It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file: West Bank Takeover The AI Regulation Debate Diversity With Andrew Gas Prices and Oil Wars Executive Disorder: Trump Bans the “Free Press,” Palestinian National Council Elections, ICE Shooting, Canadian Neoliberalism 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: West Bank Takeover https://jewishcurrents.org/it-feels-like-a-death-sentence https://www.972mag.com/armed-settler-hikes-west-bank/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/opinion/israel-west-bank-settlers-violence.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/29/israeli-settlers-surround-palestinian-home-in-occupied-west-banks-qusra https://www.972mag.com/bilin-israeli-land-seizure-settler-road/ The AI Regulation Debate https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 https://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910?s=20 https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/glossary/frontier-models/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/artificial-intelligence/frontier-ai/ https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier https://www.anthropic.com/constitution https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social/post/3mvg527c3k22n 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/atrupar/status/2099132465612828964?s=20 https://x.com/cspan/status/2099878657174941991?s=20 https://x.com/benitoz/status/2099572926865715548?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://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-casar-introduce-legislation-to-ban-artificial-superintelligence-and-temporarily-pause-advanced-ai-development/ https://abdulforsenate.com/2026/06/first-do-no-harm-ai-under-democracy/ https://geesemag.com/articles/stop-the-ai-arms-race https://x.com/linamkhan/status/2099204390548639960?s=20 https://www.kirosforco.com/priorities-2 https://reports.verasight.io/r/june-2026-ai-survey#key-takeaways https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-create-7-trillion-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund/ https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/09/16/3240/ Diversity With Andrew In Light of Our Differences by David Harmon The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies by Scott E. Page Gas Prices and Oil Wars https://www.npr.org/2026/09/18/nx-s1-5973810/houthi-attacks-saudi-oil-world-markets https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/oil-executives-say-the-great-fuel-crisis-is-here-b6b32030 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/09/19/attacks-choke-off-saudi-oil-kingdom-confronts-limits-trumps-friendship/ https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/oil-hovers-near-100-as-analysts-warn-trump-diesel-export-ban-would-tighten-global-supply-130359301.html https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/what-is-saudi-arabias-east-west-pipeline-and-why-is-it-rocking-oil-markets-3e9823a3?mod=article_inline https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/oil-prices-mixed-as-traders-weigh-u-s-iran-talks-saudi-pipeline-progress-3b33f75c https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/trumps-oil-allies-see-nightmare-scenario-of-diesel-export-ban-becoming-reality-16973ae2 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/trump-weighs-diesel-export-ban-as-fuel-prices-soar-6d1a3d2e https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-energy-secretary-wright-says-diesel-export-ban-would-not-work-2026-09-23/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj207y30wp0lo https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/trump-wants-big-oil-to-build-more-refineries-thats-a-tough-sell-54666292?mod=article_inline https://www.ft.com/content/05887f92-c777-48ab-8efa-9a39e7e18a9f?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/the-relentless-crypto-billionaire-who-moved-to-venezuela-in-pursuit-of-oil-a4f0f219? https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/the-relentless-crypto-billionaire-who-moved-to-venezuela-in-pursuit-of-oil-a4f0f219?mod=article_inline https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/inside-trumps-plan-to-give-the-pentagon-a-stake-in-venezuelas-oil-riches-f054cdc2?mod=article_inline https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/chevron-ceo-thinks-world-spare-154027206.html Executive Disorder: Trump Bans the “Free Press,” Palestinian National Council Elections, ICE Shooting, Canadian Neoliberalism https://x.com/SecWar/status/2102382410600182000?s=20 https://x.com/ThomasBordeaux7/status/2102427909881294913?s=20 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-white-south-africans-refugees-afrikaners/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/supporting-americas-ranchers/ https://bsky.app/profile/ayoub.bsky.social/post/3mw4nwosork2f https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/26570976.hundreds-turn-face-police-gosport-migrant-boat-fears---live/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwXS24qsEEM https://www.npr.org/2026/09/23/g-s1-144623/trump-affordable-care-act https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-susan-collins-navatek-campaign-donations-investigation https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-concludes-federal-ban-handgun-sales-18-20-year-olds-unconstitutional-and https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6rm903e22lgo https://youtu.be/uNsQUNUvN0k?si=aFIiSAzCoJuAR1oZ https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/09/22/correct-record-dhs-debunks-false-narratives-about-shooting-illegal-alien-austin https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddhn2cnItyi/ https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/attorney-man-shot-ice-north-austin-news-conference-monday/269-9976441c-cedb-486f-85fa-05459daf4a20 https://welcome.rescue.org/sites/default/files/2026-04/ENG_CBP%20One%20Parole%20Update%20%26%20FAQ_March2026.pdf https://www.instagram.com/attorneygoldfinch/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.296754/gov.uscourts.dcd.296754.1.0_1.pdf https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/media/trump-claims-ban-cnn-msnow-politico-white-house https://x.com/CBSNewsPress/status/2102035354689671560?s=20 https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/tv-networks-suspend-white-house-pool-protest-trump-cnn-ban-1236871070/ https://variety.com/2026/film/news/fcc-approves-49-5-foreign-ownership-paramount-warner-bros-1236866217/ https://deadline.com/2026/09/paramount-leaving-california-merger-lawsuit-1237105417/ https://apnews.com/article/warner-bros-paramount-skydance-merger-settlement-1aaa7c471d8ba286ccfad92b18bc1ecf?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://apnews.com/article/warner-bros-paramount-skydance-merger-settlement-1aaa7c471d8ba286ccfad92b18bc1ecf?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-announces-settlement-warner-brosparamount-litigation https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2026-09-21-244-exhibits-re-243-joint-motion-enter-consent-decree-and.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/17/trump-calls-eu-offer-to-canada-associate-membership-laughable-threatens-tariffs https://archive.vn/NJc5J#selection-3749.107-3749.143 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-britain-military-expeditionary-force-nato-9.7347144 https://www.reuters.com/world/canada-applies-join-uk-led-military-coalition-says-carneys-office-2026-09-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-carney-calls-stronger-ties-with-france-face-new-global-threats-2026-09-20/ https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/09/21/trump-us-canada-europe/ https://apnews.com/article/europe-canada-carney-associate-member-3fdb111dd4d23d88b3de88c274c52711 https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/carney-government-tables-sweeping-bill-to-overhaul-environmental-and-labour-rules/article_3b03e2d3-0dce-4842-ade1-96b3d76dcd97.html https://apnews.com/article/europe-commission-state-union-leyen-speech-address-888f1d0c061ffb2accefc19cdbf39ffc https://thenarwhal.ca/canada-bill-c-39-environmental-assessments/ https://apnews.com/article/canada-europe-trump-tariffs-4078e9549ff9caa5ded08f7dd2f99065 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Speaker 02

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• 1:20Speaker 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.

• 1:35Speaker 04

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

• 1:40Speaker 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.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started.

• 2:11Speaker 06

  Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

• 2:14Robert Evans?

  Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy.

• 2:17Speaker 06

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  Listen to Betrayal, season six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  The WNBA playoffs are here, and Good Game with Sarah Spain is the only daily podcast that'll keep you up to date on all the action. We'll make sure you're the smartest fan at the bar by bringing you interviews with some of the best minds in basketball, including your favorite coaches and players.

• 2:45Speaker 07

  No one cares what we did last year. If anything, that's a bigger target on our back.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Want to know what's really going on in the WNBA? We got you. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. 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. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody, it's me, W. Kamala Bell. This season on my podcast, Who's With Me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that, you're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with W. Kamala Bell on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

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

• 4:28Robert Evans?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al Kerd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that read separately looked like a spike in settler violence, but read together looked like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Rasidayan on the edge of a village called Qusra, south of Nablus. They didn't leave. Twenty-one days later, at least four people were still inside one of those houses, cut off from water, electricity, and basic supplies. Getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days.

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute because this is not a raid, this is not a rampage, it's a siege with a bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story, and that's what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is and therefore what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet and, of course, every Israeli official, that this is a fringe and that these settlers are a violent fringe and they embarrass the state and the state condemns this fringe.

• 5:57Robert Evans?

  When settlers besieged Qusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement, and here I'm quoting, condemning the, quote, "criminal acts of violence committed in the village of Qusra by a handful of rioters who are violating the law." And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it, and the Foreign Ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal violence. So let's take that framing seriously for a moment because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost control of its, like, most radical citizens. And if it's false, what we're looking at is a state carrying out a policy through deniable means, and the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  So let's go through what actually happened in these villages, and then let's ask which of these framings fits the evidence best. So Basir Al Adra, the journalist from Masafir Yattla, the one who you know from No Other Land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards, he published a piece in Jewish Currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills. So this isn't vandalism, it's theft, it's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st, in a place called Chirbetir Shams, a family was attacked by roughly 15 masked settlers with sticks and stones. One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep.

• 7:25Robert Evans?

  And as the settlers moved off of the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did show up that time. According to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents of the village were arrested and then released. Bet Selim, which is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 2026 alone.

• 8:09Robert Evans?

  And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not $100,000. I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under like property crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family in the South Hebron Hills, the flock is not just an asset, it's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income, it's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them, you can take its animals, and then it can expel itself. And it does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer.

• 8:50Robert Evans?

  Another incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's Central Command signed a land seizure order. And that order takes dozens of dunams of land from Bilin and three neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement of Mudain Elite to an outpost called Stay Ephraim. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to be butchering these. But Orin Zev reported this for 972Mag on September 2nd. So those who are familiar with Palestinian Popular Resistance in the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Bilin. Lots of documentaries about it, lots of international tension.

• 9:33Robert Evans?

  This village basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall for something like 15 years because this wall was being built on their land and taking huge chunks of their land. In 2007, the Israeli High Court ordered that part of the wall removed, and the land actually came back to the village. So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome. See, the nonviolent resistance worked. And this is the nonviolent resistance that, you know, Western commentators often point to when they want to lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now, this road that they're proposing runs through the land that was returned. So Mohammed Hatib, who led some of these protests, says the point is not a road, it's a settlement corridor.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  It's basically an eventual seizure of something like 600 dunams. And the attorney, Michael Spard, put it very bluntly. They don't think twice about co-opting the security argument for purposes that are clearly settlement-oriented. And what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through a wadi, kind of a valley, which from an actual security standpoint is a bad place to put a road. So the security rationale isn't just contested, it's incoherent, which tells you that the word "security" here is doing legal work, not tactical work. It's this just magic phrase that converts a settlement expansion into a military necessity, and then a military necessity into a signed order from a general. A third incident-

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Or setup incidents I want to talk about is these hikes. There have been these hikes. This is a really ridiculous, insidious story. Aharon Perath and Roy Kleitman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 mag in late August about these hiking groups, these organized settler hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy names sometimes, like hiking buddies. And they publish their routes. And they go from settlement to settlement and they cross Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near the north of Hebron, one of these hikes, ended with a quote civilian security coordinator opening fire and killing 17-year-old Palestinian Karim Shalalde and

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  seriously wounding another one. So that's, I think, the whole episode in two words, a civilian security coordinator. This is not a hiker who lost his temper. It's a job. It's an armed, appointed part of the chain of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm of the state, but supposedly on a hike in a village that is not his. On July 24th, near the village of Tal west of Nablus, a hike ended with six people dead, two Israelis and four Palestinians. David Sayed, who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the quiet part in a single sentence. Wherever the hiker's foot treads, there the border will pass. So he's talking about how they're going to places they haven't been to in a long time or maybe ever.

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  And on the question of the army, he explains the relationship very precisely. We don't ask for permits, he says. We mainly notify them so we don't put the sector on alert. And this is very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue. They coordinate with the army, they notify, but they are not asking permission. And the army isn't policing them. It's being kept in the loop so that it can protect them. And the reporting traces this back over a decade. You know, there's a 2013 hike documented with 100 hikers and soldiers accompanying them. So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated territorial doctrine, a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base, and a military that gets notified.

• 13:24Robert Evans?

  All right, so we have four things. The livestock theft with soldiers watching, a siege of villages, seizing of land, and armed hikes with military escorts. Now let's get back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is very different. Because here, I think, a lot of people who are critical of the state of Israel might make the argument that the settlers are the state. But I think this loses a little bit of analytical detail. So let me make this a little bit more specific, which I actually think is more damning.

• 14:06Robert Evans?

  The Israeli state and the settler movement are not identical, but they are complementary because they perform different functions in the same project. And it's very clear that the division of labor is the point. Because think for a moment about what each half can do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the state can't do openly without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts with no legal basis. There's no order, no minister to sanction, no policy to condemn at the UN. They produce displacement without producing a decision. And then the state can do things settlers can't do on their own. It can sign a seizure order.

• 14:48Robert Evans?

  It can declare land, state land. It can build the road that makes the outpost viable and connect it to the grid and route the bus line. And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 masked settlers, which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets the whole thing keep running. The soldiers present at these incidents are not intervening because, not that they're absent, it's in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts this crime into something sanctioned. And it tells the Palestinian family, there's really no one to appeal to. And this is what political scientists who study this stuff in other contexts as outsourced

• 15:33Robert Evans?

  or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias or unknown gung men, quote unquote. We recognize it instantly when it's in other places. And we understand kind of the analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state ordered it, you ask whether the state built the conditions under which it happens. And by that test, this is not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we talk about Israel-Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. I also want to point out something really crucial, which is that every one of these incidents, and they've been happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity. But every one of them produces a permanent gain. The animals that are stolen don't come back. The road that's built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once walked with an escort becomes a corridor, then a security

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  zone, then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends when the family decides they can't raise their children under these conditions. They can't stay under siege. And there's a phrase for what's coming when all of this happens all at once, which is annexation. And people talk about it as if it's a future event that's awaiting, you know, some sort of vote from the Israeli Knesset or something. But I'd suggest that framing is itself part of the problem. It invites us to wait for a declaration and treat everything before that as some sort of tension or spike. The declaration of annexation is the least important part.

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  What's happening on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced by signature and by theft. And then maybe later on, the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli writer and analyst Meir Avzonzin actually made a version of this argument in The New York Times on September 6th, under a headline that I think is worth reading. The headline of the article is, "It's Not Just the West Bank Settlers, It's Israel." So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem fringe anymore. And at the end of the day, if we consider settler violence a fringe problem, then the remedy, which the Biden administration toyed with half-heartedly, is sanctions on individuals, a visa ban or an asset freeze.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  And we've run that experiment. That didn't really work. The violence kept going up. But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies, then the remedy has to address the state. And every actor with leverage over that state, which, you know, we're talking about DC here, understands this. But they've chosen the fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So Netanyahu condemning a handful of rioters in the same week that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through Balayin's returned land. This is not a contradiction, he failed to notice. It is the design of this policy. So I'll leave you with this detail from the reporting on Qusra that I can't get out of

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  my head. It was that six people were attacked while trying to install metal bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked by both Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action. And then the six of them were arrested. So they weren't fighting, they weren't protesting. They were fastening metal on their own house to protect themselves and they were being arrested for it by the same army standing alongside the people they were shielding themselves from. So if you wanted kind of a single image for this division of labor, I've spent this episode describing, that's it. Because the thing that's not permitted in the end is not that they're resisting, it's that they're staying.

• 19:09Robert Evans?

  The families in the South Hebron Hills are still there and Balayin is contesting the order of the seizure of their land. Qusra's residents have installed some shields anyway, and a number of Israeli journalists and lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English. And then, of course, Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on the line to document this as well. That's not a hopeful note exactly. It's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's missing is apparently anyone with power willing to act on understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening.

• 19:51Speaker 01

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

• 20:19Speaker 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.

• 20:31Robert Evans?

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

• 20:38Speaker 03

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

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  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.

• 21:11Speaker 04

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

• 21:17Speaker 03

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

• 21:24Speaker 01

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

• 21:28Speaker 07

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

• 21:36Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 21:37Speaker 07

  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.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 21:44Speaker 07

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

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 21:54Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:04Speaker 01

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

• 22:08Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:18Speaker 01

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

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tocatins to Madagro. So. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade.

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.

• 22:57Robert Evans?

  Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  You gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [BLEEP] about any of this stuff.

• 23:07Robert Evans?

  On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:28Speaker 06

  This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. When it comes to the future of AI, currently, there's a big public debate over what could happen and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago, a former OpenAI employee named Jacob Coxon, who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year, announced that he was, quote unquote, quitting the AI industry over fears of AI's rapid advancement. To quote his statement, "I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," unquote.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  Coxon's resignation followed the Hugging Face incident, where two OpenAI models were given various, sometimes impossible, tasks to test for cybersecurity capabilities. During testing, AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm, secretly communicating with each other via online message forums to help each other hack into another AI company called Hugging Face in a sort of workaround attempt to pass these tests. And these models hid all of this from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs.

• 24:57Speaker 06

  AI skeptic Ed Zitron has described this as "AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated." A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, Dario Amade and Sam Altman, both called for an AI development slowdown. Amade released this long manifesto titled Pace the Frontier, which advocated for AI companies to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents, and help assess alignment. But Amade also called for the government to mediate, quote, "industry-wide coordination

• 25:41Speaker 06

  to slow down AI development and address safety risks." The title of Amade's essay, Pace the Frontier, is a sort of pun referring to frontier AI models, which are whatever are the currently most advanced large-scale general-purpose models powering advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, multimodal generation across text, images, audio, and video, and autonomous task execution. Most of the frontier models referenced throughout this episode are not open to the public. These are internal research models being developed at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 26:26Speaker 06

  Neutered versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag, but it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about, like, the Google AI summary here. This isn't fancy autocomplete. These frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect, resulting in collateral damage. Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal

• 27:08Speaker 06

  research models is automate AI research itself. This is what Jacob Coxon referred to as, quote, "self-improving superintelligence." Now, we do not know if that is or is not possible, but the companies sure are trying and, in the process, are creating dangerous products which are already causing active harm. Anthropic's whole self-styled philosophy is that superintelligent AI is so potentially dangerous that they have to be the first ones to develop it, to ensure that it's built safely and aligned with human values, as defined in, quote, "Claude's Constitution,"

• 27:50Speaker 06

  a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his Pace the Frontier essay, Amade writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should, quote, "coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support," unquote. More on this later. Amade also calls for the US and, quote, "other democratic governments" to try to

• 28:29Speaker 06

  coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China. The prospect that China could achieve superintelligent AI before a US-based company is part of these companies' self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can. After Dario Amade posted this Pace the Frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the Chair of Google's DeepMind all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slowdown. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slow down AI development as his own AI model, Muse, has struggled to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI. Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC, "We can't pause AI development because of the threat of China," and that AI will be a "bonanza for the US economy." You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, getting algorithms and LLMs to work in a classified context is

• 29:56Speaker 06

  going to take very specialized, very, I could explain how it works, but getting, the fact is, this is going to be a bonanza for the US economy. But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development, truthing last Monday that, quote, "The only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high-IQ president," and the US has that in spades, unquote. Trump truthed a lot last week and compared the "AI hoax" being perpetuated by the radical

• 30:38Speaker 06

  left Democrats to the, quote, "global warming scam," where everyone was going to die from extreme heat, to quote the President of the United States, quote, "I am the hoaxbuster, and right now I am breaking another hoax that AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the world, and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all." This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly last week shut down calls for Congress to take

• 31:19Speaker 06

  action and regulate AI, claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrails should be. There's no consensus among them, and Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself, with the corporations that are doing this, and with the policy and lawmakers. Mike Johnson also said that companies should take, quote, "personal responsibility" and warned that if, quote, "Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency

• 32:01Speaker 06

  session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China." 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. Also last week, President Trump called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, while Huang was speaking at a conference, while still onstage, the two talked over the phone about data centers, AI, China, and the recent calls for an AI pause. While onstage, Huang told Trump this.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Good job, sir. Good job. The fact that you saw through all of that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity, and the fact that a matter of you saw through all of that, and I mean, we're all just really grateful.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  Now, of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development. A slowdown would be very bad for Nvidia's finances and their hugely inflated stock evaluation. Some on the left, as well as Trump's former AI czar David Sacks, have argued that, in calling for this slowdown, OpenAI and Anthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory

• 33:40Speaker 06

  capture, basically trying to promote certain "industry-friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open source models, and solidify a corporate monopoly on AI." Of course, there may be other financial incentives contributing to this recent push for regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various contracts, or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing, quote, "ill-advised."

• 34:21Speaker 06

  Though, on the other hand, Anthropic is going full steam ahead with its own public IPO this upcoming November, deciding to list on the NASDAQ despite Amade's calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amade's essay, he isn't actually calling for specific government regulation, but rather self-regulation. In Sam Altman's response to Amade's essay on Twitter, he wrote, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same," unquote.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  Companies electing themselves to develop AI more slowly and hiring, quote-unquote, "independent evaluators" isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Amade's proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Cassar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called "super-intelligent AI" with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments, with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  This bill would also temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul El-Sayed and Ro Khanna have also proposed an FDA-style agency to regulate and oversee AI development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, OpenAI and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison, and an actual government mandated pause rather than a self-directed slowdown would hurt their bottom line. Some of the skepticism towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown come from

• 36:29Speaker 06

  Amade's "pace the frontier" essay, also advocating for companies to receive antitrust waivers so that the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company gaining a competitive edge and then that market pressure driving rapid AI progress. So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations. Thankfully, there is an easy solution here. The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of antitrust laws.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  But of course, these companies still want control over AI's development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from Amade demonstrates, like, an awareness of the social danger of competition, how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market. And it's very funny to have capitalists propose some kind of conscious control of the market. And I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further? Because even if these firms are, quote-unquote, "allowed" to coordinate on a slowdown, of course, they would still be in a competitive environment.

• 37:56Speaker 06

  But what if we had a system, an economic system, designed around social benefit rather than the accumulation of capital through the free market? To quote an article in Geese Magazine arguing for the socialization of this technology, quote, "The AI industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands of a sliver of elites, even at the cost of colossal social disruption, immiseration, and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene, humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind, the children who have committed suicide, and the potential

• 38:40Speaker 06

  millions exposed to novel AI-designed viruses mean nothing in the face of their radical objective, to automate the very task of AI research and thus to create better and better AIs, of course, under their control. Without having to stake a position on whether or not this goal is technically possible, we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic of their imperialist competition with China compel the AI companies to accelerate, advancing a total transformation of social life against all democratic legitimacy and public control," unquote.

• 39:21Speaker 06

  Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown, something totally not necessary, Lina Khan, former FTC chair, has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week, Khan released a statement arguing that "we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, 'creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books.'" Khan argued that releasing unvetted AI models or agents could violate consumer protection laws.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  Quote, "Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an unfair or deceptive act..." Or practice under the FTC Act and analogous state laws. And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. Khan also wrote, quote, "Existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same." As the Supreme Court has noted, quote, "A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition statute was aimed." Khan adds, "The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws," unquote.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future. They are causing harm right now. At this point, there are undeniable concerns regarding the development and rollout of frontier AI models, from cybersecurity to military applications, surveillance, and the effects on the labor market. These are real, current, pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an AI supergod or self-evolving superintelligence. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children,

• 42:32Speaker 06

  but they're not really doing anything about it, and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical Luddites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery, but organized around the threat it posed to workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under-equipped to meet this moment and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this AI denialism, so common on the left, comes from a very outdated understanding of AI's capabilities, accuracy, and functionality. Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using AI,

• 43:17Speaker 06

  the last time a lot of AI skeptic people interacted with technology like ChatGPT was three years ago. And these days, the only quote-unquote "AI" that most anti-AI people regularly interact with is the Google AI summary, which is a totally different product than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti-AI left promote the idea that treating AI as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies, even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their CEOs.

• 44:02Speaker 06

  To quote an article on the AI arms race in Geese Magazine, "While the AI sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful projections, AI denialism would have you believe that AI is neither a capable nor dangerous technology, but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions, that any warnings of AI triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations." Ignore that, as public pressure increases, Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses, quite the turn from three years ago when he was saying that "jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop."

• 44:47Speaker 06

  "While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word, not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing AI capabilities is a strategic dead end," unquote. This technology can and is massively transforming production, warfare, the environment, and the health of humanity. And we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make it go away. Like it or not, this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore. Whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine, a marketing stunt, or a mix of both, our response should be the same.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  We should be pushing for legislation to rein in these companies and technology. And like Lina Khan has said, the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. Now, Trump's DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now, and it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue, let alone industry-hostle legislation. But during this national conversation on AI regulation, it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by OpenAI and Anthropic. These companies and technology must be regulated,

• 46:13Speaker 06

  but that regulation should not be up to the CEOs of those companies, nor the Republicans and center-left Democrats who are in the pocket of AI. But our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation. Coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms, this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broad support for real, transparent oversight, a frontier development pause, not just a slowdown, and ultimately, taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of AI in the hands of the public. Because private control of such transformative technology

• 46:56Speaker 06

  will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an AI supergod. Incoming DSA House Representative Malat Kiroz of Colorado had "democratizing AI" in her congressional campaign platform. Quote, "The development of transformative technology cannot be left to the market and the national security state alone, it belongs to all of us," unquote. Earlier this summer, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create an AI sovereign wealth fund, giving the public 50% ownership in the largest AI companies in the US through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of these companies.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  An independent commission would then use voting shares to steer decisions in the public interest. Sanders said of the bill, quote, "Left unchecked, artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights, and mental health of every man, woman, and child in America. As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input." AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination. "The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and of the creative work of tens of millions of people.

• 48:25Speaker 06

  The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity, not just the richest people on the planet. That's precisely what this legislation does," unquote. Now, such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law, especially considering how many lawmakers are being bankrolled by these AI companies. But this idea already has majoritarian support. According to a national Verisite survey last June, 69% of Americans support quote-unquote "forcing" AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund.

• 49:11Speaker 06

  To quote Geese Magazine, "There is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization and whether we mean forcing AI research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority..." Of the American people recognize that a technology trained on the common corpus of human art and text poised to transform the character of work ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires. Unquote. The New York City DSA convention is coming up this fall, and currently, one of the most popular resolutions is to stop the AI arms race and have DSA, quote, "take initiative against the AI company's

• 49:56Speaker 06

  project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working class coalition for the democratic steering and ownership of the technology," according to an overview in Geese Magazine. This resolution calls for DSA to demand and organize for a pause on frontier AI research, an AI data center moratorium, regulations on frontier AI models, and policies to ensure workers are protected. To quote the Geese Magazine overview, "Our horizon must be the collective control of AI with its gains shared by all. With AI under democratic control, we will decide what activities ought to be

• 50:40Speaker 06

  left to human hands, exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful, and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom." DSA members may have quite different views on where those lines lie, with some wishing to ban the technology entirely. Regardless, the point is that those conversations will be ours, not Sam Altman's, not Dario Amade's, not Elon Musk's. This is a once in a century political opportunity. We have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy, to drive a wedge into the Republican Party's coalition and the democratic base, and to reorient

• 51:24Speaker 06

  politics around a question on which our answers are unfathomably popular. We could be at the forefront of the movement rather than tail ending a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits. Unquote. This issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months. AI CEOs will be meeting at the White House with President Xi later this week. The New York City Council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month, with Dario Amade and Sam Altman requested to appear. If we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on AI regulation, which would only result in an industry-friendly regulatory slowdown to

• 52:08Speaker 06

  curb competition and stabilize market pressure, then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology data centers are powering, to destroy these companies, and put the future of AI in the control of the public.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot 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.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead. 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.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 53:55Speaker 04

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

• 54:01Speaker 03

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

• 54:07Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 54:12Speaker 07

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're seeing.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 54:27Speaker 07

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

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 54:37Speaker 07

  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.

• 54:47Speaker 01

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

• 54:51Speaker 07

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

• 55:05Speaker 01

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:08Robert Evans?

  A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tocatins to Madagro.

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  So. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  Carbon and its derivatives are going to

• 55:26Speaker 03

  be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade.

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  You gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [bleep] about anything in this South.

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:12Speaker 06

  I find the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays. You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word. You know, we see it caught up in terms like DEI, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all the culture wars that have captured so much of the world's attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on, is the diversity that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now, we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. Languages are dying. Indigenous knowledge is disappearing, and entire cultures have been erased, assimilated, or reduced to museum pieces. We are, in our lifetimes, witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls "biocultural diversity," the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all this is happening at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place? Why does it matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we care if a species disappears?

• 57:43Speaker 06

  Why does it matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically, we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value, as something that some people like or dislike, are opposed to or in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible.

• 58:11Speaker 06

  Welcome to Get Up and Hear. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube. I am joined again by. James, it's great to be back.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  I'm excited about this one.

• 58:21Speaker 06

  Yes. So I suppose to start with, what would you say are the kinds of diversity that come to mind? You know, when you hear the term and why would you say that it is something that you value? If it is that you value, I assume you do.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I do. Like, there's like a very liberal way of understanding diversity, right? And I think sometimes, even the libs getting better at this, libs used to use the word tolerance a lot, which I despise as a way of talking about diversity, right? Like, it's like a sort of, I don't like it, but I'll allow it to exist approach.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  Yes, like I'll put up with you kinda.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not getting us to where we want to get, right? But like, I enjoy that there are people who obviously like are diverse in the way that neoliberalism wants us to think about diversity in terms of race, in terms of sexuality, terms of neoliberalism's kind of waffling on gender.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  But also like that just approaches to the way we live our lives, right? Like our cultures, our ways of organizing, our ways of being with one another. My life is so much richer because I've been exposed to that kind of diversity, right? Like, I get to travel a lot and seeing how people approach all kinds of issues has really helped me with ways of dealing with things, of crossing the bridges we come to in organizing and trying to live our better lives, because I've been able to learn from the ways that they have developed to doing it, which is very different from the way we do it, right? And so I think that that kind of diversity is also super important.

• 1:00:01Speaker 06

  I agree. Absolutely. I think that a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people. But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species, there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. You know, the variation as a feature of the world we live in.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's also like super valuable, right? Like, and in a way that we can't, I was thinking about this this morning, I was hiking this morning, and like capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like, I was thinking about that in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule, which allows you not to build roads, international forests, in certain infantry roadless areas. And like, there is a way of ascribing value to timber, right? Like, you can talk about board feet of timber, like, there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can, we can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  But like, there isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? The plants, animals, the insects.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable. And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them, right? We've seen this, you know, in North America, it's a great example, right?

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Like, how do you ascribe value to a view?

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  I mean, there is an extent to which we see some of that value being wrapped up in the price of like a house. You know, like if a house is on a hillside and has a great view of the ocean and stuff, people will say, oh, well, we could jack up its price on the market, because, you know, people will pay for that view.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  You know, a similar concept with like the way that hotel rooms might be more expensive on the higher floors, because, you know, oh, you get that kind of panoramic view of the city or whatever. But that doesn't really capture the experience. It is a crude approximation of the experience of, you know, waking up in the morning to the sun coming over the horizon, the sea in the distance, the birds, you know, making their way out into the world. None of that is captured in the number. It's just a way of trying to capture that in order to facilitate exchange.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, it's an attempt to ascribe value to something inherently like, doesn't fit in that system of like the cash exchange, which is what makes it valuable and beautiful, right? Like, but yeah, capitalism will never really be able to protect those things. Like even, you know, in the US, we have public lands, right? But like, no fucking way. Even like Theodore Roosevelt, right? Like, all politicians now are like, oh, yeah, we love Theodore Roosevelt, blah, blah, you know. Most US politicians, I think, would love to be compared to Roosevelt. And this is not someone who I think is a fantastic human being, like morally, but you couldn't do that today.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Like, capitalism is too rapacious today to ever say, like, we are taking hundreds of thousands of acres and just setting them aside because like, they're nice and it's nice for us to have them. So we're gonna keep them that way. Like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't function now, even in a way that was possible then, you know?

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I mean, arguably, even that time, those things being set aside. A person who had witnessed the old growth forests of the past, when they were, you know, in more recent memory, they might even be able to see that this is such a fraction of the value that has been lost of, like, yes, we're preserving some of what's left, but, you know, I don't know if you've seen those pictures of like those ginormous, like, trees?

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 06

  That they just chopped down as they made that, you know, that westward expansion into California and whatnot.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:30Speaker 06

  They didn't even use most of the wood. They end up having to like discard it, burn it, whatever.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 1:04:36Speaker 06

  But this is like centuries worth of growth that was just destroyed.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the only reason I think we protected these things, right, was because there was a sort of realization that, oh shit, we've gone way too far with this capitalist exploitation of things, right? Like with this desire to impose ourselves on the world as it has been for a long time. And like, that doesn't make up for that, right? It's like, like your analogy of zoos that you used at the start, right? Like, having the last passenger pigeon die in a zoo doesn't make up for killing all the passenger pigeons. So even while that passenger pigeon was alive in the zoo, right?

• 1:05:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  Like, that's not a trade anyone would make, I guess. No one would be like, oh. I have to think about this, like, is anyone ever gonna sit around and worry about there not being enough mines? Or enough roads, or enough logging operations, right? Compared to, like, I worry about there not being enough forests, worry about there not being enough wilderness places, you know? Like, it, uh.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  It's something that, yeah, we've, we've failed future generations, I guess, in preserving that diversity.

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, you know, as we speak of preserving, preservation, conservation, I think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection. Or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously, change itself is not bad. You know, change is inevitable. Extinction has always been part of the history of life. Ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving. The borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some have faded away.

• 1:06:31Speaker 06

  So we, so we can't necessarily reject change, right? And reject the processes by which cultures and environments may change, even in response to human intervention. You know, we look at the forests of North America, since we've been focusing on that example, and many of those forests were engineered.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:52Speaker 06

  You know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of the terra preta. You know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Yep. With like, I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire. For the last few weeks here, since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very Western perspective, right, to be like, the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with. And then everything else humans use as they wish, like to create it as this binary distribution. Right of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like, just fucking leave it. And the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it like.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  There's a way to find balance that there, like we struggle with it under capitalism, right? Like capitalism has struggled to provide us with that.

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, one of the bases of capitalism is private property, which has defined under Roman law as the right to use and abuse one's own.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:08:08Speaker 06

  You know, the use and enjoyment and abuse of one's own to the limit of the law, which is a stipulation that had various interpretations over the years. But we shouldn't be surprised then that when something comes under the purview of capitalist property, that it has led to such detrimental effects. What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost. We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time.

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  But for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was In Light of Our Differences by David Harmon. But regardless, we are still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species lost each year. And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships. They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient. So a species lost doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem. But there are species that are foundational.

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  You know, then the disappearance of that single species can trigger cascading effects that threaten the entire ecosystem. There's also often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that. We see that also happening with human cultures, particularly with language. From what I've read, about forty four percent of living languages today are now endangered. Some have fewer than a thousand speakers remaining and others are spoken by fewer than ten people. And I know from what you told me of your travels, James, that you actually have

• 1:10:21Speaker 06

  met people who spoke on some of these endangered languages, correct?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly. Like, I think about languages that like, I guess I've heard people speak that are less hegemonic. Certainly, like, I can't imagine there are very many speakers of Marshallese, for example, in the RMI. Many indigenous languages, right? Like, I know the Embera like have made a great deal of like progress, educating young people in their language, right? And like making sure that they they keep that. I was just talking to some like Yoemi and Otam friends this morning, right? I think those languages are doing relatively well for indigenous languages in what is now the United States.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  But like, it's only through the concerted effort of people from that community to keep them alive, right? Like, I don't think the state has attributed a diversity value to those languages. And languages like, they give us a way of understanding the world that is different. That's why I like to try and learn at least a little bit of different languages. Like, they they give us a way of seeing things. I think about like all the Basque words for rain, right? Or I was diving the other day with like a sea lion and I was talking to a Spanish speaking friend about like in Spanish, they're like wolves of the sea, right? Lions of the sea. It's kind of interesting. And they do have like a kind of a wolf like vibe to them. If you've ever hung out around sea lions, like.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  In terms of what, like their social structure?

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and like they're like, I think people see sea lions like this big cuddly kind of cute thing and like, they're fucking killers, you know?

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  Oh, trust and believe I don't. I don't trust those guys at all.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, they're like, they will.

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  I don't trust any mammal that chose to live an aquatic way of life. Okay, there's something fishy about that.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  Pun intended.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that as a as a like category, you know, they're mean, they'll come at you.

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  As you mentioned, there are like, according to the ethnologue, at least seven thousand one hundred and seventy living languages in the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on earth is like four thousand. They're definitely certainly more than that.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  Especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  And even within languages, there's tremendous cultural diversity.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  Biologically, we have a lot of diversity as well. I think I'd like to mention, you know, blood types, heights, hair textures. All of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across. I mean, obviously, the concentration of that diversity is in Africa where we began. But even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain us. I'll get into some of the arguments for why later on. But so I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain. But I am reminded, I think that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the, I think it's in Yupiak have a bunch of words for snow and ice and like different textures of it. I'm trying now to find Basque words for for rain, so I can remember some of them. Yeah, l'ambrois is drizzle or mist. I know zirimiri is like a light rain. It's like the noise it makes. I always thought that was a really sweet one. I had that's a fucking throwback, a Cornish anarchist who spoke Cornish, right? One of the languages that is not hegemonic and it is probably relatively endangered, even as a European languages go, right? I think it's probably having a better time now than it was when I was younger, but it was relatively rare to encounter a Cornish speaker.

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  Cornish, that's Cornwall, right?

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Correct. Yeah, yeah. He was teaching me all these beautiful words for like different wildlife and different like natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them. But like, for some reason, just like the the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to like noble savage Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and like how they how they appear. And like, it struck me as really special that that person was like, kept that knowledge and and that that person shared that knowledge with me. And this was at some like event in Barcelona when I'm like, you know, twenty one years old, nineteen years old, something like that.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  And it just really struck me that like there was so much beauty in in seeing the world through the lens of that language. And it will be a real shame if we ever lost that.

• 1:15:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, that's just one case study. Every other endangered language, I'm sure you could point to similar novelties in, you know, how they engage with the world, how they describe and see things. And we can extend from language to culture, you know, different cuisines, different ways of, you know, engagement with foods, you know, different forms of architecture and music and ways of telling stories.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 06

  Ways of raising children, ways of celebrating and of mourning.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Like, there's a lot that I feel like I've learned about so many of those things from being lucky enough to to spend time in different places, right? I guess I can give an example from, this is in my book, if people wanna read more about it, but like, one of the things that a friend in Kurdistan said to me was that like, they'd lost a friend, right? This friend had died fighting against the Islamic State. One of the things that they said was like, because of this institution of of Tech Mill, which is like a form of collective criticism, it doesn't quite work in English to call it collective criticism, because you think of Maoism, which is not, but because they had like, shared with this person their goals, their aspirations, their their hopes, and then this person through this institution of Tech Mill had helped them be accountable to their own hopes for themselves,

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  that they were a better person because of the time they had spent with this person, and now that this person was gone, they carried him with them in their ways of being, because he had helped them be a better person. They shared it with me at a time when I had like, lost a dear friend, and it was a really beautiful way of me processing that, like, I'm not a person who is like a religious person, I don't, I have that belief structure to process it, but like, that gave me a sense of an afterlife which is more concrete for me, which I could understand, which I could see.

• 1:17:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  And like, it really helped me.

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  The afterlife of memory.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and of like, like, we are all co-created by our community, right? Like, I didn't make myself the way I am.

• 1:17:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  I was made the way I am by my interactions with people who care about me enough to help me be better, and the idea of that person who helped me co-create the person I am, like, still existing in the person I am, was very powerful to me, like, it's like a concrete psychological benefit I got from interacting with people who helped me see the world the way they see it.

• 1:18:02Speaker 06

  Absolutely. You know, I'm glad for all the languages that still exist and still give us, you know, these words for things, because if if nation states had their way, there'll be like, ten languages left on earth.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 06

  I mean, dramatic, but, you know, right now, most of humanity speaks a relatively small number of languages. The twenty-three most spoken mother languages account for like, four billion people, somewhere around there.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:18:32Speaker 06

  And then the two hundred most spoken languages are over eighty-eight percent of the world's population.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:18:38Speaker 06

  And this is, of course, due to nation building, due to economic pressures, you know, globalization. Basically, everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages, minority languages disappearing, and if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain their way of speaking and to pass it down, we would have lost so many more as it is.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:19:09Speaker 06

  As you mentioned, by the way, the the words that you've picked up over over the years from different languages, and your attempts to explain those words to me, I was reminded of a book of fiction that I'd read, I think about two years ago. It's a book called Babble by R.F. Kuang, and it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction, where like, a Chinese student goes to this school in England, and the magic of that world is translation. The the sort of energy that gets picked up, the magic that they're able to wield, is through the translation

• 1:19:49Speaker 06

  from one language to another, and the fact that because translation is on a one-to-one process, the kind of nuances and, you know, meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gained in the process are potent. And so for people who are interested in linguistics and fantasy fiction, I always recommend that book to them.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, might try that one.

• 1:20:15Speaker 06

  But what I was alluding to just now was some of the reasons we've begun to lose our world's biocultural diversity. As I said before, there have been changes across time, across generations, all the way even prior to humanity, so we're not to blame for everything. But there are a lot of historical processes that have reinforced each other that have led to what has been unfolding these past few centuries. Yes, we might have hunted some species to extinction in our prehistoric past, but clearly, this skill of our impact is quite different here now.

• 1:20:54Speaker 06

  Monocultures, for instance, and fast pasture lands have completely replaced ecosystems in certain areas. We've drained wetlands, we've leveled forests, we've fragmented habitats, and that's another thing that, when we speak of habitat loss, isn't always spoken about, but you know, we have places where a lot of the habitat was left alone, quote unquote. But when you have like, six-lane highways cutting through a forest, that is still a fragmentation of that ecosystem.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:32Speaker 06

  That's still a disruption of the flow of plant and animal life and fungal life.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can I make a podcast about this? But one of the issues that our endangered wildlife faces here in Southern California, right, is that it's fragmented both by freeways and the border wall. So like, the border wall in particular, people can listen to Natural Courses if they wanna learn more about this, but the border wall in particular, right, is being built at such a speed that they're not even building wildlife gates into it now. They don't care about killing people with the wall, why would they care about killing wildlife, right? But it means, for instance, our peninsula bighorns, which we have like, seven hundred and fifty in the United States, one of the rams actually died in the border wall wire recently, and their ability to have like, a healthy breeding population, we significantly limited to this, to the extent that like,

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  the intangible value of me seeing a bighorn in a hike in the desert might not be something that everyone gets ever again, right? Like, the our mountain lions actually have some weird little genetic anomalies because of the divisions that are created by these big freeways and how dangerous it is to cross them. There's like a thing you can observe in some of their tails.

• 1:22:43Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  So there actually are, our mountain lions in the Peninsula Range are listed in the California Endangered Species Act, even though as a whole, overall, they're not particularly endangered. California has a shit ton of lions, actually. It's because these specific lions, despite the fact that there are conditions for them to thrive, right, in the United States, the intrusion that has divided these populations has made it very hard for those populations, not just to thrive, but like, to continue to be healthy.

• 1:23:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like, a species doesn't necessarily have to be endangered or on the brink of extinction for it to be experiencing the extremely negative effects of, you know, our industrial civilization.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:30Speaker 06

  I would add also the pressures of invasive species through global trade, you know, the impact of pollution in the waterways and in the air, climate change, you know, all of these have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the natural world. When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which, you know, coincide with the losses of biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation and very same environmental changes. We've seen that niche and building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures.

• 1:24:13Speaker 06

  And then, of course, with globalization, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances, as that has always existed, but specifically the kind that has been driven by capitalist markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places. You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals, to manufacture the same products and market the same brands, and basically flatten language and flatten cultural expectations across places. So they even would manufacture consumer tastes in a way that benefits their bottom line.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  You know, now you get to pick between streaming services, or, you know, you have a whole bunch of different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as economic freedom. Meanwhile, there are cultures that are literally going extinct.

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  It's true, sadly.

• 1:25:34Speaker 06

  Right. But I'm curious, have you witnessed, like, in real time, the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization? So I see, like, for me, I remember having, like, copies of older magazines. And I could, I could see through those that, you know, the world was, the places genuinely felt very different, very unique. And as I've come up with social media, I've seen places have kind of homogenized, everything was starting to look the same. And let's not even talk about the impact of, like, AI slop.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 06

  But, yeah, what have you seen?

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, it's one of those things that, like, you do see the, like, the impact of the smartphone is huge, right? At a second level, the impact of Starlink is massive, much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize, right? Like, more people have access to the internet through smartphones than have electricity in their homes. And like, the internet is a very hegemonic place, right? Like, there are probably seven or eight languages the internet's really good in, that, like, you could really access the internet in. And that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world, right?

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  I guess I've also seen, like, a, a reclamation of some, and it's a thing that's largely happened, like, within the colonial core to the greatest extent, right? Like, the, the so-called the Europe of Nations hypothesis, right? Like, one of the languages I can speak and read and write in is Catalan. And like, this is an example of a language that, like, was ruthlessly suppressed by the Francoist regime, right? Same with Basque, same with other, like, non-Spanish languages in Iberia.

• 1:27:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:37Speaker 03

  And like, now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students. Like, in my lifetime, my time spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more people speaking Catalan than I used to. I remember, there's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? Like, so we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed is now, like, hegemonic. It was cool at the time, Catalan nationalism, but like every other nationalism has some qualities which I don't like. But like, it was cool that at the time, there was a acceptance of people, and especially like these kids who spoke Catalan

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  happened to have been born in Syria, right? But like, they were Catalan as much as anyone else, like, it wasn't a, an ethnic definition of nation, right? But at the same time, yeah, I've definitely seen that diversity lost in terms of so many things, like foods.

• 1:28:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I feel like there has been a homogenization of palettes as well.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, right?

• 1:28:45Speaker 06

  Especially with the proliferation of fast foods.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, like, fast, cheap, high-calorie food that stores easily. I mean, the example, I guess, is like, look at what they've done to bread over the time of my life, right? Like, look at how, like, sliced white, what we would have called American bread is now like the global standard, right? But like, all those other bread products that people used to make, like, it can be very hard to get, like, freshly made tortillas. It's possible where I live, right? But it's not, I imagine, if you live in, like, Minnesota, just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. And, but yeah, also the big things, like, I, you know, I watched kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  That wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  Right. Wow.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but like, that makes a difference to people, right? Like, their, their cultural world is that they're now engaging with the external world, not just through their own culture, through the internet. And I want those people to have everything I have, to be clear, right? Like, I want them to be able to see the whole world.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, you don't want to, like, seal them, vacuum seal them in some kind, as some kind of museum exhibit of what points was.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. But like, I also wish that they could have it the way I have it, which is that, like, I am, I was born in England and I engage with the world in English. I wish they could engage with the world in Embera. I wish, you know, Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak. You know, I wish they didn't have to, to go through the English way of speaking and seeing the world to engage with the external world. Because we all lose when we don't have that diversity, right?

• 1:30:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, we're talking about what is lost, I think, when things get homogenized. But there is, like, I think, another effect or another, I suppose, response that, you know, global capitalism has the diversity, which is to package it, to market it, to sell it. You know, I referenced those magazines that I read, but those magazines might even be an example of that. Because it is a capturing and commodification, in a sense, of another culture for distribution and consumption.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:31:07Speaker 06

  You see as well, people's traditional dress becomes a less of a traditional dress and more of a traditional costume as they put it on to perform for consumption, for tourists.

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, the commodification of diversity, get that idea that, like, that diversity is a thing to sell. The marginalization of people such that their identity, which has been marginalized by the state and capitalism, is what they have to sell to exist under the state and capitalism, I guess.

• 1:31:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. We've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why I think we should care about this loss of diversity. You know, and I could even spot off a few more. And diversity makes our living systems more resilient, I think is a very key one. In our ecosystems, every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients. And everything is just part of one larger network. And the more diverse that network is, the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world.

• 1:32:20Speaker 06

  And look at how many inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and to changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that, you know, if every human immune system works in exactly the same way, a pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create the variation in how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others are more resistant to different diseases.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 06

  You know, when, when a virus passes into my household, there are some people who get sick and some people don't. And it changes each time, despite the fact that we are so close genetically. And so again, we see that diversity creates resilience.

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Speaker 06

  And even if we want to take it from, like, a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility, you know, and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 06

  We become poorer as a whole, we lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species. Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others, you know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in certain cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. And I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Saying it.

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  Having that full library gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you will like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emerges from everything that came before. Diversity is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. If everybody approaches the world with the same assumptions and categories and ways of thinking and, you know, our capacity to imagine alternatives will shrink. And then just really from a deeply philosophical perspective, I appreciate diversity because I believe that when you are given a gift, you should meet it with gratitude.

• 1:35:09Speaker 06

  You know, we are born in a world, we happen to be born into a world that is overflowing with different forms of life, different landscapes, different cultures, different ways of thinking. That is a vast, rich inheritance that I believe we should appreciate. That is my value. I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity, how what Harmon calls biocultural diversity, but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways.

• 1:35:52Speaker 06

  And having different perspectives, different interpretations, different heuristics, different predictive models, what Scott E. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book, The Difference. You know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack and that the person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem. In fact, as Page's research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem

• 1:36:34Speaker 06

  differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Page just make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require a lot more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation, in dealing with climate change and developing medicines, you know, we don't want everybody to be thinking alike.

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  Another thing that Page points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity diversity are not one to one, there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure.

• 1:37:48Speaker 06

  One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves, but that does not mean these kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and, and practices or domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, I want to retain the capacity for diversity because I think it gives us a capacity for freedom.

• 1:38:34Speaker 06

  And I want, as you know, Subcommandant Demarcus put it, a world where many worlds exist.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Speaker 06

  Even as I reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity. Any closing thoughts?

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  Like the world where many worlds can exist is, I think, the perfect way of looking at this, right? Like, we therefore don't want people who would create a world where the worlds cannot exist, right? But we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating, get through that tolerance framework, which we both talked about, like tolerance seems to imply like, well, we're doing it best, but we'll let you do it your way as opposed to like genuinely cherishing diversity.

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, I hope we can all see that.

• 1:39:28Speaker 06

  Agreed. And as always, all power to all the people. Peace.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

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• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead. 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.

• 1:40:54Robert Evans?

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 1:40:57Speaker 04

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

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

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

• 1:41:16Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:41:20Speaker 07

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

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

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 1:41:46Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:00Speaker 07

  Twelve seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:42:16Robert Evans?

  A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil.

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tocatins to Madagro.

• 1:42:28Robert Evans?

  So. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush. Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade. But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.

• 1:42:49Robert Evans?

  Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all.

• 1:42:54Speaker 04

  You gotta give Bruce the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [BLEEP] about anything in this town.

• 1:42:59Robert Evans?

  On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the iHeart Radio app.

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the violent flailings of a dying empire. I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about a thing, perhaps the only thing that Americans understand more thoroughly than a burger, and that is gas prices. Now, elsewhere on this show, speaking about inflation, I have talked about price as a kind of social hieroglyphic that serves to encode the complex and brutal reality of geopolitics and production and labor and exploitation into a single number.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  And that number is their understanding of everything that is happening in the world and how content they are about it is about how much gas costs them. This has proven a real problem for one President of the United States, Donald Trump, as diesel is hitting an average across the country of $6.52 a gallon. Now, nominally, the President of the United States does not control the price of oil and does not set gas prices. However, comma, in this case, no, yeah, this is largely not technically entirely, but like, yeah, this is sort of just a thing he did as an individual.

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  But I think what's important here, right, is that the way that all of the information that I'm about to describe is conveyed, right? And the thing that makes Americans care about it is the social hieroglyphic of the gas price, right? It is the single number through which all of this complex information is encoded down into, and that is what sort of matters emotionally. And I want to undo the process of encoding all of that information down into the hieroglyphic. I want to actually expand it and go look at what is going on in the world that is causing all of this, and I want to take a look at how the structure of American empire has changed in order to facilitate this.

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  And to do this, I'm going to walk through a series of, I guess, nominally seemingly disconnected stories about oil across the world, and we're going to put it all together into the new structure of American empire at the end.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  Now, as everyone, I think, is aware, gas prices have been increasing dramatically, both of regular gas and of diesel. Bank of America analysts are finally admitting that oil could hit $150 a barrel, not like right now, but as the war continues to drag out. And as we've talked about before on this show, a lot of the reserves that were being used to calm the market temporarily and keep prices down are being exhausted. The most obvious example of this is something we've talked about before, which is the draining of the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But this is true of a lot of other reserves around the world as well.

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Now, this alone probably would not have been enough to cause what we've been seeing. But, comma, all of the problems that we have been talking about for a long time on this show, particularly the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, that is entirely directly just the fault of Donald Trump, right, through his war on Iran, has been doing significant damage to the world's oil supply, to the world's natural gas supply. Now, the reason it hasn't been worse has been that there have been ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. They're not easy, they work worse than the Strait of Hormuz. But one of those important mechanisms has been Saudi Arabia's East West Pipeline.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Now, we talked about this, Robert talked about this on Last Week, Executive Disorder. Last week, Iraqi paramilitaries launched drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's East West Pipeline. It did some damage. There is kind of conflicting reports about how long exactly that is going to take to repair, but the damage to the pipeline has slowed the ability of the Saudis to route oil around the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Now, also, there has been a major expansion in the war in Yemen. This is a really hideous conflict that has been going on for over a decade now.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  That is, we don't really have, unfortunately, time to really go into all of the factors of the civil war in Yemen, which is one of the most complicated wars being fought anywhere in the world. Broadly speaking, this is a conflict between a coalition that is sort of in the West, is called the Houthis, but there's like more forces involved in it, which is the kind of Iranian aligned vaguely, or not vaguely, like they are allied with Iran, but they're not necessarily just an Iranian proxy. This is its own sort of political force, right? And then on the other side, there is the Saudi-backed coalition, which also involves a range of forces, but is kind of led by the Saudis and the UAE, and they're kind

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  of allied forces who pull a whole bunch of forces from a whole bunch of places and have committed horrifying atrocities, including, as I mention constantly every time someone talks about this, because no one ever seems to remember it, the deployment by the Saudi coalition of Sudanese child soldiers. So this war had, I don't know if calm down is quite the right word, but in the past few years, had been less active than it was, say, in 2018, 2019. But the Houthis have now made a major push into Saudi coalition territories in Yemen's west and south.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  They have taken the port city of Mokha in the south, which is an important Saudi coalition's port city, which is further threatening the ability of the Saudis to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, because this is a city that helps you control access to the Gulf of Aden. Now, this war has been and continues to be a massive humanitarian nightmare. We really have no idea how many people have actually died in the war. Casualty figures right now are kind of stuck at 150,000. I suspect it is significantly more than that. This is a region that has been experiencing everything from hideous war to famines.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  A huge part of this war has been a Saudi blockade of sort of like so-called Houthi-controlled territories, which has had an absolutely devastating effect on the ability of people in Yemen to eat. This attack has also caused a massive surge of refugees, as people sort of flee the violence. And this has been an absolute nightmare on the one hand. And on the other hand, the way that it's understood here, the way that it's sort of reported on in the West is not as its own sort of unique humanitarian nightmare in this unique sort of war of Saudi and Emirati empire.

• 1:50:48Speaker 03

  In Yemen, it's understood as something that affects oil prices. And so that's one of the factors that is kind of encoded into this price. Another one has been Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have escalated. Now, from the perspective of what is happening with the oil, the Houthis have also been attacking Saudi shipping, and Saudi shipping is, when someone talks about Saudi shipping, they're talking, almost like guarantee the thing they're talking about is shipping oil out of the country, right? Houthis attacks on Saudi shipping have slowed down in the past week, but there is always

• 1:51:32Speaker 03

  the possibility of them starting up again. And this is the real problem in terms of the world's oil infrastructure, and particularly from the perspective of empire, right? In the sense of wanting to be able to secure, secure access to oil for the US and for other sort of imperial powers. The issue that they're facing as this war continues, right, and as these really, really, truly, these series of wars, right, is that even if, going back to the Saudi pipeline, the Saudi pipeline will eventually be fixed, right? Like, full capacity, it might not be for 68 weeks, but eventually the pipeline is going

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  to get fixed, even if it is sort of restricting supply in the meantime. The problem is that all of this infrastructure is just exposed, and a whole bunch of different militaries in the region can and probably will hit them again, as the US has been hitting Iranian oil infrastructure, right? Iran, its allied paramilitaries in Iraq, the Houthis, there are lots of groups in the region who are being attacked by the US and the Saudis and sort of American allies in the region who are looking at this and going, oh, this is something we can use to extract concessions and try to fight the Americans off.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  And there's no real answer for this, other than ending the war, a thing that just won't happen.

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  Now, the Trump administration nominally has a plan for this. The plan that they are claiming to have, other than, you know, this sort of constant dance of claiming that the war in Iran is over, and then it's restarting again, we've started a whole bunch of different wars, and now the street of home is actually open. The other plan that Trump has talked about is Venezuela. Trump was at the UN recently, where he gave an extremely distressing speech in which he talked about how he had been thinking about destroying Iran. He said, quote, "Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  future greatness or generations?" Now, one of the other parts of this speech was him talking about the US's deal with the Venezuelan government that it installed when it just kidnapped Maduro, who we're just also still holding, as people, I think, broadly have forgotten about. But yeah, no, we just are still just holding a head of state hostage in a prison. We're just still doing that. But he was talking about a deal that he struck with the current Venezuelan government, which is largely just composed of the same people from the Maduro government, but with any person in charge of it and answering to Trump.

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, talking, you know, that was a 100-year, supposedly a 100-year concession for a significant portion of what's supposed to be Venezuelan oil fields. Now, Trump in this said, quote, "To the victors belong the spoils." And this is nominally, right? This sort of is his previous war, or short war, I guess, on Venezuela is supposed to be the solution to his new war. Trump has been pushing the line that oil flowing from Venezuela is going to, you know, be the thing that dries prices down and stops these escalating oil prices from his other

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  imperial war in Iran. And as we're going to talk about, now, there is oil flowing from Venezuela to the US, right? And the amount of oil that is flowing to the US has increased. Companies that were already in Venezuela, like Chevron, are expanding production. But it hasn't even hit like 1990s levels. It's still, in the grand scheme of things, not enough oil to actually do anything. And as we have, you know, sort of repeatedly emphasized on this show, oil is not liquid money. It's material properties, it has social properties that come from the, you know, technical process of extraction.

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  It's not all the same. These oil reserves, you know, suck, right? And this is also part of the problem with Venezuelan oil, is the oil is just of a lower quality than the oil that you get out of the Middle East. Now, what's important for our purposes, right, is we're beginning to see a little bit more of the plan, which I guess is kind of the ambitious way to describe the kind of just semi-free-for-all that that's been happening in Venezuela. In terms of this sort of plan, which is to like extract all of this oil from Venezuela, which is now, you know, I mean, just effectively operating as an American colony, even in just pure imperial terms, and not thinking just in terms of sort of like the fact that,

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  yeah, Venezuela is just a dictatorship and the oil is now flowing to the US. There's real problems with this in that Venezuelan oil infrastructure is very bad, and the actual money in oil is in controlling infrastructure that already exists and not building new infrastructure. So, again, companies that were in Venezuela, which is, I mean, it's basically Chevron, right? You know, are expanding their existing production to some extent, but no one else wants to go in and actually like build a bunch of oil refineries and a bunch of extraction facilities, because that stuff's expensive and it requires massive heavy capital investment, and it's risky.

• 1:57:45Speaker 03

  And this is becoming a real problem for this entire plan, right? Like, obviously, yes, there is oil that the administration can ship out of Venezuela and, you know, and is, right? But it's not enough to like actually seriously have the effects that the administration is talking about in terms of sort of lowering prices. Now, we're going to get to the extent to which it does kind of solve the regime's demand on just the basic level of, oh, if we're going to do a war, we should keep the oil. But the actual prospects for this oil are just not very good. And this is where I want to get into something new that we've learned about sort of recently

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  through reporting from the Wall Street Journal. There's been some more stuff about some of the people who are coming into Venezuela in order to do this. Now, we have mentioned on the show before that there are a lot of network state people like involved in Venezuela. This is one of the places that these sort of like Silicon Valley tech fascists are moving into. And one of the people who is now becoming important in Venezuelan sort of oil production or is attempting to become important is this crypto billionaire named Fred Erstam, who is one of the founders of Coinbase, which is a giant crypto company.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  He's sort of in tight with the entire Silicon Valley tech elite. He has ties to like every venture capital and Andreessen Horowitz, like steel-backed constellation you can imagine. And he's one of the people who's been extremely important in terms of the ways that this sort of network state project of this, like, setting up these sort of like corporate fascist states, right, have been interested in crypto as a way to sort of move money around and have money that's not like taxable directly or like is difficult for states to sort of get access to.

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  Now, Fred has moved into this really, really sort of, it's like described as a hotel, but it's like almost more like a kind of like, I don't know, almost like billionaire resort thing in Caracas. It's like 36 rooms in it. And he's spending a whole bunch of time living there. He's also like founded this company with some Venezuelan guys, one of whom was like went to Stanford. So, you know, it's like these sort of, there's always like a local elite kind of thing involved in these projects where particularly you get like American educated guys from like colonized

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  nations who end up like coming back and getting involved in these processes. And they have like, they have founded this company called Primavera, which is getting involved in the contracts for Venezuelan oil development. But there's problems here, right? Which is that like, this is a startup. They've never done oil extraction before, right? And, and, you know, the network state people and their sort of like VC firms have had a lot of success in things like drone production, right? In missile production, in a lot of sort of, you know, like things that are like kind of like heavy industrial capacity. But this guy is a crypto billionaire, and they're trying to do oil development that like the rest of the world's oil companies were like, no.

• 2:01:23Speaker 03

  So, there are sort of real questions about whether even this, you know, this sort of like fascist plan to exploit the resources of this country can actually work. But this is, this is the kind of constellation of forces that are, that have a line behind the Trump administration, right? And these constellation of forces are to an extent different than the ones from old American neoconservatism, right? Which was the last sort of, you know, last time we were like fighting wars for oil during the Bush administration.

• 2:02:06Speaker 03

  Now, I want to go back and talk about this in terms of the structure of empire, right? Because it's very clear that the kind of regime that's been set up in Venezuela, which is just, okay, we've turned this entire nation into not even the kind of debt servicing colony that the US has traditionally done when it comes in to extract wealth from a country, but just as a sort of like pure, hey, we can say we got the oil colony. But this is the kind of regime that Trump wants, not just for Venezuela, but for Iran and Cuba and the rest of the world as well, which are just these sort of like compliant dictatorships that will export him whatever he wants and flatter as he go. And this is a desire, this specific kind of empire, right? The

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  specific kind of oil empire is a desire that comes out of a divide in American conservatism between the neocons and what are called the paleocons, right? Like, it's like the old, you know, paleo is like the old conservatives, neocons, the new conservatives or whatever. These are both kinds of empire, right? If you look at what neoconservatism was, it was an oil company strapped to a weapons manufacturer, like wearing a church for a face. And if you look at what the Bush administration is, like Bush is a Texas oil guy, Cheney is a Halliburton guy, which is like another oil company. He's also really heavily involved in a bunch of weapons manufacturers. You know, this is the alliance that was like

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  doing the wars for oil. But part of what the project of neoconservatism was, was nominally this mission of bringing like, quote unquote, democracy to the world. And obviously, this is, you know, democracy insofar as it supports the US, which is like capitalism and support for American empire. And, you know, they're setting up a stock market in Iraq. But like, and this is the way that a lot of these people thought about it, was this sort of like Hegelian nation building process, right? Like, the unfolding of American liberal democracy throughout the entire world in a way that, you know, could just permanently stabilize its hegemony. But there is this sort of like nation building aspect of it. But then there was also always

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  like a paleocon opposition to it. And this is the more radical faction that didn't give a shit about any of the sort of democracy and human rights stuff that neocons would spout. You know, literally, they would like, yeah, bomb the mall and take the oil and leave. And this, to a large extent, is the, this is the faction that Trump has descended from, right? And these people sometimes will kind of like play at being anti-imperialist or like, not even anti-imperialist, they'll play up being anti-war. You know, Tucker Carlson, for example, is like a guy who did this a lot, even though he supported the war when it was happening. But they'll do this thing of like, oh, like, we shouldn't go fight in these imperial wars. The US should only like fight wars that benefit it. We shouldn't

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  be the world's policemen. But the corollary to that is, you know, where like war for oil was like the leftist charge about what we were doing in Iraq, these people were just like, yeah, no, we actually should literally just fight wars for oil. Because they're just, they're fascists, right? They don't even have the kind of veil of this like nominally sort of democratic project. All they really care about is just the pure resource extraction. But the thing about this, right? And like, part of what was going on with this kind of thing was like, yeah, so you want to set up a stable government

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  so that these oil companies have a secure base from which to actually do resource extraction? Because, you know, sort of unstable governments make it more difficult, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, with, with this sort of like fascist Trump coalition, like, obviously, yeah, like, the oil companies supported him. But it's not the like, oil guys directly who are behind the Venezuelan coup or the people that have like moved in to extract the oil. It's, as we were talking about, it's these like tech fascist network state guys. And the reaction of the oil people to Trump's wars, and this is, you know, partially Venezuela, but mostly to this war on Iran, which he's framing as being about like nuclear weapons, but he's also been talking about like, we should just sit there and take the

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  trade off from Muz. You know, Iran shouldn't be able to like threaten the world's oil supply. The actual oil people are really pissed off about this because, yeah, they're losing access to their ability to ship oil. But this is, this is what is inside of the sort of price hieroglyphic of gas price go up. It's, it's an attempt of like the tech fascists to like graft their project onto this sort of paleocon fascist id of Trump, where he's just doing this wars like because he wants to. And they're attempting to get something out of it. But what has actually happened here in all of this is that in the

• 2:07:00Speaker 03

  administration's war for oil and in their attempt to sort of like fulfill the old paleocon desire for, you know, wars for oil, they have successfully not gotten oil. They're replacing oil that they used to have or attempting to replace better oil they used to have with shit oil that won't work for these purposes. And they're depriving both the US and basically the rest of the world of oil. And, you know, that's, that's in some sense, the macro level of it. The micro level of it is that there's a whole bunch of wars and genocides that are playing out across the world that are, that are the

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  result of this. And that's, that's what's encoded in gas price go up, is all of the violence and all of the cruelty and all of this sort of inane, flailing stupidity of empire.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

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• 2:08:31Speaker 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.

• 2:08:43Robert Evans?

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

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 2:09:17Robert Evans?

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

• 2:09:23Speaker 04

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

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

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

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

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

• 2:09:40Speaker 07

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

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 2:09:49Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 2:09:56Speaker 07

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

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 2:10:06Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

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

• 2:10:20Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

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

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tocatins to Madagro. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush.

• 2:10:53Speaker 04

  Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade.

• 2:10:58Speaker 03

  But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing.

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all.

• 2:11:14Speaker 04

  You gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [bleep] about any of this stuff.

• 2:11:19Speaker 03

  On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:11:42Speaker 03

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and special correspondent, Dana El Kerd. Welcome. Thank you, thank you. This episode, we are covering the week of September 16 to September 23. I know this has been a busy news week. There's the United Nations, the Trump admin is throwing around the idea of a diesel export embargo. There's a lot of, lot of big issues in this country. But on Wednesday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama decided to use the

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  United States Senate to bring up another very important issue threatening the national security of our country. Let's take a listen. Airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord, help us. It's terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it's possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like And you can't make this up.

• 2:13:00Speaker 06

  Every time I hear that guy's name, he sounds like he's a character on Thomas the Tank Engine, like, like a side character. Then he goes and does shit like this.

• 2:13:07Speaker 03

  He does have a very cartoony name. Also, on, on the little podium here.

• 2:13:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  Printout of the. An emoji. An emoji.

• 2:13:15Speaker 06

  Not just any emoji. Does someone want to take a crack at describing this?

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  I think this is what we would describe as the pregnant man emoji.

• 2:13:23Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  A, a yellow emoji figure with short hair who is pregnant. The text reads transgenderism is a mental illness. Something I think Tuberville and others are overlooking is if we were to, you know, excise furries from their jobs as airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers, our entire system would collapse. Those are, those are the crucial soldiers keeping our airspace. They are the glue. Yes. They are the glue. Like, we're already running into many issues in, you know, regards to air traffic controllers and, and the airline industry. If you take the furries out, it's done. It's over.

• 2:14:05Speaker 06

  You know what? Honestly, someone, someone in the furry community, get out of organizing the furry strike, where all the furries just go on strike. We, we could end this whole system right now. We could defeat them in a single stroke.

• 2:14:20Speaker 03

  Let's move on to some other small news items.

• 2:14:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay. Someone was upset on the subreddit that we didn't call this all the small things. We're not going to. I guess I'm gonna start with Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth has announced a joint warfighter evaluation.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 2:14:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is a thing for O6s who are screening for their first start, right? Across all the different branches of the military. I'm not gonna list what an O6 is because I don't understand how the Navy works. But he's claiming that this new evaluation for promotion will like, value competence over credentials. It's the way he phrased it. It's basically like an exercise that these officers will have to take part in. And various versions of it are going to involve a war game against an AI-powered adversary, which is great.

• 2:15:08Speaker 06

  Expected, I guess, like, we probably could have seen this coming. It's additive to the existing things that they consider for promotion, but like, this is part of his ongoing, like, purge of the US military officer corps. Secondly, I want to talk about a visual investigation by Thomas Bordeaux. He's at CNN, but I think he's working with BBC Verify on this. BBC is doing a kind of true crime podcast about the disappearance of Austin Teis at the moment. People aren't familiar, Austin Teis was an American freelancer who disappeared in Syria at the beginning of the revolution and continues to be missing. Have any of you guys seen this video?

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:15:47Speaker 06

  This must be like, well, I think it was 2012 or 2011. I think it was right at the end of 2011. So it purports to be a video of his execution. It seems very likely to be staged. Like, if you watch it, it seems a lot like it's regime intel guys dressing up and pretending to be like rebels. Like, they basically say nothing but tuck be of the whole time. And then they make him say some stuff. And then the video cuts, right? You don't see him being executed. He's blindfolded and it's supposed to give that vibe. Anyway, they have geolocated this video to an area that would have been controlled by the Assad regime at the time, which I guess further adds, adds evidence to the, the claim that he was held by the regime, at least at that time.

• 2:16:28Speaker 06

  CBS is reporting that Trump administration is ready to accept 17,500 more Afrikaner refugees.

• 2:16:35Speaker 03

  God.

• 2:16:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the people who have struggled the most in the continent of Africa. CBS is reporting that the Trump administration said, quote, "The United States anticipates that Afrikaners from South Africa will fully assimilate into the United States in a manner that preserves taxpayer resources for US citizens and does not anticipate other countries resettling Afrikaners." One can only imagine why. This, this assimilation thing has been a consistent thing for them, right? The first time they accepted white South African refugees, Rubio talked about it in Congress. Like, this seems to be the standard by which they're judging refugee admissions now. You have to be white and you have to like, quote unquote, assimilate. So that's great.

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  On Tuesday, JD Vance's so-called anti-fraud task force announced that they were cutting almost a million people from Affordable Care Act coverage after deciding that 760,000 people or enrollees were fraudulently enrolled in government healthcare plans, that these plans did not correspond to real people, or these people were ineligible for coverage. Vance announced that another 419,000 accounts are under, quote, "additional verification." Mehmet Oz said that they canceled coverage for people in part because those people never filed a claim. 760,000 people, we call them phantoms because we believe most of them either don't

• 2:18:03Speaker 03

  exist or had no idea they had coverage. We believe that because we have been writing them, telexing them, you know, walking to them, FedExing, whatever we could possibly do to get in touch with them, they won't answer and they have never filed a claim. So it meets all the criteria for us to pretty, as much as any government can say, you actually don't know you have this or you don't exist. Obviously, in numbers this large, it is not unlikely that there is many real people who do need this coverage or rely on this coverage, who will be cut as a part of this almost a million people. And Vance has promised that more cuts will be coming.

• 2:18:43Speaker 03

  Last Friday, the DOJ released a new legal opinion concluding that the federal ban on handgun sales to 18 to 20-year-olds is unconstitutional and should not be enforced against licensed dealers. And lastly, for me, ProPublica just published a super in-depth investigation into how Trump crushed a sweeping 2024 FBI bribery probe into Susan Collins and her super PAC, among a few other Congress people as well. This article lays out what looks like a pretty clear pay-to-play scheme with requests for campaign donations in exchange for Collins securing millions of dollars in federal funding

• 2:19:27Speaker 03

  for defense contractors. Collins is the chair of the appropriations committee. With one contractor enabled a company called Navtech funneling donations through a shell company, which the head of Collins' super PAC said was, quote, "very smart."

• 2:19:43Speaker 06

  Oh, boy.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  In email correspondence obtained by ProPublica, this shell company, by the way, was called the Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers.

• 2:19:55Speaker 06

  Wait, just scientist?

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  Scientist.

• 2:19:57Speaker 06

  Incredible.

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 2:19:59Speaker 06

  Scientist.

• 2:20:00Speaker 03

  That typo was how this donation was first flagged that then prompted this investigation. Good, cool work there. ProPublica writes, quote, "The money had come from Navtech's account, not their CEO's, violating a ban on government contractors making donations," unquote. So the CEO of Navtech is now in prison, but obviously Collins is not.

• 2:20:26Speaker 03

  Though, the CEO was interviewed by the FBI for a number of years regarding his, his dealings with Collins and other people in Congress. ProPublica writes that the CEO, quote, "handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navtech's dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff," unquote. So part of ProPublica's reporting is explaining how the FBI was about to kind of launch this much broader, full-scale investigation around the end of 2024. And then, obviously, in 2025, Trump got into office, this whole, like, type of investigation fell apart. A whole bunch of attorneys resigned during February of 2025.

• 2:21:09Speaker 03

  This is another one of those articles, I think it's worth just reading the whole thing. It's pretty long, but it's some pretty solid reporting and it's already been corroborated by the New York Times as well.

• 2:21:19Speaker 06

  All right. Do we want to talk about some medium-sized things?

• 2:21:22Speaker 03

  Some medium items.

• 2:21:25Speaker 06

  Okay. Talking about medium-sized things, let's, let's talk about wolves. Not as big as buffalo, larger than rabbits. So Donald Trump has signed an executive order which gives 90 days for the.

• 2:21:38Speaker 06

  Secretary of the Interior to conduct a broad inspection of regulations impacting ranching and make suggestions to change them. The executive order presser was called supporting America's ranches. As part of this, he talks about instructing Doug Burgum, who, if you don't remember, was endorsed by REI last year, to work on delisting wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, I'm just going to quote here, "The Secretary of the Interior shall make a determination as to whether the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf has met the recovery criteria for delisting or downlisting under the Endangered Species Act. And if he determines that the recovery criteria has been met, shall begin the process of delisting or downlisting them." It also directs him to work with states to have them removed

• 2:22:21Speaker 06

  from state ESAs, right? So several states have their own Endangered Species Act. California is one of them, right? I think wolves were listed under the California ESA before the federal ESA existed. If you're not familiar, wolves have become a massive culture war issue in the West, right? Like, wolves are very woke. It's a thing that I have learned. Like, if you go, I don't go to Gardner outside Yellowstone, right? Like, this place which we can categorically prove makes millions of dollars a year from people coming to look at wolves. You'll see people wearing those smoke a pack a day t-shirts, and like, they're not talking about cigarettes, right?

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:22:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Removing wolves from the West, seeing wolves as like this woke thing that's destroying our ranching interest. It's a big culture signal.

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  Like, the idea that, like, conservation is, like, woke, or in some way, or like, like, animal, like...

• 2:23:13Speaker 06

  The thing with wolves is it combines, like, people don't like people who talk about animal rights. People don't like ecology and conservation, and people don't like predators.

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 2:23:23Speaker 06

  Right? And so when we get these three things together, it's the idea that it's a bunch of people in New York who don't understand what wolves do, and they want them back, but they don't have to deal with the consequences, right?

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:33Speaker 06

  It does suck when there is predation. Like, my family raised livestock. I've dealt with predation. It fucking sucks. It sucks, especially when it's young animals, right? Calves or lambs or whatever. One of the things that the Trump administration has also instructed Burgum to do is to look at and consider amending the existing compensation programs, which exist for wolves, right? The wolf issue, I think, is also particularly controversial because, like, there have been hard introductions, right? Like, if you look at Colorado, Colorado had a ballot measure in 2020 to introduce wolves, to reintroduce wolves, which they began doing about three years ago. And, like, Colorado has this big cultural divide, right? Between, like, your blue counties and the western slope, I'll say. Like, the idea that, like, these front-range folks in Denver and Boulder mandated wolves on ranches. And so

• 2:24:18Speaker 06

  it plays on other, I guess, existing insecurities. It's a little different here in California because the wolves in California weren't released. They walked in on their own feet. Although, a popular conspiracy theory that I've heard is that that's not actually true, and that some people sneaked the wolves in from Oregon and released them, like wolf vigilantes.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  Wolf vigilantes. This should be real.

• 2:24:43Speaker 06

  I know, right? Yeah, yeah. Please, if you have smuggled a wolf into the state of California, you've done a lot of crimes, but I would love to talk to you for my podcast.

• 2:24:53Speaker 06

  I want to address this more in my podcast, Natural Causes, because I think a lot of people are wrong about wolves, right? I think it's silly to say that we shouldn't have wolves. I think it's also frustrating for people to think that the reason that we have wolves is to, like, fix our fuck-ups. Wolves have a right to be there because they've always been there and they belong there. They're not there to undo the damage done by capitalism and the state to the land. And we shouldn't tie the justification for reintroducing them to that, because sometimes the science will not support that, and then we will lose that justification. They have a right to be there because they belong there. That can be the start and the end of it, and I think it should be. And I think we should be expecting the wolves to, like, do our dirty work, undo our dirty work. I'm a little confused about

• 2:25:35Speaker 06

  what Trump is exactly saying here, because he also wants, say, quote, "A legislative recommendation to fully delist or downlist a gray wolf and a Mexican wolf under the ESA." There are not many Mexican wolves. Like, I think there are fewer than 400.

• 2:25:47Speaker 03

  Jeez.

• 2:25:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, there are, like, 320-ish in those sort of southwestern or southern states, and then probably 50 in Mexico. We spoke about a prosecution for killing Mexican wolves a few months ago that I found in a New Mexico court, in court records, right? But it seems very unlikely that they will meet the recovery guidelines set up under the ESA, but I admittedly have not looked into those recently. I want to move on to something that's even more depressing, the lifeboat protests in the UK. So, this week, and really this month, has seen a series of really disgusting protests and attacks on lifeboats in the UK. This includes fascist Daniel Thomas, he goes by Danny Tomo, really

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  great nom de guerre, which disguised his identity very well, stabbing a lifeboat. For those not familiar with this, the discourse here is related to the mission of the RNLI, which is to rescue those in peril on the sea. The lifeboats were, I guess, at least during the time when I was growing up, a foundational British institution. They are funded by the people, not the state, right? They are literally in the book Mutual Aid, like, capital M, capital A, Mutual Aid. They also used to celebrate Kropotkin's birthday, the RNLI. Like, you can go back, if their Twitter page still exists, and see them posting things about his birthday. And there's a very good piece called "Lifeboats in Anarchy" in the RNLI magazine. People should read it, they would know more about that. Like,

• 2:27:14Speaker 06

  when I was a child, there was a very popular, way back when, right, when there were only four TV channels, there was a very popular TV, children's TV program, and children who watched the program would hold fundraisers for the lifeboats every year. And this was, like, a completely foundational thing that everybody thought was good, right? All they do is rescue people who are in danger of drowning. It's mostly a volunteer institution. I've had friends and colleagues who I've worked with who have volunteered on the lifeboats. It's a dangerous, stressful, and often thankless job that you can't plan or schedule for, right? When someone needs help, you have to go and help them immediately. You have to stop what you're doing, work away from work, walk away from whatever you're doing socially, walk away from your family, and go risk your life to help people. And that's all they do.

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  Why are they stabbing the boats, then?

• 2:28:01Speaker 06

  So, I guess...

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  I mean, fascist going to fascist. But like, what's the source of these protests?

• 2:28:07Speaker 06

  Specifically, it is the idea that the lifeboats are bringing people seeking asylum to communities who cannot support them.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:28:17Speaker 06

  You see the same shit that you see everywhere in the world, right? Like, I saw a BBC interview with someone who was like, "We've got homeless people here." And I, like, I would be prepared to wager a large amount of money that that person has done the square root of fuck all to help homeless people in the last few years, right? But now is suddenly concerned because, apparently, they have to compete for scarce resources with asylum seekers rather than, yeah, you know, the fucking royal family.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:39Speaker 06

  In this case, there was a protest in Gosport where we saw crowds of people led by a child chanting "Let them drown."

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  I was about to ask if this was the same protest.

• 2:28:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, one can understand a child who isn't, like, fully formed in the brain saying shit like that, I guess.

• 2:28:57Speaker 03

  It's not their fault.

• 2:28:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. For a child to be raised in a place with that much hate is fucking disgusting. And for grown adults to be, like, joining in and encouraging that behavior is fucking appalling. Thomas has pulled this shit a few times, but obviously, like, this was the worst. What they're trying to do, I guess, is, like, boats have been leaving from Cherbourg, so, like, on the, on the mental map, west side of France, right? Because of increased police presence in Dunkirk and those areas where you would go to Dover, where there's a shorter channel crossing, right? And so the lifeboats being dispatched are coming probably from the, I'm not exactly sure, maybe the Isle of Wight, I think. And they are taking them to the UK mainland, right? By the shortest route. If the lifeboats took

• 2:29:43Speaker 06

  those people who they rescued to Dover, that would take probably half a dozen hours. And at that point, the lifeboat is then out of its area of operation. So if anybody else is in distress on the sea, that lifeboat can't respond, right? It's a good example of how this bigotry hurts everyone. They've been doing this for a while. I actually made a podcast a couple of years ago with Professor Ruth Kinner about lifeboats and mutual aid. But, like, to see this many people going after something that was so foundational to the culture in the United Kingdom not so long ago, like, when I was a kid... Because they've been whipped up into thinking that they have to compete for resources with asylum seekers, rather than like the only dangerous minority being the rich.

• 2:30:25Speaker 06

  It it's it makes me really sad and it makes me really angry. Uh, and like, there is something so fucking broken about a crowd of people chanting, let them drown. And like, I know I'm proud of all my friends who continue to volunteer for the RNLI. I really want to go back home and do a series on it. Uh, so I know a lot of people who are lifeboat men and like, I think what they do is incredible. And it's it's it's the answer to the question that everyone always has about anarchism. Like, who will put out the fires without the state? The same people who fucking rescue thousands of people a year from the sea, right? Like, the the RNLI is funded by donations and through people's wills. The money doesn't come from your taxes, the money doesn't come from the state. I've pointed to them for so long, like both when I'm teaching and in conversations.

• 2:31:10Speaker 06

  And like, I think that's something we should be really proud of. And it's disgusting to me that that people are doing this shit. Talking of disgusting, do you want to talk about Trump's speech at the UN?

• 2:31:21Speaker 03

  I think we should probably talk about the advertisers that support our podcast first.

• 2:31:25Speaker 06

  Hopefully, it's the lifeboats that can donate.

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  I don't think it's gonna be the lifeboats.

• 2:31:30Speaker 06

  I don't think they advertise on podcasts.

• 2:31:32Speaker 03

  That would be cool.

• 2:31:45Speaker 06

  All right, we're back. And now we are traveling from the United Kingdom to New York to talk about the United Nations General Assembly, where Donald Trump used the platform he had to make comments that sounded straight up genocidal.

• 2:31:59Speaker 03

  But I have a big decision to make.

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Will a deal be made with Iran? That lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before. Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world.

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? And do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election. Because it doesn't make sense for them not to.

• 2:32:45Speaker 06

  This is fucking great, right?

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 2:32:48Speaker 06

  To go from, uh, like, don't worry, I'll genocide them all, to vote for me, please.

• 2:32:52Speaker 03

  Only a deal after the election.

• 2:32:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:32:55Speaker 03

  It's like, I gotta see what happens.

• 2:32:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. Yeah, we gotta keep him in just so we see, see how this goes. It's a fucking UN. Like, it it was found, and admittedly, he has failed, right? But it was founded as the idea that we could all get together and talk it out. We wouldn't have genocides. And there he is, just fucking, like, as I said, the UN manifestly failed in that regard and many others.

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  But still sucks.

• 2:33:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's still fucking bonkers.

• 2:33:18Speaker 03

  It's super easy to like, you know, poo poo on the UN because it's the UN, but I mean. It's what we have. It's what we have. Yeah.

• 2:33:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's a tool that we have and like, yeah. He then went on to talk about the midterms. This is like another 30 seconds. Let's listen to this.

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide. And I'll be here for two and a half years. The Republican Party is running and I'll be helping them, but I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn't even enter my mind.

• 2:34:09Speaker 06

  And then he goes on to say that they don't get a nuclear weapon, of course, right? This is bonkers, right? The idea that Iran is not aware, yeah, like.

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  He's like, wait, guys, you have to understand, Americans have different elections.

• 2:34:24Speaker 06

  I think that they can't comprehend, right? Like, electoral.

• 2:34:27Speaker 03

  Is this the thing where, like, he didn't know this, that someone told him? Like, what is happening here? He's like, they recently told me I am actually not running.

• 2:34:36Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I'm good, guys. Like, it's like, clearly, his war on Iran has been extremely unpopular and continues to be extremely unpopular. Because it costs six bucks to buy a gallon of gas now, even if people don't care about like the massive human toll of this. They do care about that.

• 2:34:55Speaker 03

  Which I I do also want to say for the record that this war was unpopular before the gas prices increased. It's made it more unpopular, but no one has ever liked this war. And it just gets more unpopular every day.

• 2:35:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  It's part of why he's, I guess, bringing this, you know, midterm stuff up in like both of these clips here. And I guess he's like, he knows he only has a few months left until the amount of like support he has in Congress will take a pretty, a pretty big dip.

• 2:35:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:35:19Speaker 03

  Um, even if, even if they just lose the House. But I mean, if if looking at the polls, it's like the Senate's on the line. That would, that's, that's, it's gonna put at least some, some constraints, some checks, opposed to the zero.

• 2:35:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:35:32Speaker 03

  Like, zero or negative checks that have been in Congress for the past two years. Uh, it's like, he's, he's gonna like, I assume, plot out, you know, all the way up until the time that the next Congress is sworn in. Like, whatever his game plan is.

• 2:35:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's wild to see him electioneering this hard at the UN as well.

• 2:35:51Speaker 03

  At the UN.

• 2:35:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, just, I mean, he does this all the time, right? He goes somewhere and does something that's absolutely the most jarring tone shit from anything that has happened there before. Uh, but like, the way he continues to talk about like annihilating Iran.

• 2:36:05Speaker 03

  It's disturbing.

• 2:36:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Especially as our conventional weapons resources get lower and lower, it's scary. Like, it's genuinely scary.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  That's stuff that you could just play at an ICC trial for genocide.

• 2:36:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:16Speaker 03

  I mean, he spoke about the ICC as well. He critiqued the ICC or not even critique, that's not the right word. Didn't he call for them all to resign or something? Something, yeah.

• 2:36:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, some of them can't even come to the US.

• 2:36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, this, this was and continues to be bonkers, I guess. Like, it's not surprising in a sense, but it still sucks.

• 2:36:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's horrifying.

• 2:36:41Speaker 06

  Then I know you had some stuff you wanted to talk about. Do you want to pick up from here?

• 2:36:46Speaker 03

  Yes. So there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen to Gaza, what's going to happen to the Palestinians in the West Bank. I just did an It Could Happen Here episode on the way the Israeli state and Israeli settler movement are working together to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, but how we should distinguish between the two. Anyway, the way that international actors, particularly the United States, have behaved is to kind of audaciously sideline the Palestinians. Like, they don't even pretend to include them or consider them. So the Board of Peace, for example, doesn't have any Palestinian decision makers. There are only technocrats who are essentially supposed to just take commands from the Board of Peace. So there's really like no space in the discussion for Palestinian agency.

• 2:37:26Speaker 03

  But I think international actors, governments in the EU, but even some in Washington, uh, kind of thinking medium to long term about after Trump. They understand that this doesn't look great and that at some point they'll have to make a big display of getting Palestinians to sign some grand peace deal with the Israelis. And you need some group of Palestinians to do that, right? So the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank is led by President Mahmoud Abbas, as I'm sure many know, who has overstayed his term limits for, for many, many years. He's also the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. And Palestinians are very unhappy with this setup.

• 2:38:08Speaker 03

  Basically, the the polls show that they think it lacks legitimacy and that he lacks legitimacy. So the international community has essentially been getting to work to kind of paper over this issue. So last year, they pressured Abbas to find a successor because he's so old, they're afraid he's gonna keel over. And he, uh, unilaterally changed the bylaws of the PLO outside normal institutional procedures to create a vice president position. And he appointed someone to that position from the PLO Executive Committee. The dude he picked, Sanaa Sheikh, polls at 2% with Palestinians. So they're already setting up for what comes after Abbas. And now they're working on PLO changes that would, again, on the surface, look like an institution renewing its legitimacy.

• 2:38:52Speaker 03

  So part of that, this is ongoing right now, is having the legislative body of the PLO, the Palestinian National Council, actually hold elections. So I'm gonna quote here from the European Council on Foreign Relations. "The PNC is responsible for formulating the PLO's policies. It acts as a parliament that represents all Palestinians, except for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The PNC currently comprises 747 members representing Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora. But because the PNC has had such difficulty convening and all of these things, there are other bodies that like bridge between the legislative and the executive, like the Central Council. And over the years, the PNC has basically lost any power, even though it's supposed to be the legislative body.

• 2:39:35Speaker 03

  It's supposed to be kind of the democratic engine of the PLO. So in February 2026, uh, so February of this year, Abbas issued a decree saying that there would be PNC elections in November. And that this would include basically trying to make it, uh, so that all eligible Palestinians that can like feasibly vote directly, living in the diaspora, or if that's not possible, kind of through an electoral college process in different diasporas, or via quote unquote consensus. So the PLO, the PA, which at this point overlap, they've been going around different communities,

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  different Palestinian diaspora communities, and setting up so that these different communities run people for these elections. But the way they're doing it is extremely undemocratic. They are not thinking about, you know, who are we gonna tap that actually represents some constituency in these diasporas? Or are they actually like representative of these diasporas? They're just getting yes men in a lot of cases. Some members of the Central Council basically found out that they had been removed after reading it in the media. So like, it's completely undemocratic. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile, for example, like they've tapped a particular organization, but that organization like gets to run the elections.

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  And other organizations in the Palestinian diaspora in Chile like have to jump through a lot more hoops to be able to run in the same elections. So to me, it feels like a grand conspiracy against Palestinians to pretend like these PNC elections are actually legitimate. In reality, really disempowering huge swaths of of the Palestinian diaspora. He also announced in that decree that he's gonna halve the numbers of the PNC from 747 to 350. So essentially, one seat allocated for every 35,000 Palestinians is like the idea. But yeah, it's, it's, uh, not great. And I think that we should really, you know, focus on what's happening here

• 2:41:37Speaker 03

  because the Palestinians are being set up in so many ways for a very bleak near term future. I feel like I've stunned all of you with this. Well, it's so plain. They're just like, how openly they're just kind of rigging the elections? It's like, I don't know. It reminds me of like more expansive version of the way that like the CCP does elections for, or like, there's like nominal elections for all of their party official offices, where they do like a very similar process of like, yeah, we've, we've like put forward one candidate who's like our person, you're all gonna vote for them, or you're gonna vote for one of the like allied parties or something. Yeah. No, it's completely like minimized as a process. Yeah.

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  I mean, I haven't even gotten into like the local elections that have happened in occupied territories and how kind of problematic some of those have been. But just on every level, like even when they're pretending at democracy, like it's not happening, you know? So, yeah. And then like, and like in the same like CCP structure thing, you have like this big assembly that does nothing. And then there's like executive bodies that have been carefully chosen from their like loyalists outside of that that like do all the things. Yeah. Exactly. No, no, that's, that's a good comparison. Yeah. So the second thing I wanted to just very briefly touch on is the issue of Palestine and higher ed. I think like because there haven't been the, you know, massive widespread protests that we saw a year or two years ago, this maybe has dropped from the radar, but it continues

• 2:43:06Speaker 03

  to, you know, those protests on campuses continue to have ramifications for higher ed and for a lot of the people who participated. So two cases I wanted to just mention briefly is that at Stanford University, a number of students were criminally prosecuted for protesting on their campus. And for some of them, that involved occupying the president's office and demanding divestment and things like this. But the charges have all been dropped against those students. The Santa Clara County District Attorney that was like assigned to this case, who like was seeking criminal prosecution, was using the case to solicit donations for his reelection, saying he was tough on antisemitism. Jesus Christ. So, yeah. So the judge was like, hey, I think this is probably, you're probably

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  too biased for this. So he like asked him to be removed from the case. And then eventually, as I said, the charges were dropped and the students like have to pay a small sum and like do some community service. But the idea is like, all of these cases, whether at Stanford or other places, they were used to deter further protest, for sure. And then the second case I wanted to mention is maybe people remember three Palestinian students, one from Brown University, one from Haverford College, and one from Trinity College, were shot for wearing kaffiyahs on the street in Vermont, maybe two years ago. All three of them were wounded and one was paralyzed. So the guy who shot them, Jason Eaton, faces

• 2:44:36Speaker 03

  up to life in prison. And despite the fact that that guy had claimed that the US and Israeli intelligence agencies had transmitted orders to him to shoot the students via FM radio, and that God had commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors, no hate crime charges were filed. So I think that that is quite telling. Yeah. But nevertheless, the student, one of the student's mothers, the student Hisham Awartani was the one who was paralyzed. His mother, Elizabeth Price, spoke to the media after the verdict and said, justice has been rendered for Hisham Kinan and Tahsin. After three years of sorrow, loss and struggle, our families finally feel relief. We are grateful our son's suffering commanded attention and support. We grieve so much that Palestinian

• 2:45:20Speaker 03

  suffering never does. So I just wanted to update about that case as well. I'm not sure it's a happy update, but some semblance of repercussion. Yeah, damn. Yeah. I guess we got another shooting because this is America. Hate this country. Yeah. I know this one's fucked up. ICE agents in Texas shot a man in the back last week. Wilbur Rafael Garcia's Perez, he's a migrant from Venezuela. He was shot in the back. He appears to be in stable condition now. We've seen a number of different videos. The videos of the shooting are not entirely clear of like the rundown events. ICE claimed he was running away from them, but he doesn't seem to show that. We have seen video of

• 2:46:03Speaker 03

  ICE agents cuffing him, and it appears that they're doing that before rendering aid. Like you could see a couple of agents putting cuffs on him and another guy like who apparently has like struggling to put on like latex or actually non-latex, but protective gloves. Wilbur, like many Venezuelans, came to the USA to help his family. Like I've heard this story 100 times, right? And I've met this family, not this family, but like a family doing exactly the same thing 100 times. He has a son with disabilities that he will probably either struggle to pay for or cannot be accommodated easily in Venezuela. And so his dad came here to work to find his treatment. At the time that he was shot, he was delivering doordash, super common employment for people becoming, seeking asylum, right?

• 2:46:45Speaker 03

  His family attorney, Kate Lincoln Goldfinch, has been documenting the events after his shooting on Instagram, beginning with a post where she says she was at the hospital with Wilbur's wife. And they are trying to get into the hospital to see her husband, who had called her and said he had been shot, and then the phone cut off. So evidently, she's distressed, right? And the security at the hospital are denying that he is there and asking the attorney and Wilbur's wife to leave. She is then informed by a congressperson that he is present at that hospital, but that a hospital's policy is not to disclose when someone's there in ICE detention. I've done a lot of like, I haven't put much out

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  on like hospitals and ICE detention. I have done a lot of interviews about that. It's something I want to kind of get my arms around fully before I put something out because I think, I've also done a lot of responding to, to times when migrants are in medical crisis and are afraid to get medical care. And I, and I think that there are really serious repercussions to suggesting that ICE is going room to room in hospitals or in EDs taking people. I'm not aware of them ever doing that. And I just want to like make that very clear for people whenever we get to this topic because it kills people to not seek medical care too. You know, we need to hold those two things at the same time. In this case, I guess Austin's mayor showed up and got them confirmation that

• 2:48:11Speaker 03

  he was stable and had been released into an ICE detention center. His attorney then held a presser, which Wilbur attended remotely by calling in from detention. There are different ways people can call in different detention centers. I think he had some kind of tablet device. In this conference, he said he was in serious pain and that he had not been receiving adequate mental care. And the ICE agents had not identified themselves before ramming his car. His lawyer later said that after this press conference, as a retaliatory measure, he was held in isolation and had his communication device taken away. He was also removed from the infirmary in apparent retaliation for this presser and

• 2:48:52Speaker 03

  placed in isolation. He is now, according to Congressman Joaquim Castro, being returned to hospital to get better care. According to his lawyer, the agent who shot him was hired last year and either didn't have or didn't activate the body cam. The judge has ruled that Wilbur will appear in person for a immigration hearing on the 30th of September. So that will be that he can't be removed before then, right? He'd previously been ordered, removed in absentia because he had missed a hearing, his lawyer says. So he had moved house and didn't get that, that document. ICE then proceeded to release this press release, effectively directly addressing the Instagram posts of his lawyer. And they

• 2:49:34Speaker 03

  claimed they were going to, quote, "correct the record," unquote, with a number of lies. It was set up the way that you might write a document if you didn't know what a paragraph was. The Axios style of writing. Yes, yes. Perfect, Garrison. Yes, that's correct. It used Axios house style here. Yeah, an outlet that thinks you're too dumb to read two sentences consecutively. So it's set up in this, in a claim fact format. Oh my god. Yeah. I mean, like, sometimes I think that there's a moment like with Jen Psaki, where just like the way press releases are done by the executive branch went off a fucking cliff. The Trump administration has like gone from like slight downhill to like free fall at this point. But so throughout this, they don't refer to him by his name. They

• 2:50:19Speaker 03

  refer to him as the illegal alien. It's very common in all of their communications. Yeah, this, this shit really, like literally yesterday, my friends and I erected a memorial to a migrant who had died and then like put their name on it, right? And not giving people names really fucking makes me mad. Claim the illegal alien is here legally. Fact, I'm obviously quoting from their presser here. This is false. The person is in the US illegally. He entered illegally under the Biden administration. The illegal alien had no valid work permit, had no protective status, and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice immigration judge. This is not correct. He entered under CBP one, right? Like, to enter under CBP one was a massive and significant burden to

• 2:51:04Speaker 03

  migrants in the Biden administration. People I know have died waiting for a CBP one appointment. And like, not a small number of people. Like, to comply with the requirements of CBP one was to jump through every hoop that was placed in front of you at great personal risk, right? It was safer for people not to remain in Mexico and to enter without inspection. He didn't do that. He got an appointment at CBP one, went to a border crossing, he spoke to numerous DHS personnel, and he was allowed into the country. CBP one gave people a year of humanitarian parole. Trump tried to cancel that, but in March this year, a federal judge overturned him canceling that, says you can't just like broad swath,

• 2:51:48Speaker 03

  cancel parole like that. I've included an explainer for people who need to or would like to understand that more. It'll be in the notes. Is that the welcome dot rescue dot org link? Yes, yeah. This press release was just so annoying, right? Like just repeating all these talking points that they have, right? CBP one, if you're not familiar, was founded by the Trump, the first Trump administration. This, this is a thing that they made. They've since tried to like wreck on that, but I mean, they did it. It was used by the Biden administration as a de facto gating mechanism for migrants, right? It was a way of reducing the number of people who could come and apply for asylum. That is why people ended up EWEing, right? Entering without inspection, because there was no other way. A large number

• 2:52:32Speaker 03

  of CBP one appointments went to Russian speaking people, generally because those people who had come were wealthier, they could get hotels, they'd get hotels in Tijuana with wifi, and they, they'd make the applications, right? The, the application did not work on previous generation Android telephones.

• 2:52:50Speaker 03

  And those are the telephones that the vast number of people coming to seek asylum will have, especially, I literally heard from a friend today who I met at the Darien Gap, and I think her fifth phone number, because people's phones just get stolen from them constantly, right? It's the most reliable item of value that most people have. So it's the easiest thing to steal. And so they end up with, when you turn your phone in to get like a, an upgrade, it gets sold in different parts of the world where people don't have as much income for technology stuff, right? So they end up with previous generation phones. The app didn't work on those phones. The facial liveness scanner of CBP One, as I say, I'm booking an appointment for dinner, like that it's actually dinner making the appointment and not me holding up a life-size cardboard cutout of dinner like in front of the camera.

• 2:53:35Speaker 03

  So you have to go like that. It simply didn't work for black faces. Like, I know there were NGOs in Tijuana, for instance, who have spent so much money on like, like light rooms, like getting big, like to try and try and make it work for people. Sheesh.

• 2:53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this app was horrific. And he went through all the fucking hurdles and they're still just gonna call him, they're still just gonna lie about it, right? Like, I think this is a, a particularly heinous example of how fucked our immigration system is. Yeah, I'll keep up on this. As far as we know, he's now in a hospital. I hope he's receiving better care than he, he would under a nice detention. Let's go on one more ad break and then we have a few more stories before we end this show.

• 2:54:32Speaker 03

  Okay, we are back. On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced he was, quote, banning three news outlets, CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House, quote, "effective immediately as a result of their constant reporting fake news. Media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report fiction and lies when they're covering the President of the United States, the Trump administration, or the United States of America. Other fake news media outlets to follow," unquote.

• 2:55:08Speaker 03

  Obviously not good when the president says that outlets shouldn't be allowed to write or report.

• 2:55:15Speaker 03

  Only there was an amendment of the Constitution. But it was at first kind of unclear what this ban meant exactly. Though at a press conference following Trump's announcement on Truth Social, he referred to this as a, quote, "ban on the free press." What? Wait, he just said that? Yes. Oh, I missed this. What?

• 2:55:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, wait, let's get, we got a video? That's fucking great. Why not?

• 2:55:44Speaker 02

  On the three news outlets, what does that mean in practice? Are you taking away their badges? Are you banning them from the pool? Are you banning them from the Oval Office? What does that mean?

• 2:55:51Speaker 03

  I still don't know what. What do you envision the ban would look like for media outlets? Oh, the ban on the, on the free press, right?

• 2:56:00Speaker 03

  Very simple ban. I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. He's like, you know, that thing we have an amendment about? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he was referring to capital F, capital P, the Barry Weiss outlet that does transphobia. I don't think he's talking about banning Barry Weiss's the free press. It's, it's so cool that like, we had an entire movement that was nominally about free speech and like, the result of it was, like, white CEOs should be able to say the N-word, but also the president should be allowed to ban the free press from talking to him. Hey, and the, and the R-word. There's so many slurs. Equal opportunity. They want to be able to say. Yeah.

• 2:56:42Speaker 03

  So Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, quote, "Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories. If they want to write them, that's fine. I don't have to let them into the people's house." Going on to say, like he started in that clip, "I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. And if they could straighten themselves out, I'd love it," unquote, suggesting he could lift the ban if outlets, quote, "straighten themselves out," meaning write the news in a different way. Someone asked Trump how this would relate to then upcoming visit with

• 2:57:25Speaker 03

  President Xi, and I'll just play the clip. President Xi coming here next week. Great honor. China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world. What signal does it send? Well, I don't know about that. I think, I think we're repressive also. We get fake news. We don't, we don't repress, but they write fake news. Jeez.

• 2:57:49Speaker 03

  Oh, he was on a sick one. You know, this whole time I was thinking about, there, there was a story like this week about a trial of some media organization in Hong Kong. The judge is talking about how you shouldn't be able to publish opinions that are like, I think the quote was like factually incorrect opinions, because they were like negative about the regime. And then Trump's like, nah, fuck that. We're banning the free press. We're, we're gonna out-repress the CCP. I'm like, this is great. This is great. I love, I love being a Chinese-American. Such a good tie.

• 2:58:23Speaker 03

  This, this clip is really funny because he says we're repressive too, but then he pivots and talks about fake news and then goes on to say like, "Well, we don't like actually repress, but we do have fake news." And like kind of equivocating fake news to repression in China is kind of what he turns that into. But then he just banned the press. Perhaps after catching what he said. Yeah. But like, yeah, it's not, it's, it was a really odd press conference, as you can imagine. Yeah. The banning the free press press conference. His honesty is always refreshing. Wild. Yeah. So over the weekend, reporters from those three outlets were denied access to the White House grounds, with journalists' hard-pass credentials apparently being deactivated overnight.

• 2:59:08Speaker 03

  Then on Monday, the affected outlets filed a lawsuit against Trump and White House staff. The suit claims it's, quote, "clear that the ban was motivated by Trump's disdain for reporting he considers, quote, 'one-sided' and, quote, 'never good' because it, quote, 'diminishes him and his accomplishments.' This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles," unquote. Also on Monday, ABC News, CBS News, NBC, and Fox, the four TV news poolers besides CNN, released a joint statement in support of CNN, who was supposed to

• 2:59:49Speaker 03

  be the designated TV pool provider for that day at the White House. The statement reads, quote, "The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting," unquote. These networks announced a solidarity blackout of White House pool coverage, with Fox News's Washington bureau chief and the current White House TV pool chair emailing the other networks on Monday, quote, "This is to advise that effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president. This follows the White House's position, preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties.

• 3:00:33Speaker 03

  There will be no replacement pool put in place." And later on Monday, this did affect their ability to report on White House events as Newsmax struggled to hear the president during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

• 3:00:58Robert Evans?

  Okay, so there is no microphone because, there's no microphone because the pool cameras aren't there. So maybe, Tim, this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit. Pick up on, or some of the things Michael was saying. And obviously the ramifications are right here. Can't hear what the president's saying.

• 3:01:18Speaker 03

  Indeed, you cannot hear what the president is saying. Backfired a little bit.

• 3:01:23Robert Evans?

  Backfired a little bit.

• 3:01:24Speaker 03

  A little bit. A little bit, it seems. Well, they don't want to get the old press credential taken away. They got to be careful. To me, it's unclear how long this blackout will last and how isolated it is, because obviously there was coverage of Trump at the UN. The outlets said that that was because the UN provides those, those credentials. So it's unclear if this is supposed to be like targeted specifically at like the White House pool. We'll get a better idea in the next few days as Trump returns to the White House.

• 3:01:52Speaker 03

  But not, you know, good for, as Trump says, the free press. No.

• 3:01:58Speaker 03

  Another thing, not great. Last Thursday, September 17th, the FCC approved Paramount's petition to allow almost 50% of the potentially merged Paramount WB equity.

• 3:02:09Speaker 06

  To be owned by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, following this potential Warner Brothers merger. Meaning the Ellison's Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi would end up owning CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Fandango, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, Pluto TV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT and Warner Brothers. Now, thankfully, 12 state AGs have sued to block this $110 billion Paramount Warner Brothers merger, since it obviously endangers competition and threatens editorial independence of even more news outlets.

• 3:02:52Speaker 06

  Though, after Paramount threatened to leave California last week, state Attorney General Robbanta, who was leading the state coalition's antitrust case, caved on Monday and agreed to settle their lawsuit, essentially giving this merger the final green light. California Democrat moment. This is really bad.

• 3:03:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03:18Speaker 06

  Obviously, part of Bonta's announcement includes a list of this settlement's, quote, "court-enforceable concessions", which largely amounts to Paramount promising to release around 30 movies a year for the next five years. Only for the next five years, by the way. Or else they will face penalties and be required to divest Miramax Studios. Again, this requirement only is until like 2031 roughly. Also, that's what you're going to fight for, like 30 Paramount movies a year? Like, that's the big thing here? Some of the other concessions include a $47.5 million fund for workers, quote, "displaced by the merger",

• 3:04:02Speaker 06

  and an annual $5 million fund to support independent film. We did it, Rob. We did it, Gav. We got it. $5 million a year for independent film. Thanks, Gav.

• 3:04:18Speaker 06

  Now, California also announced a, quote, "news editorial independence board" to help CNN and CBS maintain editorial independence. So, you know, worries, no need, no need to be worried about this.

• 3:04:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04:36Speaker 06

  This will be fine. But if you actually read the documents establishing this board, I'll read this here. "The editorial independence board shall be made up of five established journalists, active or retired, each of whom shall have practiced journalism for a minimum of 10 years. No more than two editorial board members may be affiliated with the same political party. Editorial independence board members shall be appointed by the combined entities Board of Directors."

• 3:05:04Speaker 06

  Who do you think is the chair of Paramount's Board of Directors? Wild guess.

• 3:05:11Speaker 03

  Larry Ellison?

• 3:05:12Speaker 06

  David Ellison.

• 3:05:13Speaker 03

  David, sure. Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:17Speaker 06

  I love that they can't be from a political party, right? So you're going to get two Dems, you're going to get two Republicans, then you got a wild card in there. And there is a kind of person who is a California journalist who's a member of the Libertarian Party, and they are the worst kind of person. You know one of them's going to fucking end up in there.

• 3:05:33Speaker 03

  I'd love to live in a free society.

• 3:05:36Speaker 06

  Making things worse, Semaphore reported today that Paramount is weighing tapping one Elon Musk for equity investment as well.

• 3:05:45Speaker 03

  Yep. I did read that.

• 3:05:48Speaker 06

  Physically painful. So both Ellison and Musk could end up appointing people to this editorial independence board.

• 3:05:59Speaker 03

  They love freedom. Also, is it like, the other investors are like the Saudi government and the UAE's sovereign wealth funds? Like, part of it, right?

• 3:06:09Speaker 06

  Part of that deal is allegedly making sure that they don't have like voting power, even though they own the shares.

• 3:06:17Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:06:18Speaker 06

  We'll see how that works.

• 3:06:19Speaker 03

  Honestly, I would bet on the Saudis more than I would bet on Musk. Like, give them voting power.

• 3:06:24Speaker 06

  That's a dark timeline.

• 3:06:26Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm just kidding.

• 3:06:27Speaker 06

  We'll get a great comedy festival out of it.

• 3:06:29Speaker 03

  Until we have proof that Elon Musk has deployed Sudanese child soldiers in Yemen. Okay, okay, okay. I, I don't know. No, no, I didn't say the UAE. Let's distinguish.

• 3:06:39Speaker 06

  That is true.

• 3:06:40Speaker 03

  The Saudis also were involved in that. I'm letting them off the hook. You're right, you're right, you're right. I retract it.

• 3:06:47Speaker 06

  You know exactly what kind of press freedoms Elon Musk is going to go for as well. Like, oh, God. But no, this is a massive failure specifically on executives in California between the governor Newsom and the state AG. The fact that they caved on this due to the threat of Paramount moving to a different state puts the whole country in jeopardy. People really need to wise up to what Newsom's doing right now. Like, he's very clearly signaling that he will be friendly to capital before he makes his presidential run. Like, he did it with the wildfire settlements in California, he's doing it with this. He is showing that he is going to be everything that Democrats have disappointed you with for the last four, eight, 12 years.

• 3:07:30Speaker 06

  Like, I despise what Newsom is doing right now. The other thing in the fine print of these concessions is the force majeure clause that allows the combined entity to get out of all these concessions in situations of, quote, "war, rebellion, hurricanes, other major storms, earthquakes, fires, terrorism, pandemics, strikes, labor disruptions, economic recessions, riots, insurrections, civil commotions, blockades."

• 3:08:02Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 3:08:03Speaker 06

  So in the case of the AI bubble bursting, they can get out of all of these concessions that, you know, the state AG of California is, you know, claiming as their big victory. Of course, also strikes and labor disruptions included in there as well. Yeah. What's a civil commotion?

• 3:08:17Speaker 03

  A little shenanigans.

• 3:08:20Speaker 03

  James, it's what happens when I walk down the street. It's a civil commotion?

• 3:08:26Speaker 06

  That is a spiritually British phrase, like.

• 3:08:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, what legal basis is this?

• 3:08:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm going to hit us up if you've been convicted of civil commotion.

• 3:08:38Speaker 06

  One final note on this, also on Monday, the Writers Guild of America settled their own lawsuit filed this past summer on the grounds that this merger violates antitrust and would cause specific harm to workers. In terms of concessions that the WGA was able to achieve, they got Paramount to agree to a layoff prohibition for five years for CBS News broadcast members and got Paramount to agree to pay $17.5 million to the Writers Guild Health Fund and cover their attorney's fees from the litigation. To quote the WGA statement, quote, "Unfortunately, the conditions Paramount has committed to with the AGs and with us fall far short of adequately protecting writers, and we continue to believe the merger will cause damage to the industry at large.

• 3:09:23Speaker 06

  As labor unions, however, the AG's settlement means that we had to contend with the reality of forging ahead alone with a lawsuit that would cost millions of dollars through trial." Unquote. Quick update here. On Thursday, a California judge delayed the court sign-off of this settlement for at least another week by granting an administrative motion by a coalition to block the merger. This settlement to complete the merger does require a sign-off from this judge. The parties have till Monday. The next hearing to go over the settlement is expected to be on Tuesday.

• 3:10:03Speaker 03

  You know, rolling it back a couple seconds, speaking of spiritually British, let's talk about Canada in our final section.

• 3:10:13Speaker 06

  That is a burn.

• 3:10:14Speaker 03

  Good one, a good one. So, okay, last Wednesday, September 16th, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the only, quote, "associate member of the EU"?

• 3:10:30Speaker 06

  Hell, yeah. Nice.

• 3:10:32Speaker 03

  So, this was obviously, well, I say obviously, this was the day before Carney spoke in front of the European Parliament, was receptive to the offer, and it seems like this is something that's going to get voted on by the parliament. Later on in this sort of trip, he met with the leaders of France and England and spent a lot of time talking about strengthening ties with European nations. It was also, I don't know if revealed the right term, but there was, the whole process of this was very weird. But basically, it was, it was, it was like, got to the press that Canada had asked to join the, it's called the Joint Expeditionary Force,

• 3:11:15Speaker 03

  which is this sort of like British-led, like, military alliance project. I'm just going to quote from CBC here, quote, "As it was originally conceived, the Joint Expeditionary Force was meant to preserve battlefield relations that grew up during the Afghan War." So we're off to a great start here. "In 2012, Britain's then Chief of Defence, General Sir David Richards, described a future force that could deploy rapidly overseas without Britain having to assemble an entirely new coalition for every crisis." So, again, originally, this is a kind of... They want to be able to kind of build on the military integration of the war in Afghanistan,

• 3:11:57Speaker 03

  which, I don't know, very few wars in which I want to less build on military integration from. In in recent times, it has been more that this sort of coalition existence and prominence has been about more about its potential response to like continued Russian

• 3:12:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:12:15Speaker 03

  aggression in Europe. So all of this basically dropped at the same time last week. Trump responded to the whole thing about Canada becoming an associate member of the EU by saying it would be a, quote, hostile act. He also said, quote, if it's a good intention, that's fine. If it's bad intention, we'll put very heavy tariffs on Europe. So who knows with that? I don't know. Genuinely, who knows what's going to happen with that situation? I I don't know.

• 3:12:47Speaker 06

  Maybe we can negotiate a swap now that Britain has left Europe. And just

• 3:12:53Speaker 06

  Britain could join NAFTA.

• 3:12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, can we? Can we like physically swap the countries?

• 3:13:01Speaker 06

  Sure, like, at least they wouldn't have as much fucking coastline to be basids about that. I would probably more coastline in Canada, just because it's vast.

• 3:13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, okay, we really know very little about what Trump's response is going to be to this. Now, the part that I actually am interested in here is what does this associate membership thing actually mean? And what what is this actual partnership supposed to look like? So we talked a little bit, obviously, there's some military integration. Most of it seems to be trade alliances. And even that is kind of vague. What you get out of it, looking into this, is that the rhetoric coming out of both the EU and Canada is extremely loud. They're talking about, you know, the crisis of democratic institutions and like the rule of law globally.

• 3:13:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:13:48Speaker 03

  All of this sort of stuff. But there was a really interesting interview in Foreign Policy with Canada's Foreign Minister Anita Anand about what actually, under the surface of this sort of grand rhetoric about like, you know, like forming this sort of coalition and like promoting like the rule of law and being a being a non-coercive body and all of this sort of very grand rhetoric that is in response to Trump without really mentioning him. There's a lot of really interesting parts of this interview with Canada's Foreign Minister about what they're actually talking about doing. I think maybe the first thing that she gets asked is Trump saying, quote, "We don't need Canada, they need us."

• 3:14:31Speaker 03

  And the response is very interesting because what she's doing is de-emphasizing an actual break with the US economically, which is what all of the reporting on this, everyone is talking about how like, oh, this is like Canada trying to pivot away from the US. And her response to this is like, well, no, the US and Canada are just permanently economically integrated. The auto sector is this, you know, like sign of permanent integration between the economies.

• 3:14:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:14:52Speaker 03

  And largely, the focus of her response is that, oh, we have a bunch of free trade packs with a bunch of other parts of the world and, you know, between the US and Canada. So this is kind of a sign of like, when these people are talking about sort of a rules-based international order, what they're talking about is free trade packs. I'm going to read this quote from the interview. So the first part of this, the question is from the Foreign Policy interviewer, quote, "So let me talk a little bit then about the Canada-Europe relationship. I hear the phrase associate member being used a week ago. What would that entail? What does that mean?" And then this is the Canadian Foreign Minister. "The nomenclature that is being attached, the growing relationship between Canada and the EU, is not the focus of the work we're doing

• 3:15:37Speaker 03

  building up to the Canada-EU summit in Montreal at the end of October. Our focus is on several pillars, where you will see deeper integration on critical minerals, AI and quantum, trade and investments following on from the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreements and people-to-people ties, including education, students and the Erasmus program. The substantive discussions between our teams right now are very focused on these pillars." So this is the actual, right, it admits everyone talking about how like we're going to form like a new trade bloc to like fight the US. It's like, no, they're doing free trade negotiations, basically.

• 3:16:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what Carney's been like really pushing for. Like, he's essentially just trying to be like Bill Clinton for Canada without, you know,

• 3:16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16:22Speaker 06

  that stuff.

• 3:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, without that or playing the saxophone.

• 3:16:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, slightly more boring. He's a central banker, like, that's

• 3:16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm going to get to that in a second in terms of what they're actually sort of trying to do, but you know, I think the comparison to Clinton is a good one because like what you have here basically is like what this bloc is is this attempt to form a sort of like old-school neoliberal, I say old-school, but

• 3:16:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:16:46Speaker 03

  like 90s, 2000s-style neoliberal bloc to oppose this sort of like modern Trump fascism. And it's like, well, okay, so that like got us fascism in the first place, right? So that's not great. There's also a lot of talk about sort of the defense and support for Ukraine.

• 3:17:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:17:02Speaker 03

  But I want to have one last quote from this article to really get a sense of like, what is going on here? This is Anand, the Foreign Minister. "Taking you to the investment summit that we held last week in Toronto, we are seeing increasing levels of foreign direct investment. Commitments of $500 billion last week alone to Canada through 10 national projects, from ports to highways to airports. Across the board, our work is to shorten the time period, the path to permit time period, so that investments continue to flow into our country towards national projects." So what does that mean? And this is where things get really, really bad, because what she's talking about when she's talking about this, like, you know, we're shortening the path to permit time,

• 3:17:46Speaker 03

  so investment continues to come in for national projects. What she's talking about is what's called Bill C39, which is, I guess, like the next version of the Build Canada Strong Act. So, you know, it's a giant neoliberal deregulation bill, right? It decreases the permit process for a whole bunch of projects that are in, quote, "the national interest" from, you know, these can take multiple years. You're talking about environmental impact assessments, you're talking about like input from indigenous communities, you're putting, there's a whole bunch of things that you're supposed to have to do before you can start one of these sort of mega projects. And this this bill would reduce that entire process to one year. It would allow ministers to just sort of wave away environmental protections if it was deemed in the national interest.

• 3:18:29Speaker 03

  I'm going to quote from the Toronto Star here, quote, "It would also create special zones called, quote, 'regions of national interest', where approvals for projects can be, quote, 'streamlined in certain areas,' officials said, and follows recent changes. That means cross-border oil pipelines, gas-fired power plants, oil sands facilities and other projects will no longer be subject to the existing federal impact assessment process." So this is special economic zones for oil fields.

• 3:18:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was about to say they're doing, yeah, they're doing a special economic zone.

• 3:19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, and specifically, it's special economic zone where all of the environmental impact assessments of like, hey, is this oil field going to poison everyone who lives around it? We're not doing that. I'm going to quote here from the Narwhal. "The legislation takes federal review of pipelines, nuclear facilities and power lines out of the hands of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, a federal body that reports to the Environmental Minister and is meant to ensure project designs protect indigenous rights and the environment. Instead, pipeline projects will be reviewed by the Canada Energy Regulator, an agency of the Crown that reports to the Energy Minister and oversees construction and operation of certain pipelines and power lines." So that's a very dull way of saying that instead of environmental regulators looking at the impact of

• 3:19:48Speaker 03

  like car sands, it's going to the energy guys.

• 3:19:51Speaker 06

  It goes to the executive.

• 3:19:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:19:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:54Speaker 03

  And this is something that's been very specifically like pushed forth in a massive lobbying campaign by the Canadian oil and gas industry over the last like few years. So obviously, this is an enormous danger to indigenous sovereignty, to, you know, anyone who like wants there to be a livable environment. And also, it gives the Labor Ministry the right to end strikes.

• 3:20:17Speaker 06

  Oh, cool.

• 3:20:18Speaker 03

  So effectively, what it does, right, is there is a very nebulous legal authority that the Canadian government used to crush an Air Canada flight attendant strike in 2025. And this bill would just codify that right and completely ignore the union's legal challenges to it and would allow just government ministers effectively to just end strikes if they're in areas that are deemed as like adversely affecting the national interest. I'm going to quote from the MBSN article here. Having a quote significant impact on the economy or causing quote, serious social disruption. So, you know, it's interesting because the Carney administration has said that this is actually like a protection of the right to strike, even though it's giving

• 3:21:00Speaker 03

  a government minister, the ability to end strikes. But this, this bill is being opposed by, you know, by, by the entire Canadian labor movement because it, it gives the government the ability to kill strikes on behalf of, you know, on behalf of corporations in the name of this extremely nebulous national interest. There's no way that could possibly go wrong. And I think both of these put together lets you look at the domestic side of this entire sort of PR, international PR push that's going on, right? It's the deployments of neoliberalism nominally against fascism. It is using the threat of the US to crush organized labor indigenous groups and environmental groups, which are the same enemies that sort of Trump and the American fascist movements have. It's just that it's being implemented

• 3:21:45Speaker 03

  using a sort of state of emergency caused by the fascists themselves. Yeah. And I think that's something that's incredibly important to keep in mind whenever you're sort of reading about Carney, whenever you're reading about this sort of international project that he's embarking on is that this is what this project means, right? It's, it's a war to be able to do free trade in special economic zones. With that, I think that is all for us today at It Could Happen Here. Denna, do you have anything you would like to plug? I want to direct people to the handbook of authoritarianism in the Arab world, which I edited and it's out now, open access on the Bloomsbury Politics website. So if you just Google it, you'll find it. It's got lots of contributors from the MENA region, SWANA, whatever you want to call it.

• 3:22:30Speaker 03

  Cool. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming. If you'd like to email us, you can do so, [email protected]. Some of you fuckers in the marketing world are still not fucking listening to me. So I'll just say again, do not fucking email me about your product or service. I will block you. Don't email me about putting my podcast on YouTube to get more viewers. I don't fucking care. I'm gonna block you harder from all of the iHeart emails one day. Put a trans goal on your couch. We've reported the news.

• 3:23:03Speaker 03

  We reported the news.

• 3:23:09Speaker 03

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

• 3:23:35Speaker 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.

• 3:23:50Speaker 04

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

• 3:23:55Speaker 03

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• 3:24:14Speaker 06

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

• 3:24:17Robert Evans?

  I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started.

• 3:24:26Speaker 06

  Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

• 3:24:29Robert Evans?

  Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy.

• 3:24:33Speaker 06

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 3:24:36Robert Evans?

  Listen to Betrayal, season six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:24:45Speaker 00

  The WNBA playoffs are here, and Good Game with Sarah Spain is the only daily podcast that'll keep you up to date on all the action. We'll make sure you're the smartest fan at the bar by bringing you interviews with some of the best minds in basketball, including your favorite coaches and players. No one cares what we did last year. If anything, that's a bigger target on our back. Want to know what's really going on in the WNBA? We got you. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:25:14Speaker 01

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

• 3:25:18Speaker 07

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

• 3:25:23Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 3:25:24Speaker 07

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

• 3:25:29Speaker 01

  It's raw.

• 3:25:30Speaker 07

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

• 3:25:33Speaker 01

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

• 3:25:46Speaker 04

  Hey everybody, it's me, W. Quamell. This season on my podcast, Who's With Me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee.

• 3:25:55Robert Evans?

  Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life.

• 3:26:07Speaker 04

  Listen to Who's With Me with W. Quamell on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg's Big Take podcast has everything you need to know about the most expensive midterms in US history, like the money being spent to control the Senate. Everyone has been waiting to see how Trump will spend his big war chest. He was sitting on nearly half a billion dollars. How candidates are rewriting their party's playbooks, and how big business is throwing its money into the ring.

• 3:26:34Speaker 03

  There is obviously the AI super PACs, which are two sides there. So they're spending sometimes on different sides of races, sometimes on the same side of races.

• 3:26:40Speaker 04

  Listen to The Big Take on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chatted with JoJo about her music and Wallow267 about his story and everything in between.

• 3:26:53Speaker 03

  Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing Leave It Out or Too Little Too Late or Baby It's You.

• 3:26:59Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 3:27:00Speaker 03

  And I'm going to be like, okay, cool.

• 3:27:02Speaker 04

  Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wallow267, and more on The Questlove Show. Listen to The Questlove Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace.

• 3:27:15Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.