

  Yeah. But, I mean, yeah, it's the opinion of, of Trump now is, uh, no, unless you pay me a million dollars for the gold card or whatever, you are not allowed inside. It's mind boggling to think that this is the thing that, yeah, within my parents' lifetime was completely uncontroversial. Even like, I remember those, you know, I was in the US when they passed those, uh, tuition things. This is the same time, right, when there was relatively bipartisan support for Dreamers, too. Yep. Like, when it was uncontroversial that those people who've grown up for nearly their entire lives here should be allowed to remain here. And all of that shit has gone now. And then, like, I guess, like, even the fact that there are some people who are so cowardly

• 3:38:23Speaker 07

  on both parties that they, they once supported it and now don't just because they think that's the way the wind is blowing. Yeah. Is something that shouldn't go unremarked upon, like, I don't, the, the, the least qualified people to be in any position of leadership are the ones who are cowards like that. Uh, and, uh, yeah, we have a great deal of them in Congress. If you want to hear about some people who shouldn't be in Congress, I have a podcast called Natural Causes. We will talk eventually about Mike Lee and why he is like this. Why does Mike Lee want to sell all the public land that we get to share? And who has donated to his campaign to make him want to do it? But we can hear about other stuff, too.

• 3:39:02Speaker 07

  This week, we're going to cover Cyclospora, uh, which is the incontinence parasite spreading through the Midwest. And we're going to talk about what it tells us about the rights of agricultural labor, neoliberalism, NAFTA, uh, and all the massive corporations between you and your crunch rep. And after that, we're going to talk about fire. If you listen to the show, you'll know that I was in Spokane last week. So I'm going to talk to some people who evacuated about what you should do when your phone starts going ape shit and how you can prepare yourself for fire evacuations, because this stuff isn't changing anytime soon. I'm going to talk to some people about how you can be a good friend to your friend who is being evacuated.

• 3:39:44Speaker 07

  Uh, and then I'm going to talk to some folks who lost their homes in Los Angeles and how they've recovered since then, uh, and what you can do to help them. And then a week after that, we're going to talk about what we can all learn, uh, from indigenous fire knowledge and how we can better take care of our lands to not suppress fire, but to have more say in when and how fire happens. So if you would like to hear about those topics, you can, uh, look up Natural Causes, wherever podcasts are given away for free, probably the same place you're listening to this one. Yeah, talk about fucking golf as well. Hate golf.

• 3:40:22Speaker 07

  Somehow that's both the most and least British moment I've ever, I've seen from you.

• 3:40:31Speaker 07

  Returning to the bleak present, Trump has issued an executive order on Monday about vaccines that is, at the same time, both extremely disturbing and somewhat unlikely to do that much. There's sort of a few different components to this executive order. There's one part of it that is an attempt to ram through RFK Junior's attempts to reduce the amount of vaccines that children get for absolutely no reason whatsoever. RFK Junior, we've talked about this previously on the show, RFK Junior, has been attempting to reduce the number of vaccines that children get in childhood through CDC advisory boards, which is the way that you are theoretically supposed to do this. However, this was blocked in court.

• 3:41:15Speaker 07

  And as those litigations are ongoing, those policies simply have not gone through. So Trump's attempting to use an executive order to bypass that process. It probably won't work. There is another separate part about separating the MMR vaccine into three different vaccines. So the MMR vaccine is a combined vaccine from measles, bumps and rubella. And part of this executive order is an attempt to get those spread out. And then there's also a part that's about threatening states who don't allow religious exemptions for vaccinations in order to send their kids to school. And then a lot of the total executive order is this kind of, in some ways, grandstanding,

• 3:41:58Speaker 07

  where Trump is talking about how this is what the government says the science is. And Trump is saying the government says that the science is that the MMR vaccine is bad and that you need three separate vaccines and that that's good and that that's what, like, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine is now. It's almost more like a post than an executive order. It's just him saying this is the government's position on the science.

• 3:42:25Speaker 07

  Now, th- this is all very classic anti-vax stuff. In particular, the separating out the MMR vaccine is just the classic anti-vaccine stuff, getting back to a man named Andrew Wakefield, who was stripped of his medical license after it discovered that he had been hired to produce evidence linking vaccines to autism by a group that was trying to sue the British government for damages over their belief that vaccines were quote unquote, causing their children's autism. So Wakefield was hired by this group to produce a study that would support their claims. And then also, Wakefield, it turned out, had lied to the parents of young children about the painful and invasive medical, uh, experiments he performed on them. So that's how he'd lost his medical license. There's a very good H. Bomber Guide, long essay, video essay on this that I recommend watching.

• 3:43:11Speaker 07

  Um, and Wakefield very specifically peddled a line about the MMR vaccine. His, his argument was that the MMR vaccine could be dangerous if they were taken together, but if taken individually, they were safe. This doesn't make sense, even by the mechanism of the fake condition he made up, but it made him seem like less of a full on anti-vaxer. And then he also did this because he was trying to get a patent to make a separate vaccine to sell them to the kids of parents who believed the MMR was dangerous. So that this entire thing is a product of Wakefield's attempt to do a grift in the 1990s and the British media latching on to it and spreading it. And this has just sort of persisted as this zombie belief where in the speech where Trump

• 3:43:52Speaker 07

  is giving, talking about him signing this executive order, he's talking about how the, the, the MMR together is lethal, but individually they're safe, which is the stuff that, that Wakefield was saying in the 90s. It was, it was never true then, it was never true now. Yeah. But. That's why we all died as children. I guess that's why I have autism. I don't know, like, I didn't die at rubella or whatever. No, that's, that's caused by transness. It's not the other way around.

• 3:44:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, so ba- basically, we have, we have an executive order that is the sort of persistence of this zombie grift that has, that has transcended this guy's original grift and is now in an executive order from the President of the United States. But it's sort of unlikely that any of the stuff in here is going to actually have actual effects on children getting vaccines, which is mostly good. Obviously, the attacks on states that don't have religious exemptions for vaccinating kids to go to school is bad, but it's really unclear how the legal mechanism for any of this would work. And another complication is that we don't have separate vaccines for the components of MMR. The US does not make them.

• 3:45:07Speaker 07

  Nominally, nominally, this executive order is supposed to set up the option for parents to do that. And Trump said he would be like, working with the private sector to allow this to happen, but this doesn't currently exist. So. We need another Operation Lightspeed. Yeah, it's Operation Warp Speed, but like, for anti-vax. Yeah. Operation Light Drive. Yeah, and, and obviously, every single reputable medical institution recommends that you do them all at the same time because it's safe. And also, there's, actually does mean giving children less vaccinations, so they're more likely to show up and do them. But they have 72 vaccines, Mia, 72. Yeah, so let's make it 74. All at once, all at the same time. More vaccines. I wa- I want more vaccines. I want to catch less diseases.

• 3:45:51Speaker 07

  We should vaccinate our children even more, like, that rules. I know, I want to get vaccinated for everything. It's like in D and D, you're like, oh, do you want protection from fire? And you're like, yeah, I want protection from fire. It rocks. Give me a limes vaccine. I want it. Wait, what is that?

• 3:46:23Speaker 07

  By God, is that Mia Wong's music? Yes, it is. It is tariff talk. We have a brief tariff talk. So tariff refunds are continuing after the Supreme Court overruled the so-called Liberation Day tariffs. But the question remains, who are these refunds actually going to? I'm guessing it's all of the consumers, right? No, no, it's corporations. And I'm gonna say right off the bat that Amazon is saying, is claiming that some specific consumers will get refunds? No, if you, no, they're not. Like, if you, if you believe that, I have the NFT of a bridge to sell you. Like, just, no, no, they're not.

• 3:47:06Speaker 07

  You don't think Amazon's gonna pass off all, like, $600 million to consumers in, like, an equitable and fair fashion? No. Come on. I just, I just, I can't, I can't take this seriously. I, this is, this is one of those things where you read mainstream journalists talking about this, and it's like, okay, yes, they have to, at, at face value, quote the Amazon CFO- Yeah. -and print the just obvious lie that they are telling. But I, I don't have to do that. No, absolutely not. They're just lying to you. Now, in reality, it has been, you know, it has been large corporations who have reaped the over $100 billion rewards from the tariff refunds, not consumers. And prices, meanwhile, have stayed high. What?

• 3:47:51Speaker 07

  Who could possibly have guessed that? Now, this obviously allows corporations to double dip by both receiving their tariff rebate checks from the government while also maintaining the increased prices nominally caused by the tariffs. This is because corporations are so-called price setters. They do not, as neoclassical economics suggests, take prices from some kind of abstract market or, like, you know, the point where two curves meet. That is not how prices are set. Prices, in reality, are set by guys in corporate offices whose job it is to set the price. And now, increasingly, it is sometimes set by, you know, AI programs, which are doing effectively the same thing, but trying to rip you off even more.

• 3:48:32Speaker 07

  Now, what this means is that, while you do have to take into account consumer sentiment to some, to some extent, right, in terms of, like, you know, maintaining brand loyalty, once you have an excuse to raise prices, right? Once consumers have been disciplined into accepting higher prices as the quote-unquote "results of tariffs," companies can simply leave prices high without fear of backlash and reap in more profit. This is also a decent amount of the inflation during the Biden administration, where there were increased supply chain costs which increased prices, but then those costs never came down again as supply chain costs decreased a little bit because corporations could simply leave the price sticky and keep, like, screwing you over.

• 3:49:14Speaker 07

  So, the, the net result of the tariff refunds has been companies leaving prices at the points they were at already and consumers seeing absolutely none of it. No, it's incredible. Even Amazon is saying that, like, they're not setting up a system for consumers to, like, file for a claim. Yeah. Amazon will assess by themselves if individual consumers deserve a refund and then contact them individually. Oh, I trust them to do that. That makes sense. It's incredible. It's, it's incredible. There's, there's a Canadian version of the song "Deloitte Pelosi," which is down with the police, a classical Yiddish song. A Canadian guy, his name I'm blanking on right now, wrote a version of it where one

• 3:49:56Speaker 07

  of the lines is, it's about, it's about the police, like, killing a guy in custody. "Hey, hey, Deloitte Pelosi, means the same thing now as yesterday." "Out of your houses into the trees." Yeah. But one of the lines that has always stuck with me is specifically the line, at first the situation makes the lawmen look so filthy, but they investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty. And then, that's what's happening here. They investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty. Who, who, who could possibly have expected this? All power to the corporations. Let's- Who are people, so? That's right. That's right. Electrification plus corporate power.

• 3:50:37Speaker 07

  Let's, uh, let's go on one more ad break and then discuss everyone's favorite thing: elections.

• 3:50:55Speaker 07

  All right, we are back. In Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar will likely succeed Mike Walz as governor of Minnesota, winning the Democratic primary with 90% of the vote. Meanwhile, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Lindell, also known as "The My Pillow Guy," has lost the primary to Lisa DeMuth, the Minnesota House Speaker. So Mike ended up losing with 32% of the vote to Lisa DeMuth's 43%. This is a legitimate blow to, like, the power of Trump's endorsement. And, you know, obviously, Mike Lindell's a very, you know, public figure, while Lisa,

• 3:51:39Speaker 07

  you know, is an actual state politician that voters are somewhat more familiar with as a real politician and not that guy in that TV ad who thinks the election is fake. So this is an interesting referendum in the Republican Party itself on Trump's endorsement power and figures like Mike. So kind of a, basically, picking old-style Republicans to new-style Republicans? Yes. Like, she is like the Minnesota, like, House Speaker, like, of, of the city house. Like, people that they know who are local, who are not as diehard mega, at least compared to Mike Lindell. You know, not saying that Lisa DeMuth is a good politician, nor, nor Amy Klobuchar, right? Right. Like, both of the people in this race, I think, suck. Yeah.

• 3:52:23Speaker 07

  But it, in looking at, like, what the future of the Republican Party might be, the fact that Trump's endorsement here did not result in Mike winning is, is something that I find to be a bit interesting. Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-endorsed lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan- Ooh, probably a Margaret. You think so? Peggy's usually a Margaret. Well, there you go. She won the primary to replace Democratic Senator Tina Smith, who is stepping down. Flanagan got 59% of the vote compared to the AIPAC-backed moderate House Representative Angie Craig, who earned 39.4%. So basically, like, a 20-point difference.

• 3:53:06Speaker 07

  ICE was one of the main factors in this race, as, as a lot of the races are in Minnesota, are being defined in large part by ICE, following Metro Surge. Flanagan attacked Craig for voting in support of the Lake and Riley Act and voting for a resolution thanking ICE. Meanwhile, Craig attacked Flanagan for the post-pandemic daycare fraud scandals in Minnesota regarding their state-run social services. Peggy Flanagan has also been very outspoken in support of trans rights and trans youth. Yeah, she's, she's been fairly outspoken in her support of trans kids getting gender-affirming healthcare and also wearing the, like, protect-trans kids, like, knife shirt.

• 3:53:49Speaker 07

  I like when Margaret's don't go in the Thatcher direction, so. Yeah, that's right. That is, that is good. So, House Representative Angie Craig, who was running for Senate, is now out of a job after losing to Peggy. And in the race for her House seat, the former mayor of Lakeville, Matt Little, who's a progressive running on Medicare for All and regulating AI data centers, just won the Democratic primary, beating the pro-Israel candidate, State Senator Matt Klein. This is 47% to 30%. Matt Little also participated in the community rapid response to Operation Metro Surge. Ilhan Omar also won the primary for her reelection campaign by over 80%.

• 3:54:34Speaker 07

  But for the big election news this week, let's turn to Wisconsin, where DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was heavily favored to win in the polls, barely lost in an upset to establishment-backed candidate David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive, who was endorsed by the sitting governor late in the race. And this, this race was so close. This is less than 4,000 votes, like, I think it's at 3,700-some votes right now. That's the difference. It's 0.5 percentage point difference. This was an incredibly close race. As much as the polls were wrong about this race in some ways, polls did have support for Hong about right, around 40%.

• 3:55:19Speaker 07

  Some polls maybe had her overperforming by, like, 2% to 6%. But the main thing that polling did not account for was the electorate getting in behind Crowley late into the race to edge out Hong. Polling had Crowley at about 22%, and he ended up winning with just over 40%. Now, this polling was also from at least a week or more before the election. And as we'll discuss in a bit, things can change pretty late in the game in some of these elections. Now, turnout was also much higher than expected, over 800,000 votes, nearing, like, presidential primary levels. So, like, Hong got a lot of votes, just she needed 4,000 more to win the election.

• 3:56:04Speaker 07

  I think the way mainstream media's gonna be talking about this race will be somewhat frustrating. The Politico headline right now is, quote, "The Far Left Hits a Wall."

• 3:56:16Speaker 07

  Which is interesting framing because last week their headline following Abdul Al-Sayed's victory was, quote, progressives didn't get the big election night they wanted, meaning Abdul did not win by as big of a margin as what progressives were expecting. And so this is actually bad for progressives. So whether or not you win or whether or not you lose, it's actually bad for progressives, right? That is, that is the line that media is going to take regarding this race. And again, this race was very close, hung lost by less than 4,000 votes and did pretty well in some rural counties. These results come down to campaign strategies. It's not a massive referendum on like DSA politics. Like this,

• 3:56:59Speaker 07

  this race was a stacked roster. There were seven people on the ballot. Over 150,000 votes were for other candidates besides Hong and Crowley, many of whom suspended their campaigns. And there's no ranked choice voting in this state. And oddly enough, Crowley himself suspended his campaign in early July before two other moderate candidates dropped out of the race for various reasons. And so then Crowley got back into the race with consolidated support from the party establishment. Though Crowley might not like that term establishment. Here's a clip from him. I'm trying to figure out who the establishment is, right? I think that when we talk about

• 3:57:41Speaker 07

  the establishment, I don't know who that is. I'm a kid that grew up in 53206 zippo. My parents was drug addicts and suffered from mental health. I worked extremely hard to be where I am today. And so when people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American candidate. Hong was also wildly outspent, like many of these DSA or left populist races. She did end up spending $235,000 on digital and streaming ads. But she spent $0 on traditional TV ads. And an outside group also spent about $220,000 in ads for Hong, but these ads

• 3:58:22Speaker 07

  were also digital. There was, there was no TV ads for Hong in this race. Meanwhile, to quote Politico, quote, "Two outside groups backing late reentry into David Crowley spent a combined 3.3 million, mostly on TV, while the Milwaukee County Executive's own campaign spent nearly 900,000," unquote. So one of the takeaways from this race is that maybe you should spend money on some TV ads at least. Now, Hong's campaign was not, you know, flush in cash, but TV ads might be needed to edge out a bit more support in rural areas where throughout election, Crowley kept building a lead little by little.

• 3:59:06Speaker 07

  And like I was watching Karnacki's stream last night, and that was the main way Crowley edged out a lead, is that basically every 10 minutes, he would win like, you know, 20 votes in some rural county, then you know, 50 votes in another, and this slowly built up to, you know, hundreds and then thousands of votes in these little, small counties. Now, Hong also did win some rural counties, specifically in the northern part of the state, and also a few rural counties in like the center of the state as well. And the fact that Hong did so well with no TV ads shows how good the DSA ground game was. This was a 4,000 vote difference with no TV ads, and she did very well. She just

• 3:59:48Speaker 07

  didn't do well enough. So maybe as good as the ground game is, it might not be good enough alone. Now, the other sort of thing I'm seeing people talk about is that maybe a stronger base turnout could have crossed this 4,000 vote gap, right? And specifically Madison and in Green Bay, where she was expected to do a little bit better than what she did. And what if something like a, you know, Bernie Sanders or an AOC endorsement rally have helped mobilize an extra few thousand votes in these areas where her kind of base is concentrated? Now, AOC and Bernie have said that for this cycle, they're mostly focusing on congressional races, which is why they did not get involved in this governor's race. But it is definitely worth pointing out that Hong did not do as well with college

• 4:00:30Speaker 07

  educated voters as other DSA candidates have in recent past, or someone like Al-Sayed. She still won college voters, but not by like sort of massive margins that you're seeing in other races. And as I mentioned before, a lot of this race shifted pretty, pretty late, when the, the final weeks of the primary were spent arguing about, quote unquote, electability. And this was, this was a joint effort from both the media, from news media, and the democratic establishment to question whether Hong is electable, if she'll be able to beat the Republican in the general, or will her like extreme views and old tweets alienate voters? Here is the sitting governor.

• 4:01:13Speaker 07

  Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers today awaiting into the governor's race as he was asked about Democratic frontrunner Francesca Hong, specifically can she beat Republican Tom Tiffany? I think she's in a tough place. She has spent her entire campaign dealing with, not with the issues, but what, what's on the Twitter. And I just find that that's not a good way to beat Tom Tiffany. In TV news and online, there's a lot of questions about her previous stances on abolishing police and outlets like Fox News and also on social media. They circulated an old clip from 2021 when she started serving in the state assembly, talking about being

• 4:01:56Speaker 07

  concerned about her son's, quote unquote, proximity to whiteness. Here's a former Biden admin official, the chief of staff to the White House Press Office and a press advisor, discussing Hong on the morning of the election.

• 4:02:09Speaker 05

  She has no talent. She has no charisma. Her ideas, if a toddler said them out loud, would get put in timeout. She's not a real person. She's actually, in my opinion, deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs. And I cannot believe that we might be on the cusp of having to lift up this person who is undeserving of a seat in Congress.

• 4:02:31Speaker 07

  That's pretty wild. Also pretty wild because, quote unquote, undeserving for a seat in Congress. Hong was not running for Congress. She was running for the governor of Wisconsin. But anyway, you know, much of the news coverage of the campaign during, during the final week and a week and a half of the race was spent talking about this stuff and specifically talking about old tweets about, quote unquote, canceling Thanksgiving, and how Hong, who used to work in the restaurant industry, just doesn't really like holidays. And I think the, the way that this really dominated the race, and she was, you know, bombarded with a lot of questions about this, kind of demonstrated how important message discipline is in running these races. And you do not need to answer stupid questions

• 4:03:16Speaker 07

  flatly. But you can rather use, use that as, as a way to promote or spread your campaign message, saying like, no, my biggest concern as governor is whether families will be able to afford to put food on the table and eat together, no matter what holidays that they celebrate. That would be message discipline, right? That is, that is something that Zorron did very well when campaigning. And the other thing I've kind of seen these past few weeks is a lot of these DSA candidates get asked about DSA's new platform, Workers Deserve More, which we've discussed on the show, which is neither like a minimum nor a maximum platform. It has a lot of like immediate term things that are very, very possible in like in the short term, that people, you know, should be collectively rallying around

• 4:03:58Speaker 07

  and pushing for. But it also has a lot of like long-term goals that the platform's own prologue admits, like, won't be possible under our current system and would require like a complete overhaul of society. But the platform itself doesn't distinguish between its own like actual minimum and maximum proposals. All of the actual proposals are like in the same section. And I think this is, in some ways, opened up attacks from news media, especially hostile news media. This is both a good thing or a bad thing, right? You, you could interpret the platform being structured the way it is as a way to kind of help keep DSA or some of these, like some of these ideas from sliding over to the right. And having all these proposals together does open the Overton window on

• 4:04:41Speaker 07

  a lot of like legitimately radical ideas, where, you know, now the public is, is debating things like abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, drafting a new constitution, you know, public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. But the way this platform is structured opens candidates up to attack from, you know, media journalists who do not have, you know, the best interests of these candidates at heart, where they're, they're being grilled about a lot of things that they themselves are not running on. So instead of being asked about, you know, raising the minimum wage, but ending gerrymandering, you know, ICE, healthcare, childcare, data centers, whatever, they're instead being asked about other, you know, maximum proposals in the DSA platform.

• 4:05:23Speaker 07

  And again, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I think a skilled speaker can navigate this and defend their own positions without throwing DSA under the bus. But this is a sort of trend that I am noticing. I think specifically Oliver Larkin in Florida has handled this really, really well. And Chris Rabb, who won the primary in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia, has also handled questioning on this really, really well. And I think Hong herself was getting better at this towards the end. To close, I want to play this, this short clip of, of Hong on Fox News the morning of the election.

• 4:05:58Speaker 05

  For voters who fear that the democratic socialism could turn into communism, what would you want them to know? No. This is a state where we still have a 233 tick minimum wage and 70

• 4:06:12Speaker 05

  725 minimum wage. I think it's going to be pretty hard to turn that into socialism soon. But what we can do with this campaign is make sure that we're fighting for the policies that working class people first, and we're fighting for $20 minimum wage.

• 4:06:31Speaker 07

  Interesting. The way the anchor's there at the end, just I have no idea how to react. I, I think that, that is really telling. I mean, there's just a fundamental generational divide between people who are like, that person said socialism, that should completely end their political career, which if you're over the age of about 40, is just like an axiom. Yes. If you're an American and you said the word socialism, you're not fit. You don't belong here. And if you're under 40, you're like, shut the fuck up. I don't know. Yeah, I can't afford to like live at all. Yeah. So maybe I'll support politicians or policies that might, might make my life slightly better. Yeah. Anyway, that is Wisconsin.

• 4:07:12Speaker 07

  Let's close with Robert and a very funny story.

• 4:07:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so on to my main story for this week, which obviously is not really my story, but I thought it was the funniest thing I read this week, so I'm going to tell you guys about it. So on July 8th, 2026, Donald Trump was at Ankara, Turkey with a bunch of his top aides and cabinet people, as well as his normal press corps retainers. He was there for a NATO summit and overnight on the 7th, I believe, he made the decision to have US forces restart their strikes against Iran after, I think this is like the fourth or the fifth, maybe the seventh breakdown in negotiations we've had. I, I honestly have lost track of how many times that has happened. But we started doing strikes again overnight, right? So after that decision was made, but before Trump decamped from Turkey late on the 8th, CBS News reports that US intelligence detected a quote credible plot to fire a missile at

• 4:08:03Speaker 02

  Air Force One. Now, for clarity, the Air Force One that the president flew to Ankara is what I'm going to call Air Force One Two, because it's the Qatari Air Force One that replaced the real Air Force One that Trump was given as a gift by a $400 million gift by Qatar, right? And this is legally distinct from a bribe. I need to specify that. And I need to note, we will be talking about a lot of Air Force One in this episode. Well, we'll be talking about three specifically.

• 4:08:34Speaker 07

  Because like technically, technically any plane the president is on is supposed to be Air Force One?

• 4:08:38Speaker 02

  Yes. That said, it says supposed to, they're all supposed to like change the transponder, but they don't do that in situations like we're about to talk about where there's like a threat, right?

• 4:08:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:08:47Speaker 02

  So I should talk a little bit about the Qatari Air Force One, which I'm calling Air Force One Two. Yeah, I said it was a $400 million gift that's legally distinct from a bribe, and it was, but because all they had done was make a really nice plane, Air Force One is a lot more than a really nice plane. Air Force One is presumably, I, everyone who is an expert on planes says, about the hardest plane to kill in the world, right? Because it's Air Force One. The Qatari Air Force One is not that naturally that hardened, right? Because it can't be. So they spent months and months and months and $750 million retrofitting the Qatari plane to ensure that it had the proper security features to transport and protect the president. Now, even though I just said that, that $750 million still did not bring this plane

• 4:09:32Speaker 02

  up, as far as I'm aware, it didn't even bring it particularly close to what the actual Air Force One is capable of. It does not have the whole suite of electronic countermeasures and stuff that the real Air Force One has. It's still not as secure. I also want to read one other note from aviation source news about the Qatari Air Force One. Plans to transfer the jet to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation rather than extend use to the next president after his term add to the controversies.

• 4:09:55Speaker 07

  Yes, that's one of the most insane parts about the Qatar jet is that it's technically not a personal gift to Trump because it's property of the government. And yet, after he leaves office, it'll be transferred to his library foundation. He's keeping that fucker? It's insane.

• 4:10:11Speaker 02

  Which he's put nearly a billion dollars of public money into. Anyway, so the plane that he flew to Ankara, the Secret Service is immediately like, well, now that there is a credible threat, we cannot have him fly out on the Qatari Air Force One because it doesn't have the countermeasures it would need. So at the last moment on the 8th, Mr. Trump announced that for old times sake, I think was very close to his exact statement, he's going to be flying home from Ankara on the old Air Force One, which we'll call Air Force One One, right? So he says he's going to fly home on this thing. And to all, as far as everyone is aware, on the 8th, he does, right? He, he goes, takes a whatever kind of ride out to Air Force One. He's photographed at the door of Air Force One.

• 4:10:52Speaker 02

  He enters Air Force One One and then Air Force One One takes off with all of the, the press people and a bunch of Trump staffers on it. Now, what we didn't know then, but we know now, is that Trump was not on Air Force One One after it took off, even though he got on the plane. Because the day before we sat down to record this episode of ED, The Washington Post published one of the funnier investigations of the second Trump era. Its title is contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat. Now, CBS and The New York Times had previously reported that Trump had boarded the old Air Force One due to this threat. That was a lie. In reality, the Secret Service had Trump board the old Air Force One on camera and

• 4:11:34Speaker 02

  then put all of the normal people who would be on it, on it, and then sent it on its way without Trump as a decoy in case the Iranians wanted to try to shoot it down. Any major administration visit to a summit like they held in Ankara is going to include not just Air Force One, but a couple of other Air Force marked passenger jets, which are all suitable for hosting cabinet officials and other high ranking members of the government, but are also there for another reason, in case the president needed to make a discreet escape on a different plane. This is not the only time the president has not been on Air Force One when people have thought he was, right? The White House doesn't have a history of lying to people about this. It's more the obfuscated kind of in the moment like they did with Bush. They'll just say, we're not telling you where the fucking president is because shit's happening right now.

• 4:12:18Speaker 02

  So the fact that they did an elaborate lie and sent Air Force One into the sky full of people as like a decoy for an Iranian missile is pretty new and fucked up. But the fact that the Secret Service is like, we probably shouldn't send him out on any of the obvious Air Force Ones is not really all that like weird of a moment. What is weird is how they did it, right? And I'm going to quote from The Washington Post. In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane, an Air Force C-32A via an airport catering truck you typically use to load meals and other supplies pre-flight, according to the US official corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a decoy with media and some White House staff aboard the official set.

• 4:13:04Speaker 02

  And the article goes into a hysterical amount of deal. They're combing through all of the pictures of the airport on that day and they show the catering Trump when Trump would have been on it. You can see that in the article. It's like, it just looks like a catering truck on a plane, but it's really funny to know that he's just squatting in there.

• 4:13:20Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, he's got to be having the best time of his life doing this, right? Like, he's just like.

• 4:13:24Speaker 02

  I bet it was really fun. I bet it was super fun and he felt like a spy. I know.

• 4:13:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. It's a bummer. God.

• 4:13:32Speaker 02

  But it is really funny because like, there, there's a lot that's funny in this, right? And I can't, to be fair, I can't imagine any member of the White House press corps would be surprised at the president using them as a decoy. In fact, before it was revealed that Trump had left the original Air Force One or Air Force One One for what I guess we'll call Air Force One Three, this happened. Quote, asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window shades on the plane in Turkey, Trump said that it was because you're probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags we have to deal with. Trump said that he has a threat all the time against his life and that he is number one on Iran's list. But if I go, you go, right? Trump suggested to reporters, perhaps someday you want to change professions?

• 4:14:11Speaker 07

  He's crying. He's really funny sometimes. I'm sorry, guys. It does feel like an 80s movie like side plot. It really does. It really does.

• 4:14:21Speaker 02

  Now, the people I'd imagine might be kind of hurt by this are the staff members, like the members of Trump's White House who got chosen to fly on the human shield flight without being told, rather than being rerouted to Air Force One Three where the boss was flying. Because not all of them were. Pete Hegseth was on Air Force One Three with Trump, right? He got rerouted to the real one? But a bunch of Trump's people just found out today that he put them on the death flight to see if a missile would hit them? And I think that's beautiful.

• 4:14:51Speaker 02

  Anyway, that's what I got.

• 4:14:53Speaker 07

  Margaret, where can people listen to more cool people doing cool stuff like flock cameras? Well, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff, which is usually about history, but lately I've been doing a lot of history that sometimes happened a week or so ago. And it's on this very network or even in this very feed, you can listen to Cool Zone Media Book Club, where I read a different story every week to you. Also, James's new show, Natural Cause, is coming out soon.

• 4:15:24Speaker 02

  Put a trans goal on your couch.

• 4:15:26Speaker 07

  We reported the news.

• 4:15:28Speaker 02

  We reported the news.

• 4:15:35Speaker 07

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

• 4:15:41Speaker 01

  It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check

• 4:15:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:16:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.