It Could Happen Here Weekly 250

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file: Sanctions, Terror, and the Internet Should AOC talk to MAHA? Debating the American Role in the Middle East A History Built of Uprising Executive Disorder: Oil Crisis, New Mail-In-Voting Rules Blocked, Macklemore Based?? 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: Sanctions, Terror, and the Internet https://www.inventati.org/campaign/press https://keepitfree.ai/announcements/a/i-shuts-down-stay-human/ https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/ https://davidgraeber.org/articles/the-new-anarchists/ Should AOC talk to MAHA? https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/28/poll-maha-health-fractures-kennedy-00972253 https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/maha-health-concerns-resonate-broadly-but-lag-behind-health-care-costs-even-for-maha-voters/ https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/kff-health-tracking-poll-maha-and-the-midterms/ https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/09/05/inside-aocs-maha-outreach-01066409 https://www.youtube.com/live/h6fe9CaVZCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRgeXPsihXI Debating the American Role in the Middle East https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-u-s-led-middle-east-order-is-over-the-mecca-agreement-proves-it https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/end-american-middle-east-iran-marc-lynch http://foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/new-old-middle-east-gause https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/12/the-re-emergence-of-the-palestine-question-in-world-politics/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/29/us-decline-world-order-replacement A History Built of Uprising https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-4/endnotes-a-history-of-separation-preface https://archive.org/details/blackjacobinstou0000jame Executive Disorder: Oil Crisis, New Mail-In-Voting Rules Blocked, Macklemore Based?? https://rudaw.net/english/categories/middleeast/1079247 https://www.rudaw.net/english/categories/iraq/1079243 https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/2099321216683425864?s=20 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28621690-paheivdhsord091426/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.291053/gov.uscourts.dcd.291053.192.0.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/26a305_4g15.pdf https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2097872390076141726?s=20 https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/2100014172738122001?s=20 https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/2098209805215080868?s=20 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117147749847925768 https://www.foxnews.com/media/homan-confirms-criminal-investigation-involving-ilhan-omar-says-knows-things-going https://x.com/atrupar/status/2099925671795474759?s=20https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026#conventional-weapons-sep-26 https://x.com/Ibrahym22Nagi/status/2099482678479188145 https://x.com/Ibrahym22Nagi/status/2099482678479188145?s=20 https://x.com/Bafeltalabani/status/2099810675484668045 https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg/status/2099869946423431232 https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg/status/2099869946423431232?s=20 https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/09/2003993626/-1/-1/1/OEF_Q3_JUN2026_FINAL_508%20SECURE. PDF https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2026-09/OIG-26-22-Sep26.pdf https://x.com/cspan/status/2099878657174941991?s=20 https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-casar-introduce-legislation-to-ban-artificial-superintelligence-and-temporarily-pause-advanced-ai-development/ https://geesemag.com/articles/stop-the-ai-arms-race https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631 https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2099597928142688610?s=20 https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2099648450069512426?s=20 https://x.com/linamkhan/status/2099204390548639960?s=20 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2098973625252708460?s=20 https://x.com/Jason/status/2098817101628600383?s=20 https://x.com/daniel_koss/status/2099751931400847840?s=20 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/12/anthropics-amodei-proposes-plan-to-slow-the-pace-of-advancing-ai-capabilities.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/14/anthropic-walks-tightrope-to-nasdaq-pushing-slowdown-and-pursuing-ipo.html https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social/post/3mvg527c3k22n https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/why-saudi-arabias-plan-b-for-oil-exports-is-now-under-fire/4335414/ https://www.newarab.com/news/saudi-running-out-oil-export-options-routes-choked https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/07/global-food-prices-three-year-high-heatwaves-wars-crop-costs https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/did-the-houthis-shoot-down-saudi-arabian-f-15-what-we-know-19991908.htm https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/saudi-arabia-calls-mecca-red-175848059.html https://www.instagram.com/p/DdXFZLNARm4/ https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2026/09/15/irish-acts-aaron-rowe-and-beoga-quit-ed-sheerans-us-tour-in-protest-over-palestine/ https://apnews.com/article/ed-sheeran-responds-macklemore-tour-3fd73815563039bea9b88f5efe745d62 https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49943754/patriots-kraft-says-macklemore-performance-cross-line https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/where-patriots-owner-robert-kraft-150614158.html https://www.instagram.com/p/DdXFZLNARm4/?stkn=MThsbzc2OWh3d2s5OQ== 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

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:17Speaker 03

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

• 1:32Speaker 04

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

• 1:38Speaker 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.

• 1:56Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:59Robert Evans?

  Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

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

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:27Speaker 07

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• 2:58Robert Evans?

  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.

• 3:26Robert Evans?

  Hello and welcome to the show. It's It Could Happen Here Today. I am James and I'm very lucky to be joined by Margaret Kiljoy. Hi, Margaret.

• 3:34Robert Evans?

  Hello. What a good day to talk about good stuff. It's good stuff, right?

• 3:40Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately, Margaret, I hate to break it to you. It's the government declaring left groups terrorists again.

• 3:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, that seems bad.

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it does seem bad, especially in this case, like it's an attempt to drive autonomous left organizing off the internet. And so if people are not familiar, we are talking today about Autistici Inventati. There's a forward slash in between those two groups because on the 26th of August, the Office of Foreign Assets Control added them to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups because it alleged that A slash I services were designed to facilitate violent attacks. I think I'm going to refer to them as A slash I just for brevity and also because I don't want to use AI because sadly that's already taken.

• 4:31Robert Evans?

  That's what I was thinking too, is I'm either going to call them Autistici or A slash I.

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so we can go through a little bit of blow by blow of what's happened since then in a minute. But I first thought, Margaret, perhaps you could explain a little bit about the role this organization played. Why does it have a forward slash in its name? When did it come about? And where's it from?

• 4:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So there is a group that is made up of two groups. And the name of the the single group is Autistici slash Inventati. And you might be able to guess that the two groups that make it up are Autistici and Inventati. They've been around since 2001. I want to say March 2001. If I was at the right place of my own script, I would be able to tell you that for certain. And they came about during the ultra-globalization movement, which is something that I've talked about a bit on my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And it is one of the things that, I mean, if you were there, you know what I'm talking about. But basically, there was a massive movement against the stripping of

• 5:33Robert Evans?

  resources from the developing world by the developed world. There was basically a massive attempt by people all over the world, kind of spurred on by the Zapatistas and Chiapas, to get everyone together to say, stop using free trade agreements to take all of the wealth of the global south and give it to the global north. It's a really important idea to wrap your head around, but complicated right now in this era where tariffs are the bad thing and free trade is the lesser evil, right? We weren't fighting against, this is the movement that I came up in. We weren't fighting specifically against free trade, although we were fighting against the free trade agreements, so much as specifically that we were fighting

• 6:13Robert Evans?

  for fair trade. And we were fighting for people getting paid decently and, yeah, stopping the economic extraction of the world.

• 6:21Robert Evans?

  Fair trade's a proper noun, right? But it's also a concept and they differ. And that's all I think I need to say about it.

• 6:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so during this period, activists from all over the world created all of these like massive protests, bringing people all together and creating horizontal decision-making structures and doing all this important work. And one of the things that came of that, for better and for worse, is the concept of social media. We can trace it directly back to the hacking groups of this era. Community journalists, citizen journalists would go out and work with especially something called indie media.

• 6:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Robert Evans?

  And they would go out and they would film what was happening. And so there was this international network of people who created a structure called indie media, where indie has like I N D Y media, right? And be able to report on what was happening in their regions, but have it all networked together. And it kind of created microblogging, which is what created Twitter. And there's actually like direct lineages with some of the people. And so sorry about that, that we did that. I was a part of indie media for a long time. And a group in Italy, two groups in Italy, among many others, came together to do indie media work in Italy. Italy was an important part of the ultra-globalization

• 7:38Robert Evans?

  movement. Unfortunately, it's where we first saw police kill a protester, R I P Carlo Giuliani. I was like, oh, I'm going to really quick read their own history that they set. But what they did is that 10 years, like 2011 or so, they put out 140-page book that describes the like oral history of the creation of their project. And so I have not fully read everything in this yet. But in general, Autistici is from Milan. And it was started by basically like cyberpunks, although one of the people was like, I'm not a cyberpunk, you know?

• 8:07Robert Evans?

  Of course.

• 8:08Robert Evans?

  But literally, like, it was coming out of groups that would use concepts from William Gibson's books, like intentionally, like it was a consciously cyberpunk movement. And then you also had in Florence, or in Firenze, if you're wanting to pretend like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati. Now, Autistici, you're like, that sounds like the word autistic. It means autistic. It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was, I don't know, I'm not holding this up to today's lens of how we want to talk about this neurodivergence. What they were saying is, we're all interacting with computers instead of each other. So that's what we're going to call ourselves, are the autistics. Inventati was the self-invented. And these were the citizen journalists. And

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  they they came out of a group of basically protest journalists that were mostly students in Firenze, in Florence. So they came together and they formed a thing. Why does this matter 25 years later? Well, on some level, that's a good question. It kind of shouldn't.

• 9:12Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  The thing is that these groups, when we call them hackers and hacktivists, actually, one of the things that they talk about is that they basically do the reproductive labor of social movements. They're not out there hacking places. They are creating infrastructure for people to

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Robert Evans?

  talk to each other in non-corporate ways. Like, because the corporate environment owns so much of the internet. And they have from the beginning, they are so much older than all of their enemies, right? 2001 is ancient in internet terms. And they created ways to have websites called No Blogs, which is a WordPress platform. They created email servers, and they created listservs, right? And they kept doing it. And they, every now and then, the government would fight them. They'd say, someone that you are giving a blog to has done something bad. And every single time, they would take it to court. They're not underground people. This isn't a shadowy organization.

• 10:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:09Robert Evans?

  They have names and legal, like, this is a legal thing, that they pay for internet services and host website servers. So they are trying to have a free internet. And that is what the government is coming for. So when they are being designated this way, they hosted approximately 10,000 blogs on the No Blogs platform. And that is from people all over the world. So they are basically stripping away the platform by which 10,000 people or groups do their communication and do their publication. That's what I got.

• 10:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that's a really good, I'll just give some examples. There were groups in Myanmar who used No Blogs, for instance, right? Like, it's very easy to see this from an American lens, because it's the American government doing it, or the United States government, I should say, right? America, two continents, United States, one country.

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Like, America, not a thing. But let's look at it a bit more broadly, right? Because, like, you and I can remember this era of the internet because we're old now.

• 11:08Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:08Robert Evans?

  The free internet, when the internet was cool, and we were really hoping that it would be a liberatory force for humanity, right?

• 11:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We gave it a good shot.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  We gave it a fucking try. Like, people may not remember the Arab Spring, right? But like, there was this idea that like Twitter, I think it's rather myopic to say that Twitter gave us the Arab Spring, right? Like, decades of oppression and people wanting to live free and bravely standing up against teen violence gave us the Arab Spring.

• 11:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  But Twitter paid a part in people communicating. But like, before we had that, we had things like hush mail is another example, right? But like,

• 11:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  there was an independent internet structure that wasn't always explicitly anything politically, apart from anti-corporate.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Let's take a break here and come back after we've heard some advertisers.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  All right, we are back. The internet is dead. Let's talk about what an SDGTO is, Especially Designated Global Terrorist Organization. These come from an executive order, I think it's 13324, I've written down here, that was signed by George W. Bush in the wake of September the 11th, right? Uh, September the 11th, 2001. If you're wondering if I'm talking about the Catalan National Day, no, I'm not. I'm talking about the, uh, the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yeah.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, interesting. Oh, okay. Okay.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:42Robert Evans?

  Have you heard that Trump is claiming that he was at ground zero and got dragged away by firemen?

• 12:46Speaker 04

  No, that's a, that's a new one for me.

• 12:48Robert Evans?

  It's a complete lie. He was further away from ground zero than I was.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:52Robert Evans?

  I looked it up before we started recording. I was much closer to the ground zero than he was.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Perfect.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  Anyway, whatever.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Great. Okay. Yeah. Uh, well, what a guy.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Again, like, I don't want to harp on like being old or whatever, but like, the world changed after September the 11th, 2001 in so many ways. One of them was the United States pursuit of these new anti-terrorism laws, right? And these new anti-terrorism sanctions, right? And an SDGTO is a sanction, right? There were a series of executive orders from between 2001 and 2003, which kind of amended how they did this. I guess the first example of how the SDGTO sanction was supposed to work would be the Holy Land Foundation, right?

• 13:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's the largest Muslim charity in the United States.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  It was at one point, yeah, a huge Palestinian-American charity. Its offices were raided, its assets were seized, and it was closed. Previously, like, it collected, like, we're talking tens of millions of dollars here, or like, more than $10 million, I can pretty confidently say. This is a big organization, right? And what the SDGTO sanction does is it can list individuals or organizations, but it effectively makes them sanctioned so that people cannot transfer assets to them, right? So that makes them more or less unbankable. And that is what, as we'll see, has happened to A/ I, right? It is a different designation, this is important, from an FTO. FTO is a foreign terrorist organization, right? The difference there is

• 14:26Speaker 04

  that this is an economic sanction, whereas an FTO also contains the State Department itself, as well as the Treasury.

• 14:35Robert Evans?

  Right, like, they're probably not going to drone-strike people over this.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. An FTO designation does a couple of things, but one of them, as you say, is it gives them that, like, pretext for more, like, physical, kinetic, if you want to use the term that people in the industry use, violence, right? Uh, as opposed to, like, economic attacks, like we're seeing here. And the FTO is kind of the highest level of designation, right? And with it comes a, a series of things that become illegal for any US individual, US person who is, um, or indeed, anyone globally who is involved with that organization. In practice, what this does is it removes their ability to, to interact with the global banking system, right? And being an FTO does too, right? That's,

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  the FTO designations that we saw earlier in the Trump administration that impacted, uh, Greek, German, was there also an Italian organization in those? And I don't think so.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Certainly, it has made it very hard for a number of organizations in Germany to have bank accounts, period.

• 15:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And what happened was, no one tells you, apparently, that no one, like, gives you a call to be like, hey, just so you know, like, you're a specially designated global terrorist now. They learned that this was coming because of Marco Rubio tweets. It had already happened. And then immediately their PayPal got shut down. There's some irony to this because theoretically, PayPal was created in order to kind of be a, like, libertarian way of getting past government interference with money or whatever. But that's probably long gone and probably was never good in the first place.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:06Robert Evans?

  Their PayPal got shut down immediately. There's no reason why their PayPal had to be shut down immediately, because in this designation, there was a specific exemption given for a month. There was a 30-day or one month to September 25th. Hey, if you have business dealings with this group, you have until the September 25th to stop. Now, theoretically, this only applies to United States people, right?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:32Robert Evans?

  There is no method, well, there is a method, there's no legal method by which this necessarily applies, uh, more broadly. But pretty much immediately, Banca Etica, which I am not certain, I believe means ethical bank, is a specific cooperative bank. It is an independent cooperative bank working for the highest interest, that of everybody, including yours, according to their website. And the bank that is, like, basically meant to be the less evil bank of Italy, shut them down pretty much immediately. And they released, as of this morning, as of recording, Tuesday, September 8th, Autistici slash Inventati released a statement saying,

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  like, this is what happened. They shut down our bank. Because after they received this order, after they got told that they are this, this designation, and they had to tell their more than 10,000 not customers, because they're all volunteers and no one had to pay to use their services, they had to tell all those people, like, hey, this is what's happening. And when it first happened, they came out and they were like, look, we're going to fight this, because they have fought in court all the time, right? But the thing that is important and different in this particular situation, they have no legal recourse.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:51Robert Evans?

  They've been accused of kind of similar things, like, hey, you hosted a website that included a manifesto about some people who did some crimes, right? Is a thing that gets used against them a lot.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:02Robert Evans?

  And they go to court and they're like, this is what we are, who we are, this is what we do. We don't have fucking anything to do with the people who we, you know, publish or whatever. That is not an option in this situation. And so they were waiting for their bank to give them a chance to fight, to argue. And their bank just didn't because of basically a fear of secondary sanctions.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:22Robert Evans?

  So, no EU court, no Italian court has accused them of any wrongdoing.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  The intention is not to pin a crime on them so much as it is to remove this infrastructure from the internet, right?

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  So like, what the State Department is alleging, uh, in its press release here, is that, I'm quoting here, "It provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world." And then they say that "groups have relied on the collective digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiques by US-designated FTOs, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure." They go on to other stuff, right? But like, they are not alleging, the State Department itself is not alleging that A/ I themselves did anything.

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  It's that they hosted a platform where people who they are saying did terrorist things could, could either recruit to do those, or talk about them, or claim credibility for them. In amongst some of the examples it gives, right, uh, sabotage the Transalpine Pipeline that's in Europe. They talk about Jane's Revenge in the United States, which it calls a, uh, violent far-left extremists. It talks about Stop Cop City. They list a number of, like, listed FTOs, right? But they're saying a far-left extremist group claiming to be a tool for global militants relies on AI. So they're not saying the FTOs do directly.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  They're saying a group claiming to be a tool for those people relies on the A/ I infrastructure. So it's, it's always, I guess, like, one tier removed from them.

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  But I think that that, in a sense, is what the point is here, right? Back in the day, they used to smash printing presses, right?

• 20:09Robert Evans?

  The state.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the state would smash printing presses, the cops would smash printing presses, so would bosses, right?

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  When I look at my own research, right, when I'm doing archival research and I'm writing about, uh, specifically about Spanish anarchism, about union organizing, my first research project was on, like, the Catalan building. Union, you see this, right? Like, they're putting out publications and their means of communication is being destroyed by the state.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's one of the most essential parts of any resistance movement, right? Is the ability to communicate. I remember reading a biography, an autobiography by someone who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, right? And this Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And there were three things that the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were smuggling in from outside. The three things that mattered.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:58Robert Evans?

  Food, small arms and printing presses. Like, the ability to have printing presses, we see it over and over again as an essential part. And not just of resistance movements, but also social movements and also just free exchange of cultural ideas.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I'm reading a lot about the Mexican Revolution right now. I'm thinking about like magazines like Vespa, right? Which was an Afrofeminist magazine. Even Flores Magón was a journalist, right? Like, he came to St. Louis to try and continue writing safely. You can specifically look at Borfilio Diaz if you want to look at like the state attacking people's ability in that instance, right? To communicate freely with each other. The reason like this is important is because it's, it's one of the last parts of that old internet.

• 21:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Right, like, I'll give the example of like, and I know it's, there are no blogs, pages about Kurdistan as well. But like, if I, if I give the example of Myanmar, right? Like, everybody in Myanmar, to talk to them, apart from people who are really, you know, part of the Spring Revolution, who will talk to me on Signal, I have to use Facebook, right? Because Facebook is the internet there.

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Because in some cases, you don't pay for data if that data is going through the Facebook app. But you do pay for data if you're using it through a browser or an email client, right? So, so Facebook is synonymous with the internet. Therefore, Facebook controls the internet. And so we get to this situation with the beginning of the genocide against the Rohingya people, where the military is running a massive bot network. And we have NLD government officials trying to call Facebook, being like, yo, like, a genocide is actively beginning and you are complicit in it. And Facebook not responding until they shut it down, they shut down Facebook entirely, right?

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  And then in doing so, basically disconnect a large portion of their population from the world. And like, the people who had the tools to stop that genocide were in offices in California. And I think they had one Burmese language content moderator.

• 23:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  What I'm getting at here is that like, the corporate internet is not equipped, it just doesn't care about the consequences of lots of things, including misinformation, right? And at least the autonomous internet, people could speak freely, right? They weren't controlled by the policies of Facebook. They weren't controlled by the policies of Google. Yes, what the government is alleging is part of the consequences of that free speech, where that they are saying that people who were doing violence were organizing on it. Free speech is also like, to just go like, super liberal American, right? Like, it is the very first amendment that they made to the Constitution. The printing press and pamphlets were integral to the revolution here, right?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Like, if you just want to be super fucking-

• 23:51Robert Evans?

  Patriotic, yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like, it's a betrayal of the concepts that like, that this country, many other of those concepts are bad things, like slavery.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  Well, but do you know what else is a foundational concept of the American economy?

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Oh, is it the sale of products and services?

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  That's true, and the advertisement of products and services.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 24:09Robert Evans?

  Of which we are proud, continuing that tradition.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  All right, we're back.

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  So, as we discussed before we started recording, neither of us are total internet understanders. I read a blow-by-blow. NoBlogs.org, et cetera, have gone down. If you want to keep up, Inventati.org is still up as of this recording.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  And KeepItFree.ai, which is probably the only good dot AI in existence.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  AI.

• 24:46Robert Evans?

  Is where you can find press releases and things like that, right? And they did, as of a couple of days ago, as of two days ago, A slash I was like, all right, we're done. We don't exist anymore.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:58Robert Evans?

  You beat us. And a lot of that has to do with the taking down of all of their infrastructure. And it's interesting, and part of the reason is so chilling, is that back in the day, when we thought of the internet as a very resilient thing, as right, decentralized, as very resilient. If you own your own server, unless it gets seized in a raid by the police, like a physical computer as a server, right?

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:20Robert Evans?

  And these days, it's even hard to imagine that like, a lot of people used to just have servers like, under their desk, you know? Or in their closet, right? They were like, oh, I run an extra cooling fan in there and I have a website in there.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  You know? My first website was on my boss's server, living at his house, you know?

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:40Robert Evans?

  And so you would defend the physical server and fairly regularly, the police would raid and capture physical servers in various places around the world, you know? And it was usually seen as an overreach and often found later in court to be an overreach. But what's happening here is they got censored off of the internet in a different way. In a way that's a little bit frightening. And again, I read all of the data about this and I even have some technical background and I don't fully understand all of it. But even if you have your physical computer and you own your dot org, right? You own NoBlogs.org. The concept of dot org is owned in America.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  I know this isn't totally what you asked me to do, but I think this is what's really important for everyone to understand, even if you don't care about any of this stuff. Tyranny in America can fundamentally gut the internet.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:33Robert Evans?

  Because there are American parts on a lot of this stuff. You know, it's kind of like how the UN is everywhere, but it's also in New York City.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I think it is really important to reinforce that, right? Like, because there's somebody sitting in the mountains of Myanmar right now who can't communicate to the world anymore.

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Who probably doesn't know what A slash I are.

• 26:54Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Let's go through like exactly what happened. Margaret and I have spoken about this a couple of times. Now, there are also internet understanders. I'm sure some of you listening to this have a better grasp on the nuts and bolts of this than we do. But essentially, on the 28th of August, so that's two days after they were declared by the Office of Foreign Assets for all to be a specially designated global terrorist organization, there was a DNS level issue with their website. From what I understand, the domain status was on something called server hold. The level at which this happened, I guess, is attributable, they believe, to the public internet registry.

• 27:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so like, your website's address isn't CoolZoneLover.org, right?

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  Your website address is, I'm making this number up, don't put it on your computer, 148.2.994.255.0.1, right?

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  That's your actual address, that's your IP address of the server, right? And that is what goes to that. But no one wants to walk around remembering whatever number I just made up. I don't remember it anymore, even though it's my website, even as Cool, CoolZoneLover.org. And so what we have is we have domain name registries, which is basically an agreed-upon list of, well, this points here.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:12Robert Evans?

  Right? And so there used to be only be a couple of these TLDs, top-level domains. There used to only be dot com, dot net, dot org, dot edu, dot gov, dot mil. I'm probably missing a couple. And then there's like, all-the-nation ones, dot us, dot whatever.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Dot co, dot UK, yeah.

• 28:30Robert Evans?

  But like, those are not centrally owned, right? Those are not coming from one place. But so if you take down someone's DNS, I believe that this is the same thing as saying like, you're disconnecting from the registry where CoolZoneLover.org goes to that string of numbers. But I'm actually a little confused about what's happening in this particular case, because I, and I, some of the stuff I read says like, it's actually kind of not known and maybe by the time this comes out, it'll be a little bit clearer. Because there's also discussion that they have probably been hacked at some point.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  And also, very importantly, there was no official declaration that everyone had to stop. If nothing else, they had a month to comply, right? So it seems like there's been some compliance in advance. And I know that they were in the process of basically trying to DUS themselves, right? When it first came out, they said, all right, we're going to fight this. And they planned on fighting it and they started doing the work of fighting it. And they started looking to say, where else can we host our, you know, domain names and stuff like that, right? Because the physical servers aren't in America. And they were like, all right, how do we get clear of this? But they were not given the chance because of the advanced compliance of organizations like their bank, right?

• 29:47Robert Evans?

  Because you can't run an above-ground organization where you all say, hey, this is my name, and you pay for internet services if you can't give those people money. And that is very often the choke point. That is like why sex workers are so fucked in America, is that all of the payment process, it's not illegal to send- Sell nudie pics on the internet. Everyone knows that. But you can't do it. You can't do it, but you have to put a lot of work into it. Because even if it's not against a site's like content moderation, the payment processors won't let you do it because they're afraid of getting anywhere near anything that could possibly be a crime. So they're going to destroy people's way of life and cut them off from the banking institutions.

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  And so it's just more of a problem about how all of this centralized infrastructure can be seized by fascists. Again, that only partly answers it. So by, what was it, September 6th, they threw in the towel, essentially. And they said, like, we've been talking to everyone and this just isn't working. We can't do this. And I actually think that's a way of being responsible to the people who rely on them instead of trying to pretend like they're going to soldier on. If I sound defensive, it's because I think some people are kind of curious about why they gave up. But they write very eloquently about why they stopped. And on September 8th, they wrote a statement about the banking situation. Quote, "We are undergoing US sanctions without any kind of hearing in a court of law,

• 31:12Robert Evans?

  without any possibility to defend ourselves and without ever receiving a request to take down specific contents or abide by laws that we may have been deemed to infringe upon."

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that's a very good summary of like where we're at with this. I'll just say like a couple of things. One, if we want to look for places where violence is coordinated and organized, X.com, the everything website.

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, totally. Everything, including organized violence, yeah.

• 31:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it's where the violent right has organized for years, right?

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Robert Evans?

  And then increasingly since Elon Musk purchased it. The other thing that I wanted to say is that these are WordPress sites, right? WordPress, to be clear, if you're not familiar, is not owned by A slash I. It's a software that can be used on other blog hosting platforms, right? So some of these people will be able to host their blogs somewhere else. I imagine that, given what has just happened, it will be hard for them, right? To include groups that have nothing to do with those mentioned in this executive order. But like, the fact that it is WordPress makes that movement to another platform a little bit easier for them.

• 32:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If they were able to download their data. There's been a lot of complicated things about whether or not data has been accessible.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  Okay, yeah, that sucks.

• 32:27Robert Evans?

  But I don't have the current blow by blow of that.

• 32:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's really difficult. But yeah, because the entire banking system runs through America, no one will want to bank with A slash I. And I imagine because of what has just happened, other places where they might otherwise put their blogs will be concerned.

• 32:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Robert Evans?

  So we will see how this plays out for those groups, right? Like, we'll see like what happens to them. Again, people were not paying for this, so they weren't like transferring money to organization. And again, there was a time period in which these would be implemented. So these people are not directly impacted by the sanctions because A slash I stopped existing before those sanctions would have come into play.

• 33:16Robert Evans?

  Right, which is one of the things that they are doing by throwing in the towel is they're not letting people make a specific dangerous decision or even more so accidentally by not having not paid attention to the news, right? You set up a blog like this 18 years ago and you forgot about it?

• 33:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  And you're suddenly like, you know, being called a terrorist by the US government. I think that they're saving a lot of people a lot of trouble. I hate saying that. I think they made the right call, but I do.

• 33:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, I don't quite know how because I know transferring money, but I'm not an expert in these things, but it does seem like a risk.

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  That's what's messy about it, right?

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Robert Evans?

  And the whole point, I think, is that you don't quite know how. This is one of the many things that the US began doing after 9/11, which were fundamentally betrayals of the Bill of Rights.

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  And we live with the consequences of them every day now.

• 34:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Robert Evans?

  Like DHS. DHS is a post 9/11 thing.

• 34:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Robert Evans?

  This country did just fine without it for a very long, well, was doing just fine. Still lots of fucked up shit going down, but yeah, didn't need DHS.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  But you know, even if your goal is to be like a fucked up kind of center right guy, America was doing just fine. Didn't need all that shit.

• 34:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I think that part about the open internet stuff is so essential because it's like, everyone was starting to say with the rise of fascism, people were starting to say like, hey, we should probably get off meta.

• 34:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Robert Evans?

  Right? And I'm not telling people what to do. I have an Instagram still, I hate it. But people are starting to say like, how do we organize outside of this? And in ways that have been perfectly legal since the internet existed, right? This is like the kind of thing that seems like such a non-issue, you know?

• 35:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  And it's a way of keeping all of us trapped on platforms where we have to abide by their moderation standards, which of course change all the time and become never in positive ways, you know?

• 35:23Robert Evans?

  And it's a real, they come for them in the morning, they come for you at night kind of thing. I think that this is a pretty serious statement by the federal government that they are interested in attacking autonomous infrastructure. And not just structure for autonomous Marxists, but I mean, infrastructure that is autonomous

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 35:44Robert Evans?

  from the corporate world that everyone is aware of being pretty dystopian.

• 35:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and again, this will have global implications, right? Just real quick to sum up the other stuff that they talked about in that sanction document, talk about how like violent acts and acts dangerous to humid life are exempt from the First Amendment. Again, we've been over how like AI was not doing violent acts, right?

• 36:10Robert Evans?

  A slash I, yeah.

• 36:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, A slash I, sorry. AI itself actually is doing violent things by proxy, and that's sad. They also mentioned in this sanctions document, Palestine Action, they refer to it as a foreign terrorist organization. I think what is important is that if you're hearing this, not reading it, those letters are used in lowercase. So it is an organization which the United Kingdom has prescribed as a terrorist group as opposed to a listed FTO. There is a list of foreign terrorist organizations. We talked about that before, right? That's kind of the highest level.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  That's, to my knowledge, not what they're saying here because it's not on the FTO list and because the use of lowercase text, I am taking to mean that it's, and also because it is factually true that it's prescribed by the United Kingdom. And then they also sanctioned a group which they claim acts as a front for the PFLP, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine during that time, all of which they bundled together under far-left extremists and violent far-left terrorist networks. The internet continues to get more dystopian every day.

• 37:12Robert Evans?

  Yep, but learning some of the hacker type stuff. And again, I don't mean breaking into computers when I say hacking. I'm talking about like, although, you know, do whatever you want. But the way that they built this kind of infrastructure was that they got together and they said, we want to build this kind of infrastructure. What does that look like? And people did it all over the world. One advantage of being not a very centralized movement. This is a big blow and it sucks. But like, if you want to fight back, one of the ways you can do it is get together with your friends and learn about how to use the internet at a pretty fundamental level to put up websites and things like that, host servers.

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  You know, a bunch of people who weren't even necessarily technically savvy when they started, just started teaching themselves, especially the inventati, seems like they just were like, we're going to teach ourselves how to do this, and they did it. And it sucks when we have to fight same battles over and over again. But that's life, baby, that imagines Sisyphus happy.

• 38:12Robert Evans?

  Perfect. Margaret, you have another podcast if people want to hear about life and some of the nice things that have happened during people's lives.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  I have a show called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. James is often a guest on that. Sometimes I think even a host teaches me the thing. And it is a radical history podcast. And I did a long series on the ultra-globalization movement somewhat recently. You can look in the archives for that. And I'll probably be talking more about this issue on there. I just finished a four-parter on flock and the fight against flock and the popular revolt that is currently winning against flock. So if that's up your alley, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, yeah.

• 38:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If people want to understand anti-globe, a relatively short summary. If you like reading more than listening, I get you've made 40 minutes into a podcast.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Is the New Anarchist by David Graeber. Yeah. Graeber writes excessively. I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, that's all I got. Thank you, Margaret. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming.

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• 40:35Speaker 03

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• 40:47Speaker 07

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• 40:53Speaker 03

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• 40:55Robert Evans?

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

• 41:02Speaker 03

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• 41:05Speaker 07

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

• 41:09Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 41:27Speaker 04

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• 41:33Speaker 03

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

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 41:44Robert Evans?

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

• 41:52Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 41:53Robert 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.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

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

• 42:08Speaker 01

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• 42:10Robert 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 van.

• 42:20Speaker 01

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• 42:24Robert Evans?

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• 42:34Robert Evans?

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• 42:38Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 42:44Speaker 07

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about everything being totally fine and great. Always, right now. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Dr. Cave Oda.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Everything is great. You're doing great. I'm doing great. Things are fantastic. Oh, ketamine.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  It's good to see you again, Cave. Last time we spoke was on your podcast, House of Pod.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yes, about looks-maxing. Yeah, thank you for, for having me. First of all, it's just nice to see you, and it's nice to see your face, and it's nice to hear your voice. And I know we're going to be talking about some stuff that I actually am very curious to hear your thoughts on. I exist very much in the doctor-science-public-health world online, and I hear a lot of those voices. I have a good sense of the variety of voices coming out of those spaces on the topics we're going to touch on today, but

• 43:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I really want to hear your thoughts about it.

• 43:46Speaker 07

  Oh, I want to hear your thoughts on it, not just because you're a doctor, but because you have also done a decent bit of research or have spent some time in the digital Maha universe.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have.

• 43:59Speaker 07

  As an outsider.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  We talked about Maha not too long ago on your show as well. And we kind of talked about some of like the class dynamics of Maha, how, how the sort of healthier lifestyles that some of these influencers push for

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 07

  is unaffordable to a lot of, a lot of working-class people.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:17Speaker 07

  And we're going to talk about Maha once again today. And because of how much time you've spent watching those horrible Maha podcasts.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Too much. I listen to a lot of RFK Junior's podcasts. I think it might have hurt my brain. I think I did things to myself that I have not fully recovered from.

• 44:37Speaker 07

  But because of your experience, I want to briefly ask you what Maha is. Like, what, what do you understand Maha being? But like, before we talk about this whole

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:47Speaker 07

  idea, which this episode is about, it's in the title, about if you should do outreach to these people. What are the risks of that? What are the benefits of that potentially?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 07

  Who actually are these people? Like, what is Maha?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  That's a really great question and something I have been trying to figure out myself. I largely, like a lot of people, when I first heard of it, was kind of hoping it would go away. It wasn't. It didn't. And it is a actual factor now that we have to take into account and discuss. It's real, and it's very important. And what I have learned from going into these Maha spaces, which I tragically have done, and also not just Maha spaces, but sort of the Maha-adjacent spaces.

• 45:29Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Things like the Andrew Huberman podcast and the Peter Attia stuff. I've done a lot of work into that for, for episodes. And that has given me, I think, a pretty broad sense of what's going on. Now, I think the easy thing for most people when they hear Maha, they think anti-vaxxer because, you know, RFK Junior.

• 45:49Speaker 07

  RFK Junior anti-vaxxer. That's like the first two associations.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Right. But it is important to know that they are not monolithic. There's a lot of variation there. And actually, if you poll them, if you ask them, which I think we're going to get into, Maha supporters, of which there are varieties of, from mild to severe supporters, they will actually not say that vaccines are their top issue. Now, I don't believe that. If I'm being totally honest, I just don't believe that.

• 46:17Speaker 07

  I mean, there are Maha people who vaccines are their top issue.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:21Speaker 07

  And they are very vocal online. I think what we'll kind of get to in a bit is that there's other Maha people, or people in like, as you say, this kind of Maha-extended universe, who maybe do not list vaccines as their top issue.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:34Speaker 07

  But obviously, this is like culturally, like a big part of the Maha Association.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  That's right. And when you ask them, what is their top priority? The thing that comes up the most is actually the cost of healthcare. And then that's sort of followed by other things like, you know, chemicals in foods.

• 46:51Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Restricting environmental pollutants, limiting corporate influence in food policy, and limiting, you know, malfeasance by healthcare institutions and insurance. Which, you know, when you say that, it all sounds actually pretty reasonable and pretty, if you take it out of its current context, left-coded. These are all sort of, you know, relatively

• 47:16Speaker 07

  Traditionally left-coded things, yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  leftist ideas. Now, that being said, you know, aside from ushering in the golden age of diarrhea, undermining vaccines has really been at the core of Kennedy's HHS.

• 47:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And one of the few things he's actually successful Actually accomplished is dismantling that. And so even I, I, we're gonna talk about it and I see the polling that says, no, it's not only about 4% of Maha really care about vaccines.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  I've definitely seen other polling, which.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would say from my personal experience online, again, and I am, I am an old, as you are very well aware, Garrison. You have helped me out in the ways, uh, young people do with old people online.

• 47:57Speaker 07

  In the ways of looks vaccines.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you helped me out a lot of this stuff, but I have, when I am online or even I R L, as I hear the, the kids say. If you push them on vaccines, it becomes pretty clear that there are really only very few pro vaccine Maha folks. And even then.

• 48:13Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  It's usually like, oh, well, like the polio vaccine was fine. And, and they, and they don't even think that's necessary anymore. So Maha is a big diverse group of people.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  It is.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  And the, the movement itself is really powerful and has done a lot in two years. And if nothing else, they have done an amazing thing with their branding and being able to draw in people to this big tent. So that's the best I can do to explain Maha, I think.

• 48:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, I really understand why this question of should you do outreach to these people is, is so charged? Because this really is a life and death issue, like in like a literal sense.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 07

  Right? This, this sort of like movement that's come up, like up and around R F K Junior has, has caused a lot of deadly harm.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:01Speaker 07

  In the world, right? In the name of make America healthy again.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  R F K Junior has rolled back childhood vaccine recommendations, has overseen massive budget and staffing cuts at H H S, C D C and the F D A. The administration has cut snap food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and the anti-vax movement more broadly has contributed to measles outbreaks in multiple states, right? This is real, real harms that have been done in the name of health.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the funniest part about it. That's, that's the great part about all this.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  And as something that we'll kind of get to in a bit, any sort of potential outreach, and I'm not even, I'm not recommending my listeners to do this outreach like at all, that's, that's not what this episode is for. But because all of these things that R F K and Trump has done in the name of health, because of how bad they are, that does also open up a lot of opportunity for people to attack R F K Junior on this, this massive level of failure, including failing on a lot of things that Maha people largely believe in. And I think something that's really unique and interesting about Maha compared to other aspects of like the Trump world is that like Maha doesn't have the exact same kind of like cult of personality around R F K Junior, the way mega does around Trump.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 07

  And Maha is also just not nearly as loyal to like Trump himself.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Well, actually, let me ask you that because that is the narrative now is that Maha and MAGA are headed for a divorce and that they are diverging. But I don't really see the evidence of that. I, what you say I think is really interesting though, in that even though Maha is a pretty popular movement, and we'll talk about the numbers of people that support it at least in some way.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  R F K Junior is not viewed like largely by the American population as trustworthy and like someone that they, they rely on.

• 50:49Speaker 07

  No, Maha is much more popular than R F K Junior is.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 50:54Speaker 07

  And I, I think it is really important in this discussion to understand that like Maha isn't even uniformly Republican.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:02Speaker 07

  And the movement and its goals are actually much more diffuse. According to a Politico poll from June of 2026, so fairly recently, just under one third of U S adults identify as a part of Maha, 31%. And 20% of respondents said that they support the movement, but don't identify as a part of it. So that's 50% of Americans who say they at least support the movement, only 30% of which wants to actually openly identify.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  With the movement. And of the people who Politico polled, 20% of those who identified as Maha also voted for Kamala Harris.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  That's interesting. It's actually more than I expected.

• 51:42Speaker 07

  And 17% of respondents who support the movement, but don't identify as a part of it in name, also voted for Harris. And you can compare these results to a poll from the K F F, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation. Their poll is from May 2026. They found that 41% of U S adults are Maha supporters, half of which identify as Republicans, 30% independent and 15% Democrat.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  There's a lot of interesting things about this polling. One, that it's more common, commonly you'll see online, people refer to the four in 10 Americans support Maha. But there is a variation of how much support that means. And if you're gonna ask somebody, yeah, do you want, uh, chemicals in your food? Most people will say, no, not really. Or they'll say, do you want stricter food monitoring?

• 52:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I mean, most people are gonna say yes, unless you're some weird libertarian that's just like the marketplace of diarrhea will solve those problems. So it's understandable. Again, the branding is really good and, and it works for a lot of people. It is interesting that so many people who may believe in at least some degree of it, don't want to be labeled as Maha. I think.

• 52:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  They, they realize how it looks largely.

• 53:00Speaker 07

  There is a stink to it.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 07

  And there is a very strong kind of anti-science component to.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  Maha, like in name proper, most of which, but not exclusively, most of which revolves around vaccines.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 07

  And like you said, there actually is broad support for many components of Maha, things that Maha, you know, influencers talk about pretty often, regardless of whether people actually identify with or agree with the movement as a whole. There's broad support for improving our diets and increasing fitness.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 07

  For reducing exposure to harmful chemicals and limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies. There is general broad support for all of those issues in this political poll, regardless of whether the respondents were Maha or not. So there is this broad support with the exception for vaccines. And that is where all of these kind of polls and stats take a really big divergence.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 07

  In this Politico poll, 65% of Maha said that they support reducing how many vaccines Americans receive. Compared to 23% of non-Maha and those who support the movement, but don't identify it in name are kind of in the middle at 45%.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 07

  So that is like the clearest split in all of this, in all of this polling. But, but what's interesting is that this vaccine question also has, in terms of all of the Maha priorities that, you know, people in Maha support themselves, this has the least amount of support among their own movement. This is 65% as opposed to limiting the influence of pharmaceutical companies, which had 80% support. So that is an interesting peek into like the fractures within this Maha brand itself.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It is interesting as it's becoming bigger and becoming more like code, they're trying to codify it a little bit as an organization or as a group, how you're starting to see some of those little cracks form. I mean, getting to the, the question, which has been coming up about this, does this mean that we should be reaching out to these people? Because there is this variation in beliefs and that we have the opportunity as people who, I don't know, believe in vaccines to talk to these people and bring them back. Is it politically something that's worthwhile to bring those people into the margins? That last part, I don't know, I, cause I don't, I don't really have a great sense of, you know, how politically this group will function in the next coming elections.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  I don't really know if A O C has to do the outreach that she's been doing and that's been getting a lot of press. I do think the question from just the public health standpoint is a really interesting one. And it's one I'm really grappling with. What do we do? Do we in this country need Maha? Does public health need Maha? That's a, that's a literal question that has been asked by some very smart public health people online, some of which are, I know very well and have been on the podcast, like Craig Spencer and got a lot of grief for it. It's a tough question and honestly, I may have a different answer in, in a month. My belief is we, we don't need Maha, but we do need the people in Maha

• 56:11Speaker 01

  to reconsider some of their voting patterns and their vaccine choices. And it's a tough call for me. I'm really of two minds about it. Like on one hand, I do believe it's important to reach out and convince as many people as we can that Maha is making people less healthy overall. While all the things that have been enacted in the name of Maha, even despite all these things that they seem to be interested in, haven't really done that.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  And then on the other hand, yeah, historically, we've probably done a poor job of explaining the point and the safety of vaccines. You know, to be fair, it didn't always used to be the issue that it currently is. There's always been this anti-vaccine sense, but public health officials and doctors were not really trained in political persuasion the way a lawyer is. And, and I understand I might be a little condescending when I say all this stuff and I don't mean to be, but two things. I refuse to believe that we're in the situation that we're in now because we somehow messed up and we weren't nice enough to like the Jim Carrys and the Jenny McCarthys of the world. And, and yeah, maybe that your doctor was a jerk at some point and made you.

• 57:14Speaker 07

  Feel bad about knocking a vaccine. But that's not the reason we have the situation we're in. No. And even if it was, it doesn't mean that everything that we have to do in terms of Maha is changed. Our outreach does not need to change because of that. We should, I do think that, I think we need to be talking about these people. We need to be connecting on the things that we can totally connect on. And these polls show us that there are a lot of varieties of what we can connect with. We could connect with the cost of healthcare. We could talk about improving public health infrastructure. And we, our politicians who are aligning with these things, they should make it clear that President Trump not only didn't run on it, him and RFK Jr. Haven't advanced any credible benefit to lowering healthcare costs.

• 57:58Speaker 07

  In fact, the big, beautiful bill is only going to make things worse and going to destroy rural hospitals. I think there are things in these polls that show us we can address some of those points with people without having to capitulate. And that's key. That is the key aspect. Right, because, and I know people are worried about that, that this could be like the Trojan horse. If we try to embrace these Maha people, then it'll shift AOC or all other politicians, or even public health officials, sort of to be more, you know, open to the anti-vax perspective. I don't think that's the right attitude. I mean, as distasteful as it may be, and again, I'm probably not the right person for this because I don't have the sophistication, but as distasteful as it might be, this movement

• 58:42Speaker 07

  is just two years old and it draws some level of support from four in 10 Americans. And it's something that we have to take seriously and we have to try and connect where we can, try to be empathetic when we can, try to understand what can, but we cannot, and I think this is super duper important, we cannot give an inch on our scientific principles. And I think those two things are manageable. I think we can do those two things at the same time. 100%. And I honestly, I don't see anyone arguing the alternative to that, that we should compromise those things. And the type of outreach the rest of this episode will focus on, and what prompted

• 59:24Speaker 07

  so much debate and discussion online last week, has not been based on appealing to or validating pseudo-scientific beliefs or conspiracy theories on vaccines, but rather focused on some of those other Maha priorities that may overlap with some concerns that you, the listener, may have too. And if left-wing politicians actually address those concerns, how that could perhaps undermine the monopoly Maha currently has on those issues in our attention economy. And so next, we will discuss and debate AOC's approach to this outreach and the pros or cons that may have.

• 1:00:08Speaker 07

  But first, here's some ads.

• 1:00:22Speaker 07

  Now I do want to go a little bit more into AOC's kind of version of this outreach, which has kind of sparked a lot of debate online regarding this topic, is how she has approached this problem because she has, you know, seen the same things that I've been kind of talking about, and she has decided to act on it. Yeah. About like a week ago, Politico ran this story about AOC's outreach to Maha, both like, you know, influential figures within the movement, but then also trying to put out content to appeal to normies who see themselves as Maha. Right. This reporting from Politico seemed to be prompted by an interview on The Majority Report, Left is Best, between Emma Vigeland and AOC last July, where she talked about

• 1:01:07Speaker 07

  environmental policy. AOC had recently been to Tennessee to help campaign for Justin Pearson. And she said that people there in Tennessee are quote unquote pissed off about data centers. And she talked about how her constituents in the Bronx are a less ideologically driven electorate. They're very working class and racially diverse, but they might not have all the same concerns as a tree-hugging activist. And so when she was first elected, she did a quote unquote, "deep canvas" of the community to learn how to talk about climate issues in a way that isn't just academic and theoretical, that actually points to day-to-day issues in people's lives.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  So eight years ago, it was me doing teach-ins in public housing, saying the lead in our water, the sky-high asthma rates that we deal with, that is environmental. And this is directly contributed to with the gas infrastructure that we have in our public housing that is leaching into our air and all of the other environmental issues that are going on. And so with the data center fight, I think that this is, it's the similar analog. People are seeing how all of this is wrecking their health, wrecking their communities.

• 1:02:25Robert Evans?

  And it makes environmental issues, not academic, but very real in people's everyday lives.

• 1:02:33Speaker 07

  She later said, quote, "We always have to be making three arguments at the same time for any issue, a moral argument, an economic argument, and also a political argument. And when we're able to argue for something in a chorus of all those three, then we're able to build a majoritarian coalition to actually win on them," unquote. This is something she's been, she's been adamant about for the past like two years. Yeah. Is building these sorts of majoritarian coalitions to actually win the things we believe in, not just endlessly scream about them online. Yeah, one thing in there that I think is really astute is, and this goes for us in public health as well, is that we need to show people that we are fighting for them, even for the people in the Maha movement.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  Because we do, still, no matter what, they are our responsibility to take care of. And their public health is also our responsibility. But something in there that's interesting is we have to also show them that we're not just fighting to preserve our precious institutions. It's not just that we're fighting for the CDC and FDA to retain some sense of normalcy, which, you know, we are, but we need to show them that we're fighting for them. And I think that's a really important thing that if she can do that, I honestly don't follow her career well enough to know her as a politician, but she seems very smart and very savvy, so I don't see why she couldn't. I feel like that is not, that's a really reasonable approach, I think, to doing this, is to try to connect with them on those levels.

• 1:04:01Speaker 07

  And one thing she's, she's talked about trying to appeal to Maha supporters through is not by, you know, capitulating to their crazy stuff, but by pointing out to them how the administration has completely turned their back on a whole bunch of like very base, like popular policies that Maha also supports. Yeah. I mean, but, but here, okay, here's also where I get cynical, because there's a part of me that's sort of like, yes, we need to be doing this and we absolutely need to be showing people that not only are other people that you're not voting for, apparently, fighting for these exact principles you care about, but the people that you're now aligned with

• 1:04:42Speaker 07

  are actively doing things to dismantle the regulations that are the things you care about. And there's a part of me that's just like, why, how can you not know already? And that's, that is something I have to deal with. I have to sort of get past because we have to, we, I mean, we just sort of have to get, grow past that point. But I also don't see how it's not apparently obvious to everyone at this point that these people are doing all the things you don't want. You think the environment has gotten any better? Do you think that there's been any meaningful like food safety or improvements? Yeah, a couple of red dyes, now you can get like very pale Cheetos. But like, people have to see past that, I think, and I, and I don't think they are.

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  I think in order to see past it, they have to be presented with that argument. Yes. And if no one in their media orbit is doing that, or if they don't, if they don't, if they feel like anyone who would make that argument is like, you know, actually against them, is hostile, then they're not going to listen to that person. And I think that's the needle that she's trying to thread, something she's talked about specifically in this majority. Report interview is that if Dems end up taking back the House in the midterms, they have to go after, quote, "not just corruption generally, but corruption in the ways that undermine their base." Right. And a big factor that contributed to Trump's win in 2024, which was a blind spot to the Democrats and the media analyzing the election results, was the Maha movement.

• 1:06:09Robert Evans?

  I actually think a lot of it was Maha. I think that there was very little political analysis done on how they really focused on women, on moms, on radicalizing and doing a lot of persuasion in an electorate that was much more swingy than, than, you know, to be frank, white male voters. Those are generally broken more strongly towards Republicans. But they really focused a lot on women and they have had probably the biggest betrayals with the glyphosate rulings, with their

• 1:06:55Robert Evans?

  complete throwing in with Big Ag and Monsanto and Bayer, including coordinating with the Supreme Court and all of that. And so I think their political vulnerabilities are in, we want to focus on corruption in the ways that undermine their promises.

• 1:07:14Robert Evans?

  And we want to go after investigations that cut off the supply of their illicit money flows.

• 1:07:23Speaker 07

  Adding on to that, like the food safety cuts at the FDA, right? Leading to this massive food safety crisis that people in like half the country are dealing with. Yeah. It's a very easy thing to point to. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's, it's great. We should, you're right. You're right. It is easy these days to be in a echo chamber where all the people who are getting this misinformation are getting it solely from like wellness influencers on Instagram or TikTok. They're solely getting it from like their news station that they listen to, Fox or One News or wherever they're getting that stuff from. I, I think it's great and I do appreciate when someone tries to get out into that, break through that, that bubble.

• 1:08:06Speaker 07

  I actually did watch a clip of Fox talking about AOC in this interview and the outreach. And there is a little truth to it. You can kind of tell that they are taking it seriously because I think they know on some level that it is a smart strategy. Yeah. These are like easy touchpoints. I will say though, I do see a little danger in it. And again, this doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but we have to discuss it. And that there is a little bit of, of real danger to doing this. And you're right, very few people are saying, hey, we need to capitulate totally on science. But it doesn't require that much. What I see, what really bothers me is that we just aren't fighting and pushing back

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  on all this COVID revisionism that's been happening. And it's because it's easier. But like, that's part of what I think we need to be doing is while we are making these outroads, while someone like AOC is focusing on those exact issues, cost of healthcare, they also need to be very clear that the science and the vaccines works and it's sound. And this COVID revisionism is hard because I think a lot of people, doctors, I'm talking about public health professionals, they just don't push back on it because it's too hard to do. The people that have come out with like, oh, see it was all, we were all lied to, Fauci lied to us. It's all lies.

• 1:09:31Speaker 07

  And it's just this, this narrative that is so strong out there that people just kind of step away from it. And now they're like, so hey, well, let's focus on things we can focus on. I say, no, let's do that, but let's also be very clear that those were not all problems. Sure, there wasn't completely perfect, you know, practice with Fauci and with the rolling out of vaccines and talking about masks. Mistakes were made as oftentimes there is in a novel disease crisis. People were moving as fast as they could with what information they could. Things weren't perfect, but there is this real asymmetry to what people will tolerate with Maha versus what they tolerate from someone like Fauci. Like Maha makes mistakes all the time, proven wrong all the time.

• 1:10:13Speaker 07

  And people forgive them because, oh, they take big swings or at least trying to help the, the American healthcare system. But then if Fauci like made a mistake talking about masks, then you know, he is the literal devil. You know, so it, it, there is this asymmetry. We have to be very vocal about that. We have to push back on COVID revisionism the same exact time we are doing this outreach. And I think that, I think it's great. There are young people in politics like Mamdani and, and what I see with her that are getting really good about staying on target with the messaging. I think that is. Message discipline. Yeah, message discipline. Yeah. I, I think we're seeing more of it these days, which is nice.

• 1:10:57Speaker 07

  I agree. I, I agree with everything you say there. And I think that all has to be done like in conjunction with addressing the base problems that cause people to be compelled by the crazier parts of Maha in the first place. Right. And, and this is something that, that Vigeland and AOC talked about, how like Maha charlatans have been able to like tap into some issues and then manipulate people. Right. Based on their like anxieties around our totally broken healthcare system, right? They're able to tap into this notion that everyone has that we're all being fucked over and our healthcare system is broken. Yes. And so if it's broken, maybe I'll look for solutions outside the healthcare system. Maybe I'll, I'll, I'll listen to what people outside of this industry are saying.

• 1:11:39Speaker 07

  And that can lead you down some very dangerous roads as we've been talking about. Yeah. And this part specifically is why AOC mentioned that she's actually been meeting with some Maha advocates and activists. It's to understand the issues that they're tapping into. And this is like the clip that has, you know, sparked this whole, this whole discourse. And I'll play it here for you in case you haven't actually heard the whole thing.

• 1:12:05Robert Evans?

  A lot of them really don't believe that their fight is partisan. And in, and it's not in many ways. We do have extraordinary corruption in our agricultural system, in our big corporate system as well, you know? And it, this is an area where both parties in our entire political system has been compromised. Like one of the first things I did was

• 1:12:34Robert Evans?

  be part, when I first got to the House was be part of these congressional investigations on PFAS dumping.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:12:40Robert Evans?

  And you have companies like 3M and others that, you know, and this goes back decades where you have a big company that is doing manufacturing of some kind and they just dump whatever cancerous byproduct that they have and poison communities around them. And then they just pay off our political class to ignore it and to let it continue to happen or to shield them legally, like with glyphosate, from everyday people trying to get that back.

• 1:13:11Speaker 07

  So like, that's an example of one of these like very real issues that then has been used to like, you know, on-ramp people Yeah. into these much more like cultic milieu, kind of like dangerous information spaces. Yeah. But it is, it is based on like a real material issue, you know? Same thing with like cost of healthcare, right? If you, if you look at that KFF poll that like breaks down, now what does Maha people, whether they're Republican or Democrats, what do they rank as their top issue? Among Republican Maha voters, the most frequently cited top issue was lowering the cost of healthcare, including prescription drugs. Yeah. The second top issue for, again, Republicans, not Democrats, but for Republican Maha voters, was restricting the use of certain chemical additives in the food supply. Right.

• 1:13:56Speaker 07

  I mean, the PFAS thing is a very interesting discussion, these forever chemicals. I've actually done two episodes on it with authors of these really well researched books on the matter. And I still left that with more questions than I had answers. And that requires a bit of a nuanced conversation on what the real risks are to the general population. But I will say this, the more you learn about those companies, 3M, and she didn't mention it, but DuPont is the other big one. There's a number of them. The more you learn about them, the more you just realize the real villain is, I mean, if anything was going to radicalize me, it's that sort of stuff. You learn about these corporations, they're, they're truly awful. Yeah. Truly awful. As a quick aside, you've got to watch the show, The Boys.

• 1:14:41Speaker 07

  I love it so much. And, and the major, the major reason is it's like a superhero movie. It's a superhero show, but really the villains are the corporations. And that's really, I think such, I think more Americans should watch that show. I think it's super important anyways. So you will learn about those things, but you learn about the people behind those companies. And it's not the people that Maha is fighting against right now. It's the people that currently aligned with are the people that are behind these corporations. That's the part that gets me and I don't know how to educate them, but that is going to be the important thing. If that, the cost of healthcare and those regulations are important to them, then I think we need to hammer that as much as possible.

• 1:15:26Speaker 07

  And, and get on those points and people like, I hate to say this, but people like me and other healthcare peoples, we need to get into those spaces to have those conversations. But we're also not trained to do so because we don't have like, if, if, if I go on like a talk show with RFK Jr. and he gish gallops me, I'm going to get pissed and I'm going to like say something mean about his voice. And then I'll feel like a jerk, like, you know, like we're not trained. Totally. And like, to be completely clear, when I ask, should we do outreach? I'm using we in this royal we sense. I am not proposing that you or any of the listeners actually need to go out and do this stuff yourself.

• 1:16:09Speaker 07

  And I'm certainly not proposing that guesting on Maha podcasts or debating on Jubilee to find your common ground is the way that we should do outreach at all. Public outreach can be done completely on your own terms, either through your own social media accounts or your own health podcast where you can talk about these issues that Maha adjacent people claim to care about, but in an actually scientifically backed way. According to KFF, more Maha voters say that healthcare costs and food safety will have a major impact on their vote than vaccine policy, which is, I think, not something

• 1:16:51Speaker 07

  your average Blue Sky user would be aware of. Like, I, there is this sort of like idea of like the average Maha person is this like, you know, eugenics crazed anti-vaxxer, and some of them are that, yes. Yeah. But there's also a lot of like normie moms who, for whatever reason, have had a bad experience with the, with the medical system, or maybe they have too much time on their hands and they're going into crazy, you know, internet rabbit holes. Both, both are things that happen, but there's, there is a lot of like kind of normal moms who will fall into this stuff because they do care about their children's health and they feel like the world that their kids are being raised in is not one that's actually

• 1:17:35Speaker 07

  set up to prioritize the health of their kids. And without people, including, you know, politicians, speaking to that, you know, accurately and like backed by like real science, it opens the door to people who will speak to them about these concerns. Yes. But without that scientific background and it can, it can funnel them into these places that are like not actually going to benefit the health of anyone as we've, as we're now living in the national consequence of. You're, you're absolutely right, and I recognize that, and it is something that I think is important. And that's, you know, a big part of why I, a simple country doctor, decided to become, you know, active online and have a podcast and, and do this sort of stuff because I felt it was a, a good way to fight misinformation and to connect with people. And it is, it is very important that, that we do that.

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  I, I do think that's, that's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. I mean, it is, it is hard. It's a challenge, a real challenge, but we, we all can find our own ways to do it. And kind of, I really, I hope that these outreaches have some benefits, some positive benefit. I, I've become a little bit, and this is not me by my nature, I'm an optimist, but I've become a little bit pessimistic about the ability to win back some of these people with at least the current Democratic leadership. Oh, I mean, certainly, yes. I'm much more hopeful that with the younger people that are much more savvy, internet savvy and know how to speak to people, I'm much more hopeful that they will be able to

• 1:19:04Speaker 07

  connect broadly on some, on some major level in a way that, you know, Chuck Schumer never could or, or care to. I should also say something else. I also recognize fully that there are real problems with our healthcare system. I am not here to say that like, hey, our medical healthcare system is awesome in this country, why would people be dissatisfied? No, people, you're totally right. There is real dissatisfaction with our healthcare, the cost of it, the delivery of it, the access of it. All these things are real and there are issues that, you know, we have to show people that we're championing or we're trying to champion because there are real problems and, and that's why it's working. It's people are easy, I mean, you're right, there's some degree of just bored people

• 1:19:48Speaker 07

  like getting down internet like conspiracy theories about this stuff, but there's real issues that are plaguing our public healthcare that, that we need to address. And we need to, to show that we are not, I mean, it's so funny, like I get accused of being like a pharma shill all the time because I'm like for vaccines. And I'm like, I hate pharma companies more than you. I guarantee it, and I have good reason to. Yeah. Because I see what they do to patients and I see what they do to, to the, the cost of healthcare. So I have, we, we gotta, we have to show people that we are on their side and this is the right place to start. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's also something AOC talked about on the Majority Report as a reason why people are getting pulled into Maha.

• 1:20:31Robert Evans?

  My mom's side of the family is evangelical. Right. And I see how all of these issues that have been at their surface level expressed as right wing are actually very much just the anxieties that we have as working people not being able to afford healthcare. And so it's also like, how do I stop being sick? How do I prevent being sick by limiting my exposure to things that I think are toxic? Yep. And then, which there are things that are actually toxic and things that aren't actually toxic that get taken advantage of.

• 1:21:10Robert Evans?

  And then also, when I do get sick and I can't afford medicine, what are the holistic and low-cost alternatives that I can turn to because I know that I can't afford to see a doctor?

• 1:21:24Speaker 07

  So yeah, those were AOC's comments on the Majority Report, which then served as the basis for a Politico piece earlier this month, digging into her quote unquote Maha outreach and the varieties of issues that she was discussing with Maha advocates. This newsletter also clarified the sequence of events in terms of why she started this outreach when she did. Yeah. And she started this effort last spring ahead of some hearings with the EPA head Lee Zeldin. And the Politico reporting does note that AOC, quote, "still has significant differences

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  with the broader Maha movement, including its vaccines, got this," but she sees overlap on things like pesticides, corporate power, and access to safe food, according to a person close to AOC, unquote. So in spring, her office began specifically working around the issue of glyphosate and pesticides and ended up contacting some Maha organizers who together helped FOIA some emails and correspondence, which then influenced how AOC addressed and questioned EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. And this produced a lot of viral clips. In fact, tens of thousands of lawsuits in the United States, many issued by farmers

• 1:22:50Speaker 07

  with high exposure, have been filed against Bayer for failing to warn them about the cancer risk of exposure. Now, interestingly, Administrator Zeldin, on February 18th of this year, President Trump released an executive order to increase the production of glyphosate in the United States, correct? Yes. And not only did that executive order call to increase the production of glyphosate, it also called for legal immunity for Bayer from the tens of thousands of Americans who are seeking justice in court for their toxic exposure.

• 1:23:35Speaker 07

  So a lot of people in the Maha world saw clips from this hearing and found them compelling and then thought, maybe AOC isn't all that bad. Maybe I could listen to some of the stuff that she's talking about. I think that is the crux of why she is doing this. Yeah. She can address some of these issues around glyphosate, around, you know, specifically these internal EPA emails showing that the pharmaceutical company Bayer was in communication with the EPA about the then upcoming Supreme Court case regarding the carcinogenic weed killer Roundup. Yeah. And that Bayer sought information regarding EPA's regulatory review of Roundup.

• 1:24:18Speaker 07

  And to quote this internal email, quote, "Bayer will provide a small thanks for updating the glyphosate webpage from the EPA and work on Maha," unquote. Insane, an insane thing. This glyphosate update that they're referring to seems to be correlated to the EPA agency withdrawing its support for California's cancer warning on glyphosate. Now, this is important because five days after the EPO this year, Bayer filed their opening brief to the Supreme Court citing the, Trump's executive order and hinging their case on the EPA's warnings or lack thereof of glyphosate.

• 1:24:59Speaker 07

  So we have internal emails from your agency saying that Bayer wanted to thank you and your agency for removing support for California's warning because their, their, their case before the Supreme Court right now hinges on you not warning the American people and withdrawing your support on glyphosate. Do you understand the conflict of interest that is before the American people right now, Mr. Secretary? I understand.

• 1:25:27Robert Evans?

  The gentlelady's time has.

• 1:25:28Speaker 07

  You mind if I? Thank you. So after this sort of viral moment, a few other people in the Maha world started to get into communication with AOC to address issues around pesticides and chemicals, which someone close to this situation told Politico were the issues that, quote, "the traditional left has cared about for decades," unquote. Well, I mean, for your listeners also, I should probably mention, so in case they're wondering, glyphosate is the weed killer in, in Roundup, and there is this big question about whether or not it can cause cancer. And, and this is something that, I'm glad that she's addressing this. I think this is.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Low hanging fruit, and she should. And this is the kind of thing we can all agree on. Like, if there's a chance of it, why not try to get rid of it? But it also, I think we should be careful. Because these can be, just like PFAS, these gateways to greater conspiracy theories. And we should be careful about what we do and do not know. We should say that, like, the honest answer is, you know, we don't know how much of a risk it is for cancer. Probably a very small risk for people who use it rarely. And then a more moderate risk of developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is the thing that seems to be connected to it.

• 1:26:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  And people who use it a lot. So, yeah, it's bad. You know, if there's any way we can make sure it's not around, and we need to follow it and find out how it slipped through the cracks of testing. And those are all questions that we need to address. But I also would say, let's also caution making that our new boogeyman. I would love for the people in charge to be adults about the stuff and to talk about these things, like what we do actually know and don't know, and not to score points based on just the fact that we want it gone. We should, it should be gone. But, I mean, like, it's, again, it's one of these, like, we have a lot of fish to fry.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  And if this is what it takes to get Maha thinking that she's cool, great. But I also have much bigger health-related issues that I would love for her to be focused on.

• 1:27:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like, kind of, one kernel at a time. And this became an issue because of Trump's executive orders trying to give companies, you know, complete immunity.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Robert Evans?

  For any possible health risks as a result of people using these products. And so, you know, a part of politics is both being proactive, but then it's also responding to things happening in the world. And this Supreme Court case was one such instance.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, it's good to score some easy points. These are layups, talking about stuff like this. We should take care of it. But I also don't want it to stop there.

• 1:28:06Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  I don't want this to be, like, where the limit of where our public health discussion ends, you know?

• 1:28:22Robert Evans?

  Something else we learned in this Politico newsletter is exactly who some of these Maha advocates are that AOC has been meeting with. According to Politico, in late July, AOC met with Zen Honeycot of Moms Across America, Joe Maxwell of Farm Action, and government consultant Emily Steinbridge. Moms Across America is a very influential, kind of, Maha-adjacent organization, especially on Facebook. The main four petitions hosted on the Moms Across America website currently relate to data centers, glyphosate, and pesticide manufacturers.

• 1:29:03Robert Evans?

  There's also pages on independent food testing, tox screenings. A whole section of the website is actually on data centers. But there are also webpages on things like genetically engineered food, EMF wireless radiation, and a page promoting vaccine skepticism. The founder, Zen Honeycot, believes that autism can be partially caused by childhood vaccines and claims that an organic diet helped her son's autism symptoms. Honeycot told Politico that her meeting with AOC was a "thorough conversation touching on pesticides, PFAS, and environmental health." She's quoted in the newsletter, saying, quote,

• 1:29:48Robert Evans?

  "I don't agree with socialism, and most Moms Across America also don't. But we do believe in corporate responsibility. Even if someone isn't a socialist or a conservative, I think we should agree that everyone should have access to non-toxic food," unquote. There has also been some recognition among certain Maha figures that a connection with AOC could hurt their own access to the Trump administration. Vani Hari, the food babe influencer, had "trepidations" about meeting with AOC because she, quote, "wants access to the administration still," according to someone familiar with the matter.

• 1:30:33Robert Evans?

  Considering the variety of beliefs, many harmful, that some of these Maha influencers have, I do want to mention a variety of the risks of talking to these people. And, again, to reiterate, I am not arguing that you, the listener, do this. I'm not calling on you to debate your unpleasant family member about vaccines at Thanksgiving. I'm not saying that you have to go on Maha podcasts to argue these things. But there are people in positions of power whose job it is to navigate politics in this way. And there are some real risks from doing that.

• 1:31:13Robert Evans?

  The main one being capitulating on your values and beliefs for political benefit, right? Compromising with people, compromising with, in some cases, like, you know, eugenicists in Maha in hopes of winning some votes. And I don't believe that's what AOC is doing. But for people who are extremely skeptical of, like, AOC's political motivations, I can see how that would be a concern.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Robert Evans?

  Another risk factor is that in your communications with these people, you end up platforming people with genuinely harmful beliefs, right? Stuff that causes active harm to the public health.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Robert Evans?

  Through kids not being vaccinated. And by extension, if you end up promoting some of the justifications for those anti-vax beliefs, which are very dehumanizing against people with autism, sometimes with this, like, soft eugenics component, right? That is a real, you know, possible danger of talking with influential people in this world. There's also this factor that, just by talking with them, you might end up, like, legitimizing some of their crazy beliefs, right? This is an idea that people have.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:21Robert Evans?

  My counter to that is that they don't need to be further legitimized. Donald Trump is the president. The Republicans control the whole of the federal government. RFK Jr. runs HHS. They have received institutional legitimation, like, already.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. You're right. It's not about you can't platform these people. These people are the platform at this point.

• 1:32:44Robert Evans?

  And AOC is not platforming these people.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Robert Evans?

  She isn't telling her followers or supporters to seek out these Maha activists. She isn't live streaming with them. She's doing outreach in private to pull people from their side.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Robert Evans?

  Maybe back towards reality.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  And I think it's working. I think it's actually working for her, at least. I mean, assuming that this is going to be for a potential presidential run, or at least for some sort of political maneuvering. For whatever reason, she's doing it. I think as long as she's able to collaborate with clear boundaries, addressing the legitimate concerns, like the PFAS, pesticide exposures, cost of healthcare, while really clearly addressing the scientifically unsupported claims, like these chronic disease things, the soft eugenics, the vaccine narratives. I think that's important. But what was important to me, though, those have to be vocally addressed. Because, like I was saying before, with all these people that have been pushing these COVID revisionist thoughts,

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  like, just letting those people say those things without responding, it does build this narrative overall that COVID vaccines were a mistake and that they're dangerous, et cetera. We have to not just, you know, focus on things that we agree on, but she has to clearly set boundaries and say that the things we did were really good. The one good thing that Trump ever is connected to, really, in my perspective, is Operation Warp Speed, the worst.

• 1:34:15Robert Evans?

  Operation Warp Speed.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  The worst name for a vaccine project that you could have made. But still, you know, that's like, that's the, that we have to be really clear about those two things. And I think if she can do that, that's great. And people should take the lead. And I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get hurt for saying some of this, because I know a lot of my, you know, doctor friends, public health friends, who have a much different perspective about Maha and don't feel there's really any benefit to talking with them for all the reasons that you mentioned. Maybe I'll get there, I'm not there right now. I'm just not. I feel like we need to be able to connect.

• 1:34:51Robert Evans?

  I mean, I, yeah, I would like to kind of touch on that for a sec, because, like, there is this idea that you can maybe ignore the problem away.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:00Robert Evans?

  That instead of trying to talk to these people, we just want them to go away, so you should not acknowledge them. You should not, you should just pretend they aren't there until they go away.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Robert Evans?

  How well has that strategy worked for us thus far?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Hasn't, hasn't worked that well. Hasn't worked that well. It hasn't, it hasn't.

• 1:35:18Robert Evans?

  And to me, this idea that you can just not acknowledge this whole problem is just like a rejection of politics, to me. Like, that is just rejecting what politics is. And again, I'm not saying that you have to do this. But to say that our solution is going to be just making fun of them until they go away, to me, that feels like a kind of liberal bourgeois position from someone with enough privilege to just reject real politics.

• 1:35:47Speaker 07

  Through pretending that a very big group of people simply do not exist.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 07

  And I don't think that's how we're gonna get ourselves out of this problem. And when I said this online, someone said, well, yeah, but I mean, if you're gonna talk about real politics, real politics is when I asked my dad to see a doctor about his stomach problems, and he said he's not going to, and he's just gonna use cod liver oil.

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, the one trick that I don't want you to know, I personally don't want you to know that, folks. It's gonna put me out of business.

• 1:36:19Speaker 07

  And like, that's a huge problem. Like, that is a huge problem, that someone's dad said that. But that problem won't be solved by ignoring the problem.

• 1:36:28Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:36:29Speaker 07

  Right? This is, this is, the endpoint of what we're trying to do is reach people who have this reaction. And that's gonna, that's gonna require massive healthcare reforms.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:36:40Speaker 07

  And building public trust in state capacity and in our ability to actually help, help people.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 07

  And this is gonna be a long-term project. I'm not saying this is gonna be fixed by 2028. But towards the end of this Politico article, there's a really interesting quote. Quote, "AOC's outreach comes at a moment when the Maha vote itself appears to be up for grabs ahead of the 28th presidential election amid ongoing frustrations with the Trump administration. Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA personality and the host of the health and wellness podcast, Culture Apothecary, told Politico she's, quote, "certainly concerned about the possibility of the influential block of voters slipping away." Clark said she's already seeing interest in AOC among her own viewers. After AOC began publicly talking about pesticides,

• 1:37:28Speaker 07

  Clark said audience members sent her clips with reactions along the lines of, "Wow, this is crazy. Agree with AOC?" To quote Clark, "Maha voters are not Republican. They're so focused on health issues, they don't care who it is that's saying they're gonna get it done." Unquote. And this, this sort of movement points to why I think it might be a good idea for someone like AOC to talk to some of these people and disrupt the pipeline from the alternative health industry.

• 1:38:00Speaker 04

  Give them an off-ramp.

• 1:38:02Speaker 07

  Give them an off-ramp, because the alternative is that they're just gonna get even more insular into this world of conspiracism and eventually, like, eugenics-style fascism. So for someone who's doing outreach, you have to, you have to first, like, figure out what the variety of concerns are that are held by these big groups, right? Where do these concerns come from?

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 07

  And if there's any overlap between some of the material concerns that they actually have with, you know, scientifically-based environmental issues or left-wing critiques of corporate interests. And this might lead someone to kind of question, okay, but then why would you do outreach to influencers and leaders of Maha rather than just regular normie moms? Well, AOC is also doing that through her own, you know, social media channels. But how do you think she can reach normie moms in the first place? Who are very bubbled, right? Who are in their own information silos.

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:52Speaker 07

  It is through, you know, talking with some of these movement leaders in private that can help you learn about their political operation, about how their ideas are disseminated, what their leaders believe, what their followers believe, the range of their politics, and like, what's exactly being sold. And also, you can learn things that they might only say in private.

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Speaker 07

  All of that information can help inform how to target regular people, which AOC does from time to time on Instagram, and also through, you know, visits to data centers, which get picked up on local news coverage.

• 1:39:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Speaker 07

  And like, these Maha influencers command very large audiences that ordinarily would not be exposed to the substance of what AOC's politics actually are. But now they might be. And if AOC can position herself as a figure that someone in the Maha world can go to for takes outside their regular bubble, ideally, over time, she might be able to off-road them away from the crazy stuff towards health policies that actually make us healthier. And I think there really is, is value in attempting to pull these followers away from the Maha side and educate them on real harms being perpetuated by profit-seeking industries. And part of a politician's job, like, is learning how to talk to people, right?

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 07

  Talking to like, these like, politically lost parents who have concerns about the health of their kids might mean different things than talking to like, a leftist, right? AOC has to learn, or, you know, anyone has to learn how to talk to different types of people.

• 1:40:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 07

  And building a base that's like, capable, you know, a coalition, a majoritarian coalition, that's capable of challenging capital, challenging these big corporations, will mean talking to people that you disagree with or might even have some harmful beliefs.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Speaker 07

  And this happens, like, in unions all the time, right? There's, there's people in the working-class unions who might believe some things that are bad.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 07

  But if you're gonna build, like, worker power, you're gonna have to talk with them. And maybe then, through the process of building solidarity, you can address some of those harmful beliefs that they have. Once you have that solidarity kind of built, what, what, once, once you realize you actually do have shared interests.

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Speaker 07

  And these sorts of harmful beliefs are actually working against those shared interests.

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

  Agreed. We need a bigger tent. I mean, people who want to make these fights, we need as big a tent as we can. I agree with that.

• 1:41:09Speaker 07

  This is the same thing with the data center battle, right?

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Speaker 07

  Like, that has a lot of conservatives supporting it.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. And it's a very interesting topic to bring up, along with the same thing, I, you know, with the same people whose perspectives on this. How it aligns with Maha and how that aligns with the greater MAGA picture is really interesting. And, and you're exactly right. It's about listening, about being empathetic. For what it's worth, there are studies that show if you want to change public opinion on healthcare and the healthcare infrastructure, that's what is required. And what does seem to work is, you know, listening, showing empathy. It is difficult to scale, is really the issue, you know? That, that's the kind of thing that is a challenge to, to scale. But it is exactly what you're talking about. It's coalition building whenever you can. And we're at a crisis moment where I think that's necessary.

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  And, and when we talk about, I talk about, you know, building a bigger tent. For me, that means we're bringing in these people, but it doesn't mean abandoning the other things.

• 1:42:06Speaker 07

  No, and also, our tent does have rules. Our tent has, has rules for its continued operation.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:42:14Speaker 07

  And if you're gonna come in here and start assaulting people in our tent, if you're gonna start, you know, hitting down the stick.

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  Throwing trans kids under the, the bus for it, yeah, then that, our tent should not be for those people. I agree.

• 1:42:27Speaker 07

  No. But there is legitimate problems that if the left doesn't address in, you know, actually substantive ways, which the right can never do, because the right's whole ideology is very contradictory.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:42:38Speaker 07

  They have these kind of populist Maha things that they can never actually fulfill, as you see with, with, with the Trump administration. But there is some legitimate issues or anxieties that motivate issues, both legitimate and not.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Speaker 07

  And if, if, if the left doesn't address those, then we give the opening to the right to sell crazy bullshit.

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:42:59Speaker 07

  And like, that is the thing that, that needs to be disrupted.

• 1:43:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:43:03Speaker 07

  To kind of show my cards at the end here, the reason why I kind of like, care about this is because like, I, I grew up with like, a crunchy mom. I, I'll, I'll use that kind of terminology. And I have seen her shift politically to the left over, over the years, right? Like, if Maha was a thing 20 years ago, she would have been like a Maha person.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:43:24Speaker 07

  It's all the same types of stuff around like, some legitimate issues, some kind of borderline issues, like, is organic food necessarily better than non-organic tomato? Maybe, maybe not. And then also vaccine hesitancy. That's, that was, that was a, a big thing in my family. And I saw my mom change her opinions as I grew up.

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:46Speaker 07

  And for me, it's, it can be really sad to see so many, so many people assume that like, large swaths of just regular people must, like, have to be these like, completely unreachable lunatics.

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Speaker 07

  And not all Maha sympathetic people are crazy anti-vaxxers. But there, there are some, there are some. And even those people, I think, are still people that, that should be reached. I'm not saying that you have to do that. I'm not saying that AOC doing a congressional hearing is going to do that immediately.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 07

  But, but when you start writing off so many people as just like, beyond saving, then, again, you have kind of given up on politics.

• 1:44:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. We are still responsible for those people.

• 1:44:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  We are still responsible for those people's public health. Even the people who don't believe in vaccines, I feel responsible for their health. So that's really well said. And it gives you an interesting perspective on it, and it's good. And I think if most of us are, you know, really think about it, we probably have someone in our lives like that as well. A lot of your listeners probably are people who grew up with parents who have pretty different ideas. Some of them probably haven't shifted that much, but a lot of them probably have. There's someone in your life that probably has shifted over time. I think, I think it's important that we keep trying to. I mean, these are people that we have to, to some degree. I think the bottom line is we have to keep communicating with Maha. And we have to show that we're listening. And it doesn't matter how much we know, if it doesn't show that we care.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  And I, and that's super cheesy, but it is true. And, and I think that's at the core of what AOC is doing. And again, I don't know her politics that well. I haven't followed her that closely, but she seems pretty savvy. And I feel like that empathy thing, she, she nails. And I think that's great. And I think that's probably something more of us need to do, more politicians should be doing.

• 1:45:37Speaker 07

  The empathy aspect. Is really important. And of course, something that just doesn't get encouraged on social media because of the way those platforms are structured and the way the algorithms work. But in trying to answer this question of should we, the royal we, do outreach to Maha people, I think we first really need to ask ourselves, do we actually want to understand this problem? Or do we just want to feel superior to anti-vaxxers? Because if we just want to feel better than other people, then yeah, ignoring the issue and just making fun of these people online, that's enough to fulfill your goal. But if your goal is to actually address these problems and their root causes, you're

• 1:46:21Speaker 07

  going to actually have to try to understand the diffuse nature of Maha, the variety of issues it tries to address and the anxieties it feeds on. Because if you don't, your understanding of the people in Maha will not just be incomplete, but politically useless. A lot of regular people in the world don't vote or shape their beliefs based on deeply held ideological or partisan conviction, but through trying to respond to the material conditions in their lives. Now, sometimes that means they may get tricked by a con man. And it's really easy to just laugh and shame those people as gullible fools. But like, how is that useful?

• 1:47:04Speaker 07

  Or is it just a way to make yourself feel superior amidst a public crisis? It's worth remembering that one out of 10 Mamdani voters voted for Trump in 2024. And Mamdani started his campaign by talking with Trump voters in the Bronx on Fordham Road. That was like his first campaign video in November of 2024, after the presidential election. Rebuilding faith in the public health will take a long time.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:47:36Speaker 07

  I think passing universal healthcare would be a huge step

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Speaker 07

  Towards that. Having people occupying the government that is actually transparent, doesn't just lie about being transparent.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Speaker 07

  Will be steps towards that goal. And I guess I hope to see that goal one day, even if it is not right now. But you know what you can do right now is listen to House of Pod if you want some real information about public health.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  You sure can. As soon as you're done listening to this, and I mean, including the ads that come at the end of this podcast, once you're done listening to all of those, then go listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, where we talk about a lot of these same issues. I bring on experts from all kinds of different fields, because I don't know everything about medicine, although I am pretty smart, I don't know everything. So I bring on people smarter than me whenever I can. And we'll cover things from wellness grifters, Dr. Oz, Peter Attia, more obscure people that you probably haven't heard of, to what RFK Jr. is currently doing to our healthcare infrastructure. And it's a pretty fun show. It's not too sciency. So I think if you like this podcast, there's a very good chance you're gonna like The House of Pod.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Also, if I may plug, I have a new podcast coming out that I'm very excited about. It's a little different. It is called Persian of Interest. It's gonna be a Persian history podcast, gonna be to take a look at stories of Persian contributions to the arts, to music, to philosophy, gonna look at stories that Persians have largely been written out of or minimized in, where the role is more prominent. And I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. So stay tuned for Persian of Interest as well, which should be coming out at the end of this month.

• 1:49:17Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for coming on and talking about a very, very challenging topic.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Speaker 07

  For, geez, an hour.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Bring me back in like a month and let me see if I'm still feeling as open to talking to Maha.

• 1:49:31Speaker 07

  Will do. Thank you.

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• 1:50:08Robert Evans?

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• 1:50:56Speaker 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.

• 1:51:08Speaker 07

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

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  Stories of survival.

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

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  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 1:51:25Speaker 07

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

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:51:40Speaker 07

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

• 1:51:48Speaker 04

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

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

• 1:52:01Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:52:05Robert Evans?

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

• 1:52:13Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 1:52:14Robert Evans?

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they were seeing.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 1:52:20Robert Evans?

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

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:52:30Robert 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.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:52:44Robert 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.

• 1:52:54Robert Evans?

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

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:53:05Speaker 07

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Take It Happen Here. My name is Dana Alcard. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today's episode is going to be about the role of the US in the Middle East and the debate around that that's happening in DC and policy circles at the moment. Very smart people are debating because of the Trump administration's disastrous policies, including the war in Iran, whether Washington's decades-long position as essentially top dog in the Middle East just died, or is dying, or was never quite what everybody said it was. So here it is. I'm going to give you the definitive answer on what the role of the US in the Middle East is and is going to be. Okay, just kidding.

• 1:53:48Speaker 07

  Obviously, what I would want might piss a lot of people off, but I'm gonna summarize for you what the debate is. So the different arguments that capture this debate can be encapsulated in the next three sentences. They were published within a few weeks of each other by three, you know, serious, well-credentialed people who studied the Middle East for a living. So the first sentence is, quote, outsiders continue to play their balance of power games within the borders of weak Arab states. Overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before. The second sentence is, quote, the American Middle East is finished. And the third sentence is, quote, it is no longer possible to talk about a US-led order in the Middle East.

• 1:54:31Speaker 07

  These are all from articles published in Foreign Affairs or directly on the Council on Foreign Relations website by Greg Goss, Mark Lynch, and Stephen Cook. They're all looking at the same set of facts and arriving at some opposed conclusions about whether something around the US role has actually ended. I think there's a lot here that is accurate and like worthy of engagement, but the focus for me is a little off. Not because they're wrong about the facts, the facts are mostly right. It's because the question of, is the order over, misses how the order functioned to some degree, and that its functioning was predicated not just on a tolerance of repression, but the generation of authoritarianism.

• 1:55:13Speaker 07

  So these scholars and analysts do acknowledge the impact on people in the Middle East to some degree. They reference what happened in Gaza and Lebanon and other places. But I think the scope of the American impact on the region isn't necessarily emphasized enough. Just in the last year, hundreds of Iranians have been killed in the war. The Lebanese have been displaced for like the third or fourth time in 20 years by a war they didn't start, and they can't seem to end. And Palestinians continue to die even during a so-called ceasefire. And these are referenced sometimes in the discussion, so they do talk about that in these articles. But when policy people reference these things, they reference them as kind of casualty figures on the way to maybe a bigger argument about primacy.

• 1:55:56Speaker 07

  And I think this captures kind of what's off about the discussion and encapsulates maybe how the American order works. As I've argued endlessly before, talking about this American order ending misses the point. For the people who actually live in the region, there was never a legitimate order there to lose in the first place. And US hegemony, key to the quote-unquote liberal order that people are now talking about saving, was established on the Middle East being the way it was and sustaining American hegemony all these years. Okay, so let's start with the article by Greg Goss titled- The New Old Middle East and subtitled Wars of Sound and Fury. His argument is essentially, yes, the last three years have been transformative looking.

• 1:56:41Speaker 07

  The US and Israel fought an actual, direct war against Iran. Iran's supreme leader of 36 years is dead. Bashar al-Assad in Syria is gone. Hezbollah has been decimated. Gaza has been flattened. These are all real, all enormous impacts. But, and this is his real point, none of it changed the underlying structure. So outside powers are still playing a balance of power game inside weak Arab states. The Iranian-Israeli conflict is still unresolved and the Palestinian question is still unresolved. And the US is still stuck in the position it's occupied for years now, which is characterized as unable to actually order the region the way it wants, but too enmeshed to leave. So his evidence is strong.

• 1:57:22Speaker 07

  Iran, despite losing its senior leadership, despite watching their infrastructure get pounded, despite Israel and the US going after it directly, Iran came out the other side still standing. It's still running its "resistance foreign policy." It's still engaged in Iraq and Lebanon through its allies and now has a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz that it's used extensively. Gaz's phrase for it is, "It's still got it." And it's a good phrase. The regime that the war was supposedly going to topple is, by his account, arguably more entrenched afterward. Because it can now tell its own public that, "We took a direct hit from the two most powerful militaries aligned against us and we're still here." Now Gaz talks about the Iranians killed. He says this, "According to the human rights activist news agency, Iranian security forces

• 1:58:07Speaker 07

  killed at least 7,000 protesters during a wave of unrest in December of last year. Other organizations put the number in the tens of thousands. The fact that the regime killed that many and got away with it essentially functions as evidence for a claim about regime durability." So it's there to explain why Trump thought Iran looked weak enough to bomb. And that's the through line of the whole continuity thesis. Gaz, of course, mentions the human cost. He does so repeatedly, I would say, more than a lot of his peers in these circles. So he talks about Lebanon over 4,200 people killed, a million displaced, the West Bank. But the analytical weight of the piece sits somewhere else, on whether weak states can

• 1:58:52Speaker 07

  produce durable peace and whether Iran retains regional influence, on whether the US can restore a more "stable region." So it's all about stability, order, primacy. These are the units of account. And this isn't a problem with this particular author. I think this is what the genre requires. Foreign Affairs as a publication is asking, "What should Washington do?" Which means its whole vocabulary is built around a subject, the US government, or occasionally Israel or Iran as fellow state actors. And everyone else becomes the terrain that that subject acts on. Palestinians, Lebanese civilians, Iranian protesters, Yemenis, they appear as populations, undifferentiated, something that gets caused to suffer by the real actors doing the actual politics.

• 1:59:37Speaker 07

  In the end, Gaz concludes that the region "looks a lot like it did before the war." I'd actually push on that a different way than he does. What he means is, the balance of power hasn't shifted. The conflicts are the same conflicts. But I'd say, the region also looks a lot like it did before in this other sense, that the people living in it are still structurally objects of a debate about state power, rather than participants in it. And that continuity is real too. Okay, now we move on to Mark Lynch's "The End of the American Middle East." It's also in Foreign Affairs. Lynch's argument is the opposite of Gaz's.

• 2:00:21Speaker 07

  He says, "No, something did actually end. The regional order that's existed since the first Gulf War in 1991, built by George H.W. Bush, sustained through five presidencies, organized around Israeli security and the flow of oil and American hegemony, that order is dead. And the Iran war is what killed it alongside the destruction of Gaza." And it's not because Washington lost the battle, it's because the bargain at the core of this order stopped functioning. So the bargain, in Lynch's estimation, was, "Align with us." Basically, the United States saying this to other Arab and non-Arab state actors. "Align with us and we'll protect you."

• 2:01:03Speaker 07

  And then when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz and bombarded the Gulf states that had both signed the Abraham Accords and didn't, so they've been attacking many of their neighbors, and the United States and Israel, "With all their military might, simply failed to dislodge the Iranian regime," that bargain broke in front of everyone. So Gulf leaders watched that bargain break and made that assessment that it was broken. I want to be clear about what I really appreciate in this piece, because there's a lot, and it's rare to see it in this venue. Lynch writes, and I'm just going to read this directly because I don't want to paraphrase it into something softer, "For Washington, the strategic benefits accrued from this order seem to justify the costs of the war required to sustain it.

• 2:01:47Speaker 07

  But the price was much higher for those who live in the region. For most people, the US order meant only violence, hopelessness, and deprivation. By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other region." So for this publication, it's a genuinely bold, radical sentence. He's naming the thing plainly, that this wasn't a stabilizing project that had some unfortunate externalities, and that it was predicated on violence for the people who live inside it. And he goes farther than that, too. He talks about, "The moral hazard built into American security guarantees, how they let autocratic allies disregard Washington's stated interests because they knew they were

• 2:02:28Speaker 07

  untouchable, and how US support for neoliberal economic reforms essentially let regimes loot their own populations under the cover of privatization. And how the war on terror gave Washington's allies a permission structure to build surveillance states." If you've listened to me talk before, you know that's basically very close to the argument I've spent my career making about US-backed regimes in the Arab world, that Washington's security relationships didn't just fail to prevent repression, they were often the delivery mechanism for it. But of course, and understandably for this publication, the fix on offer is still a fix for Washington. Lynch's closing argument is that the next American president has a "real chance" to build something better. Renounce military intervention as a first resort, pressure Israel on settlements and

• 2:03:11Speaker 07

  annexations, stop pushing Iraq and Lebanon to disarm the militias before they're ready, recommit to international human rights norms, etc. But essentially, everything on this list is the US as a subject. I don't say that to be glib. A US government that actually did those things would matter enormously. And domestic US politics is showing a shift. It's showing that 2/3 of Democrats now think Washington is too supportive of Israel, and there was a House vote to cut military aid to them. So in this context, he's right that there's more room now than there's ever been for a shift. But again, the theory of change, it still runs entirely through whether an American administration decides to be different. It's not, for example, Palestinians get self-determination because Palestinians have built the power to demand and win it.

• 2:03:56Speaker 07

  It's that they might get relief from Washington if Washington decides it's in its interest to provide relief. It's not nothing, but it's not the same thing as agency. Additionally, Lynch's frame as order versus disorder, or old order versus new order, reaches for the Suez analogy, for example, in 1956, the last gasp of British and French imperial power. But his argument is essentially, the American empire in the Middle East is following the same arc that the European ones did, decaying for structural reasons and eventually that would recede too. Now, I'm sympathetic to this historical analogy, but I want to flag something about it, which

• 2:04:38Speaker 07

  is that it's still a story about the transition between empires, or between an empire and a vacuum, or between an empire and some future multipolar agreement. It's not on its own a story of what the people of the region actually want, which, and this is the part that's available if you go looking in a lot of different types of surveys, is it's not usually, "Please replace American hegemony with a different hegemony." It's just, people in the region want very basic things. They want accountability from their own governments. They want an end to being treated as a security theater for other people's conflicts. They want actual sovereignty over the decisions that get made about their countries in Washington or Riyadh or Tehran without them in the room.

• 2:05:20Speaker 07

  So Lynch is closer to writing about this than anyone in this genre, but again, he is focused on what Washington should do next. And I'm wondering if we should start also asking what it would take for the people living in this region to be the ones deciding. And finally, the third piece by Stephen Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations, published just this past week. I'm recording on August 21st. So it's about something that I think a lot of people outside the region, or those who study the region, haven't fully clocked yet, which is the MECA Joint Defense Agreement. So here's the quick version. On August 7th, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed a mutual defense pact they called the MECA Agreement.

• 2:06:01Speaker 07

  The full text hasn't been released, but reporting indicates it functions like a NATO Article 5 clause, which is, "An attack on one is treated as an attack on all." On paper, it obligates Saudi Arabia and Turkey to come to Pakistan's defense in a war with India or... Or Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back Turkey if it comes to blows with Israel over Syria or any other adversary. Forty-eight hours after the signing ceremony, the Houthis hit a Saudi Aramco refinery. Now Saudi Arabia didn't invoke the pact. And Cook reads that correctly, I think, as less about whether the treaty's security guarantee is credible and more about what its existence signals, which is that Saudi

• 2:06:42Speaker 07

  Arabia is building an alternative to relying on Washington, full stop. Cook's argument is very similar to Lynch's, that the US-led order is over, but he gets there kind of in a different way. For him, he's not emphasizing the moral bankruptcy or the violence against ordinary people. It's straightforward, realist account. After the US failed to defend Saudi Arabia directly, when Iran hit its oil facilities in 2019, and after the whiplash of Obama signing the Iran deal and then Trump tearing it up, and all of the disasters of the Biden administration pushing the Abraham Accords, even as Gaza was being erased, after Trump's own Iran war, the Saudis simply stopped believing

• 2:07:27Speaker 07

  that Washington's guarantees were reliable, and so they went and built their own. And the part I find most striking about Cook's argument is the picture he draws in the end, which is a Middle East splitting into two competing blocs: the Abraham Accords bloc versus the Mecca Agreement bloc. So the Emiratis staying tight with Israel and the United States, and then the Saudis, Turks and Pakistanis building something that explicitly competes with that. And he calls it, quote, "a major change," and says it's hard to overstate its significance. And honestly, structurally, I think he's right that something has shifted. But here's where maybe I would slow down a little, because I think the piece has a missing question. Cook frames the whole thing as a story about whose order it's going to be.

• 2:08:10Speaker 07

  So American order giving way to regional multipolarity, and Riyadh and Ankara shaping the region instead of Washington? And, okay, sure, but shaping it how? And for whom? The three signatories to the Mecca Agreement are, and I just want to say this plainly, all authoritarian. One is an absolute monarchy, another is a rapidly authoritarian, an increasingly authoritarian state, run by a man who jailed his last serious electoral rival, and then a military-dominated national security state that's fought multiple wars against its own populations. So this is not a coalition of the region's publics asserting themselves against outside domination. This is three governments, each of which has spent considerable energy over the past

• 2:08:51Speaker 07

  decade, surveilling and jailing, and in some cases, killing its own dissidents. They're deciding they'd rather coordinate their security agreements with each other than depend on Washington's. And that might genuinely be bad news for American hegemony. I just don't think it's automatically good news for anyone living under these three governments or anyone in the region. Multipolarity is not a synonym for liberation. Sometimes it's just another table with more authoritarians on it, none of whom actually answer to the people they govern any more than American hegemon did. Now, Cook's piece, to its credit, doesn't claim otherwise. He's writing a narrow, careful analysis of this security architecture shift, and he says so. But it's worth noting that, quote, "the US-led order is over and something better is emerging,"

• 2:09:35Speaker 07

  are two completely different claims. And only one of those three pieces that I talked about today even gestures at the second one. And even that piece, which is Lynch's, gestures mostly by asking Washington to be nicer.

• 2:09:58Speaker 07

  So here's my synthesis. Gaza says nothing structural has changed, the game is the same game, weak states are still weak, Iran and Israel are still locked in, the Palestinian question is still open, and the US is still stuck playing a role it can't fully commit to or walk away from. And Lynch says something did change: the moral and material bankruptcy of the American security bargain has been fully exposed, and now there's a narrow window for Washington to build something less violent in its place. And then Cook says something has changed, but it's not about morality or bankruptcy, it's about credibility. American guarantees stopped being trusted, so regional powers built their own, and now we're watching this bipolar regional order emerge that doesn't run through Washington at all. And all three, I think, have a real and important argument. I don't want to flatten that.

• 2:10:42Speaker 07

  The difference between "nothing changed" and "the empire is ending" or "something more competitive is taking its place," that's not a trivial disagreement. It has real implications for what happens next in Gaza and Lebanon and in the Gulf. But again, notice what all three arguments hold in common underneath that disagreement is they're all arguing about whether an order existed and whether it's ending. And maybe we don't emphasize enough existed for who and ending for who and according to whose clock. So I want to back up a little bit further from the three essays we just walked through. All three of them write as though the story starts with the Iran war, or with Gaza's destruction, or with the Mecca Agreement. So a story that begins in the last two, three years.

• 2:11:26Speaker 07

  But let me go back to December 2023, just a few weeks after October 7th, the Hamas attacks in Israel and then the start of the war on Gaza. Back then, the working assumption in a lot of Washington rooms was that this could still be contained. I wrote a piece about that in December of 2023 for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and I called it "The Reemergence of the Palestine Question in World Politics." The argument had three parts. Part one was that Palestine functions for Arab publics as what I call a gateway to dissent. Not because everyone in the region is single-mindedly obsessed with Palestine at the expense of their own politics. It's because organizing around Palestine is one of the few forms of political mobilization

• 2:12:07Speaker 07

  that Arab authoritarian regimes historically had a hard time fully criminalizing, because the regimes themselves had claimed to support the cause rhetorically, even if they worked with Washington or maybe sometimes Israel behind the scenes. And there's all sorts of examples about this, like Egyptian revolutionaries in 2011 during the Arab Spring. They pointed directly to their earlier organizing around Palestine as the training ground for their work. In 2023, after October 7th, the same dynamic reappeared. There was protest that Arab governments, several of them allied with Washington, that they struggled to contain around Palestine, because for once, the people's anger and the regime's professed position were pointed in the same direction, which made it very hard to police.

• 2:12:50Speaker 07

  Now, part two of my argument was Palestine and violence. This is the part I think is particularly useful now. I argued then that Israeli military conduct, plus very visible American acquiescence to it, was functionally handing the Palestinian cause over to the actors most willing to escalate around it. So Iran and its proxies, who explicitly positioned themselves as the keepers of the Palestinian cause. At the time, the Iranian officials and others used the term "unifying the fields," meaning they coordinated attacks with Hezbollah and the Houthis and the militias in Iraq and Hamas. So I cited an Arab barometer polling at that time that was already showing growing public

• 2:13:32Speaker 07

  traction for "the resistance access." And I flagged that shift in how Israel was fighting itself. There was reporting at that time that was coming out of 972Mag on the use of AI targeting systems that basically were enabling, in their words, "these wars of massive scale rather than precision." So my worry was that when extremist actors and militias are the only actors that are left actually representing the Palestinian cause by force, you get a zero-sum dynamic that produces exactly the kind of mass, multi-front violence that becomes very hard to de-escalate. That was the argument I made in December 2023, and it's, I think, more or less a summary of what's occurred.

• 2:14:16Speaker 07

  The 2026 Iran war, the Houthis re-engaging, Iran's whole regional strategy still oriented around this unifying the field logic I was describing before. Now, part three of my argument was Palestine and the world order. I argued that Washington's simultaneous position, the full-throated backing at the time for Ukrainian sovereignty against occupation, paired with material and diplomatic cover for Israel's actions in Gaza, was doing serious damage to the credibility of the entire liberal international order and not just to America's regional reputation. I use this term from the literature in international relations of "recognitional justice," which

• 2:14:58Speaker 07

  is the idea that a global order's legitimacy depends not just on power, but on whether it's perceived to deliver justice on longstanding unresolved sovereignty claims. Palestine is like the textbook case of an unresolved claim, that sovereignty was never granted and never addressed. And I pointed out then that Arab officials were already, in December 2023, showing up in Moscow or Beijing and treating Washington's mediating role as compromised beyond repair. And I closed with a very specific historical contrast. Ronald Reagan in 1982, when Israel was attempting to destroy Lebanon, he picked up the phone and told Menachem Begin to stop bombing Beirut. And the bombing stopped. So there was- Like real leverage applied.

• 2:15:43Speaker 07

  Now compare that to Biden's approach back in 2023, which reporters called, you know, bear hugging Netanyahu. My argument then was nothing short of abandoning this model and treating Palestinian self-determination as a genuine sovereignty question, rather than just like a security management problem, was going to prevent exactly the kind of regional escalation that's consuming all of us now. Now, I'm not saying this to claim like how great I was to have said this. I didn't have a crystal ball. A crystal ball is not really required here. The mechanism for how this was going to function was very clear in December 2023 for anyone who was willing to look at Palestine or the cause of Arab publics as a cause rather than just a footnote.

• 2:16:25Speaker 07

  And two years later, you know, Gregory Goss, for example, is describing Hezbollah and the Houthis re-engaging exactly along this logic that I described. And Lynch is describing Gulf states starting to hedge towards Russia and China. And Cook is describing how Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are building this alternative security structure because the bear hug model of American reassurance stopped being credible. And Arab public sentiment now has more interest in Washington because of what's happened in the last three years. There was also this piece in Foreign Affairs by Amane Jemal and Michael Robbins, and they talked about survey data from Arab respondents that showed how lots of Arabs, you know, majority, don't think the United States upholds international law. And single digits in these surveys picked the US as an acceptable mediator for the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

• 2:17:11Speaker 07

  And in every country surveyed, more people said China does a better job protecting freedoms and rights than the United States does. So Jemal and Robbins read that as kind of a recent collapse, something that had become lost for the United States after October 2023. I'd go further. We know from survey data since 2011, you can look up the Arab Opinion Index, for example, that this wasn't a cliff, it's a slope. It's been a steady, years-long trajectory of Arab publics souring on the United States that predates what's happened in Gaza and the genocide by over a decade, at least. Between 21 and 29% of respondents across these nine rounds of the Arab Opinion Index

• 2:17:54Speaker 07

  have consistently named the US as the greatest threat facing Arabs, second only to Israel. And the share who reject the idea that the US genuinely cares about human rights climbed from 49% in 2014 to 55% in the most recent round. And finally, 76% hold a negative view of US policy towards Palestine. And none of that is just a reaction to the last three years. This double standard that the United States has upheld wasn't a failure of the liberal international order in the Middle East. It was the order. It was operating as designed. The post-World War II architecture of multilateral institutions, the democratic norms and open markets and rules that, you know, supposedly apply to everybody.

• 2:18:34Speaker 07

  That's the version that the European publics and European states were sold and experienced. The Middle East, as I've argued in a variety of different pieces, was governed through a different logic from day one. It was about securing the flow of oil. It was about guaranteeing freedom of navigation through strategic choke points and propping up whichever regime would sign on to that bargain. Democratic issues were completely optional. And of course, unconditional backing for Israeli governments regardless of conduct. There's actually a companion statistic in the piece that I wrote from the Arab Barometer. Forty to 50% of respondents believe that the United Nations sides more often with Israel than with the Palestinians. And the conclusion is plain.

• 2:19:15Speaker 07

  Quote, "Many Arab citizens no longer see the problem as one of double standards alone. The root cause is the bankruptcy of the entire international system." So it's not just Washington, it's this whole architecture that people were told to place their faith in, the UN, the rules, the institutions, basically read by the people who are supposed to be protected by it as functionally captured. Now, an important caveat, because I don't want to leave you with the wrong takeaway here. 68% of respondents in that latest Arab Opinion Index still say they support democracy as their preferred system of governments. This isn't a story about people giving up on democratic values or self-determination or accountability or rule of law. It's a story about people concluding, based on 15 years of consistent data, that the American-led vehicle claiming to deliver those values was never actually built to deliver them in the Middle East.

• 2:20:01Speaker 07

  And then, of course, there's the Trump administration's contribution to all of this, which I've been fairly blunt about, you know, in previous episodes. Previous administrations at least maintain the pretense. You know, there were the summits and they gave lip service to the rules-based order and they like performed that they cared about democracy sometimes. But stripping away this performative rhetoric doesn't just look bad, it removes a tool. As long as Washington claimed to believe in a rules-based order, Arab performers and Democrats had something to point at, like there's a gap between your stated standard and the actual conduct. And so maybe we can name and shame you and like you'll change your opinions or change your policies. Once the US stops even claiming that standard, you know, that lever disappears. There's nothing left to leverage.

• 2:20:46Speaker 07

  So what's the prescription? I don't think the prescription can anymore be wait for a better administration. Maybe we need to stop centering Washington as the mechanism of repair at all. Instead, maybe we need to support international accountability mechanisms that Washington is currently trying to defund and sanction into irrelevance, like the ICC, or build multilateral efforts to uphold something like a rules-based order without waiting for the American establishment and develop civil society strategies that don't depend on the outcome of US domestic politics. Because any order that eventually replaces this one has to actually reckon with the injustices that this one spent decades systematically ignoring. There's a really interesting article in The Guardian titled "What Should Replace the American-Led Order?" by Asla Bali and Samuel Moyn.

• 2:21:31Speaker 07

  I'll put them in the show notes. And I think it's an interesting argument about how to stop mourning what they call the old order and build the foundations of a new world. But when we go back to kind of the DC policymaking space, the honest through line of all the articles I engaged with today is that the system is failing. But it's been failing. It's been happening for a very long time. The debate in Washington is just finally grudgingly catching up to admitting it. And even now, it's mostly catching up on Washington's terms, asking what Washington should do about it, rather than asking, you know, who's been trying to tell it this entire time? Thanks for listening to another episode of It Could Happen Here. Stay safe.

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

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

• 2:22:58Speaker 07

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

• 2:23:05Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

• 2:23:07Robert Evans?

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

• 2:23:13Speaker 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.

• 2:23:31Speaker 07

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

• 2:23:39Speaker 04

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

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

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

• 2:23:51Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 2:23:55Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 2:23:56Robert Evans?

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

• 2:24:04Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 2:24:04Robert 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.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 2:24:11Robert Evans?

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

• 2:24:20Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:24:21Robert 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.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

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

• 2:24:35Robert 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.

• 2:24:45Robert Evans?

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

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. For a decade now, I've been seeking the answer to a single question. How does history move? It is not, as it first appears, an abstract question.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  In it is the answer to a more immediate query. How did we get here to a decade defined by war, by dictatorship, and by genocide?

• 2:25:32Speaker 02

  How did we live to see a world where India, China, and the United States, the three largest countries that have ever existed, ruling over three of the world's 8 billion people, are ruled by different forms of fascist governments? And is there any way out of the endless nightmare that every summer sets the world on fire, only to leave it the same, but somehow worse?

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  To understand this, to understand how we Live these days of horror, we must understand why history moves at all. What is it that drives history forward? Is it great men, and they always seem to be men in such formulations, seizing the stage of history and driving it according to their great will? Is it a moral arc of progress, forever bending and forever pushing the world, however slowly, towards a kinder, gentler form of liberal democracy?

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Is it the inexorable unfolding of the internal dynamics of capital, acting, depending on your position and political faction, as either the material basis of history or a kind of god in potencia, leading inexorably to either communism or something worse? Is it the movement of the working class storming onto this historical stage? Are all of these simply a series of irrelevant meta-narratives? My answer is this. The great Marxist historian C.L.R. James, a man as intimately involved in the process of revolution as any of the men he

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  spent his life depicting, once wrote in Black Jacobins, his magisterial account of the Haitian Revolution, that, quote, “The rich are only defeated when they are running for their lives.” And even in this darkest hour of the working class, with fascism ascendant and a movement to break its power failing to materialize every day, I have lived to see them run. I have lived to see their shield walls break, their armies falling backstreet by liberated street, seen those streets turn to cities and those cities turn to whole provinces.

• 2:28:04Speaker 02

  I have lived to see ancient and terrible ruling classes reduced to huddling like rats, besieged in their own capitals, to see a commune that outlasted the commune of Paris. I have lived to see the President of the United States hide in a bunker where protesters fought the Secret Service outside the gates of the White House. I have lived to see history come not on horseback, but to the sound of an upturned bucket beaten as a drum, and the thunder of a million voices of a thousand peoples who could not live to see another moment of a world like this one.

• 2:28:45Speaker 02

  And whether you realize it or not, you have lived to see it too. And just as surely, I have lived to see what came after. I have lived to see the firebombs, the machine guns, the all-night courts filling the prison cells, just as surely as the army filled the abattoirs. I have lived to see them build the wall and fill the camps and attempt to wipe whole peoples from existence. And this too is history. But the trick, the secret, the pattern so obvious that it cannot be named, is that these are the same history.

• 2:29:28Speaker 02

  History moves in and is driven by cycles of uprising and repression, cycles of revolution and counter-revolution. It is an insight so obvious that it does not seem profound. The implications are easy to miss. But if what drives history is cycles of our uprisings and their repression, it means that history is not driven purely by cyclopean forces outside of even the possibility of our imagination, much less our control.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  It means that those forces, those impossible abstractions, capitalism and the state and the white supremacist order, the systems and institutions that rule the world are reacting to us. Capital is forced to maneuver around our advances, just as we are forced to maneuver around its development. The state builds its own capacity against our movements, not from their own desire, but from their own necessity. The ruling class, for all its power, does not simply rule, it is forced to react to us.

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  The material reality of a world of uprisings is that we are a force of history. This is a dangerous idea to even express, much less to analyze. For if you take the idea seriously, that history is not driven by the pure will of great men or the inexorable movement of capital, then, just to start, elites are not, as they would have you believe, the only people who matter. It means that history is driven by ordinary people, who in an hour of crisis like their

• 2:31:28Speaker 02

  mothers before them, pick up a brick and throw it at the nearest symbols or personages of the ruling class. It is of such struggles, from the gates of Versailles to the gates of the White House, that history is made. Regular people, individuals like you and me and your neighbor across the street with the cute cat you see sometimes, change the course of human history. It seems almost impossible. And yet, I know it's true, because I've met them, the ordinary people thrust into the fulcrum of history.

• 2:32:08Speaker 02

  There was David Graeber, the late anthropologist, who helped steal a crowd from an otherwise largely pointless protest in a park in New York. There was Vicky Osterweil, a writer who many of you have heard on this show, who facilitated the first meeting of a movement called Occupy Wall Street. These were people, just like you and me, who showed up to a meeting, and after that meeting, the whole world was different. This is the reality of history. It is driven by ordinary people, who in retrospect are remembered as something greater,

• 2:32:50Speaker 02

  as a movement, or a class, or a world historical force, who at the beginning of the day, rolled out of bed as nothing of the sort. And yet, we are a historical force, and we belong on the stage of history just as much as the rulers and oppressors. It is in fact the great task of the political order, the state, the politician, the social media company, the fascist, to convince us that we can only be observers to history, that the best we can aspire to is, as Walter Benjamin described, to have a fascist dictator represent and act out our feelings.

• 2:33:33Speaker 02

  Thus, the task of counter-revolution is to clear us from the stage of history that we have seized in the streets. And it is here, perhaps, that the kind of revolutionaries who rule the world have had the greatest success. They have crushed the idea that we can shape history so thoroughly that the very idea of us changing the world seems like a joke. In order to wrestle back that place in history, in order to take back our autonomy and our ability to change the horror that is the present world, we must come to understand

• 2:34:11Speaker 02

  what it looks like when we take the historical stage, how we have failed and how we succeeded. We must know, at the most basic level, that it is even possible at all.

• 2:34:36Speaker 02

  And so in this series, we turn to the last three cycles of uprisings. An old man with a beard once said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.”

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  Given and transmitted from the past. Marx, of course, was writing of the 18th Bremer, of an earlier set of revolutions and counter-revolutions, different in many ways than our own. Each uprising cycle is shaped by its material conditions, the social and economic structures of the age. We are to examine the last three cycles of uprisings in an age defined not, as Marx spoke of, by the triumphant rise of the industrial proletariat, but by the death of that very working class. I have spoken elsewhere about the death of the old working class at Tiananmen,

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

  and I will leave those details to that previous work. We are going to be looking here, in the episodes to come, at the cycles of uprising that came next, beginning roughly with the cycle known as ultra-globalization and the Zapatista uprising. Now, periodization, or the task of putting these cycles firmly into lists of dates in which they begin and end, is always a troublesome process. It is never quite historically precise. Movements persist and die in 100 forms in 100 places.

• 2:36:23Speaker 02

  And the waves of global uprising and global suppression that we are tracking are more complicated than can be fully captured by start date here and date here. But for our purposes, roughly, this initial period of uprisings, the first we will examine, begins roughly with the Zapatista uprising in 1994, but really kicks off with the Battle of Seattle in 1999, through Argentina, 2001, through the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia, and travels, I think, to unexpected places, like post-Katrina, New Orleans,

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  before eventually ending with the Oaxaca Commune in 2006. The second wave, the so-called Movement of the Squares, that starts in 2011 with the Arab Spring, continues with Occupy Wall Street and its myriad successive movements across the world, and ends, I think thematically, with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015 with the crushing of Ferguson and the uprising in Baltimore. And finally, we'll turn to the more recent wave of uprisings best remembered for Hong Kong and George Floyd that stretched from Lebanon to Ecuador

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  and roughly from late 2017, early 2018, to probably about 2021. The periodization here is obviously more difficult because unlike with the movements of the previous two cycles, we do not have the luxury of seeing where they led. We are, you know, still living through them in a number of ways. We are still living in the sort of counter-revolution from that cycle in ways that make periodization difficult. It's possible the cycle of uprisings after that has begun already. I simply cannot say we would not be able to periodize it until after the period has sort of ended.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Now, these uprisings, save for the special case of Argentina 2001, which we will talk about at length, since it is, I guess, the origin of the conception of Occupy that would become the core, if in extremely different forms, of the 2011 uprisings. These uprisings do not look like the uprisings of the past. The working class has stubbornly refused to cohere into its old fighting forms because those forms, the mass party, the workers' council, the mass syndicalist union, were born of structures and conditions of production that no longer exist as they once did.

• 2:39:17Speaker 02

  The old identity of the working class, that of a class that was building the future with its own hands and will one day inherit its own creations, is dead. In its wake, workers have tried over and over and over again to forge a new identity. In some cases, they found limited success. Mostly, they have failed. But in those successes and in those failures, they have defined the modern world. And that is the story we tell in this series. It is the story of Oaxaca and Argentina, of Boston and Bosnia, of 30 years of uprisings

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  and the worlds we built and lost together. It is the story of how the old working class died and how a new class struggles to be born in its wake. It is the story of how conflict with the state came to be the sole force that could put us back into the streets. Once we had abandoned the occupation of the factories that had been our domain for almost a century. And it is a story that even though many of us lived through most, even all of its components, is already being forgotten. So that today, when I speak of the time that workers took a major North American city and held it for several months,

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  people simply don't know that I'm talking about Oaxaca and that those events happened this century, in 2006, a time almost all of you listening to this were alive. And the economic and social fuels that built these last three cycles of uprisings have not gone away. In fact, the repression has only grown worse. And whether we like it or not, there will be another cycle of uprisings. The question, the question that we all face, is this. What are you going to do about it?

• 2:41:33Speaker 01

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• 2:42:04Speaker 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.

• 2:42:16Speaker 07

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

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

• 2:42:24Robert Evans?

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

• 2:42:30Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 2:42:33Speaker 07

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

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

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

• 2:42:49Speaker 07

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

• 2:42:56Speaker 04

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

• 2:43:02Speaker 03

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

• 2:43:09Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 2:43:12Robert Evans?

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

• 2:43:21Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 2:43:22Robert 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.

• 2:43:28Robert Evans?

  It's raw.

• 2:43:28Robert Evans?

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

• 2:43:37Robert Evans?

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:43:38Robert 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.

• 2:43:48Robert Evans?

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

• 2:43:52Robert 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.

• 2:44:02Robert Evans?

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

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I am joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Kim Kelly. Hello.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 2:44:31Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, no, sorry. You're Kim Kelly. I forgot for a second.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not, no, you're not Kim Kelly, Robert. This episode, we are covering the week of September 9th

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  to September 16th. Big news week. Oh, dear. Where do we even begin? Where, indeed. Let's start with a quick update on mail-in voting because we've been covering this story the past few weeks. And on Sunday night, a second federal judge blocked the postal service's newly appointed... It wasn't, it wasn't actually on 9/11. I'm sorry. Yeah, I thought you were gonna do a 9/11 joke. It was, it happened like two days after 9/11. So that would have been cool. Damn it. The Justice Department never gives us what we deserve. That's certainly true. But this second federal judge blocked the newly adopted final rule designed to be in compliance with Trump's executive order

• 2:45:24Speaker 02

  to restrict mail-in voting. This rule laid out new requirements for mail-in voting, including standardized envelopes and voter verification through a newly created online federal ballot mail portal. And if these new requirements, which were announced just a few months before the midterms, were not met, the postal service said that they would not accept or mail out ballots. But on Sunday, Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols found USPS lacked the authority to require states to submit a list of eligible voters to this online portal and only transport ballots to voters verified via this portal. Nichols wrote that if the rule was implemented, there would be a, quote, "increased risk that a significant number

• 2:46:08Speaker 02

  of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections." And this was kind of a double whammy for the Trump administration because then, the next day on Monday...

• 2:46:21Speaker 04

  The Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling, which is usually means bad news. But in this case, they denied the Trump administration's request to lift the first injunction blocking the implementation of the Postal Service's final rule, finding that the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge. And this appears to be a 7-2 ruling with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting, though Justice Kavanaugh wrote a one paragraph concurring opinion, which states, quote, "There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority, but applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the

• 2:47:05Speaker 04

  Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections." End quote. So that kind of goes against what Trump appointee Judge Carl Nichols found in his other separate injunction. But this rule will not be implemented, at least for the upcoming midterm elections. Okay, do we want to move on to some other small things? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, let's do all the small things. Yep. We found out this week that some of the drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline had come from inside Iraq as opposed to coming from Yemen, right? Which is where many of the other attacks on Saudi Arabia that we're going to cover later have come from. Today, I heard that these weren't coming from like the

• 2:47:50Speaker 04

  large militia groups that you would expect, but from allegedly smaller IRGC-aligned groups. And a regional operations chief in Iraq has been fired as a result of this, right? Like as a result of the, I guess, the failure to address this. Secondly, the Yebeshay, that's Yekiney Imbeswadana Shengale, the Sinjar resistance units, have agreed to hand over their weapons to the Baghdad government and be integrated into the security forces. We'll find out if it's kind of a similar thing to when the SDF, or as the SDF are now integrating into the Syrian military. If you're not familiar with Yebeshay, they are a Yazidi armed group with close ties to the Yebegay Yebeshay.

• 2:48:33Speaker 04

  So the SDF in Syria, or the Kurdish elements of the SDF specifically, I guess. The Yebeshay grew significantly during the battle against the Islamic State and of course, the Islamic State's genocide of the Yazidi people. Since then, it's been a pretty complicated security situation in the part of Iraq where they reside, right? And then in their homeland. Yeah, especially since as a result of what happened in the early stages of the Sinjar campaign, they have no reason to trust either the Peshmerga in Kurdistan or the government in Baghdad. Yeah, because both of them left them more or less on their own, right? Yeah, to die. Yeah. Left to die is what people told me when I was in the camps they fled to. Yeah, left to die is what they told me as well.

• 2:49:17Speaker 04

  And of course, this is one of the moments when the SDF kind of, I guess, really entered the global. Yep. They weren't the SDF then, right? They were the Yebegay. No, everyone called them just the PKK, right? Like that's what all the Azizites I talked to said. Well, some of the people who were those initial guerrillas who entered onto the mountain there probably had come from the HPG and the PKK, right? We can argue that at length, but it doesn't matter. It was not the Iraqi government nor the KRG, the Baghdad government nor the KRG. This is something that I'm going to keep following. Moving to Iran, the DOD this week declassified footage of the rescue of the weapons safety officer from Iran. This is the backseater in the plane that got shot down, right?

• 2:50:00Speaker 04

  The guy who was in Iran for a couple of days there where they did this crazy search and rescue mission. Interestingly, they didn't blur out like the people rescued, well, the people rescuing him were just visible as human shapes on like a thermal. They did blur out the helicopter. We know they have several secret helicopters, but I found that kind of interesting. He did an interview where he claimed he hit the ground, or they claimed he hit the ground between 70 and 100 miles an hour. He's looking pretty good for hitting the ground that hard. He had a parachute malfunction, apparently. I don't know how we could ever confirm if any of that's true. A FPV drone from NATO GPDFs, they have a gender-integrated drone unit, right? People have been saying it's an all-women's drone unit.

• 2:50:43Speaker 04

  That's not true, but there are certainly women in the drone unit. There's many gender-integrated drone units across various militaries. Drones love gender. You've heard it here, folks. Yes, yep. The drone doesn't know gender. It struck a Burmese military YAK aircraft on the ground this week. This is a significant turning point for the Spring Revolution. They have been trying to do this for years. Following the Barmo flotilla's demise and the captures of positions the Hunter has held since the 1990s by Qaren forces this week, the fighting season has really begun in Myanmar, and it's not starting that well for the Hunter, right? They're also having pretty mixed success in attempting a offensive and recon strike against the Arakan army there.

• 2:51:27Speaker 04

  In Syria, protests have begun all over the country as fuel and bread prices have risen this week. So previously, certainly in the parts of Syria where Robert and I have been, these were subsidized. The government has hiked prices because fuel prices are more expensive everywhere, right? Because of the war in Iran. But nonetheless, this is making things very hard for people. The price of petrol went up about 29%. Cooking gas went up about 9%. Diesel went up more, like 40%, I think. And people have been leading with like 40% fuel hike. But we should be honest and like talk about the fuel that most people are using, right? Nonetheless, this is making things very difficult for people, which is why they're in the streets.

• 2:52:09Speaker 04

  And this is one of the first big protest movements that this new protest movements, I should say, in places that it considers to be part of its constituency, that this new government has had to deal with. Obviously, it's dealt with protests and has had armed conflict with other people within Syria since the transitional government came to power. Finally, in the US, a Massachusetts district court judge has blocked Trump's administration's attempt to reduce student visas to four years. Previously, they were trying to, it seemed that they were trying to restrict F1 visas period to four years from what I read in this judgment. And then you'd have to apply for an extension, like if you're doing a PhD or if you're undergraduate, it just takes more than four years, right?

• 2:52:53Speaker 04

  The court went on a great length about like how this was a bad idea. And then went, we can't actually rule on whether it's a bad idea or not, but we can say it violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which it does. So that was the grounds on which they blocked it.

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  All right. And now it's time for, undeniably, our biggest story of the week. Kim Kelly, please, what do you have for us?

• 2:53:12Speaker 00

  So in pop culture news, everyone's talking about the Ed Sheeran Macklemore controversy. Earlier this week, Sheeran, who comedian Zach Woods accurately described on Instagram as an internationally tolerated acoustic artist.

• 2:53:34Speaker 01

  Wow. I wouldn't put it quite that far.

• 2:53:36Speaker 04

  What a precision hit.

• 2:53:38Speaker 00

  I love Zach Woods so much. He, man, if I was single, daddy call me. That's what I'm going to say. But, okay, also British, so first problem there, honestly.

• 2:53:47Speaker 04

  But rude.

• 2:53:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:53:49Speaker 01

  Same with Ed Sheeran.

• 2:53:50Speaker 00

  No, not Zach Woods. Ed Sheeran is British. I would never lust after an Englishman.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  Wow. Jeez, ouch, James, taking strays left and right. My God.

• 2:54:00Speaker 04

  Kim entering the chat hard.

• 2:54:03Speaker 00

  Look.

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  Brutal.

• 2:54:04Speaker 00

  My first husband was from Wigan, so I know a lot about what y'all get up to.

• 2:54:08Speaker 04

  I want you to understand that you have not picked a representative sample.

• 2:54:14Speaker 00

  Mac to the bomb, PWA, I know what y'all get up to. That accent does not fool me. But anyway, hard-hitting political news, James. This Jim who man made headlines earlier this week when he announced that Seattle rapper Macklemore was out as the supporting act on Sheeran's current Loop World tour. And the reason, apparently, Macklemore's vocal support for Palestine and refusal to stay silent about a genocide was just a bridge too far for the self-identified, non-political pop star, as well as the consortium of wealthy venue owners who are backing his tour. So here's what happened.

• 2:54:59Speaker 00

  During the tour's first two shows, which took place at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium on September 4th and 5th, Macklemore said the words "Free Palestine" onstage. First problem. And performed his pro-Palestine song, "High and Tall", which he'd released in 2024 in memory of Haian Rajab and in support of the Gaza solidarity camp that was then active at Columbia University. As you'll remember, Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was brutally killed by the Israeli military along with six of her family members in January of that year, has become one of the many symbols of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, about which Macklemore has been extremely vocal. Not a big secret there. And at the second MetLife show, he used his platform to

• 2:55:42Speaker 00

  directly address his Jewish brothers and sisters, as he said, in the audience, saying, quote, "Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide is in no way a criticism of you. This message is for peace, love, for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality." So the Israeli-American counsel did not agree. They're like, no, absolutely not.

• 2:56:11Speaker 00

  Publicly called on Sheeran to drop Macklemore from the tour. And then Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, boo, go Birds, as well as Gillette Stadium, a venue at which the tour was scheduled to stop later this week, informed Sheeran that Macklemore had to go. The rapper noted in his public Instagram statement about the matter that Sheeran had told him that Kraft called on his other stadium owner pals to increase the pressure to get Macklemore out of there. And it worked. According to Rolling Stone, the tour promoter, Messina Touring Group, was informed by the owners of these venues that, quote, "They will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup."

• 2:56:52Speaker 07

  Up, which would result in the cancellation of the tour and impact hundreds of thousands of fans. So Macklemore got dropped. And he released a very good statement about it in which he was really generous to his old buddy Sheeran. Yeah. Like, this was not just a Overly. pairing. Like, they're, they're homies. Yeah.

• 2:57:09Robert Evans?

  As hard, hard as that is to imagine, although I guess I can imagine Macklemore and Ed Sheeran getting along. I just don't like to.

• 2:57:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's some overlap there.

• 2:57:18Speaker 07

  The Seattle, the Seattle vibes are very strong. Yeah, like, just having a shitty tattoo off, like, it, it makes sense.

• 2:57:25Robert Evans?

  Get Ben Affleck in there.

• 2:57:27Speaker 04

  Kim has shared a picture of Ed Sheeran's tattoos. It has rendered me speechless for the entire time.

• 2:57:32Robert Evans?

  I had not seen these.

• 2:57:34Speaker 04

  Oh, dude, fucking unreal, man. Like, I'm gonna put them in the Zoom chat. Like, is there a fucking Ghana flag on this guy?

• 2:57:43Speaker 07

  There is so many things he's got. Irish stuff.

• 2:57:46Speaker 04

  It's a big lion.

• 2:57:47Speaker 07

  He has a ketchup bottle.

• 2:57:48Speaker 04

  Lads on tour, fuck off.

• 2:57:51Speaker 07

  As a tattoo American, I am just so mad when I see this stuff. It's like, this man has more money than God.

• 2:57:58Robert Evans?

  A pokeball. Also, he is so bad at finding people to do good line work. That pokeball looks like shit. Pizza, the proportions are fucked. Everything's like bled, like fucking blown out on those, uh, those weird picture frame pieces on the back. Like, it's just bad ink.

• 2:58:13Speaker 07

  Look, like, there's a difference between a dumb tattoo and a shitty tattoo, and this man.

• 2:58:21Speaker 07

  Cause I have dumb tattoos, but like, the lines work.

• 2:58:24Robert Evans?

  I've gotten tattooed in war zones, but like, at least they're competent, you know?

• 2:58:28Speaker 04

  Watched you with a guy with a car battery.

• 2:58:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:31Speaker 07

  Like, the lip tattoo I got in a West Philly kitchen when I was 19 looks better than this man.

• 2:58:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The stick and poke my buddy gave me.

• 2:58:42Speaker 04

  Some of these are watercolor guys as well, so like, they're not likely to get better over time.

• 2:58:48Robert Evans?

  Is that a lion on his heart?

• 2:58:50Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, dude, I feel a little bad. Cause I found his tattoo artist on Instagram because I'm a nosy bitch. And the guy's like, he just knows his career's kind of over. I feel like Ed Sheeran is just paying his rent with his bad tattoos. Because you can't come back from that.

• 2:59:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, wow, man.

• 2:59:07Speaker 04

  God. Yeah, these are, I could do a whole, you could do a dissertation on this shit.

• 2:59:11Robert Evans?

  Someone should.

• 2:59:12Speaker 04

  Someone should, yeah. Hit us up if you already have.

• 2:59:15Speaker 07

  I mean, I will do an entire episode about celebrity tattoos.

• 2:59:18Robert Evans?

  I'm wondering if maybe my grandparents were right about tattoos. I could do a solid hour on Ben Affleck's back tattoo, but that's a respectable, that's, that's a respectable shitty tattoo.

• 2:59:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:59:30Robert Evans?

  Right? That's a whole back piece that's just a phoenix and like, nothing else on his body. Like, that's a beautiful choice that says only good things about Ben Affleck, in my opinion.

• 2:59:40Speaker 07

  That's an honest man's tattoo. That's for him.

• 2:59:42Robert Evans?

  That's an honest man's god awful tattoo.

• 2:59:47Speaker 07

  You know that's for him.

• 2:59:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no one else would ever got a moment of enjoyment out of that piece.

• 2:59:54Speaker 07

  Oh, my God, poor J Lo.

• 2:59:59Speaker 07

  So, Eddie Sheeran, very bad tattoos, but also a worm person. Like, all this is happening and Ed Sheeran takes to Instagram because everyone's extremely mad at him for doing something really just not cool and wimpy and unfortunate and embarrassing. So his response, he sold out his boy. He blamed the concert promoters for dropping Macklemore, saying, it wasn't me, it was these big mean people that I pay lots of money to book my shows.

• 3:00:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and then I have leverage over, because they also, they want to make money.

• 3:00:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, he wrote, uh, in one section, "I am not complicit," which is absolutely what someone who is complicit would say.

• 3:00:41Robert Evans?

  My "I am not complicit" shirt has a lot of people asking questions.

• 3:00:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, man, I don't know. Remember the SNL skit with Scar Joe that was making fun of Ivanka Trump being like, "complicit"?

• 3:00:53Robert Evans?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 3:00:54Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, deep cut. Like, if you have to say, "I am not complicit," like, dog.

• 3:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, you already fucked up.

• 3:00:59Speaker 07

  But absolutely, like, complicit in trying to silence pro Palestinian sentiment just because he's a coward and also in bowing to pressure from billionaires like his buddy Robert Kraft, who casually a former Epstein associate and also an old pal of Sheeran's. Uh, he performed at Kraft's wedding in 2022 to a very much younger woman. So, you know, I guess that's, uh, being non-political, hanging out with those type of people. And, uh, you know, Sheeran, he can't pretend to have been blindsided, right? Like, Macklemore's pro Palestinian stance is kind of like all he's known for. It's like the thing that he's doing right now, which is cool. We don't need another food shop.

• 3:01:41Speaker 07

  One was enough. He's had a successful career, like, he had his big 2010 hits, like, as, as Macklemore said in his statement, like, he can afford to take this kind of hit. He can afford to use his platform to speak up for Palestinian people, for people who are being, being murdered and just destroyed, while some people would rather keep politics out of everything. And, uh, his relationship dates back to that era. The two have collaborated on songs, like, Ed Sheeran was on a song that Macklemore released for his daughter when his first kid was born in like, 2015. So Ed Sheeran knows Macklemore pretty well. He's definitely aware that the rapper's become one of the loudest pro Palestine voices in mainstream pop. And Sheeran is worth like $400 million.

• 3:02:27Robert Evans?

  My God, how did we let that happen?

• 3:02:29Speaker 07

  Internationally tolerated pop star. Oh, my God.

• 3:02:33Robert Evans?

  All I knew is he, he did, he had that song in that Hobbit movie, which is how I heard of him. And then suddenly he's got almost half a billion dollars? What the fuck did you people do in between?

• 3:02:42Speaker 07

  Dude, the radio.

• 3:02:43Robert Evans?

  How did this happen?

• 3:02:43Speaker 07

  There's wild stuff happening on the radio, dude. It's like a whole other world. He is very much like America B's pop star.

• 3:02:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:02:52Speaker 07

  It's dicey, right? But one of the reasons he, he reached for to explain why he kicked his old buddy off of this tour for saying the forbidden, forbidden words was that he had to keep touring because his crew depends on him. Ed Sheeran employs a lot of people to bring his nonsense on the road. And it is good to acknowledge that workers need to be paid no matter what kind of nonsense is happening. But like, Eddie.

• 3:03:16Robert Evans?

  I feel like you could just pay him.

• 3:03:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, baby, like, just.

• 3:03:17Robert Evans?

  You just give him money. You got $400 million? I mean, that is quite a lot of money.

• 3:03:22Speaker 04

  You got a smorg pile of cash at your house, like, just fucking.

• 3:03:25Speaker 07

  Like.

• 3:03:26Robert Evans?

  I'm not casual about like, the creators, oh, just pay for it yourself thing, but like, $400 million, you could pay everyone's salary for that show and still have basically $400 million, right?

• 3:03:38Speaker 07

  Send him to Bali.

• 3:03:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could also just score a huge dub. Like, I would, I don't think I've ever consciously heard an Ed Sheeran song, but if he'd done that, I'd have been like, okay, cool.

• 3:03:47Robert Evans?

  Here's the thing, I don't like Macklemore, but I have been forced to be like, oh, wow, that's a respectable person with moral courage. And I'd have to say that about Ed Sheeran if he hadn't fucked up his responses.

• 3:03:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:57Robert Evans?

  You could make me, I could be miserable right now, Ed. I could be acknowledging you have worth as a human being, but I don't have to, thank God.

• 3:04:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:04:05Robert Evans?

  Well, no, but you know what I mean.

• 3:04:06Speaker 07

  The ways in which he has fumbled this are just, it's, it's becoming not just like a, a blip, it's becoming a generational fumble because his entire tour is just in the toilet. Like,

• 3:04:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04:18Speaker 07

  Hours after the news broke that Macklemore got got, four of Ed Sheeran's other supporting acts dropped off the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.

• 3:04:27Speaker 04

  Including his backing band.

• 3:04:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:29Speaker 04

  His own band quays tour.

• 3:04:31Speaker 07

  Funniest part, like, it's so good. And, and they also were all like, yeah, also free Palestine, you fucking idiot.

• 3:04:40Speaker 07

  He came out looking so bad. He lost Aaron Rowe, who's Irish, Lucas Graham, Danish, a guy named Phineas, who is American, but, you know. He's Billie Eilish's brother.

• 3:04:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I learned this against my will yesterday as well.

• 3:04:53Speaker 07

  There you go. Well.

• 3:04:55Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 3:04:56Speaker 07

  I'm clearly up on the, the, the pop men.

• 3:04:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:59Speaker 07

  And Billie Eilish has spoken out against the genocide in, in Gaza and is, uh, pro Palestine. So it makes sense.

• 3:05:06Speaker 04

  Sick.

• 3:05:07Speaker 07

  You gotta wonder, like, he hired a bunch of Irish musicians, first of all, and I was like, surely they'll be quiet about politics.

• 3:05:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if, if the Irish have a reputation, it's for being quiet about stuff like this.

• 3:05:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, famously, especially Palestine, there isn't any kind of, you know, overlap, any current solidarity efforts.

• 3:05:25Robert Evans?

  No.

• 3:05:26Speaker 07

  One of the, his backing band, I found out through their statement, is that they're founding members of the Irish Artists for Palestine Movement. Like, what did you think?

• 3:05:36Speaker 04

  I could have Googled that, Ed.

• 3:05:39Speaker 04

  I love he didn't, he did, literally didn't Google, like, anyone, but well, before making his cowardly little thing, like, where, where does everyone else stand on this?

• 3:05:48Speaker 07

  And you gotta wonder, like, this has never come up when you're at the bar, like, literally no one you've ever spoken to is like, oh, yeah, so, ooh, the news.

• 3:05:57Speaker 04

  You're going to Robert Kraft Stadium, right? The guy who rents his plane to ICE to deport people. Like, the fucking wrapped Patriot Jets takes people to be fucking deported. It tears families apart. Like, you think your buddies aren't gonna have a problem with this? Like, wild.

• 3:06:13Speaker 07

  It's that, like, like, so many of the statements all said, like, we know he's giving us this huge opportunity, like, these are, it's a stadium tour, like, there's gonna be all these hundreds, thousands of fans. And they all, it's really, it's really impressive that all these bands were just like, look, this is kind of gonna fuck us, but some things are more important. And it also just makes Ed Sheeran look like even more of a bitch because he has so much money. And like, you can't even, you can't be cool for one minute. Like, all of your friends just bailed on you. Everyone can see you being the worst. And Macklemore, just today, he, I think it was today, he posted that he's donating all the money that he got paid for those two shows

• 3:06:58Speaker 07

  to six organizations that are working to help Palestinian people. So he's, Macklemore is like, mackling even harder and better.

• 3:07:06Robert Evans?

  He's mackling more, god damn it. God damn it.

• 3:07:10Speaker 04

  How did, how did?

• 3:07:11Speaker 00

  Macaline the correct amount, man. Like, we were all wrong. Yeah, we all, we were all wrong.

• 3:07:16Speaker 07

  Not familiar with his game.

• 3:07:18Speaker 00

  But thankfully, we were all pretty much right about Ed Sheeran. At least there's that.

• 3:07:23Speaker 07

  I guess like, maybe I'll do a full episode about this at some point. But I have found some people on the internet left's response to this to be frustrating, which is shocking, right? They're people who are never wrong. Culture is important. Anyone who is arguing with you seriously, the culture is not important, is not a serious person. Like, if we look at the movement against apartheid, right? And the role that culture and music and sport played in that. And so, like, almost every other liberation movement in the 20th century had a cultural element to it. If you're gonna really be like a fucking crass materialist in 2026, just, like, don't engage with those people. I know I'm engaging with them here, but like, it's a deeply unserious response.

• 3:08:03Speaker 00

  Like, there's, not everyone lives on Twitter or Discord, like, seeing.

• 3:08:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:08:08Speaker 00

  This news is on ESPN. This news has broken containment from the lefty internet.

• 3:08:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:08:13Speaker 00

  And, like, any normal person who reads, oh, this guy just said some nice stuff and said Free Palestine, and he got kicked off this big tour, like, that's kind of weird. Like, why is that? Why can't you just say that?

• 3:08:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:08:24Speaker 00

  Like, I think they're even discussing it on Fox News. And Jesse Waters, that, you know, sentient douchebag, was like, what, he just did Free Palestine? I mean, that's allowed? Freedom of speech?

• 3:08:35Speaker 07

  Tucker Carlson's gonna endorse Macklemore next.

• 3:08:37Speaker 00

  Oh, fuck. This is the trouble, right? All's left to say, you know? So what have we learned? It's always Free Palestine. Ed Sheeran is a worm person, again, to quote our internet daddy, Zach Woods. And Macklemore, you know, just, just keep on Macaline, babe. You're doing amazing.

• 3:08:57Speaker 07

  You know what? There's a, there's a non-zero chance we will have an advert that includes the music of Ed Sheeran after this. If that happens to you, it's your own fault for the cookies in your browser.

• 3:09:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:09:19Speaker 00

  And we're back. Let's start with Saudi Arabia. On September 8th, Saudi oil structure in the Jazan region was targeted and struck by Houthi missiles. At least 73 people were wounded, and oil assets in the Abha and Najran regions were hit as well. NASA satellites show significant damage to the Jazan refinery and other infrastructure. This is significant because Jazan is located on the Saudi side of the Red Sea, which provides an alternate route for them to transit their fuel and avoid the Strait of Hormuz. Despite the Trump administration's claims and some reports that, you know, the traffic has been trending up as the US Navy escort ships through, traffic at the strait is still disastrously unreliable.

• 3:10:01Speaker 00

  In 2025, about 21 million barrels a day were moving through the strait at this point that year, and right now, we're barely breaking 5 million barrels most days, right? So that's a significant drop still. Any infrastructure that has allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the Strait of Hormuz has thus assumed extra importance in the last couple of months. So these strikes have at least temporarily forced Saudi Arabia to shut down their east-west pipeline. And this is one of the largest, like, pieces of oil infrastructure on the planet. It goes across some very high mountains, and it's, it's effectively impossible to defend in, in its entirety, right? It is too big to be adequately defended either from small infiltration teams, which hasn't happened yet, but very well might at some point in the future.

• 3:10:45Speaker 00

  You know, they, they've got some options for that. But right now, they're, they're doing quite well, striking them with ballistics and drones. Per an article in The New Arab, quote, "The kingdom is still able to export part of its oil, which is piped to Yanbo, and then exported either via the Suez Canal or Egypt's Ain Sokna, where it is carried by another pipeline to the eastern Mediterranean." The other option for Saudi Arabia is embarking on a dangerous journey through the Hormuz Strait, where Iran has repeatedly attacked commercial shipping. And, you know, how long is the east-west pipeline going to be shut down? And I think you'll probably hear fairly soon, maybe even by the time you hear this, that they've got it going again. The problem is, we're not likely to see it returning to anything like full capacity, and it's going to be going off again.

• 3:11:29Speaker 00

  Like, they're going to keep hitting it, right? Is, is, is my contention. So this is not, and it's like the strait, right? This doesn't mean that the, the pipeline's shut down for good. And likewise, when you hear they're shipping stuff through it again, that doesn't mean the problem is over, right? It means this is yet another piece of world-critical oil infrastructure that is kind of flickering on-off like your router when the internet's fucked up, right? Like, that's, that's the problem the world is dealing with right now. So this adds fuel to what has already been a long-building calamity. And I don't need to inform anyone of, like, how critical oil and gas is to the basic infrastructure that makes civilization possible. The thing I am focusing on a lot right now, because it really concerns me, is what we're seeing happen with fertilizer costs.

• 3:12:12Speaker 00

  Fertilizer costs have skyrocketed as a result of the shutting off of the strait already. Earlier this year, there were serious worries that this would cause a massive food crisis in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, which relied heavily on nitrogen shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to make fertilizer. And the good news is that the worst of this immediate crisis may have been averted, or at least has been averted for the present time, although not without cost, as this piece in The Financial Times explains, quote, "Egypt and Nigeria increased their urea exports by 98 and 81% respectively over that period, according to the International Trade Center, a joint agency of the UN and the WTO. The US and Russia grew their share in key markets, the data shows, while China also increased its exports. Analysts warned that fertilizer prices were rising to unsustainable levels for some of the world's poorest countries.

• 3:12:57Speaker 00

  New suppliers emerged, and supply chains adjusted to a certain degree, but there has been a cost. For many developing countries, the challenge has shifted from finding supplies to being able to afford them, Pamela Coke Hamilton, executive director of the ITC, told The Financial Times." And so what you're seeing here is basically a number of countries, including, you know, Nigeria, the United States, China, have kind of responded to this crisis by massively increasing the exports of, like, things that are ingredients to fertilizer that have been cut off by the strait. And that's allowed farms to keep going and the immediate fears to be sort of allayed, but it's, it's come with a tremendous cost, right? And as a result, you are seeing import prices rise for urea alone among about 70% in Q2 of 2026.

• 3:13:41Speaker 00

  And in some parts of the world, like Brazil, the cost of importing sulfur has risen by almost 200%. What we're looking at here is, basically, we can keep food production at the levels that are necessary to sustain the population, which was something people were worried about, but cost of food is going to rise and keep rising massively, right? And this is not just tied to, like, fertilizer. One of the other issues for, in terms of ag prices right now is that diesel has jumped up by an absolutely insane amount, right? Like, diesel fuel has gotten way more expensive than other kinds of fuel. And diesel fuel is what big ag in the United States uses to fuel combines and tractors and everything else that you need to grow and harvest, two of the largest commodities that our country produces, soybeans and corn.

• 3:14:24Speaker 00

  Per an article by the AP, "American diesel prices are now 60% higher than they were before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran in late February, when the national average was about 3.76 per gallon, according to AAA. Prices quickly climbed as the cost of crude oil, the main ingredient in diesel, as well as gasoline, skyrocketed amid disruptions to tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Farms are there cash-strapped, they're the ones that are having to figure out what to cut to make this work, Paul Mitchell, an agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin, said. There are a lot of farms facing that." And this is, again, not a, there's not going to be food in the immediate future problem, but this is a, food is going to continue getting more expensive, and you're also, this is going to contribute to a number of problems that, like, agriculture has been having for

• 3:15:06Speaker 00

  a while, like, when fuel costs increase, you start seeing maintenance deferred. When fertilizer gets more expensive, you start seeing, like, farms use less of particularly phosphates, and that kind of builds up like a level of debt that, you know, you can do that for a few seasons, but eventually, it's going to start affecting yields, right? And that's all kind of colliding with the fact that as a result of climate change, particularly in Europe, you have, like, massive amounts of crops like wheat, barley, maize, and oats, not just Europe, the United States too. You've seen huge crop losses that are kind of unprecedented in, in recent times, almost, as a result of climate change. So all these kind of things are forming together into a perfect storm for what I think is going to be both increasing for the foreseeable future, food costs in the United States, not

• 3:15:51Speaker 00

  really shortages in the United States, but there are going to be shortages increasingly in other parts of the world. This is not a gets better soon problem or collapses right away problem. This is a, things are going to keep trickling worse and worse, then you're going to see sudden food shocks kind of thing. So I-

• 3:16:07Robert Evans?

  I have my eyes on this situation quite a lot. It does worry me and it is all rooted back fundamentally, not just to our war of choice in Iran, but to climate change as well, although those are both very tied. I don't know, in less depressing and existentially frightening news, the Houthis shot down a Saudi F-15 today. There's a photo of the wreckage and I don't think there's a lot of doubt that it's legitimate. In a statement, a Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarri, said that the group shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter that was carrying out hostile operations in the airspace of Marib Province and that the jet had been targeted by a locally made air-to-air missile. It doesn't look like, and I certainly haven't seen any convincing evidence that this had anything to do with the anthropics story James mentioned earlier.

• 3:16:51Robert Evans?

  There's other kinds of locally made air-to-air missiles, right?

• 3:16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16:55Robert Evans?

  We're not talking about that. We're probably talking about like something that was rebuilt or repurposed, right?

• 3:17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have a history of doing that.

• 3:17:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they've been doing that for a while. This is not, it's not all AI. I don't like just conflate these two stories in your head and think that they're evidence of the same thing, right?

• 3:17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed.

• 3:17:12Robert Evans?

  It's also worth noting that the same day that the Houthis shot down that F-15, Saudi Arabia accused the Houthis of attempting a drone-based attack on Mecca, which they say was shot down by Saudi air defenses. Colonel Turkey Al-Malki, spokesperson for the Saudi coalition in Yemen, called attacks on Mecca a red line. The Houthis were previously accused of having tried to strike the holy city back in July of 2017, but claimed to have been aiming for King Fad airbase. And they deny these new allegations as well, saying there is no threat from Yemen to the holy sites, our operations targets, oil facilities and military facilities, and are far from holy sites. I don't know that I think the Houthis really tried. I can certainly believe something like hitting Mecca because it fucked up or something, but like, I don't really think they would go after just like random shit in Mecca. That doesn't seem like the Houthi move.

• 3:17:57Robert Evans?

  I don't think it would really help them in their cause, but you know, I guess anything's possible.

• 3:18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does seem like a weird one. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the United States war of choice on Iran and generally what's happening in Iran, I guess. I want to begin with, on the day that we're recording, which is Wednesday, the 16th of September, I guess I'll just add a little note here, if you see things that are auto translated, especially on X.com, the everything website, to say the 25th of September, that is because Grok has not grasped that a different calendar is used in Iran. And so the months won't line up. But what we're looking at here is a general strike that was called today on the 16th of September by an alliance of Kurdish political groups. They started talking about this a few days ago.

• 3:18:45Speaker 02

  It's a coalition that includes the KDPI, the PAK, PJAK, HABAT, and two of the Kamala parties. The strikes, which are happening today, right? And there are pictures of like closed markets, closed stores, chiefly in eastern Kurdistan, right? The Kurdish region of Iran. The strikes are in part a memorial to Gina Amini. Gina Amini is sometimes referred to by her Persian name, which is Masha, but her family called her Gina, right? She was Kurdish and that is important. Today, the 16th, is the anniversary of her murder by Iranian security forces. On the day before the anniversary of her murder, Iranian security forces began flooding her hometown. I mean that in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

• 3:19:29Speaker 02

  They released water from a nearby dam to block access to the cemetery where she is buried and then blocked access themselves with security forces to the main entrance. Previously, her own family have not been able to visit her grave on the anniversary of her murder. Meanwhile, in Iran's prisons, some women prisoners have gone on hunger strike to mark this anniversary. If you're not familiar with Gina Amini, she was 22 years old when she was killed by Iranian morality police after having been detained for improperly wearing her hijab on a trip to Tehran. She was Kurdish and we can see from other photos that she only wore hijab when it was something like she felt like she had to do, right? Like, we can see her sometimes at like family weddings and things in traditional Kurdish dress.

• 3:20:14Speaker 02

  Her murder, of course, sparked a massive protest cycle, which took up the Junjan Azali slogan, which is used by the Kurdish freedom movement. It means woman, life, freedom. The words woman and life are like etymologically connected in Kurdish. Unfortunately, the slogan has kind of been divorced from the revolutionary context.

• 3:20:33Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 3:20:34Speaker 02

  And it kind of commodified by a lot of people who either think it came from Iran or are ignorant of the women's revolution in Kurdistan powers.

• 3:20:43Robert Evans?

  Also, I mean, there was that like Hillary Clinton thing, right?

• 3:20:46Speaker 02

  Hillary Clinton, yeah. Hillary Clinton has bought the film rights to the book, Daughter to the Khabani, which is about the YPJ. Luckily, we have not seen a Hillary Clinton take on that yet.

• 3:20:57Robert Evans?

  We'll see.

• 3:20:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's still time. It'd be real good if she could do something useful for people in Khabani.

• 3:21:04Robert Evans?

  Finally, another perfect role for Chris Pratt.

• 3:21:07Speaker 02

  God. What's that lady Gina Caruso? Hopefully not. The protest cycle resulted in a massive outbreak of state violence, right? I have met several people who lost friends, family members, loved ones, who were tortured or threatened with torture themselves, both at the border here and in the Dariyan Gap. This call for protests is brave because the Iranian state hasn't lost its capacity for violence against its own people, right? It has continued to execute people. It has continued to rule through fear throughout the United States bombing campaign. The United States, if that was even a goal, has not been successful in doing that.

• 3:21:49Speaker 02

  This call for strikes comes at the same time as Ba'ful Taliban, a head of the PUK, one of the most influential parties in southern Kurdistan, met with Iran's Foreign Affairs Minister in Tehran. This will likely signal an even harder time to come for anti-regime Iranian Kurdish groups. So the Rajalati groups, groups from eastern Kurdistan that we've spoken about, have camps in southern Kurdistan, in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, right? Last time Taliban had a meeting with Iran, they moved into their camps. Since then, Iran has bombed those camps, including this week. It seems like this time they might have to move entirely out of Kurdistan. I've heard there's a plan to send them to Albania, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

• 3:22:35Speaker 02

  The PUK is in a very difficult position here, right? It got absolutely battered by Iranian drone strikes and the United States did very little to help it, right? Trump had this whole animus against Kurdish people that we've discussed at length before here. And so it's really in a very difficult position. We also found out this week that the United States consulate in Abil sustained damage during one of the Iranian drone attacks. This is part of a more broad realization of the damage done to US bases and assets as the DOD's Inspector General report was released this week. We also learned that, quote, "The Department of War estimated the cost of Operation," fuck, what do they call it? Epic? It's not epic fail, but that's what it is in my head.

• 3:23:18Robert Evans?

  Enduring freedom?

• 3:23:18Speaker 02

  No, it's not.

• 3:23:20Robert Evans?

  Fury, epic fury.

• 3:23:21Speaker 02

  Epic fury, that's the one. Operation Epic Fury.

• 3:23:24Robert Evans?

  Video game ass war.

• 3:23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Operation Epic Fury to be 33.4 billion as of June 29th. And that from February 28th to June 30th, seven US service members were killed in action and seven were killed in non-hostile events during OEF combat operations. During that same period, 417 service members were wounded in action. As we commented, things have not been going great for the Saudi-backed government of Yemen. They lost the port city of Mohar and Mayoun, an island in the Bab al-Mendeb Strait. This is obviously an issue, as Robert spoke about, right? Because it will continue to see shipping harassed and will further lock down global trade.

• 3:24:07Speaker 02

  According to the United Nations, 80,000 people have already been displaced by the sort of resumption of full-scale hostilities in Yemen. Talking of Yemen, this week, we found out via Anthropic's threat intelligence report that the Houthis had been talking to Claude. Specifically, they'd been talking to Claude about the development of ballistic missiles. The report identifies them as a group in northern Yemen. They tried to develop, quote, "a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final phase homing guidance, as well as a multi-stage ballistic missile with stated goal range above 2,000 kilometers and a multi-variant missile."

• 3:24:50Speaker 04

  To us, the R2000 that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant. Anthropic said our safeguard blocked many of their requests, but not all of them. The actors used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards, including hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for. And they split their work across multiple sessions, so no single session revealed their full intent. This is fairly funny, right? Like, they were like on there being like, what if I wanted to build a hypersonic glide food delivery vehicle for better door dashing? And off Claude went. They know that the group test fired a rocket and they know that it failed because a few hours after the test fire, they logged back into Claude to ask why it had failed.

• 3:25:31Speaker 00

  Oh dear. That's fun.

• 3:25:33Speaker 04

  That is very funny. It also doesn't point to surface to our missiles. This report is bonkers. I think we will do a whole episode on it. We see Chinese weapons companies pretending to be US firms trying to develop a whole pitch deck for an anti torpedo system. Like including asking for like a slide, a pitch deck slide and technical documents. We also see Russia trying to use it to build software from autonomous drone storm that they trained on combat footage to avoid Russian systems and to geolocate and attack Ukrainian drone operators. This is the future that we live in now.

• 3:26:11Speaker 00

  That's super concerning.

• 3:26:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, Robert and I will do an episode on this because like Robert and I have both spoken to people in Myanmar at great lengths, who are like attempting to develop weapon systems outside of the world of military industrial complex, right?

• 3:26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:26:26Speaker 04

  But yeah, this is, this is pretty scary shit.

• 3:26:29Speaker 00

  There's been a lot of AI kind of news and a frenzy around AI in the news this past week, especially in the wake of a high profile employee resignation at Anthropic citing safety alignment concerns, which also, you know, follows the widely publicized hugging face incident hack by OpenAI agents. Just this past week, multiple tech CEOs, including Dario Amade, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have joined in calling for a regulatory quote unquote slowdown of AI development. But not all tech CEOs agree on this. Others like Palantir's Alex Karp and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as the Nvidia CEO have called for the opposite.

• 3:27:13Speaker 00

  Zuckerberg has said to accelerate rather than slow down AI development as his own AI model Muse has struggled to catch up to where Anthropic and OpenAI are at. Earlier this week, Alex Karp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of the threat of China and because AI will be a quote unquote bonanza for the US economy. But you see this China thing a lot as one of the main reasons why we cannot enforce a quote unquote slowdown or a pause on development is because then China could get ahead. This is one of the justifications that people in the Trump administration have been saying to oppose efforts for a regulatory slowdown. Trump has very loudly been against this the past few days.

• 3:27:55Speaker 00

  Truthing that the only quote controls or guardrails AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And has compared this quote unquote AI hoax to the global warming hoax. And House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly shut down calls this week for Congress to take action and regulate AI.

• 3:28:15Speaker 04

  They can self-police, they can self-regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot, we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, okay? Because then we will lose our edge to China and that has serious national security implications for every American family.

• 3:28:33Speaker 00

  A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders introduced legislation to ban the development and deployment of quote unquote super intelligent AI with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons. But this legislation also would temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body can establish safety guidelines. Now, the tech CEOs are against this idea for multiple reasons. One, it would hurt their bottom line. They don't actually want a pause. They want this quote unquote slowdown. Also, they don't want to face 20 years in jail for developing this extremely dangerous technology, which they are, you know, already doing. In an episode next week, I'll go into some more detail about what this proposed quote unquote slowdown actually amounts to.

• 3:29:16Speaker 00

  It's basically self-regulating while also trying to get the governments to weaken antitrust laws to strengthen OpenAI and Anthropic's monopoly over this whole industry, right? Because obviously they have their own incentives when they're calling for regulation. This regulation that they're calling for is going to be friendly to them as the big titans in the industry. People on both the right and the left have accused OpenAI and Anthropic of trying to employ a form of regulatory capture. This is something that Lynda Khan has addressed, the former FTC chair, who posted a statement on Sunday, explaining that even without, you know, new regulation, the government already has the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products.

• 3:30:00Speaker 00

  We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws. Unquote. So like I said, I'll go into more detail about this later, later next week in its own episode. But this is something that I'm sure you're going to hear a lot about these next few weeks leading into the midterms. As the White House and Congress will start meeting with these tech CEOs about regulation and other even local municipalities are planning to do the same, including here in New York City. Let's go into ad break and then have two more little news stories before we close.

• 3:30:46Speaker 00

  We are back. So last week, the Republicans held their first ever midterm convention and unfortunately, none of us could attend. Or rather fortunately, none of us could attend. We saved a little bit of our sanity. Senator John Fetterman sent in a video message to the midterm RNC. They showed Hassan Piker's thirst trap on the Jumbotron.

• 3:31:11Speaker 04

  Oh yeah.

• 3:31:13Speaker 00

  And during Trump's speech, the president promised to give every US citizen adult $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms.

• 3:31:23Speaker 07

  If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them. Because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in history, we've never had anything like what's happening. But because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.

• 3:31:54Speaker 00

  I'm definitely filing this on, how is this legal? Is this not just bribing the population?

• 3:32:00Speaker 04

  Oh yeah.

• 3:32:01Speaker 00

  I mean, like Trump knows that it's literally impossible for the Republicans to hold on to the House or the Senate. So this will never actually happen. But still, it's crazy. And a few days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, quote, "If you want more money in your pockets, you gotta keep Republicans in charge."

• 3:32:20Speaker 04

  It would be really funny if the Democrats won both houses and then pushed through a $5,000 bribe to the American people.

• 3:32:28Speaker 07

  Biden bucks, baby.

• 3:32:29Speaker 04

  Just nuke the economy, fucking a trillion and a half dollars in added spending. Crazy bullshit. Just see what happens.

• 3:32:36Speaker 00

  Another really interesting tidbit about this is that according to an Ipsos poll from September 14th, the public seems largely negatively polarized against a free $5,000.

• 3:32:48Speaker 04

  Because we know it's a scam. Because it's obvious, because he's a liar. It is a remarkable place to have got when the economy is really shit and people are struggling to be polling badly of giving people free money. Because he's our lyingest, lying ass president.

• 3:33:04Speaker 07

  It's just like Lone Charn vibes.

• 3:33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:33:07Speaker 00

  63% of respondents said they oppose the $5,000 dividend check from Trump. Only 17% said they support it.

• 3:33:16Speaker 04

  My God.

• 3:33:17Speaker 00

  Pretty, pretty wild.

• 3:33:18Speaker 07

  You gotta be so bad at your job to get Americans to hate money.

• 3:33:24Speaker 07

  Damn.

• 3:33:25Speaker 00

  $10 gasoline, price of eggs.

• 3:33:28Speaker 07

  They're trying to give away free puppies and people being like, no, they have, like, there's something wrong with them.

• 3:33:34Speaker 00

  Now, there is one other thing that happened at the midterm convention, which is something I've been keeping an eye on because this is, this has been a kind of pet issue of like the gross racist online right for years and they're pushing it more right now. At the midterm convention, DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen told right wing podcaster Benny Johnson that Ilhan Omar married her brother, echoing the years old. The conspiracy theory, which Omar has has called absurd and offensive. Mark Waymullin added, quote, "Something is going to happen. We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity

• 3:34:18Speaker 00

  for them to come to the United States to begin with. But all of this, we're investigating," unquote. She's been a citizen for mad long, right? Yeah.

• 3:34:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like, what could you even? The conspiracy theory goes that she she married someone to help bring them into the country before splitting. Like fraud.

• 3:34:38Speaker 04

  I'm fairly sure the form that you fill out for that has a question about that. I'm absolutely certain. Also, like, you can sponsor family members on a Form I-130. If you're a US citizen, you have to marry them.

• 3:34:53Speaker 00

  A few weeks ago, Trump did hint towards this by posting an article on Truth Social with a headline claiming that Omar was the subject of ICE quote unquote enforcement proceedings, with this article detailing that ICE denied a FOIA request for documents related to the immigration fraud allegations against Omar, citing an ongoing investigation. Earlier this week, after the convention, both Tom Homan and AG Todd Blanch have also referenced this quote unquote "ongoing criminal investigation."

• 3:35:29Speaker 04

  So I guess to wrap up, I want to talk about a couple more DHS OIG reports that dropped this week. One was of the Chrome Immigration Facility in Georgia. What we saw was what we've seen there before, right? Overcrowding, disgusting conditions, absolutely atrocious food safety precautions, like literally just like ambient temperature stacked boxes of frozen chicken, just vibing, which parallels what I have heard from many, many, many people who have been in immigration detention, which is that food is dangerously bad, not just like not tastes good, like dangerous for human consumption. The one I want to focus on is the OIG report. It's called, quote, "Unannounced Inspection of ISIS Florida Soft-Sided Facility," brackets,

• 3:36:14Speaker 04

  quote, "Alligator Alcatraz," unquote. They dropped this report on Friday, September the 11th, as one does when one wants a report to get loads of attention and coverage. The report found that employees had no idea what the standards for detainees were, let alone obeying them. Every housing unit was overcrowded, sometimes three times more than it should be in order to achieve the 75 feet per square person standard. Detainees were deprived of any stimulating leverage time and not given access to legal materials. Perhaps the most disgusting find is the use of these tiny cages, quote, "Between July 17th, 2025 and January 18th, 2026, FSSF," that's Soft-Sided Facility, Florida, "confined

• 3:36:59Speaker 04

  79 detainees in small metal enclosures, each operating about 18 square feet of floor space for periods ranging from several minutes to nearly two hours, a practice unlike any OIG team has observed in ICE facilities. The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment." That's one way of saying it. These are cages that are four feet, three inches by four feet, three inches by seven feet, nine inches, and the staff called them calming areas.

• 3:37:28Speaker 00

  You have to see the pictures of these, like, you should put on yourself to look up, if you haven't already, like, look up pictures of these tiny cages.

• 3:37:35Speaker 04

  They they're reminiscent of shit I saw in Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin. Like, that's not an exaggeration.

• 3:37:41Speaker 00

  They sell bigger dog crates for training your dog than these these calming areas.

• 3:37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, you couldn't lie down. And it's a metal crate in Florida. It's a cage, yeah, some of them are outside. Yeah, exposed to the sun. Yeah, I think that the one I saw that was outside was under a little roof area, but they'll still be unbearably hot, right? They also state that detainees told us they did not have access to clean drinking water and could not clean their plastic cups. Drinking, potentially contaminated drinking water from unclean cups could negatively impact detainee health, something I have also heard myself from detainees. They were allowed to shower three times a week. They were only allowed toothpaste when staff members applied it to their issued toothbrush. This is a facility designed to dehumanize people, right?

• 3:38:28Speaker 04

  Like, I have been to prison camps all over the world and no longer prison camps from, like, brutal dictatorial regimes. That is what this is. This facility won't last long because it's already closed, but one day this shit will be a museum where we send our children to understand the fucked up shit that we did to people, and they will feel a sense of shame. But Florida does not. Indeed, it is not something that seems to concern DHS because, quote, DHS stated it did not have a contract with Florida to manage the detention space at FSSF. DHS indicated Florida detained illegal aliens at FSSF pursuant to its delegated authority

• 3:39:11Speaker 04

  under Section 287G of the Immigration Nationality Act, and therefore the state maintains authority of day-to-day operations at the facility, and that, quote, DHS stated a Section 287G agreement does not give the federal government authority over the physical operation to any facility or over the state employees, except to the extent in which they are performing the function of immigration officer. This is a crazy argument, right? Like, there are ICE logos all over this facility. These people are in immigration detention for a federal misdemeanor in some cases, for other cases, just for not compliance with with immigration regulations, right? Maybe some have committed crimes or misdemeanors in Florida, but they are not being detained by a court in Florida for an offense in Florida.

• 3:39:56Speaker 04

  Florida is a contractor here, just like Geo Group is a contractor.

• 3:40:00Speaker 00

  How are they not performing the function of an immigration officer?

• 3:40:03Speaker 04

  They're performing the function of a prison guard, right? So like someone like a Geo Group.

• 3:40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:40:09Speaker 04

  Prison guard, right? But like, but there are ICE immigration officers there, there absolutely are, right? What's worrying about this is, yeah, this facility is closed, but the Baker facility, for example, is run under 287G. There are other people detained under 287G, and the line that DHS is taking is that there is no minimum, other than that which the state decides to enforce in terms of the quality of these people's food, the way they can be mistreated, the way they can be tortured. Like, this is really alarming, and that is what I want people to take home from this. Like, the conditions were bad, and DHS is asserting that there's nothing they can do about it. Like, it's one of these pie in the sky legal arguments that the Trump administration has

• 3:40:54Speaker 04

  increasingly been making and sometimes sticks a landing on, and this one is wild.

• 3:40:58Speaker 00

  "There is no minimum" is such a chilling phrase.

• 3:41:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I don't think it's possible to overstate how fucked this is. Immigration detention under Biden was fucking inhumane. Like, I spoke to hundreds, I've interviewed someone on this show who had just left immigration detention, and it was horrific then, right? They they call it the ice box because they keep that place super cold. And it is something that I didn't, well, I mean, I'm constantly, I've underestimated how terrible shit could be in this country, but it has got worse, and that should be a national shame.

• 3:41:32Speaker 00

  Well, that is all of our stories for this edition of Executive Disorder.

• 3:41:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:41:39Speaker 00

  Kim Kelly, where could people find more of your work, anywhere, online or maybe in Fleshspace, I don't know, at a bookstore, perhaps? Oh, yeah, I have some books.

• 3:41:51Speaker 04

  Fleshspace.

• 3:41:51Speaker 00

  They're at Fleshspace. Give me a break, okay?

• 3:41:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely not.

• 3:41:56Speaker 00

  I know, like, we're like, we're all internet people. I've been reading these anthropic reports all day. It's the only way I can think now. Trapped in the matrix. Oh, my God. But if you do like old school analog books, I have created some of those you can find. Fight Like Hell and Fight to Win, the kids' version of my radical labor history. It is out there. The paperback is so much cheaper, buy it for some kids, radicalism. I'm freelance, so I am a labor journalism mercenary. You can find me all over the place. And as of fairly recently, sometimes I pop up here in the the cool zone. So, yeah, you can Google me and we can argue about tattoos on Blue Sky or Instagram.

• 3:42:37Speaker 00

  And also, I just wanted to say, there was a little update from Robert Kraft and Gillette and all that. After McAlmore had posted that he was going to donate a million dollars to these Palestinian organizations, Robert Kraft posted, "Actually, before that happened, I talked to Ed and we decided we're both going to donate $2 million. Also, I've been really cool to Palestinians, so meh." So internet bullying works is my final sort of takeaway for you guys.

• 3:43:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. If you want to email us about insurance tattoos, don't.

• 3:43:13Speaker 00

  Send them to me.

• 3:43:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, you can find Kim at Iwriteok on social media platforms everywhere.

• 3:43:20Speaker 00

  Oh, no!

• 3:43:21Speaker 04

  But if you would like to email us about a story tip, you can do so. It is [email protected].

• 3:43:30Speaker 00

  We reported the news. I think the newsroom guy got like divorced or he's like broke up with his like girlfriend. He did. He and Amanda Seyfried are getting divorced. And the rumor is it's because she's actually into women, so good for her. So pour one out. Honey. Good for her. Godspeed.

• 3:43:53Robert Evans?

  We reported the news.

• 3:44:01Speaker 07

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

• 3:44:25Speaker 03

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

• 3:44:44Speaker 04

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

• 3:44:50Speaker 03

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

• 3:45:08Robert Evans?

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 3:45:11Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 3:45:12Robert Evans?

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

• 3:45:17Robert Evans?

  It's real.

• 3:45:18Robert Evans?

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

• 3:45:23Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 3:45:24Robert Evans?

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

• 3:45:28Speaker 01

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

• 3:45:31Robert Evans?

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

• 3:45:38Speaker 07

  What happens when romance gets a little monstrous? On Radio 831, a romance podcast, join us, St. Johnna Basker and Tyler McCall, as we host our own monster romance extravaganza. We're joined by the villain edit author, Rosie Dannen, and sentient object romance expert, Gracie Delgado, to explore what these unexpected love stories can reveal about desire, fantasy, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:46:08Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.