It Could Happen Here Weekly 254

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file: 2026 Midterms Polling Update The French Student Uprising Breadfruit! Fear of a Nuclear January 6th Executive Disorder: ICE Shooting in NYC, Russian Diesel and Ukraine, Protests Around the World 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: 2026 Midterms Polling Update https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-revolutionary-guards-call-trump-big-liar-2026-09-29/ https://img9.irna.ir/d/r2/2026/09/29/0/173138753.pdf?ts=1790679102019 https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/midterm-elections-in-maine-october-2026/ https://mainebeacon.com/new-polling-jackson-narrowly-leads-collins-mainers-want-affordable-childcare/ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/maine-senate-democratic-party-troy-jackson-graham-platner-susan-collins.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/north-carolina-us-senate-election-polls-2026.html https://www.semafor.com/article/10/02/2026/republicans-pull-ad-spending-from-north-carolina https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6131462-sabatos-crystal-ball-shifts-alaska/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/alaska-us-senate-election-polls-2026.html https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-its-lone-star-senate-showdown-between-talarico-paxton https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/texas-us-senate-election-polls-2026.html https://x.com/AdImpact_Pol/status/2106409529512808548?s=20 https://x.com/MediumBuying/status/2108208307550752820?s=20 https://floridapolitics.com/archives/820643-poll-ashley-moody-45-angie-nixon-45-and-florida-now-has-two-toss-ups-at-the-top-of-the-ticket/ https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article317496818.html https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ttw_fl_20260921_lv.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/michigan-us-senate-election-polls-2026.html https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/michigan-voter-poll-abdul-el-sayed-mike-rogers/ https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/kff-health-tracking-poll-health-care-issues-in-the-lead-up-to-the-2026-midterm-election/ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/midterms https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/how-much-will-gerrymandering-impact-2026-midterms https://www.npr.org/2026/10/06/nx-s1-5989694/midterm-elections-control-congress https://news.gallup.com/interactives/507569/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/house-overview/gop-track-lose-house-majority-15-race-ratings-shift-towards-dems Breadfruit! https://es.mongabay.com/2023/08/arbol-del-pan-conservacion-crisis-climatica/ https://www.wired.com/story/breadfruit-caribbean-pacific-climate-change-super-food/ https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000062 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/is-breadfruit-the-climate-change-proof-foo https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/is-breadfruit-the-climate-change-proof-foo%20d-of-the-future-180980665/ d-of-the-future-180980665/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/is-breadfruit-the-climate-change-proof-foo%20d-of-the-future-180980665/ https://thestoryexchange.org/shes-brought-a-climate-resilient-superfood-to-the-worlds-att https://thestoryexchange.org/shes-brought-a-climate-resilient-superfood-to-the-worlds-att%20ention/ ention/ https://thestoryexchange.org/shes-brought-a-climate-resilient-superfood-to-the-worlds-att%20ention/ https://ntbg.org/breadfruit/about-breadfruit/ https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/09/supply-and-demand-concerns-breadfruit/ https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/09/ulu-on-the-up-hawaii-breadfruit-production-keeps-boo https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/09/ulu-on-the-up-hawaii-breadfruit-production-keeps-boo%20ming/ ming/ https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/09/ulu-on-the-up-hawaii-breadfruit-production-keeps-boo%20ming/ https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/09/supply-and-demand-concerns-breadfruit/ https://www.9millones.com/story/como-los-puertorriquenos-disenan-su-recuperacion-just https://www.9millones.com/story/como-los-puertorriquenos-disenan-su-recuperacion-just%20a-colectivamente a-colectivamente https://www.9millones.com/story/como-los-puertorriquenos-disenan-su-recuperacion-just%20a-colectivamente https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/18/climate-change-impact-on-food-everyone- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/18/climate-change-impact-on-food-everyone-%20giving-up-breakfast/ giving-up-breakfast/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/18/climate-change-impact-on-food-everyone-%20giving-up-breakfast/ https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/08/climate-resilient-breadfruit-might-be-the-f https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/08/climate-resilient-breadfruit-might-be-the-f%20ood-of-the-future ood-of-the-future https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/08/climate-resilient-breadfruit-might-be-the-f%20ood-of-the-future https://www.plateapr.com/que-hacer/origen-festival-de-la-pana-humacao https://www.eater.com/23664880/what-is-breadfruit-hawaii-how-to-cook https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/12/climate/3-degrees-warming-reports-iea-united-nations https://bittmanproject.com/breadfruit-is-delicious-and-versatile-but-it-shouldnt-have-to-sa https://bittmanproject.com/breadfruit-is-delicious-and-versatile-but-it-shouldnt-have-to-sa%20ve-the-world/ ve-the-world/ https://bittmanproject.com/breadfruit-is-delicious-and-versatile-but-it-shouldnt-have-to-sa%20ve-the-world/ https://www3.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FN-68.pdf https://estadisticas.pr/Agricultura https://ishs.org/ishs-article/1128_8/ Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree by Russell Fielding Recetario de Pana Edición 2014 by Asociación Recreativa y Educativa Comunal del Bo. Mariana, Inc (ARECMA), edited by Luz A. Vega Rodríguez https://treesthatfeed.org/programs/planting-trees/ https://treesthatfeed.org/programs/school-feeding-programs/ https://treesthatfeed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/AR_2026_.3.6MB.pdf Executive Disorder: ICE Shooting in NYC, Russian Diesel and Ukraine, Protests Around the World NYC Immigration Resources: Immigration Legal Support Hotline: 800-354-0365, or dial 311 and say "Immigration Legal." “Free, confidential, funded by the City. Interpretation in 200+ languages. Immigration status does not matter,” - Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. https://www.nyc.gov/site/immigrants/legal-resources/moia-immigration-legal-support-centers.page Intake form for help from the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative: http://nyc.gov/RRLC Know Your Rights booklets, multiple languages: https://www.nyc.gov/site/immigrants/legal-resources/know-your-rights.page “What to do if ICE agents approach you / what to do if a friend or family member is detained / Sanctuary City laws in NYC.” https://x.com/David_J_Bier/status/2108722293967073459?s=20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHE6Zfi-vUs https://x.com/hollypret/status/2108343537309990968?s=20 https://x.com/StatusCoup/status/2108344393958617221?s=20 https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/10/09/dhs-debunks-new-york-sanctuary-politicians-lies-about-ice-shooting-illegal-alien https://www.amny.com/news/ice-shooting-detainee-bullet-neck-10122026/ https://x.com/DarializaforNY/status/2108564402756595758 https://x.com/nycDSA/status/2108539679452942837?s=20 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/10/09/nyregion/ice-shooting-bronx-nyc https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/10/08/federal-officers-shoot-man-in-the-bronx-nypd-says/utm_content=buffer39205&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/10/08/federal-officers-shoot-man-in-the-bronx-nypd-says/?utm_content=buffer39205&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQA_BiDZH-0 https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/10/mayor-mamdani-directs-first-comprehensive-review-of-nypd-use-of- https://x.com/IlhanMN/status/2109675562344087792 https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/2108344900165263476?s=20 https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2109454084961137040?s=20 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crx23qlnj27qo https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article317572876.html https://prospect.org/2026/10/13/militants-victory-uaw-shawn-fain/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96ogPwN9ykM https://nypost.com/2026/09/22/tech/seniors-struggling-worse-than-teens-with-screens-ai-and-algorithms/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions-and-use-of-ai-differ-by-age/ https://brendonbeebe.substack.com/p/did-bot-traffic-drop-after-the-yandex https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/russia-s-yandex-bot-traffic-plunges-after-ukraine-drone-strikes-cripple-russia-google-data-centers/ar-AA2e0IjN https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko https://archive.is/2RtqI#selection-1999.0-1999.257 https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-10-10/russian-attacks-kill-20-in-ukraine-after-trump-strikes-diesel-deal-with-putin https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russian-Strikes-Cut-Power-to-600000-Ukrainians-Days-After-US-Diesel-Deal.htmlhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/india-shuts-down-iconic-delhi-024043716.html https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/france-student-protests-spread-scroller-9.7379099 https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/belgium-9-minors-arrested-clashes-055545941.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/spain-madrid-protesters-mourn-evicted-123225186.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/india-cockroach-leaders-jailed-protest-140533064.html See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 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.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  One number can save your round, so when the pressure's on, don't guess. Bushnell Golf gives serious golfers the confidence to pull the right club with range finders, GPS devices, and launch monitors trusted by 98.1% of pros. From the Tour V7 Shift to the Pro X3 Plus and Launch Pro, Bushnell Golf is built for precision you can feel on every shot. Shop direct at Bushnell Golf for the widest selection, exclusive offers, and free shipping. When the pressure's on, trust the number trusted by the pros. Bushnell Golf. Visit bushnellgolf.com today. That's B-U-S-H-N-E-L-L-G-O-L-F.com.

• 1:16Speaker 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.

• 1:31Speaker 04

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

• 1:36Speaker 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.

• 1:55Robert Evans?

  Folks, there's important news, there's depressing news.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  And then there's the news we actually want to talk about.

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  On our podcast, Bananas, we search far and wide for all the news stories that make you say, what? What? And then we tell you all about them.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  Doorbell prankster that tormented German resident apartments turns out to be a slug.

• 2:14Robert Evans?

  Ding dong.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  New episodes drop Tuesdays with more than 400 episodes to catch up on.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

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

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:58Robert Evans?

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

• 3:24Robert Evans?

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by Robert Evans. Hello? Hello, Garrison Davis. How are you doing today? I'm doing OK. I'm really, I'm getting prepared to vote. I'm Yeah. I'm psyching myself up. Just like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps told you to do, huh? I think that's what we want to start with. This isn't, this isn't. In general, this episode will be kind of going over the midterm polls as they are in early October, kind of what we can get a sense of the election about a month out now that we're just a few weeks away from the election. But a few weeks ago, the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Prince of LaPod.

• 4:10Robert Evans?

  Sure. At this, you know, at this point, man, it's

• 4:16Robert Evans?

  one bad day, full Stalinist, uh, full, full Maoist. I mean, that's more, it's a slightly differentist, but.

• 4:26Robert Evans?

  A few weeks ago, the IRGC released a 26-page letter, not short. Not, not, not strong on brevity, the IRGC. Addressed to the American people, a spokesperson from the IRGC told Reuters, quote, "The American people are not knowledgeable about many developments. We believe if they knew more, they would think differently and take other decisions," unquote. You guys might have more faith in the American people than I do at this point. The start of the letter and how it's addressed reads, "To the honorable people of the United States of America, the scholars, the students, and the members of the media." I think that last part is important because at least some of them know that the American people are not reading a 26-page letter.

• 5:11Robert Evans?

  This is going to be mostly read by journalists. This is going to be read by nerds on Twitter and Blue Sky. And nerds on Twitter. Yeah. Now, I actually was able to get a short video. The IRGC also released a short video kind of summarizing the letter, and I will, we'll play that here for Robert.

• 5:41Robert Evans?

  So that's, yeah, that's the special, that's the special video. Yeah, that, that really is. That's something else. So there's a few sections before. The bulk of the letter is arguing why Iran is the victor in the war. Concrete evidence of Iran's victory. They have a section on the meaning of, quote, "Death to America." Yeah. Uh, which reads, quote, "Death to America does not in any way express any ill will toward the American people who have themselves suffered through the same oppression. Death to America is a prayer for the eradication of the diabolical ruling elite whose seat of power is in the White House." And the letter goes on to say that the IRGC and the people of Iran have no feeling of hostility toward the American people. And then they ask, "How can the US be saved?"

• 6:24Robert Evans?

  And this is what leads to the bulk of the letter, which is essentially trying to get Americans to vote harder. Which, you're, you're finished fascism. Oh, man. There's also a few other interesting kind of like, uh, name drops here. Quote, "God will come to the aid of the American people if they decide to change course. Thankfully, Americans are waking up to the truth. Over the past two years, Americans have participated in numerous demonstrations in cities across the US to express their outrage at Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza. Moreover, the No Kings rallies that swept across the US last year. Okay, IRGC. We're a nation, right?

• 7:05Robert Evans?

  Repudiation of the burgeoning autocratic tendencies within the American government. These powerful manifestations of collective action are evidence of a national awakening spreading through the US.

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  Polls show that the majority of Americans, especially younger Americans, no longer wish to be complicit in their government's crimes against other nations," unquote. Part of what makes this so funny to me is how diametrically opposed it is to the messaging coming out of like, you know, US-based like Maoists or like anti-imperialists, you know? Oh, yeah, like the US far left. Absolutely. They're so much, so much more generous to the American people.

• 7:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's something that's really, that's really funny to me. As for the vote harder section, let's read one paragraph here. "Your response may be that you do not accept these atrocious actions but are powerless to do anything about them. This answer, however, is not acceptable. You are the ones who empower, with your votes, the government and allow it to do what it wants. Although American politicians often win your votes through deception and false promises, as Trump did, you can change the makeup of the government if you apply the criteria for good leadership in choosing the people you vote into office." See, guys, I, I gotta tell you, it's not that easy.

• 8:23Robert Evans?

  First off, I've voted every time I've gotten the chance, pretty much. I don't think I've ever empowered anyone with my votes. You know, it's one of those kind of Adam, Adam Curtis moments. Yeah. We have the IRGC advocating the, the ideal of electoral politics, something that does not exist really in Iran either. It's consistent with, there's that one famous interview with an Iranian cleric where he's like, "As Alexander de Tocqueville, who I'm sure all Americans have read once said, he's like, guys, you are way overestimating us."

• 8:58Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, if you have any sort of anti-imperialist impulses as per, as per the IRGC, get your voter registration up to date. Get your voter registration card and get out there. If you're in line, stay in line. That's right.

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  So part of why this letter was released is because it is just a few, a few weeks away from the midterms. We are less than a month away from the 2026 midterm elections. And so I thought we should do a little update on polling and take a look at some of the close races. Sure. And let's start by talking about the current makeup of Congress. Right now, in the House, 218 seats are held by Republicans, 214 by Democrats, and there's one independent who caucuses with the Republicans. 218 seats are what's needed for a majority. This has been a very, a very, a small majority that the Republicans have been able to hold on to in the House these past, these past few years. The Cook Political

• 9:57Robert Evans?

  Port is forecasting that the Dems will pick up around five to 15 seats in the midterms, likely putting them in charge of the House with anywhere between 220 to 230 seats. And this lead in polling, and their projected victory, has only grown these past few weeks. It's not becoming a closer race for the Republicans. No, things don't look good for them because gasoline costs all of the money in your pocket now. That is a huge factor. That's a big part of the reason. I'll go over some of the kind of main issues driving the election person polling, and gas prices is like number one or number two. Yeah, I have trouble imagining anything other than other cost of living stuff being

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  like a larger impact on voters. Something that is interesting, the redistricting across Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah will likely have a minimal impact in the results, like in total. Obviously, for the people actually impacted, the people whose votes are being diluted especially. Not that this is not bad or a problem, it's just they have fucked up enough that it's not going to benefit them to the extent, that's what it seemed like to me, that like they're not going to benefit the way that they were. No, so I don't want to discount the impact of the erosion of the Voting Rights Act by any means, or the larger structural issues with partisan gerrymandering. But

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  an analysis by Harvard estimated a net gain of only two seats for Republicans in these midterms, though other estimates give them a few more seats, anywhere between five to nine. So we're looking at somewhere between a couple seats, I think nine is probably a bit optimistic. Yeah, for the Republicans. Around two to five seats they could net because of the redistricting measures. Could, might, yeah. Even that gain will likely be undone in the coming years, going into 2028, when Virginia is able to push forward its redistricting again, which they tried to do earlier, but because of a procedural error, it was shot down. So that will also net Democrats

• 12:02Robert Evans?

  a few more seats that will start to kind of even things out. And then we had this whole little fun redistricting for nothing. Yeah, it's a real, just a marker of how badly they have botched their starting position going into this administration. Just kind of a catastrophic series of political decisions. We'll see if any of that matters, but it really does highlight how pissed off people are. Now, obviously, the Senate is kind of the big question here. Yeah. Will Democrats be able to actually take the Senate? Will they be able to control all of Congress, not just the House? Yeah. Currently, the Republicans have a 53-seat majority, plus a Fetterman and the Vice

• 12:45Robert Evans?

  President, who can vote. So that kind of really throws a wrench in all these numbers, the Fetterman factor and the Vance factor. Yeah. Democrats just have 45 seats, plus two independents, two caucus with the Democrats, like Bernie Sanders. So essentially, things actually sit at like 54 to 46, adjusting for independents and Fetterman. So Democrats really need a net gain of like four to five seats to be able to have the Senate be more of a competitive voting arena, also considering J.D. Vance. There are 35 Senate seats on the ballot next month. So Democrats will need

• 13:26Robert Evans?

  to flip around four to five seats, like I said, and one of the seats Democrats have wanted to flip for a long time, and especially this year, is Maine with Susan Collins. One of our worst lawmakers. Yes, and ProPublica, as I reported on ED a few weeks ago, ProPublica did that great investigation into military contracting corruption and bribery involving Susan Collins. So, union logger Troy Jackson is trying to unseat Collins. Right now, this race leans D or is a toss-up. Morris has Jackson up four points ahead of Collins among registered

• 14:10Robert Evans?

  voters, but with a margin of error of 3.8%. So that's essentially still almost within the margin of error. This is going to be a very close race, right? A margin of error like that, this is still basically a toss-up. Other polling shows roughly the same results. Jackson up a few points, but within the margin of error. Per Morris, among the main electorate, 57% think Collins will win. That's not saying 57% want Collins to win, but they think that will happen, right? That's what they think is more likely. A survey from the Maine People's Resource Center found Jackson ahead among independent voters, 58% to 33% for Collins.

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  The Maine People's Resource Center is a progressive-leaning institution. Obviously, this race in Maine has been a big shit show, to say the least. And since Jackson has taken over as the nominee, Democratic Party establishment consultants have really swooped into Maine and have been trying to keep Jackson on a tight leash. Jackson's campaign has not replicated the Plattner-style, like, intensive town hall strategy. I think that would be a bad idea. Like, it would be really obvious if he just tried to be Graham Plattner without the scandal, right? Yeah, let's try to be Graham Plattner, but I think it is, the style of campaigning is very different. Yeah. Yeah, Jackson's on is accessible to the electorate. Consultants have tried to

• 15:38Robert Evans?

  keep him from doing Q and As at the events that he does end up doing. They've been dissuading him from talking about ICE and Israel and Palestine. Great. So they really have been trying to keep him on a pretty tight leash. There's a story in New York Magazine a few weeks ago that kind of details how Democratic establishment consultants have been trying to lead the Jackson campaign, that if people are interested in that specific topic, I recommend they check out. So this is one of the races that Democrats really do need to flip if they have a chance of winning the Senate. And it is theoretically possible, you know, he may be slightly ahead in the polls, but only

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  very slightly. But I think this is essentially a toss-up, especially looking back at 2020, when the Democrat in that race also was, you know, a little bit ahead, and Collins still ended up walking away with it. Yeah, I think they're, I mean, they're both trying to avoid having another Plattner who gets like out of control of them and is saying shit that the DNC does not want to have to stand by. And I think they are also hoping that Plattner's campaign at least did enough damage to Collins that she isn't going to be able to like pull out a win this time. And maybe that'll be the case, you know, that might wind up being a play that works. Definitely. It's not a great position to have someone who is doing as well as Plattner had been

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  doing, get dropped out with a scandal that fucked up. Like, that's not easy to handle. Yes, especially mobilizing that many people who were already kind of disillusioned with politics, giving them that sort of hope, and then having that hope be ripped away. And then those people who maybe, some of them who even still want to, you know, be politically engaged, the Jackson campaign is not letting them touch the campaign with a 10-foot pole, which you can maybe understand the reasons for. But there's a lot of like grassroots, you know, very like working-class oriented activists who want to be involved in some way that are not being tapped. Yeah. And as strong as Plattner's campaign was, it was because it was built on the work that they were doing. Yeah. Not just him as a person. Yeah.

• 17:45Robert Evans?

  So those are sort of complicating factors in this race. And you know what's a complicating factor in this podcast episode, Garrison? The fact that we have to pivot to ads in order to pay the bills. We have to pivot to ads right now. Yeah, yeah, that is a complicating factor in our lives.

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  And we're back. How do you feel about North Carolina, Robert? Of the Carolinas, definitely my favorite. That's so true, actually. Easily the best of the Carolinas, top 50% Carolina. Sorry, everyone in South Carolina. I'm not apologizing. I did not apologize, South Carolina. You need to know that.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  While North Carolina could also be one of the states that flip for the Dems, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is facing former RNC Chair Michael Watley. What a name. Who is running to replace Republican Senator Tom Tillis. Those are both silly names. Have some self-respect, goddammit. This race is leaning Democrat. This is not a toss-up. Yeah. Polls from late September have Cooper ahead 5 to 13 points. Yeah, that's pretty good. And last week, a Republican super PAC pulled $30 million of ad money out of the state to use in other races. So that's a sign that at least even among some Republicans,

• 19:11Robert Evans?

  they're kind of giving up on this. Roy Cooper is a pretty strong candidate for this state. I should say, as we're going through all of these sort of candidates, this is not, it could happen here endorsing any candidate just because they We don't do that. belong to one party or another. Not our thing. I'm just talking about this in terms of what the Democrats want in order to take back power and the sort of how these candidates relate to each state. Roy Cooper is a relatively liked figure in North Carolina. That is reflected in the polling for this. His campaign is also helped by the fact he's not going up against an incumbent. He's not going up against someone who voters already are familiar with, already like, who they just want to keep in power. He's going up against a new guy, a former RNC chair.

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  So this is one of those states where the Democrats will probably flip. You can kind of count this on the Yeah. you know, four to five states needed to flip. This is, this is the most kind of certain one. There'd be a massive polling error if it, if it goes the other way or some sort of fuckery, but. And just, just a total misread of, of the, of the situation on the ground. Yeah. Now, one of the more interesting kind of surprises is Alaska, which could also flip for Democrats. The former Democratic Congressman Mary Peltola is going up against sitting Senator Dan Sullivan. Peltola is definitely running more as like a centrist, very pro fossil fuels here in Alaska. Yeah. Pro-gun too. Pro-gun.

• 20:40Robert Evans?

  Her campaign slogan is fish, family, freedom. Yep. That makes sense. That's not a terrible slogan for running in Alaska. Not bad for Alaska. And rather than attacking Republicans, a lot of her campaign messaging is focused on taking on, quote, DC. You know, it's very much like Alaska versus DC. Yeah. Yeah. Corruption is a massive issue for the whole electorate. So I, that makes sense. Like, that's, yeah, kind of the obvious play. And really prioritizing Alaska as like a, its own special interest because it's so different from every other Yeah. state. Part of Peltola's strategy is try to, you know, is trying to attract certain Republicans. So why she's not really going hard against Republicans per se, but attacking the sort of like DC swamp establishment.

• 21:24Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, that's her main strategy here. A New York Times/Siena poll from late September to early October has Peltola up seven points. Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty solid lead. Alaska's been wavering Yeah. the last couple of elections between blue and red. So this is not like a sea change, right? This is kind of an incremental change in some of the, the, and obviously the disaster that this administration has pushed things further along than I think it otherwise would be, but this is, it's been moving in this direction a while. Yeah. And like Alaska hasn't had a Democratic Senator in like almost 20 years. This would be a significant event if this happened. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to say it wouldn't.

• 22:06Robert Evans?

  I've just been like, this, this pattern has been occurring since before like Trump II, right? And obviously there's this general pattern of in the midterms, usually Yeah. especially the House, but sometimes the Senate as well shifts to the opposition party. You know, this is like politics 101. This is a very basic pattern. And what we're looking at is this, this could be even stronger this year than some years previously, probably not as strong as 2018, but taking back the Senate and the House would, would be huge, especially because of how far they have to go in the Senate in order to retake it. Yeah. Now, the race in Alaska, this definitely used to lean Republican, right? This was not seen to be a very competitive race, but recently this went to a toss-up, right?

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  And, and now some models even have it leaning Democrat. So this is one race where there's been a lot of movement. And JD Vance was dropped in to Alaska to campaign for Sullivan last week, something that they may not have needed to do or thought they needed to do a few months ago. But now, now this is competitive enough that they're sending in the vice president. Will JD Vance actually help Republicans win the state? That's, that's certainly debatable, but. I don't know if I would be putting JD in as my pinch hitter. That's the thing, right? I don't. Like, like, I don't know who I'd put in as my pinch hitter right now in the Republican bench, but it would not, Vance would be the bottom of my list. Like honestly, send in Fetterman. No, legitimately, yes.

• 23:33Robert Evans?

  He'll do better for you in this instance. Getting Fetterman to campaign for the Republicans would be, I think, probably a smarter move. Yeah, you could convince him to do it. What a nightmare. What a horrible situation. It's, it's, I, things are really bad, buddy. Things are really bad. I know when like we were getting shot at by federal agents in Portland, things were bad, but things are a lot darker. Yeah, well, I'm about to get maybe shot at by federal agents in like 20 minutes. So. Yeah, because they just shot a dude with an actual gun in New York. Yeah. Time is a spiral. Yeah. Let's talk about Texas. Sure. Yeah.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  I, I'm, I'm excited to talk about Texas because this is the first time I get to be like a little optimistic about more than, like two Texas elections, actually. So yeah, I'm, I'm excited. Let's talk about Talarico. Talarico.

• 24:31Robert Evans?

  In terms of the Senate, the big, big question is Texas with James Talarico going up against Kenny Pax, Ken Paxton. K-Pax, as I like to call him. You probably didn't see that movie, Garrison. It's not good. No, no. I did just see Out of Sight, the Steven Soderbergh movie. I don't know if I've seen that one. From like the 90s. It's, it's like, it's like the proto Ocean's Eleven. Okay. It's the hottest I've ever seen George Clooney. Oh, Cloon Tang, okay. He plays like a serial bank robber. That's a good role for him. Who keeps going to jail, prison, and he breaks out. And then it kind of cuts between a few different timelines as, as he gets into a sort of doomed romance with a federal marshal played by Jennifer Lopez. Okay, I was gonna say, I've seen this movie and then, well, no, I have seen this

• 25:16Robert Evans?

  movie with J Lo. Yeah, yeah, I have seen this movie. It's hard to tell because like the first half of that description is like 18 different George Clooney movies. Exactly. Where he's like, he's like a bank robber. He keeps going to prison.

• 25:27Robert Evans?

  No, especially like the late 90s, early 2000s. This is like his role. He had this like on lock. The hottest bank robber you've ever seen. Yeah. People love a criminal. Speaking of, Ken Paxton, not doing great in the polls.

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Marist and New York Times/Siena have Talarico up six points as of late September, with a recent Fox News poll showing Talarico at 51% to Paxton's 49%. Not good for old K-Pax. No. There's also this big enthusiasm gap that the Fox News poll really focused on. Among MAGA Republicans, 64% say they're extremely interested in the midterms. But for non-MAGA Republicans, only 50% is extremely interested in the midterms. So that's almost like a 15% gap among Republicans for, for how much they're invested in these midterms. Wow.

• 26:28Robert Evans?

  And this difference does not exist on the Democratic side. The Fox News polling has Democrats broken down into two categories, similar to, you know, MAGA or non-MAGA. They have DSA Democrats and non-DSA Democrats.

• 26:42Robert Evans?

  Which is funny on its face. DSA Democrats are at 68%, non-DSA is at 67%. So basically no gap. Jeez. And I think this has less to do with Talarico's specific characteristics as a candidate and everything to do with the fact that Ken Paxton is the literal Christian devil. Yes, he is Satan. And people want to see him beaten. Yes.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  But I mean, these numbers are not just interesting because of the gap between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans, but also MAGA Republicans are at 64% for enthusiasm versus Democrats are at 67, 68. So that's, that, that, that's a few points ahead just for enthusiasm against the MAGA kind of hardcore. Uh huh. And the other really worrying part of this for Republicans is that out of the percent that say that they will vote, MAGA is at 76%, non-MAGA is at 65%. That's an 11, 11% gap. Oof. And similarly, this gap does not exist for the Democrats, DSA or otherwise. That is really interesting. And it says a lot about MAGA Republicans that they have Oh, so hardcore.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  completely given up any kind of like moral Yeah, do not care. standards for their candidates. Do not care. Does not matter at all. In a lot of the country, Republicans and MAGA Republicans are synonyms, but that's not the case in a lot of Texas. Like Texas has a lot of Bush Republicans still. Yeah. I mean, like those people still likely are going to vote for Trump in the presidential election. Absolutely. But oversimplifying their, like all of their politics to MAGA is a, I think is a sort of theoretical mistake. It's a mistake. Those people are not, some of them are, but because there's, there's a chunk of Republicans that look like they're going to Talarico, but it's not a huge chunk. No. It's more that some of them just aren't going to vote or are going to put in like a protest candidate. You know, I've, I've read some interviews to that stance with like Republican voters

• 28:35Robert Evans?

  who are on sort of the Bush Republican side of things, being like, I'm just gonna put in a protest vote or something, which in this instance is just as good as voting for Talarico in terms of stopping Paxton from winning again. Because the Republicans who have some degree of moral fiber left are also disgusted with Ken Paxton. He's gross. On that topic, I don't know if you saw this, Ken Paxton's ex-wife, who is a Texas state senator. Yep. Was tapped for an election ad where she does not even say her ex-husband's name, No. but just begs people to vote for the quote, Republican ticket to stay on the team. I want to play the ad. Yeah. God, this is great. I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton.

• 29:18Robert Evans?

  People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out I have some. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. In a general election, it's not as much about the individual players.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  On the team. It's about getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican seat or we hand the future of Texas to the other team. That's why I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd. Let's hold the line together. Texas PAC is responsible for the content of this advertising.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  Rousing. Won't even say his name. Rousing message. Crazy stuff. Wow. Wild stuff. Hold your nose and vote for my shitty ex, the psychopath. Especially because she starts by saying, let's address the elephant in the room. And then doesn't. Does not address the elephant. Can't bring herself to say his name. Oh, my God, that's amazing. It's one of the most incredible political ads I've ever seen. Almost as good as, we may as well play this one. This is technically a House, a House ad. Unfortunately, we're going to drop it here in the Senate section, but in terms of talking about political ads, this is an ad running in Ohio in response to a series of anti-trans ads that the Republicans have been blasting in the airwaves.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Seen these ads? They're a complete lie. Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas, she didn't have any surgery as a minor. But John Houston, he protected men who abused young girls by voting in the Senate to block the release of the Epstein files. Maybe that's because Houston took $116,000 from associates of Jeffrey Epstein, 10 times more than any other senator. John Houston should be ashamed. I'm sure Brown and I approve this message.

• 31:00Robert Evans?

  It's that easy. It's that easy, folks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the ads made for you, really. If the Republicans want to make quote unquote protecting young girls the center of their politics. Yeah. They fucking handed you the silver platter. The Epstein's right there. Yeah. It's frustrating because Taylor Rico has fucking recently made some kind of bows to the anti-trans kids in sports panic shit, which was very wishy-washy. Flippy, floppy, not standing firmly where he should be, certainly. No, and I don't think that's helping him. Honestly, I think the primary thing helping him is that Ken Paxton is an abominable monster. He's awful. He's the devil.

• 31:44Robert Evans?

  And to run against the devil, you simply have to not be the devil. I guess it's harder than that. Trump won. And also offer people real things as well. I think. I'm not being fair to the campaign. Like, he has run a much better campaign than that. Well, I'm also just saying, like, in general, I think the sort of running as just not Trump has, you know, that's not one as a strategy. That's not enough. Taylor Rico has worked hard to portray himself as, other than being a Democrat, like a Texas Christian that Texans can, you know, find respectable, right? Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about Texas, but first, here are some ads.

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  And we're back. I did want to mention one more thing about the K-Pax campaign. Paxton's Senate campaign recently put out a series of missing posters demanding proof of life for James Taylor Rico. Oh, yeah. A little less than two weeks ago, he took sick with the flu. He got diagnosed on September 30th. And after that, he had to like attend, he attended like a Hispanic Business Council meeting via video that he'd been scheduled to attend in person. Yeah. He told attendees, I'm running a fever and I'm at my most contagious right now. And I guess I've been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, so I want to keep everybody safe. He stated that if he passed his illness to somebody's grandmother or baby, he couldn't live with himself. Totally reasonable thing.

• 33:14Robert Evans?

  But Paxton's campaign put out this like old West looking like wanted poster of him demanding proof of life because he's been absent 12 days from the campaign trail. They're doing the fucking Mitch McConnell bullshit. Yeah, it's nonsense. He's been making statements. He's just not, he's sick. That happens. He's booked for a CNN Town Hall on October 14th. There's been a pretty bad illness going around, whether, I think there's probably a few. I know that there is a cold, there is a COVID strain. And he's young for politics, but he's also at the age in which flus and shit hit you harder, you know? Like, he's not, not a baby, right? I did see a clip from the president in the past few days talking about this. And he said that Paxton's hiding because he's been forced to eat meat when running.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  And so he's been vomiting up meat all the time. And that's why he's not not visible. Donald, what? What the fuck? Because Trump's been, Trump just learned what veganism is. Yeah. And he said, he says it really funny. And it's been like the main thing he's been attacking Talafrico with is that the fact that he's like a let. Alleged vegan, right? Because he's not a vegan. Yes. Like, no, even if you were a vegan, if you wanted to win a major election in Texas, you would lie about that. Yeah. That's almost more of a disqualifying factor in Texas politics than being a Democrat. But, yeah, that's been the main thing Trump's been trying to attack Talafrico for is this alleged vegan status.

• 34:39Robert Evans?

  And the idea that Talafrico is having to fake being a meat eater. Yeah. Has gotten sick from eating meat and is thus vomiting. And that's why he's out of the spotlight. Yeah, of course. That's definitely it. Simple, basic stuff. Politics 101. Yeah, politics, something or other. The gubernatorial election is also going to be this year for Texas. And this is like the first time in a while that it's looked actually kind of competitive. Gina Hinayosa is running against Greg Abbott, who is right up there with Ken Paxton in terms of being an evil scumbag. Like, he is just a monster, although a much more popular monster than Ken Paxton is with voters.

• 35:24Robert Evans?

  But even so, Hinayosa is giving him a run for his money. Right now, the Real Clear Politics average trend has Abbott at 48.1 and Hinayosa at 46.4. But there are several polls that have Hinayosa ahead, including YouGov. The New York Times/Siena Poll has her up by three. Marist has her up by three. Okay. Recon MR at Siena has her up by four. Now, obviously, there are some, like, Telemundo has Abbott up by seven. Okay. Box has Abbott up by five. And there are definitely more polls that have Abbott ahead, but this looks close enough that like, it's being considered by a lot of people to be a toss-up or close to a toss-up. It's competitive. It's competitive. Like, she really could pull it off.

• 36:08Robert Evans?

  I'm not saying I think that's the likeliest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thing to happen here, because this is still Texas. And I, I just can't be that optimistic about the gubernatorial race. But I would love it if Gina could unseat Greg Abbott, because he is just a fucking monster. And yeah, she's a, running a really good campaign. Yeah, she's currently in the House of Representatives, representing the 49th District. The Texas House or the federal? In the Texas House. She's a state legislator. The Texas House, okay. Got it. Yeah, and she worked for the AFL. Okay. Prior to that, she's been a lawyer for quite some time. She was part of the legal team that sued Tom DeLay. The Hinayoses are like a prominent North Texas family. I went to school with one of her, I don't know if it was her kid or like a cousin or something,

• 36:53Robert Evans?

  but like the Hinayoses are like a prominent wealthy family in North Texas. So it's very interesting that she's, and I haven't enough of a deep dive. I think a lot of what's helping her is just the general unpopularity of the Republican Party right now. And I do kind of suspect that Greg Abbott is being dragged down a little bit by Ken Paxton, too. Like, that just the general, the overall trend. And also, like, I think Hinayosa's probably benefiting from some of the enthusiasm that Taylor Rico's campaign has helped to generate, too, right? Obviously, she's also made a lot of really good moves on her own that have increased enthusiasm. But in general, I think because Texas looks competitive in a way it really hasn't, it's benefiting probably both candidates a lot.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Just that, that is bringing more people out to volunteer. It's bringing more people out to donate. Just creating this impression that like this might be a winnable fight has done a lot. Yeah. So that's one to keep watch on. Again, I would say, gun to my head, Abbott's still probably going to eke out a victory, but I can't say definitely, right? Yeah, he does have that sort of like incumbent advantage. And that's another factor with the Taylor Rico-Paxton thing. Paxton does not have that incumbent advantage, I think. I think Corbyn would be a much harder. Yes. Candidate for Taylor Rico to beat. This wouldn't be an election if Corbyn had won the primary. That's why we were sort of softly excited when Paxton won. Because as, as dangerous as it is for Pax to potentially be in the Senate,

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  he has a much bigger attack, attack radius or attack. Attack surface. Attack surface than Cornyn does. Mm-hmm. Another one of these kind of long shots, and actually, I would say the biggest long shot for a flip is in Florida, with progressive Democrat Angie Nixon running against Ashley Moody, who took Rubio's seat. The best poll for Nixon as of a few days ago is by Florida Politics. And according to them, the race is at a tie, 45%. But a recent poll from Stetson University has Moody leading 51 to 40, so 11 points. A YouGov poll from late September to early October has Moody five points ahead,

• 39:03Robert Evans?

  with 5% of likely voters still undecided. Though, actually, as of just a few hours ago, as of recording, we're recording this on Thursday night, Florida Politics did another poll, which shows Moody at 47% and Angie Nixon at 45% within margin of error. So this slight difference from, from the last poll that had them, that had them tied. This is one of those races that the Democrats, as like, you know, like the DNC is not actually expecting Nixon to win. It's like, they're not really pumping much money in or, you know, really any money in. So like, they're not helping. All of this is the result of just Nixon being a really good politician, like the fact that the race is this close.

• 39:47Robert Evans?

  And like, Nixon's a sort of like, you know, like sleeper candidate. Like, I was not familiar with Nixon until the primary. And I've, you know, since then, I've watched videos of her working in the State House from these past few years and then campaign appearances. She is great. She is really good. A really clear communicator. Of working class issues, issues impacting the black community in Florida, right? This Florida is the state we often like reduce to kind of the worst of the worst people. But there's a lot of like, good people in Florida as well. They just haven't been represented in, in politics for Yeah. Almost, almost as long as I've been alive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it gets forgotten, but there's like a reason why the 2000 election hinged on Florida.

• 40:30Robert Evans?

  And it was because it was really close. And I'm really interested to see what the results of this races, because this will indicate kind of how much Trump is hurting the Republicans. If it's like a really, really close race, if, if, if the results are really close. And it will also point to Nixon's strength as a candidate. And I'm interested to, to watch what she does after this election, whether or not she wins. Now, of course, there's the other close race, which is in Michigan, uh, which currently leans Democrat with Abdul Al-Sayed on average polling about 3% ahead of former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers. A Mars poll from late September has Al-Sayed at 51 to Rogers 44, a seven point lead. That's Al-Sayed's most favorable poll. A New York Times CNN poll from mid September shows Al-Sayed

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  up five points. A Fox poll has him up one point. If Abdul wins, Dems could hold on to this seat, you know, strengthening their chances of controlling the Senate. But this would not be a flip. So this is something that they, they really need to hold on to in order to have a chance. But this will not go towards the sort of four to five seats they need in order to flip. Uh, before we close, I do want to just mention a few of the sort of underlying factors that could be influencing this election. One of the big ones just is Trump and how much everyone hates him. He has a 36% approval rating, which is the lowest pre midterm approval rating in 50 years. Yeah, that makes sense. Not good, not great for the Republicans. Not what you'd want, yeah. Not, not what you would want.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  And remember when I was talking about the enthusiasm gap that the Fox poll was showing? The latest KFF health tracking poll, it's from the organization formerly known as Kaiser Family Foundation. They found a very large enthusiasm gap between parties in their last poll, with Democratic voters much more likely than Republican voters to say they're quote, more motivated to vote this year. Way more than usual. It's 63% to 38%. That's a, that's a, that's a huge gap. Yeah. The cost of healthcare and gas tie as voters' top affordability worries. A quarter of respondents said that they are very worried about affording each, ahead of food, utilities and housing.

• 42:44Robert Evans?

  So 25% said they were very worried about affording healthcare, 25% said they're very worried about affording gas. So that's the tie. It's 50% of the, of the concern. It's those two. The Democratic Party has a clear edge over the Republican Party on who voters trust to handle many top issues in the election, including cost of healthcare. 42% of respondents trust the Democrats more on these issues. For cost of living, 39% of respondents trust Democrats more compared to 25% for the Republicans. And the cost of living was the top issue for both Democrat and independent voters, while Republican voters wanted candidates who discussed, quote, fraud.

• 43:29Robert Evans?

  That's the big issue for, for Republicans right now. This is, you know, JD Vance's task force, the Post kind of Doge thing, is they're really obsessed with this idea of fraud and not really the type of fraud that Robert or I would talk about, you know? I think everyone's pretty familiar with how much we're all being ripped off all the time. Yeah. Scam culture is huge, corporate fraud. The only culture. It's, it's everything, right? And that's not what Republicans are interested in. They are wanting to kick people off your public benefits, right? That's the type of fraud that they are mostly interested in. To close, the most interesting part about this KFF poll, though, is the numbers around Medicare for All.

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Two thirds of the public, 66%, said they favor Medicare for All, the highest share KFF has recorded since it began polling the idea in 2016." And this is the really crazy part, quote, "About half, 52%, said they would favor Medicare for All if it eliminated private health insurance companies," while 47% oppose. That is a huge change. Yeah. From like five years ago. Or this has been always, this, this has been the biggest kind of protest against Medicare for All is the idea that it would take away your private healthcare. When respondents get told this in polling, historically, we've seen support for Medicare for All take a big dip. This is the first time a majority of respondents have said

• 44:54Robert Evans?

  they would still support Medicare for All if it took away private healthcare, to quote KFF, quote, "This marks a departure from when KFF last asked this question in October 2020, when the prospect of eliminating private health insurance companies led to lower support for Medicare for All at just 37%." So this is, this is a huge thing. And I, I would be remiss to, to mention, you know, most of these candidates we're talking about in the Senate, the Democratic ones, you know, Troy Jackson, Angie Nixon, Abdul, Al-Sayed, they are running on Medicare for All. This has become a big resurgent topic this election. The cost of healthcare is a big topic in these midterms. And rather than doing this sort of Pete Buttigieg style

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  Medicare for All who want it, you know, just kind of vaguely talking about having a public option, right? These candidates are being a bit more strict about Medicare for All as like an actual policy and as a, as a policy guarantee. I think Abdul's policy has, has some slight differences where it does not completely eliminate private healthcare, but it says that private healthcare should become redundant. And still has a focus on a universal single payer system, which is much closer to the Bernie Sanders version than the sort of like half-assed versions that we've seen from other progressive candidates, you know, running for president like six years ago. So something that, you know, maybe two or three years ago, I felt like is kind of like a political, you know, bygone.

• 46:22Robert Evans?

  This focus on like Medicare for All is definitely coming back in a big way. And people are not nearly as scared of the prospect of them not having private insurance, because private insurance sucks. Yeah, it's gotten even worse. Like, we're, we're what, like two years after the Mangione assassination? Things still suck. Everyone still hates healthcare companies. Yeah, only hate them more as time goes on. So yeah, that is the kind of rough overview of the issues affecting the midterms and where the polling stands now just a few weeks away from November, I want to say 3rd? Let's see if I'm right. I am right, boom. We'll probably do a few more polling updates on executive disorder as we get closer to, to election day. Absolutely.

• 47:07Robert Evans?

  But yeah, that's, that's all from me here. Yeah. Remember, guys, do what the IRGC would want you to do. Just state of votes. We're, we're not telling you to vote. No, no, the Iranian government is. We're not.

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  Good stuff.

• 47:33Speaker 01

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• 48:04Robert Evans?

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• 48:48Speaker 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. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 49:33Speaker 00

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

• 49:40Speaker 04

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

• 49:46Speaker 03

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

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

• 49:56Speaker 03

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

• 50:07Robert Evans?

  You will have hell to pay.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Cyber stalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  And then the text threats escalated.

• 50:25Robert Evans?

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

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Sheriff's Department! It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Daryl Bell. And I'm Kadim Harson. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network. A different worldview with Daryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives and so many others. A different world. We're sharing never-before-heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives.

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way. We did a movie called School Days and me being A trained actor. You got, you get the first shot. So I took the trained actor. Yeah. And you being the dude that said, hey, Spike on the street. You saw him in the coming out of the bathroom or something and said, hey, Spike coming out of the bathroom. I might've made that up. So I'll miss the start of something great. Listen to a different worldview with Daryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:59Robert Evans?

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast with the Here is France and the It is It. I am your host Mia Wong. And today we are going to be talking about the enormous and incredibly militant student protests in France. And with me to talk about this is Faza, who is a political analyst and feminist theorist in France. And Faza, welcome to the show.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me, Mia. Hello, everybody.

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm really excited to talk with you about this because there has been so much unbelievably wild stuff happening, both good and bad. And like, oh my God, it's like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, most of whom are like 15, 16, like, oh my God.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  It is so exciting to watch. I mean, I've wanted to see such an uprising for so long and it's finally starting to, to happen.

• 53:02Robert Evans?

  Like, yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  It's, it was a slow build up this past couple of years, but I feel like something is maybe happening and not just in France. Like the whole Gen Z worldwide is really tired of this shit and is hitting the streets and I love it. And I'm here for it.

• 53:25Robert Evans?

  It's amazing.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  It is.

• 53:26Robert Evans?

  And yeah, we're going to be getting more into every other country that's also going up right now because it's, you know, it's like, it's like India and Spain and Chile. And we've seen a whole bunch of other countries in the past.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Yes, we have.

• 53:39Robert Evans?

  Six months go up. But I guess I want to start with going a bit into sort of the background of this and going into what, what the political situation has been in France that's sort of been leading up to this and what kinds of conditions have been sort of producing this?

• 53:59Speaker 05

  Well, have you heard of neoliberalism?

• 54:05Speaker 05

  No, like seriously, like that, that.

• 54:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  I mean, well, we've had Macron, which is our very dear president. No, I'm kidding. We, we, we fucking hate the guy.

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 05

  The guy is right into the, his very core. So yeah, he's been president for almost 10 years now.

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And the utter complete destruction of anything public, like public education, public health and everything, didn't start with him. But let's just say that he put the final nail on the proverbial coffin. And he's been like dismantling public education ever since he arrived and took his job as president. And if you want some, an analogy or something comparison with what's happening in the US with respect to your public education. Well, when I saw like 10 years ago, Betsy DeVos arrived.

• 55:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  As the Secretary of Education. Well, you remember her.

• 55:14Speaker 05

  She basically destroyed anything public education wise. Like she wanted to funnel all the money to private schools and charter schools. And that's basically what has been happening in France too, like in these past 10 years. All the money has been funneled in more or less legal ways to private school. Yes, I, I see more or less legal ways because there, there are a lot of loopholes. And Macron and his governments are experts at using those loopholes. Basically, they can look at you in the eye and tell you that what they're doing is legal, technically.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? And they will say that to your face while destroying everything you hold near and dear at the same time. So these past 10 years, the money allocated to education has decreased. The number of teachers has tremendously decreased, like dramatically decreased.

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  Jesus.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  The number of a student by a class has increased. The way this protest started is, well, a school year in France started in September. It's basically from September to June, July.

• 56:40Speaker 05

  And well, in the poorest areas of France, high schoolers arrived in, in their high schools and found basically no, not enough desks, not enough chairs.

• 56:53Robert Evans?

  Jesus.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  No teachers, holes in the roof, water leaking in the classrooms.

• 57:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  No AC, like that goes without saying. Like we don't have AC. Like this is not the standard thing in France. So you could have like a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep.

• 57:14Speaker 05

  You know, and with no AC, like people, like high schoolers were cooking in their, in their schools. During the winter, some, some of these schools, the poorest schools also don't have heat.

• 57:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I, I would, exactly. I would imagine how you can, how can you learn anything in school?

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  While freezing by, I don't know, 50 degrees in your school.

• 57:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like, you know, like I remember the thing you had to buy his high school and it's like, well, we, like, we occasionally had drowned rats falling out of the ceiling. But like, at least, at least we had heat in the winter. Like we would have all died.

• 57:54Speaker 05

  The heat is out of the window. Like.

• 57:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 05

  There's nothing left in some high schools, like really nothing. And the egregious thing is that you can have a very poor area with the poorest high schoolers, with the, the most destroyed high school you, you can see. And in the town nearby, you will find the best high schools with the richest population. Like, for instance, in Paris, like you have Paris, the capital, and you have Parisian suburbs. Some are extremely rich and some are basically the poorest ones in the whole country.

• 58:37Speaker 05

  So what, what has happened is that we don't have states. We basically have regions and departments and stuff like that. Like the way France is, is cut, the, the map is cut like, like that. And so the president of, it's called the Île de France. Basically Paris is part of a region. The president of this region is a right winger, pretty much far right, but officially she's only right winger. And her specialty is to funnel money, public money to private schools, private Catholic schools.

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  Ah, Jesus Christ. Oh.

• 59:14Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 59:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, many, many such cases, many, many such cases.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  Amazing. You see the similarities with Betsy DeVos?

• 59:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's basically, those two women are the same picture. Let's just say like that. So that president has been putting a lot of public money in private schools in Paris and in the Paris suburb, rich ones. But where is she taking that money?

• 59:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 05

  Well, instead of distributing this money equally across the, the whole territory that she's leading, she's only distributing that money to private schools, Catholic schools and schools that are in the richest suburbs and in the richest area.

• 59:58Robert Evans?

  That makes sense.

• 59:59Speaker 05

  So that's how you find yourself when you're poor, when you're a poor kid, growing up in a poor suburb. That's how you find yourself going in a high school that has holes basically everywhere, that doesn't have enough teachers, that doesn't have enough desks, enough chairs, that is lacking basically everything, that has rats running in, in the hallways and.

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. So came last September, like a month ago, high schoolers went back to school. And lo and behold, they found their school being just as bad as it was when they, just before when they went to, in like for the summer holidays and stuff like that. And so they came back and they, they found no teacher. They found no desk, no chair, no nothing. And yeah, they were mad and they were right. And so they started to protest to ask for teachers, money for desks, for chairs. I mean, it's the most basic things.

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  Like they're not asking for, they're not asking for the, the latest, I don't know, iPhone or iPad or whatever. You know, whatever the fuck. No, no, they're asking for like the most basic necessities.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, like we're asking for to be a school, like.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:01:24Robert Evans?

  Desk plus teacher is like the most basic school. Like, what, what are we doing here?

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  And they're asking for a chance at life.

• 1:01:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? Like we have a system, it's a system that's been in place since 2018. It started so under Macron again. And it's a very, very opaque system. It's a system that is designed, it's an algorithm basically, that is designed to pick for you what you're going to do next. Like basically when you're in 10th grade, so I was telling you that before we started taping, but high school in France only has three years in it, like 10th to 12th grade. So when you get in 10th grade, you have to choose in 10th grade what you're going to do in college or university.

• 1:02:17Robert Evans?

  Which is ridiculous.

• 1:02:18Speaker 05

  It is utterly ridiculous. Like granted, like.

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  Awful. Like, why?

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  You're, you're 15. You're 15 and, and people are asking 15 years old to.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  To pick with high accuracy what they're going to do as adults like for the rest of their lives. That's

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 05

  That is stressful. The the level of stress these kids are facing is humongous.

• 1:02:40Robert Evans?

  Ridiculous, yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  It it is ridiculous and the level of um uh attempted suicides.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Among high schoolers has increased in a way that I you cannot comprehend. Like, the number are terrifying. Also, that algorithm is a very racist one, it's a very classist one.

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's it's it basically is a black boss, like people, we, the public, we don't know what's in the algorithm. Like, we do not have access to it. The only thing that we know is the result. And the result is uh poor kids coming from poor areas.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  Uh have basically zero chance at getting access to a proper university or a university at all.

• 1:03:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  Like, you could end uh in a queue, but like the five thousand kids.

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Speaker 05

  In a queue to access a public university. I'm not talking about private schools. I'm talking about public schools.

• 1:03:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  It's something that is deeply unfair. It's a system that, when I was in high school, didn't exist. When I was in high school, like it was twenty, twenty-five years ago, I'm old. But yeah, when we was in high school, basically, the only thing you had to do, you had an exam at the end of high school. And if you passed that exam, you could go to university.

• 1:04:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  And that was it. And then, the only thing that matters was your grades in university. That's it.

• 1:04:18Robert Evans?

  Which is also still like a stressful system, but it's like, we've made it worse, like.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  Exactly. It is, it it was a stressful system, but it it made some sense.

• 1:04:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that there's a one-to-one correlation.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like, there was some logic behind it. The logic now is cruelty. It is violence. It is class violence. It's it is race violence. It is ableism, obviously, also. And kids, well, they they arrive in high school and they already know that, like, their life is screwed. That's what's happening. So.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  And and the the government, the state, doesn't give a fuck.

• 1:05:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  Which is basically why you're seeing the the footage you've been seeing for the last weeks is this is why uh the cops have been beating the shit out of high schoolers, because they don't give a fuck.

• 1:05:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 05

  And also, they know that they don't have a choice, what they're going to do.

• 1:05:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It surprises me so much of the protests in India, where it's like, yeah, you're facing the same thing of like. This, I guess, is one of the, one of the things of neoliberalism, was like, on the one hand, education was supposed to be like your ticket out, right? It was supposed to be like, if you, you know, like meritocratic, if you were like good enough, you could get you could get into a like elite university and now it's your like ticket out of poverty. And then simultaneously, we're gonna make that impossible. And, yeah, I mean, just like thinking about, like, yeah, like, this, the stories of these kids were forced into this, like, unbelievably intense, like, competitive pressure and are just getting screwed out of the ability to

• 1:06:00Robert Evans?

  fight their way out of the poverty that they've been born into and just being like, fuck this. If they're going to rig the system, we're like, the only thing we can go do is fight them.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Exactly. And, you know, you were talking about like meritocracy, like I'm putting it in between quotes for people who can see me.

• 1:06:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, I mean, it was that that that term was originally a joke.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  It was originally a joke. It was invented as a joke, like. And it's it's it's the same thing with like the like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The whole point of that is that you can't. It was a joke, but no, we've like, we decided this is a thing that exists in the world, even though it doesn't. God, ah, makes me insane all the time.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  You cannot create a parody out of this reality, like, it's the level of, like, a comedy of dramedy is is god tier.

• 1:06:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  I mean, but talking about that, like, uh, a few days ago, um, we on my stream were uh watching a clip from the news, I don't remember which news outlet it was. But they were basically talking about a a high school, a very famous one, uh, which is called Henri IV. And this high school is inside of Paris, and it is well-known for being like a very bourgeois high school. Like, this is uh like, basically as bourgeois as you can do, as you can get.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a rich kid one.

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  The anchor, the news anchor, introduced this high school by telling that it was basically poster child for meritocracy. And I, oh, I choked. I choked on my saliva. I was like, no, no, you you you meant it's bourgeoisie. Like, you missed it. Like, you used a word for instead of another word. Like, that that's not meritocracy, like, that's bourgeoisie. But basically, that's the same thing, and thank you for saying it out loud. Like, I was like, thank you.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's so funny, because it's like, it it it is in the original sense, which is that, which was, it was a joke about how it was just rich kids who got into college. But like, it's not in the sense you're trying to use it, like, come on.

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, like neoliberalism saw the the joke and was like, yeah, you know what I can do about it? I can rip the joke out of it, and I can just keep the word and make it something real. How about it?

• 1:08:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like, what what if all of the metaphors became literal now? And that's like the world that we live in.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. That's the fucking world we live in. Absolutely. The kids have no prospects. I mean, they don't have any in the US. Like, Gen Z won't be able to buy a house. That that's the same thing in France, like, that's the same thing in Spain, that's the same thing in Chile, that's the same thing in every, every.

• 1:08:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  Capitalist, ba- capitalistic-based society, basically. So, yeah. What we're seeing worldwide, what we are seeing in France right now, is the product of what you're seeing in the US. It's a product of what you're seeing in in Spain. It's

• 1:09:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  The neoliberal order, it's white supremacy, and of course, I mean, uh, to be honest, it's the least surprising thing ever. Like,

• 1:09:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  It's basically one plus one equals two. That's what we're seeing.

• 1:09:15Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  It's a logical product of our society. So, yeah, the kids are mad. They have the right to be, and I'm fully supportive, like, really.

• 1:09:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, we're gonna take an ad break, because, uh, yeah, we too are subject to the horrifying violence and whimsy of of of neoliberal capitalism.

• 1:09:35Speaker 05

  I hear you.

• 1:09:47Robert Evans?

  And we are back. So, let's talk about what the students have been up to.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  And you mean on the streets, or do you mean on social media?

• 1:10:00Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, let's let's get into, I guess, the streets first. Like, what what what have the students been doing? What kinds of tactics have they been using?

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  So they've been using blockades, a lot of them, which is basically a French tradition. We're very good at that. Like, whenever there's a protest, especially high school protests and student protests, we build blockades. So, we we go for disruption. So, the purpose is to disrupt high schools. It's to disrupt universities and to push the adults, basically, to listen to the kids and what they want. So, that's what has been happening. Except that our dear government

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  basically says, fuck, we don't care, and accept the fuzz. So, so the cops have been answering to the protests by mutilating kids.

• 1:10:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 05

  And mutilating adults, basically. That's been this government's response to any protest since twenty seventeen, since Macron arrived in uh the L E Z, which is our White House, basically. So this time around, even news anchor have been taken aback by the violence coming from the cops.

• 1:11:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because it's it's like it's like actual children.

• 1:11:26Speaker 05

  It is. It's children, but on the other side, uh, you have a authoritarian regime.

• 1:11:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 05

  And uh, what is evidently behaving as a police state? I mean, come on.

• 1:11:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like you're you're you're blowing kids' hands off, like I like.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  You know who they've been getting their inspiration from?

• 1:11:50Robert Evans?

  Uh, the US?

• 1:11:51Speaker 05

  ICE.

• 1:11:52Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:11:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Yep. Our government, when they saw ICE, when they saw how, quote unquote, effective ICE is at handling the public in handling protests.

• 1:12:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  They didn't even hide that it was their weird dreams. What we're seeing is the logical evolution of policing in a neoliberal society.

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 05

  Like, the kids are asking for the most basic stuff, and the most basic stuff could lead to a semblance of equality. And they cannot have that.

• 1:12:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  So let's just send the cops, let's just bit the shit out of the kids and terrorize the fuck out of adults. And let's teach everybody, the the whole population, what protest looks like. It looks like blood. It looks like amputation. It looks like losing an eye. The purpose is very clear, is to put the fear of God in the population. Once the population is scared shitless, the sad population will stop protesting and start complaining.

• 1:13:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which I I will say, the kind of upside of of drawing from from the American ICE anti-protest model is that that didn't work. Doing that stuff in the US just pissed everyone off, and it was only when they stopped doing that kind of confrontation and like move to this like quiet ethnic cleansing model, I guess, where they didn't do mass confrontation that like everything kind of, I don't know, that they were like really effectively able to carry out the ethnic cleansing. Which is bleak in its own right, but like it did it did backfire on them, like sort of spectacularly.

• 1:13:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it was a polite ethnic cleansing. Like, what is scaring me, and it's it's not surprising, but it's still scary as fuck, is that you could do the most violent things with a polite tone, and people just

• 1:13:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  Stop, look at it, and just keep living their lives as long as it's polite, as long as it doesn't make a lot of noise, as long as it's not disruptive.

• 1:14:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 05

  And our government really understands that, but yours also does.

• 1:14:08Robert Evans?

  Sort of. I feel like they're they're kind of like, like our government's like, be- because our entire government is like designed to produce content. It took them a while to figure out that this is the way that you should actually do it, because their initial instinct was just to like do these giant confrontations to produce content out of, and then eventually they realized like if you just do it quietly, then you can actually do the thing, but.

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, co- cause if you do it quietly, then you get the liberals behind you. Because liberals, at the end of the day, they're not disruptive. Like, they want to keep on living their lives.

• 1:14:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  They want to keep on like being able to consume. They want to be able to go to the movies and go on vacation and like, they they need that that kind of scope. They need that uh, sense of normalcy to keep on going and protest like disrupt that sense of normalcy. So once you get back to a semblance of normalcy, you get liberals on your side, basically. Or at least you stop having liberals against you.

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  And yeah, that's what has been happening in the US.

• 1:15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 05

  That's how our government has been rolling for the past almost ten years now. What has been happening, though, with this protest is that liberals have been watching their own kids being beaten up.

• 1:15:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 05

  They've been watching their own kids losing eyes.

• 1:15:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  Like being arrested, uh, put up in jail, uh, and stuff like that. And that is way too disruptive. This doesn't fly.

• 1:15:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  So they're going to find another way to to do things. I mean, I know how they're going to do stuff. They're just going to point their fingers at black and brown folks.

• 1:15:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  And say that these kids are the bad ones, and they deserve what's everything that's happening to them. And that uh, they are like manipulating the good white kids and stuff like that, like through social media, through what hap- so what our government also has been doing these past almost ten years is verifying anything remotely left-wing. Like, I don't know if you know Jean-Luc Mélenchon?

• 1:16:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's the kind of, the the media used to describe him as like Francis Bernie, but he's like

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  I actually, that's not so so so far-fetched. I would say that he's not as left-leaning as Bernie.

• 1:16:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it it's very funny, because like, when you when you read about him in the press, he gets described as like the hard-left guy, and he's like, no, he's not. This this guy's like to the right of like the PCF, who were like.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  I know, no. His his political party, France and the Bastille, la France sans soumises, has been categorized as far-left. It's it's it's social democracy, like, it's not even.

• 1:17:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like, what are we doing here? Like.

• 1:17:08Speaker 05

  They're not revolutionary at all. They're not anti-capitalist.

• 1:17:12Robert Evans?

  They're trying to save capitalism from you. And you're like, no, you're communist. It's like, no.

• 1:17:18Speaker 05

  No, they're not even socialist, like they're, they got a less harmful capitalism. Like, it's really social democracy. Like, it's Bernie core, basically.

• 1:17:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  But uh, they might be a little bit more radical than Bernie here and there. Bernie can be more radical on some stances. But, you know, none of them, neither Bernie nor Mélenchon are far far left. Like, they're not. They're just not.

• 1:17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 05

  But when you have such reactionary politics in power.

• 1:17:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  Anything remotely left-leaning seems far-left. So this is how they've been presenting our opposition. And so, coming back to what I was telling you, they're linking the protest to the France and the Bastille party, saying that it was created.

• 1:18:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

  It originated from France and the Bastille, and that this political party is instrumentalizing the protest and is basically, it's a big puppeteer, manipulating the youth.

• 1:18:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is like exactly the same shit they did in India, except with India, there was like, I guess, well, actually, I I don't know if if if the French government has pulled the Islamist card yet.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  It has.

• 1:18:31Robert Evans?

  The other one.

• 1:18:31Speaker 05

  Oh, it already has.

• 1:18:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're all the same, like, god damn it.

• 1:18:37Speaker 05

  Islamophobia, transphobia, those two things are at the very core of our reactionary uh, figures, political figures.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  And as they are, as yours and and mine, like, this is white supremacy, basically. Like, they're defending what they see as whiteness and white femininity, and Islam to them is a danger to white women, and so is the existence of trans folks. So.

• 1:19:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're coming, they're they're trying to link everything, even remotely left-leaning, to trans folks, Islam, Hamas, obviously, of course, and yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood.

• 1:19:26Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ, at least, well, okay, I'm not gonna say at least, but like that that was the the one thing in the US to be at least kind of moved past was like we at least kind of stopped accusing everything of being the Muslim Brotherhood, because a bunch of people started taking money from the UAE. And then it was like, okay, we're gonna quiet it down a little bit.

• 1:19:48Speaker 05

  Girl, it's the same thing in France. Like, the UAE have a lot of uh, financial interests in France, but they're the good ones.

• 1:19:57Speaker 05

  Like, they're the good Muslims, because, you know, they invest a lot of money.

• 1:20:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  So that's okay, we can do business with them. So if we want to do business with them, we have to like be able to say that they're the good ones. So the UAE, the good ones.

• 1:20:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Speaker 05

  Algeria.

• 1:20:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  Palestine and other Muslim countries, not so much, not so much.

• 1:20:20Robert Evans?

  I feel like we we kind of moved from like, it used to be everything was the Muslim Brotherhood, and then that changed into everything is Hamas. But it's like, so like, at at at le- at least we moved from one to the other, but it's like, no, no, we're still still doing the Muslim Brotherhood thing. God damn it.

• 1:20:36Speaker 05

  Islamophobia is so wrong, like, so wrong. They they don't even think about, like, are they Shiite? Are they Sunni? Are they like?

• 1:20:46Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:20:47Speaker 05

  No, not like, not at all, like.

• 1:20:49Robert Evans?

  No, that that's like.

• 1:20:50Speaker 05

  Muslim. The problem is Islam, the problem is brown and black people.

• 1:20:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

  And the problem is the left, which is defending Hamas, which is defending the Muslim Brotherhood, which is defending trans folks. Like, when you look at the arguments, that's basically what they're saying. Like, it's and I'm not even exaggerating. I wish I were, but I'm not. And it's like, they're not even trying, but it's so obvious, but it's the same argument that has been fed to uh, the population through our media for years now. So, yeah, people like just eat it up.

• 1:21:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and and I guess that leads into this question of like, how has the rest of French society been reacting to this? Have other sort of like movements been mobilizing? Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  Well, I was going to say apathy, which is kind of true. If you look at people on the center and on the right, it's apathy, it is, uh, they just want to be able to wear their head their heads in the sand and keep on going, just like to doing business as usual. Left-leaning people, some of them are scared, some of them are in disbelief. Like, they want to believe that if things were as bad as Gen Z is saying it is, they would have somehow managed to see it.

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  And a lot of, the majority of people still believe that the media are a honest actor, which they are not. They haven't been for years. And as long as, basically, as long as people keep believing what the media, like mainstream media, traditional media feeds them, then they're not going to be able to see the problem.

• 1:22:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Speaker 05

  And I think it's the same thing in the US. I mean, if people keep watching CNN and MSNBC and stuff like that, how can they possibly know how bad things are on the ground? They cannot.

• 1:23:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  They cannot. So that's where we are. And it's scary, but it's the truth.

• 1:23:10Robert Evans?

  There's this quote from the sociologist Raul Zabetti about how, basically, one of the things that social movements do is like in these moments of rupture, they act like bolts of lightning across the sky, like illuminating the darkness. And that's what social movements do to the actual fundamental nature of reality. They reveal the structures of like power and domination in the world that are otherwise hidden by the sort of darkness. And that's what you're trying, but part of what you're trying to do with these protests is to like make the actual function of society clear for a moment where I don't know if there is a more clear expression of what neoliberalism is than we took all the money from the schools and gave it to the cops.

• 1:23:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of signs during the protests, like down the streets explicitly say that.

• 1:24:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  Like, the kids know where the money is.

• 1:24:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  It is funneled to the very rich through state subsidies and stuff like that. And then it's funneled to the cops and to the military complex, defense complex and contractors and stuff like that. They know where it's going. So they know there is money. Even when like our president say that there is no money left for anything, like, no, there's always money for the rich somehow. Go figure.

• 1:24:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. There's always money for the police, too.

• 1:24:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. There's always more money for the police. There's always more budget for the, like, for the military. There's always more budget for the cops. There's always

• 1:24:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Speaker 05

  less budget for hospitals. There's always less budget for teachers and schools and stuff like that. So

• 1:24:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  People are not stupid. So they kind of like can put two into together. But people knowing what's happening and people acting on what they know, that's two entirely different things.

• 1:25:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 05

  And that's where the issue is, is what people know, people feel the problem like every end of the month when they realize that they don't have any money left in the bank for food and for anything.

• 1:25:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 05

  But they don't act on it. Like, it feels impossible to get out of this way of life for the majority of people. And

• 1:25:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  Of course, that liberal mindset also, like, do you know Thought Slime? Like, do you know the YouTuber Thought Slime?

• 1:25:37Robert Evans?

  Vaguely familiar.

• 1:25:39Speaker 05

  Uh, they made a wonderful video about the way liberals think inside of a box and how even the most revolutionary thoughts are still imprisoned within that scope of thought for liberals. Like, that scope of thought basically is what makes Bernie or Menon Shaw far left to them.

• 1:26:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  Because it is so out of their, the possibilities to them that it feels revolutionary, even though it is absolutely not revolutionary.

• 1:26:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  And that's why people stay in that apathetic state. Like, it feels impossible

• 1:26:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 05

  to them to ask for the most basic stuff. And that's what keeps people in that loop of work, waking up, going to work, coming back home, wondering how you're going to pay the bills, going to sleep and going back to work the next morning. So I, I don't, I don't think that people don't know what the issue is. But I think the issue is that people feel like they have no leverage on their own lives and on their own governments. And if we stay in a liberal mindset, I think they're right, which is why we have to get out of that liberal mindset. And which is how we have to, like,

• 1:27:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Speaker 05

  throw away the liberal playbook. Because if we keep on playing by those rules, we're fucked.

• 1:27:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you either get like more Macron or you get the just, the, the inheritors. You, you, you either get the indirect inheritors of the SS or you get the direct inheritors of the SS.

• 1:27:23Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And they're all defending the same thing. Like, they're defending capitalism.

• 1:27:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  They're defending the very rich and we already know who the very rich are. Like, we saw that about a hundred years ago. So we know who they're rolling for. They're rolling for fascism.

• 1:27:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 05

  That's, that's all there is. So as long as we keep trying to adapt and keep on trying to save liberalism, we're not going to save us, ourselves. Like, we're not going to save the population. We're just going to save capitalism. It drives me crazy.

• 1:28:12Robert Evans?

  Speaking of, of doing things of like finding alternatives to saving liberalism, like this is all happening at the same time as the giant sort of mass movement in Spain has kicked off.

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:28:27Robert Evans?

  Which is about, for people unfamiliar, the, I guess, the, the short and incredibly bleak version is that they basically like Spanish authorities evicted a, I think it was like an eighty, ninety year old woman.

• 1:28:39Speaker 05

  She was eighty seven, I think. Yeah.

• 1:28:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, eighty seven, and she fucking died because of it. And this has set off a massive, massive series of protests. I think they put, like, a couple of days ago. So we're, we're recording this on, like, Friday, October ninth. I think like, I think on like the eighth, they put a hundred thousand people like in the streets of Barcelona over this. There's been a, you know, they've been reoccupying some of like the core sort of places where like the, the two thousand and eleven protests were born and like that sort of, the thing, the thing that became occupied, like the movement of the squares.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  There still is a massive protest in Madrid. And yeah, it is.

• 1:29:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  It is beautiful to see the solidarity around that woman and around her situation, how she's been evicted from the place she was living for over seven decades.

• 1:29:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  It resonated with so many people.

• 1:29:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's, it's social murder, but it's like, normally, social murder happens at like one more degree of remove than that. And this is like, no, actually, yeah, she was just murdered by the state and the landlords.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:29:50Robert Evans?

  So directly.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  And yeah, and for everybody to see.

• 1:29:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so I guess, I guess my question is like, how are you and how are also like people in the streets kind of, like, are people looking at this in the context of like the other movements that are happening at the same time? Or are we kind of still in that, what I would call that like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen mode of like isolation where it's hard for people to see themselves as part of like a broader thing?

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

  That's a very good question. And I think it's the latter. I think that people are so depoliticized that it is hard for them to link like the most obvious linkable stuff together.

• 1:30:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Or it's like, you, you, you and the kids in India.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. But that's

• 1:30:33Robert Evans?

  I believe in us.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  That's manufactured. Like, the depolitization of your population, mine, it's not random. Like, to be able to keep us doing the nine to five and complying and everything, they need a depoliticized population to keep on going forward. So I think that social media managed to get through Gen Z. So they managed to see that what's happening, what has been happening in France has also been happening in other countries. And they

• 1:31:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 05

  managed to put two and two together. And they managed to see that, yeah, the issue is capitalism. The issue is white supremacy. Supremacy, the issue is patriarchy and imperialism. But when you start looking at millennials, Gen Xers.

• 1:31:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 05

  That's.

• 1:31:26Robert Evans?

  But which is also like, hey, if you're a millennial, we've literally you've done this twice already.

• 1:31:31Speaker 05

  I know.

• 1:31:31Robert Evans?

  We did 2011, we did 2020. I believe in us. I I believe we could figure this out.

• 1:31:38Robert Evans?

  I I know we could do this.

• 1:31:39Speaker 05

  There's a part of me that believes in us, but there's also a part of me that knows how effective the capitalistic propaganda is. So.

• 1:31:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Speaker 05

  The moment you start owning owning stuff like a house, you know, an apartment and stuff like that, you start wanting to keep that stuff for yourself. Like you deserve it. Like suddenly meritocracy seems real. And that's where the danger is at.

• 1:32:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  And that's where the danger is at. So I mean, I I see people living their lives and having zero realization.

• 1:32:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Speaker 05

  Like with respect to what's happening in the streets. Like it doesn't hit them at all. Like they keep on going, doing their stuff and they just don't see how it affects them.

• 1:32:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  Or they worse than that, they see how it affects them, but they seem to have accepted like.

• 1:32:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, nothing can be done about it.

• 1:32:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like I've suffered, you're going to suffer.

• 1:32:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 05

  That's how shit works. And to me, this is the scariest thing. This is the scariest thing. I don't have an answer.

• 1:32:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Speaker 05

  To how as for have to deal with that. I just know that, again, liberal mindset and we have to get rid of that. I don't think that we're going to be able to convince the majority of people that what we are doing is the right thing. But then again, a hundred years ago, when we're fighting against fascism and Nazism, the majority of people weren't resisting, the majority of people were complying.

• 1:33:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 05

  So we don't need a majority of people.

• 1:33:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this, this is, this is the actual lesson of the storming of the Winter Palace. Like the the actual lesson of the October Revolution is that you don't need everyone on your side. You just need your enemies to stay home.

• 1:33:31Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:33:34Robert Evans?

  Then you can knock off Kerensky like, oh, oh, all you need is for them to stay home. Like your enemies to stay home and like enough of your allies to come out and you can do this.

• 1:33:44Speaker 05

  But like you can see this liberal mindset is so hell bent on trying to convince the majority of people. Like, no, we're not going to make it. Like, it's not going to happen. Like, this is why the very rich are owning all the media.

• 1:33:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 05

  Because they know, they know what you want to do and they see what you want to do and they have already put their like chess pieces in place to disrupt that. So you have to do something stuff differently. We have to organize differently.

• 1:34:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Speaking of doing something differently, I want to close on. So, okay, I think people in France kind of understand, like, logistically, what it means when you're doing a blockade of a school. But for people, for example, in the US, we're like, I I guess I have seen schools, like I have seen colleges blockaded, but like I've I've never been involved in like a high school blockade. What what is that actually just look like on a practical level? Like, is it like, we're like blockading the street leading up to the school? Is it like we're borrowing the entrance? Like, what, what, what does that actually like physically look like?

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  Well, basically, physically, you are barring the entrance. Barring the the street is complicated because for a lot of legal reasons and like logistical reasons, it can be really difficult to to block a whole street.

• 1:35:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  But yeah, you can block the entry of the school. You can like put in front of the school, whatever you want, like trash bins, uh, barriers, like you can, whatever, like you can take desks from the inside, put them outside, pile them up. Yeah, like anything.

• 1:35:29Robert Evans?

  Cl- classic French.

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  Anything goes.

• 1:35:30Robert Evans?

  Because they can stack all the desks.

• 1:35:33Speaker 05

  But you might surprise me when you ask me that because I was like, what? People don't know that? You you take shit and you you like you put that in front of the door and that's, that's it.

• 1:35:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We we have, we have a less of a tradition of that.

• 1:35:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. Just like burning, like burning trash cans and stuff like that. That's, it's a tradition. We do that all the time. That that's protest shit. Like, of course, we're going to burn the trash. Like, it's, it's normal. It's normal. But yeah, no, it's really, it's really, it's that simple. The purpose is to disrupt. So you you do everything in your power to stop people from getting in the school.

• 1:36:14Robert Evans?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:15Speaker 05

  Because you don't want them to be able to get in the school because you want them to ask for the same thing as you do so that they can go.

• 1:36:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  Back to school.

• 1:36:24Robert Evans?

  Into, yeah.

• 1:36:25Speaker 05

  So yeah, you forbid them from getting into school and you push them to support you. That's the whole blockade mindset.

• 1:36:33Robert Evans?

  Makes sense.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  But that's how strikes work basically also.

• 1:36:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I guess is the other angle of like, something I've been thinking about a lot, talking to you. Because one of the things that struck me about these protests is the extent to which when you like read over the student grievances, it's like, oh, this is like exactly the same grievances you would have for a teacher's strike.

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Robert Evans?

  Like, it's it's the same things. It's like, oh, wow, class size too big. Don't have teachers, don't have.

• 1:36:57Speaker 05

  That's very good that you're talking about that because our teachers are not really supportive.

• 1:37:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which is like, what, what is wrong with you? Like, you gotta go now. Like, if if if you want your conditions to suck less, you need to move right now. Like, this is the best you're gonna get.

• 1:37:11Speaker 05

  Well, in France, like a few decades ago, teachers used to be seen as left leaning, left wing. They're no longer left wing. They're, I'm sure they're really like right wingers. Like, they, they want to be paid more, which they deserve to be paid more. Like, really, they're paid.

• 1:37:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  They're not paid enough, but they're not asking for it like in a disruptive manner. And basically, they're not getting paid more. Oh, shocking, I know. But so, yeah, the the teachers are not really supportive of the their students, which shows you everything you need to know about the state of affairs, basically.

• 1:37:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which like that has been like one of the things that's been heartening in the US is seeing a lot of kind of like, like students coming out to support teacher strikes and like things like that, where like teachers are sometimes like are supporting like student walkouts and stuff. And that's, that's really sad because like,

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:06Robert Evans?

  I don't know, like if if you were a teacher, like the thing that you have the responsibility to do is to care for your students. And if you're not doing that, then like, yeah, I mean, I guess you are just the kind of like, you're doing education in the Napoleonic sense. If like, yeah, we're cranking you out so you can like be cannon fodder for like the French Imperial Army, like.

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. No, what? That's what's happening. Like, again, neoliberalism is a deeply individualistic way of life.

• 1:38:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  And you can see that in the way teachers are not supporting their students who are asking for stuff that teachers are also asking. So logically, you should see teachers support students. But when you look at reality, they are not, they're not. So, yeah, because they only think about what's in it for me. And we've been molded into only thinking about what's good for me, what's in it for me. And we've stopped thinking us as a society, but just as a sum of individuals. And that's one of the biggest issues we're facing, politically speaking.

• 1:39:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure people know before we wrap things up?

• 1:39:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I want, I really want to stress the fact that what's happening in France and the problem is at its root is the same problem that is happening in the US is the same one that is happening in Spain, in the UK, in Germany.

• 1:39:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:36Speaker 05

  And basically, the whole West and even more like in Japan, in South Korea, in India, just like we were talking about, that is neoliberalism, that is capitalism, that is imperialism, that is white supremacy, that is patriarchy. And we need to come together. I don't think that fighting within our borders is going to lead to anything, but we cannot change stuff by just fighting for our countries individually.

• 1:40:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 05

  Like, we have to fight together because, well, capital doesn't know borders. So.

• 1:40:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  We we share the same enemy. We share the same enemy and we have to coalesce and organize worldwide in order to fight back and have a chance of fighting back properly.

• 1:40:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:29Speaker 05

  So, yeah, organize internationally, talk to your.

• 1:40:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  French folks, to your British folks, Spanish folks, et cetera. And, yeah, teach what you know and learn from them. And I think that's the only way out of that shit. Cool.

• 1:40:45Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah. Faza, thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your work?

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me, Mia. Uh, people can find me on Twitch at Faza, so F A Y C A underscore underscore. And also on Instagram and Blue Sky and sometimes on TikTok.

• 1:41:08Robert Evans?

  Cool. Yeah, we will have links to that in the show notes. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on and I don't know, I hope, I I hope you all fucking win.

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  Thank you. I also hope that much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you again for having me.

• 1:41:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's been, it's been great.

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  on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:46:00Speaker 05

  Hi, everyone. You're listening to It Could Happen Here. My name's Carlos Berrios Polanco, and today, I'm going to be talking about breadfruit, a climate-change-resistant crop that also works as a tool for emergency preparedness. But before I get into that, let me tell you why I started thinking about breadfruit in the first place. If you're anything like me, the effects of human-caused climate change on the food that we eat and grow have been on your mind lately. Maybe you've been thinking about it because you saw a scary-looking graph that shows the global temperature shooting up over the last few years and only increasing over the next couple of decades. When this type of graph comes up in an article about food,

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  it's usually accompanied by a rice or cornfield so dry that the ground is cracked to show how bad it's gotten and how much worse it can get. Or maybe you're thinking about it because the price of foods that have become staples in your diet, like rice, chicken, and coffee, have gone up significantly year over year because of a mixture of different climate-related causes has caused crop losses all over the world and for the very process of planting and harvesting to become more expensive, a process known as, quote-unquote, "climate inflation." And in the case of more specialty foods, like Florida oranges, for example, maybe they're not even available at the grocery store anymore because of how hard crops

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  have been hit by extreme weather events and illness. To be clear, climate change isn't the only reason that food prices have gone up lately. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz because of the US's war on Iran has also certainly led to prices going up for everything across the board. But climate change is the main thing that has been and will continue to affect the way that we consume food into the future, especially as resources become scarcer and we, as a planet, start realizing that what once worked to feed us isn't going to be viable forever. A study by the Climate Impact Lab found that every additional degree Celsius of global warming will lead to global production of six stable crops:

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  corn, soybean, rice, wheat, cassava, and sorghum, to decrease by 4.4%, which is roughly equivalent to a loss of 120 calories per person per day. As Solomon Shian, one of the senior offers of the study and a professor of environmental sciences at Stanford Dohre School of Sustainability, told the UK Telegraph, quote, "If climate warms by three degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast," end quote. This is pretty bad already, but it's going to affect the people already suffering from food insecurity the worst. And that's not to say that we're not growing enough food,

• 1:48:57Speaker 05

  just that it's not being distributed to the people who need it most. Three degrees of warming would also cause cataclysmic ecological effects for millions of people around the world, to include cities submerged by rising sea levels, months-long deadly heat waves, and turn people into refugees by the millions. The regions most affected by climate change right now, like Africa, Southern Asia, and the Caribbean, would be the most affected by this. So I've really been thinking a lot about that lately, and I did what I always do whenever I start to think about collapse and cataclysm like that. I look for the ways that people around me are trying to deal with the effects of climate change in the best way that they can.

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  That's why, on a recent Friday morning, I found myself about an hour away from my hometown of Kauai in a tiny, little neighborhood called Mariana that's nestled into the mountains of the municipal borderline between Yabukoa and Umacao. As I made my way through the labyrinth-like roads up to the mountain that definitely were not made to fit two cars side by side, I knew that I was getting close because I started seeing nearly 100-foot-tall breadfruit trees reaching towards the heavens. I was there in late September, right at the tail end of the breadfruit's harvest season. So the bright-yellow-green, football-sized fruits weren't as plentiful as they would be if I had come earlier in the month. If you've never seen a breadfruit or never tasted one, you should probably fix that as soon as you can.

• 1:50:26Speaker 05

  It's delicious. Breadfruit trees can grow up to 100 feet tall and are covered in large, green leaves. The fruit itself can grow to be almost 15 pounds, but usually tops out at about 6 to 10 pounds. Per the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaii, it's an energy-rich food and a good source of complex carbs, fiber, and minerals, like potassium and calcium, as well as vitamin B and others. Although some varieties grow with seeds, in my experience, the majority don't. Therefore, about 90% of the time, you're more likely to see breadfruit propagated through root cuttings or tissue cultures or something like that, rather than from seed. Breadfruit trees grow extremely quickly, like up to four feet per year,

• 1:51:11Speaker 05

  and will begin producing fruit in about three years. And it produces a lot of fruit, like between 100 or 200 individual fruits per tree, although some trees could blow past that. Harvest season depends on where these trees are grown, but it's generally late summer to fall, usually. The tree itself doesn't need too much care or perfect growing conditions, far from it, actually. As long as you can provide it with medium amounts of water and deep, fertile, and well-draining soils, it'll grow for you. And even then, some varieties grow in a tolls that are shallow and sandy, according to the Breadfruit Institute. And it'll also grow on hillsides. That's why it's often touted as a quote unquote climate resilient tree,

• 1:51:56Speaker 05

  because it'll grow in a bunch of different conditions. It's really the GOAT of trees. As to what the fruit tastes like, well, it's in the name. When cooked, it tastes like bread, although I've read some people can describe it as kind of like a starchy and nutty potato. It can be used in a million different recipes and used in all states of ripeness, from completely raw to overripe. Personally, my favorite way to eat it is cooked into tostones, which are these kind of twice fried flattened fritters that are usually made from plantain, but I prefer when they're made out of breadfruit. I've been to Mariana before, about three years ago, to work on a story about how communities affected by the destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022,

• 1:52:40Speaker 05

  were designing their just recovery through bottom up methods, like a community aqueduct to help ale the neighborhood's decades long water issues, as well as a community census to know who is the most vulnerable in case of an emergency and make sure they got help first. And in a sense, I was back there to cover essentially the same thing, except that this time it was community preparedness through a breadfruit farm that they've planted at La Loma de la Niña Mariana, a kind of community park slash rec space. It's a really serene space, especially when it's empty. It's surrounded by breadfruit and other trees, so there's a lot of green, and the breeze is a welcoming reprieve from the near triple digit temperatures we've been having lately.

• 1:53:25Speaker 05

  Mariana is the neighborhood that grows the most breadfruit in Omakao, Rosalina Abreu tells me. She's a community leader who's part of the neighborhood's nonprofit organization, Arekma, which is in charge of community participation and development. As a quick note, I interviewed Rosalina in our native Spanish, but Mia from the Cool Zone team was gracious enough to read a translation of that interview here and in following sections.

• 1:53:50Robert Evans?

  It's a tree with a strong root. It's resistant to hurricanes and any environmental changes. And a mature tree can yield a harvest of between 100 and 300 to 400 breadfruits. Therefore, the harvest is fruitful and abundant.

• 1:54:11Speaker 05

  Breadfruit has a long history here. Rosalina tells me that her family has always had a breadfruit tree or a couple growing near them going back generations because of how much food it produces and because when you preserve it, it can last months with proper refrigeration. In Puerto Rico, it was originally used as sustenance for pigs and other livestock, but little by little, people started paying attention to how good the fruit was, how many nutrients it provided, and people started using it for everything. Mariana has been hosting a breadfruit festival between the end of August and the start of September amid the peak breadfruit harvest for 38 years. The community has also created a breadfruit recipe book

• 1:54:55Speaker 05

  that I'm flipping through as I read this script, and it has dozens and dozens of different things you make with it, from fritters to flan and even juice. When Hurricane Maria, a category four hurricane, tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, leaving thousands of people dead and causing more than $91 billion in damages, Mariana was left more or less incommunicated from the rest of the world. Rosalina told me years ago that it was like a bomb had been dropped in their neighborhood. But knowing that the government wasn't coming to help their small rural community, they knew that the only people they could count on were themselves. So they got to work and opened a food distribution center at La Loma,

• 1:55:40Speaker 05

  where they were feeding members of the community with whatever food they had on hand and whatever food they could gather from the hundreds of breadfruit trees and others in the neighborhood.

• 1:55:54Robert Evans?

  We've seen that when the need arises, people come here to look for breadfruit. And not only that, but the environment is full of trees that keep us cool, that provide a natural space for growth. And eventually, we know that we are going to be one of the neighborhoods best prepared for any situation that involves a food shortage. We're going to have breadfruit to share and to use. In fact, we have a kitchen here, a semi industrial kitchen that opens to feed the neighborhood. During the time of Maria, we served 400 people daily that came looking for food here. We already have the kitchen, we have the trees planted.

• 1:56:33Robert Evans?

  So we're already a step ahead for the survival of our people if an event occurs.

• 1:56:42Speaker 05

  Neighbors in Mariana have planted about 80 breadfruit trees throughout La Loma as a kind of disaster insurance policy. There is probably not a fruit tree that can really withstand a hurricane or severe flooding or something like that. But if a breadfruit tree goes down, it'll likely start to spring back up from the roots. Of the four people that I interviewed for this episode, all of them told me something similar. And if a breadfruit tree gets stripped of its leaves and its fruits by a storm, it'll probably start sprouting leaves a few weeks after and will probably produce breadfruit next harvest season. Something similar, although to a lower degree, happened when Hurricane Fiona hit in 2022.

• 1:57:24Speaker 05

  Rosalina explained to me that in the 1920s and 1930s, the US government tried to take down breadfruit trees to grow potatoes, but they didn't take away the roots, so it just sprang back up again. She also says that Puerto Rico's farmers took the tree up into the mountains. It usually grows closer to the beach and other places where it has thrived ever since.

• 1:57:49Robert Evans?

  It looks like a Christmas tree with its bulbs, because each branch has two or three breadfruit. And when they're ripe, when it's harvest time, you look at it and it's really miraculous. Plus, it provides food, provides shade. It's resistant to the soil, meaning you can plant it in areas prone to landslides, and it will preserve the terrain, so there's no collapses or landslides. So for many reasons, it's a tree we could consider miraculous.

• 1:58:25Speaker 05

  Breadfruit is one of the first crops to grow back in Puerto Rico after an extreme weather event. It also grows pretty much everywhere throughout the archipelago. And this is super important, because Puerto Rico is one of the countries most affected by climate change, ranking six on German Watch's Climate Risk Index, which looks at how countries are affected by extreme weather events and how they cause loss of life and how it impacts their GDP. Puerto Rico has experienced several disasters caused by extreme weather over the years, the biggest of which were Hurricanes Irma and Maria and Fiona. Maria caused a loss of around 80% of the archipelago's crops, or about $800 million worth of food, according to The New York Times.

• 1:59:08Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, Fiona caused about $159 million in losses for the agricultural industry, per the AP. Breadfruit has proven to be drought resistant. It's wind resistant. After Hurricane Maria, we were eating breadfruit first, then we were eating local bananas and local plantains, because they were highly affected by the winds, but they would come back. So it's very interesting how, even if the fruits are smaller, it will bear fruit, especially in a drought season. That's Marisol Villalobos, a co-founder of Amasar, a company that sells breadfruit flour that's shelf stable and can last years with no problems.

• 1:59:51Speaker 05

  Their farm's in Hayulla, and in 2017, her and her husband, who's also a co-founder, had planted about two acres of their farm with breadfruit, but the saplings were little tiny sticks when Maria hit and only one survived. Marisol now calls it the quote unquote matriarch tree. Nearly 10 years after that, their farm now has 500 breadfruit trees that are producing hundreds and hundreds of pounds of breadfruit that they turn into flour every year. They're one of the first farms in Puerto Rico to grow breadfruit and cocoa at the same time. The breadfruit trees provide the necessary shade for cocoa to grow. They've also planted several other native trees throughout their farms. If you wanted to produce breadfruit at an industrial scale,

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  this probably isn't the best way to go. Most industrial agriculture has one singular crop planted over large swaths of land to maximize production, ease of gathering, and resources. This is called monoculture. However, there's serious downsides to it, like needing to pump tons of fertilizer and compost into the soil to keep it growing the same thing over and over again, as well as increasing the risk that a pasture illness will wreck havoc throughout the crop. The way Marisol grows breadfruit isn't ideal if they wanted to maximize production, but Marisol isn't really bothered by it. Instead, she thinks it's better that way because of its positive effects on the soil and on the plants.

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

  Some people say, no, it might not be the best synergy. I see it in a way, you know, I'm enriching. My model of agroforestry and what we produce is what we produce. But if I have a more secure crop in terms of resilience and protection from sicknesses, illnesses and plagues, I'm very happy with that. Puerto Rico grows very little of its own food, about 10 to 15%, depending on the source that you look at. While breadfruit has been part of Puerto Ricans diets for centuries, production of it has been going down over the last few years as Puerto Rico becomes even more reliant on imports. Per data from the Archipelago's Department of Agriculture,

• 2:02:04Speaker 05

  production of breadfruit has gone down from 1991 to 2019, the last year for which public data is available, by about 771,000 pounds. Only about 650,000 pounds of breadfruit were produced in Puerto Rico in 2019, according to the data. Meanwhile, imports have risen rapidly from 2015 to 2019, reaching about 830,000 pounds of breadfruit imported in 2019. So people are still eating breadfruit. They're eating more of it, but we just can't grow it fast enough. So we definitely have a great opportunity in Puerto Rico to increase local production and local consumption

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  with a crop like breadfruit, and especially incorporating other crops with it. Beans, vegetables, a lot of farinaceos, taro, plantains, all that. Yeah, and even animals, you know, nice farms that have both things, silver pasture with trees and with the animals, and then we have a little bit more protein there too. So. When we get back from the ad break, we're going to be talking about the history of breadfruit's voyage from the Pacific to the Caribbean and the rest of the world, and how breadfruit is being distributed to help combat hunger crises everywhere.

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  And we're back. You're listening to It Could Happen Here. I'm Carlos, your host for today's episode. And while breadfruit has become a staple in the Caribbean because of how easily it grows and its ability to be turned into a gazillion different things, it's not native here. Instead, it's originally from the Western Pacific, specifically from New Guinea and the Indomale region. Thousands of years ago, it was spread by the indigenous Polynesians, who were the literal first people to travel across the region. They would travel on double-hulled canoes that are nothing like what we know of as canoes today. Instead, each hull could reach up to 100 feet in length. They had a sail and they could fit entire families, as well as the food and resources they needed

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  to settle on the islands they were traveling to. And one of the things they carried were breadfruit saplings because of how much fruit it would produce when planted.

• 2:04:27Robert Evans?

  In the case of breadfruit, it was usually the little saplings that shoot up from the roots. They would cut them and pack them in a ball of earth and leaves and keep them moist so that they could plant them on the new island and have the same familiar foods that they were used to, wherever they were coming from.

• 2:04:43Speaker 05

  That's Russell Fielding, an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, who researches geography and environmental justice, and who wrote the book Breadfruit: Free Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree. He explained that one of the Pacific people's earliest uses for breadfruit was roasting it in an earth oven, which is when you create a pit, put burning coals in there, then the fruit, then more coals on top, and then you cover it all with stones and soil. This type of cooking is common to a bunch of indigenous cultures across the world, and it produces delicious food. Another way that the people of the Pacific used breadfruit that Russell's never seen outside of the region is putting it into a dark pit, making sure there's no airflow,

• 2:05:29Speaker 05

  and then letting it ferment. This turns it into a sort of paste that can be stored for a long time. It tastes kind of tart, almost like citrus, Russell told me. Its name depends on which Pacific island you're on, but the people of the Marquesas call it mah.

• 2:05:44Robert Evans?

  And so this fermented breadfruit was used as kind of an insurance against times of scarcity, where, you know, if you get a big crop of breadfruit, like you said, a single tree in a single season produces lots of fruit. So if it's more than you need for the time being, you can ferment some of it to store it away for later. And then maybe there's a drought or a famine at some point, and you have to dip into your reserves.

• 2:06:10Speaker 05

  This shows that the history of breadfruit as an emergency preparedness tool goes back millennia. People and the breadfruit they carried continued spreading across the Pacific. When the Europeans colonized the region, they essentially forced the people to switch from breadfruit to imports from the globalized market. Crops like coffee, pineapples, and sugar overtook the breadfruit groves and taro patches, while rice became a staple of the Pacific diet, according to Russell's book. It's a story anyone familiar with colonization or who's been a victim of it knows all too well. However, breadfruit has seen a resurgence in recent times. In Hawaii, according to an article in Civil Beat, breadfruit production is booming,

• 2:06:55Speaker 05

  but similar to Puerto Rico, farmers can't keep up with demand. We'll get back to the modern day breadfruit situation in a second. But before that, let's talk about how breadfruit made its way all the way from the Pacific to the Caribbean.

• 2:07:08Robert Evans?

  It wasn't until the very end of the 18th century that breadfruit made its jump to the Caribbean. And this was intentional. This was directed by the European colonialists. It was the British that eventually succeeded first, but they weren't the only ones trying. The French had also made efforts to bring breadfruit to the Caribbean. And there's some hypothesis that the Spanish were also moving breadfruit around around the same time. But the British did it first.

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  You might have heard this story before, the story of the mutiny on the bounty. Every time I mentioned to someone that I was working on this breadfruit project, they would mention the original 1945 movie, The Mutiny on the Bounty, or the 1962 remake with Marlon Brando to me. And I would be like, yeah, for sure. But let me be honest with you, dear listener. I did not know that these movies existed up until a couple of weeks before recording this episode. And to be honest, they're pretty good. 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. Anyway, as European colonization wrecked terror and death throughout the Caribbean, the British came up with a plan to transport breadfruit from their Pacific colonies to their Caribbean colonies,

• 2:08:21Speaker 05

  all of which had more or less the same climate to feed the enslaved people that they had kidnapped from Africa and forced to work on sugar plantations. So the British assigned William Bligh to the HMS Bounty, and they traveled to Tahiti to load upon breadfruit. Bligh, as the foretarians commonly do, was quick to anger and routinely verbally berated and physically assaulted his crew, who eventually mutinied and sent Bligh and his loyalists packing. However, Bligh eventually made his way back to England, where he would once again make his way back to Tahiti and eventually reach his original goal of bringing breadfruit to the Caribbean. He first stopped in St. Vincent in 1793, then Jamaica shortly after.

• 2:09:07Speaker 05

  Then breadfruit was all over the Caribbean in a few short years, even reaching the state of Florida a few decades later, where it's still really the only place in the continental US where it can grow outside without too much trouble. Although it really only mostly grows in the Keys and the warmest parts of South Florida because it's super susceptible to a cold snap.

• 2:09:30Robert Evans?

  It was specifically intended to feed people that were enslaved on sugar plantations or otherwise impoverished. I know that not every island was practicing slavery at the time that breadfruit was imported to that island, but breadfruit was never really intended as a food for everyone. It was for the poor and the enslaved. And unfortunately, that gave breadfruit something of a stigma or a negative reputation in a lot of places throughout the Caribbean. And you can even still find traces of that today, where it's referred to as, you know, poor man's food or comida de barro, where it's still got that association today with poverty.

• 2:10:10Speaker 05

  Russell explained that While slavery was still going on, people that were able to eat something else absolutely refused to eat breadfruit. That's how hated it was, and who could really blame them? This reputation as a food for enslaved people or something that only people in poverty ate stuck around for decades, and one could make the argument that some of that sentiment still lingers today. Even if breadfruit's reputation has started to turn around, so much of that evil history of colonialism and slavery is inescapable. Even now, as I read this script, I think about how the communities where this fruit grows the most are some of the ones most affected by human-caused climate change, which they

• 2:10:53Speaker 05

  contribute the least to. The Caribbean historically accounts for less than 1% of the world's global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. Theoretically, there could come a day when breadfruit is not as bountiful as it once was because of the heat or even refuse to grow altogether. Even though breadfruit is certainly climate resilient and it can take a lot, it can't survive without soil and water, both of which are becoming harder and harder to come by day by day. The global south, a lot of which relies on breadfruit as part of their diet, will no

• 2:11:33Speaker 05

  longer be able to grow this bountiful tree if we reach certain levels of warming. As the hottest year on record morphs into the hottest year so far, the global north will likely get to experience breadfruit for the first time as areas that were once hostile to breadfruit become its new home. This seems to already be happening in the Marshall Islands, another place that is very, very, very affected by climate change, as in they're literally disappearing before our eyes. Their breadfruit, which they call ulu, similar to other places in the Pacific, has seen better days. They're growing smaller and less bountiful, according to one farmer the civil beat interviewed.

• 2:12:17Speaker 05

  He thinks it's salt getting into the soil or the aquifer. While breadfruit can resist some salt, the constant presence is killer. Per a study published in Peelos Climate about how breadfruit can contribute to climate resilient food systems in areas near the equator, the area suitable for breadfruit cultivation in the tropics and subtropics is projected to decrease by 4.4% in a scenario where we stabilize emissions, AKA where emission levels go down but do not reach net zero by the year 2100. And they'll decrease by about 4.5% in a high emission scenario, which essentially means if we burn even more fossil fuels by 2100.

• 2:13:01Speaker 05

  In these scenarios, the areas most affected will be Latin America and the Caribbean, where suitable range for breadfruit growth will decrease by 10.1% if we stabilize emissions and 11.5% in a high emission scenario. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, yield quality and consistency show minimal decreases under a high emission scenario, while the land where you can plant breadfruit will likely go up. In all regions, a high emission scenario will lead to reduced consistency and quality of breadfruit harvest. The narrative of the study ends by saying that breadfruit may play a role in alleviating

• 2:13:42Speaker 05

  current and future food insecurity, particularly in equatorial Africa. When instituted with an agroforestry model, as Marisol is doing, it could be a potent climate adaptation strategy. This study also mentions that its role can be expanded in countries that already produce it to become even more of a staple and help address growing climate-related issues there. Ironically, tropical regions are where you do find some of the world's underserved people, people with hunger and malnutrition as part of their risks of daily living. So the kinds of tree that we plant and the need are very well matched.

• 2:14:25Speaker 05

  That was Mike McLaughlin, co-founder and secretary of the Trees That Feed Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit whose mission is to feed people, create jobs, and benefit the environment. Mike and his wife, Mary, who's president of Trees That Feed, grew up in Jamaica, where breadfruit is incredibly common. However, they didn't think of planting it until years later, when they realized how badly climate change was affecting the environment as well as the problems it was causing around the world. And then they started thinking about what they could do about it. And the reason we wanted to plant fruit trees, it was kind of an easier sell.

• 2:15:07Speaker 05

  There were, and there still are, climate change skeptics, people that don't think anything is happening. They're not worried about super El Niño. They're not doing anything to reduce our fossil fuel use, our carbon footprint. And so because of the skeptics, we said if we lead our effort with with climate change and solving that problem, we kind of have to do more explaining. We're going to be more skeptics. But if we say we're planting trees to feed people, everybody understands that, they know that. Trees That Feed gives breadfruit and other trees to farmers in more than 20 countries,

• 2:15:50Speaker 05

  then teaches them how to take care of them, harvest the breadfruit, and process it so that it can be sold and used to feed their families. Part of the reason they have this emphasis with farmers is that it reduces reliance on imported food, which means that more money circulates in the local economy instead of going elsewhere. The organization also buys breadfruit flour and other breadfruit-based products from processors and bakeries, then donates them to schools as part of their school feeding program, which serves more than 20 schools and orphanages in Haiti, which is the second country that they started working with, Mike explained.

• 2:16:32Speaker 05

  5.8 million Haitians, a little more than half of the country's total population, face crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, according to the United Nations World Food Program. More than 250,000 children aged 6 to 59 months are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition between June 2026 and May 2027, per a UN analysis. Some people in Haiti are forced to eat mud cookies, which are exactly what they sound like, a little bit of earth, salt, and oil that's meant to curb hunger pangs. It's the saddest thing Mike's ever heard of, he told me. Trees That Feed Foundation have tried to substitute that where they can with compare,

• 2:17:15Speaker 05

  a type of bread that's dense like cake or a breadfruit porridge. These recipes were co-produced with bakers in Haiti and North America, according to the organization's website. Part of the trouble of growing so much breadfruit is that it ripens really quickly, like within a couple of days, it might start rotting if you don't refrigerate it. So to combat that, Mike helped create a solar dehydrator that can dehydrate breadfruit so that it can be stored without refrigeration, without affecting the nutritional benefits of the food. This means that it can be stored for up to several years and still maintain the same nutritional value. What Trees That Feed is doing, using breadfruit as a tool for sustainable development, is

• 2:17:59Speaker 05

  part of its history all along, Russell, who's also a board member of the organization, told me during our interview. When indigenous communities were carrying it across the Pacific, they were hoping to feed themselves wherever they settled. Although it was a weapon in service of the evils of slavery, the British brought breadfruit to the Caribbean to provide food when it became scarce, in large part because of their own actions, planting monoculture sugar plantations everywhere, to be clear. Meanwhile, in modern times, it continues spreading across the world as an attempt to feed people suffering through hunger because of climate change and other crises. It's time to throw the ads, but when we come back, we'll wrap this episode up by talking

• 2:18:43Speaker 05

  about how the real power of breadfruit might have been the friends that we made along the way.

• 2:18:59Speaker 05

  You're listening to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Fredy Carlos. And one thing I haven't mentioned yet is about what we call breadfruit in Spanish. It has a bunch of names, depending on where you are. Panapang, frutipang, masa pang, buen pang. You get the idea. They're all bread-related. However, what I and millions of other Puerto Ricans call it is pana, which is exactly the same way that we refer to a close friend. A direct translation would be something like buddy or homie. So every breadfruit is a friend. This fruit that grows quickly and produces hundreds of pounds of food from a single tree

• 2:19:40Speaker 05

  that has accompanied people into the unknown and been turned from a weapon that sustained humanity's greatest evil into a food that now helps sustain millions and millions of people every day, that has started sprouting weeks after disaster raised every other crop that will grow tall and wild without much help and almost always has something to give, is literally named friend. That's the kind of beautiful and surreal that only real life could ever be. Marisol from Amasar has a theory about why it's called pana that I think is worth sharing. We in Amasar have a theory that it has to do that.

• 2:20:22Speaker 05

  Com cuando el comai y el compai, you know, we have a very strong relationship in Puerto Rico with our godfathers. And comadre and compadre is that relationship of the parents of the godchild with the godfather and godmother of that child. So if I were to visit in the 1800s, and we were very, very, very poor, extremely poor, and a lot of malnutrition, if I were to visit a friend, I would bring a pana with me. And here's your pana, aquí está tu pana, una pana. So it was kind of like that connotation of I'm giving you something to help nurture your family. So that's something very special. So if you're really my pana, you're dear to me. I will protect you.

• 2:21:04Speaker 05

  I will take care of you and I will, I will have your back. I want to end this episode by returning back to La Loma de la Niña Mariana. After my interview with Rosalina, when I was on my way out, I stopped to take a photo of a mosaic made with hundreds of little pieces of colorful tiles. It depicts about a dozen hands together in a circle, like they're about to go three, two, one, go team. There's a breadfruit at the center of the circle, almost as if it's the thing they've put their whole faith in. But the inscription under the mosaic, glory to the hands that work, makes it clear that even though breadfruit might be at the center of this art and one of the most important things in this community, the real greatest thing that this neighborhood has are its people.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  The ones that are putting in the work when it's needed, the ones that are making sure to help their neighbors when they need help, the ones that are using all this breadfruit and have used it to cook for years and years, whenever there's a crisis. It can't happen without them. Breadfruit might grow super quickly. It might be incredibly abundant as a source of food, but it can't be used to feed people without the community putting in the work to gather it, cook it, store it, and then bring it back out when it's needed.

• 2:22:20Robert Evans?

  Porque nosotros sí algo hemos hecho. Because to us, if we've done anything, it's that we've ceded solidarity. I mean, whenever a situation happens here, people show up and immediately ask, how can I help? What can I do? Where can I pitch in? People get here hauling water with whatever they have at home, cans of beans, rice. Look, I have this. You can start cooking. People say, I can get to such and such place because I have the right equipment. What can I do? We have that in abundance. This community's greatest resource is its people. We've always said so. We might not have the vast financial resources, but we do have the people.

• 2:23:04Robert Evans?

  And that is the primary resource we work with and the people to whom we owe everything we have here.

• 2:23:12Speaker 05

  I've been thinking about that mosaic pretty much every day since I was at La Loma. While breadfruit is at the center, it's the people that are putting in the work who are actually able to help one another by using breadfruit. It's a powerful reminder that the only way out of a crisis is through, that the only way through is together. Thanks for listening.

• 2:24:14Speaker 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. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 2:24:59Speaker 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.

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him.

• 2:25:43Speaker 05

  Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation.

• 2:25:48Speaker 03

  And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

• 2:25:55Speaker 05

  Yes, department! It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone.

• 2:26:00Speaker 03

  Every piece of evidence pointed to one man, but every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, season six, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:26:19Robert Evans?

  This is Darryl Bell. And I'm Kadim Harson. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, A Different Worldview with Darryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives and so many others, A Different World. We're sharing never-before-heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  We did a movie called School Days, and me being a trained actor. You got, you get the first shot, so I took the trained actor. Yeah. And you being the dude that said, hey, Spike, on the street. You saw him coming out of the bathroom or something and said, hey, Spike. Coming out in the bathroom. I might have made that up. So don't miss the start of something great.

• 2:27:09Robert Evans?

  Listen to A Different Worldview with Darryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:27:22Speaker 05

  Vampires, minotars, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, Sajana Basque, and my co-host Tyler McCall as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the Villain Edit author Rosie Dannen joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then sentient object romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assign Tyler some homework to read C. M. Niscosta's Morning Glory: Milking Farm.

• 2:28:03Speaker 05

  And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 2:28:20Robert Evans?

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:28:25Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Robert Evans. We all know what happened at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Those events were so consequential and infamous that I fear people have forgotten how they felt about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol by a mob of citizens on January 5th. That's not something I can forget. As I spent my first days of January that year digging through thousands of comments on social media and MAGA-focused message boards, I came away from my research convinced an attack on the Capitol was possible, and I tried to warn people. I was not the only researcher who wrote about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol before January

• 2:29:06Robert Evans?

  6th. None of our warnings were heeded, in part because the authorities, like most people, considered the odds of a mob successfully occupying the Capitol to be right around 0%. "The United States is the most powerful nation in history," the argument went, "and the Capitol Building and nearby government facilities are some of the most hardened targets on Earth. There's no way a mob of mostly unarmed protesters could just storm them, like the Winter Palace, and put lawmakers' lives at risk. Your fears are a fantasy. You're just trying to scare people. Shut up." Well, we were correct about January 6th, and over the last few years, I've begun to worry about something new. The name I've given this fear is Nuclear January 6th. Now, I'm not talking about an all-out nuclear war here,

• 2:29:51Robert Evans?

  and I'm certainly not talking about a nuclear strike on the US Capitol, although that's one possible way this could occur. You're all readily familiar with the possibility and consequences of atomic holocaust, and I'm not using that term for the possibility of a terrorist organization or their non-state actor acquiring a nuke or dirty bomb, which remains possible, but let's say unlikely. A nuclear January 6th would be a lot like its namesake, a catastrophic event that would have seemed impossible, even laughably so, before it occurred and involves the use of a nuclear weapon. A nuclear January 6th, then, would be a fuck-up, either a disastrous nuclear error caused by incompetence or a

• 2:30:31Robert Evans?

  limited nuclear deployment inspired by incompetence. Either way, the scenario I'm envisioning doesn't mean the end of the world. It means one or at most a small number of warheads are detonated for a very stupid reason, and we're all left to move forward in a world that is now permanently less safe. In 1989, American political scientist Robert Jervis published a book titled The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon. Looking out at the international situation at the tail end of the Cold War, Jervis argued that war between nuclear powers was now unthinkable. Within the context of that conflict, he was correct. Both the US and the USSR, despite their separate battalions of warhawks and substantial doses

• 2:31:15Robert Evans?

  of paranoia, avoided stepping over the nuclear brink. The men who ran both nations clearly considered nuclear war unthinkable. In the decades since the Cold War's end, the nations of the world have continued to avoid nuking us all into Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But there is an unfortunate amount of evidence that some of the people in charge of the great powers of our time no longer find deploying a nuke to be unthinkable, even against other nuclear powers. The clearest example of this comes from the Russian Federation and its activities in Ukraine. Back in January, The Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported on building support in the Kremlin for the battlefield use of a tactical nuclear

• 2:31:55Robert Evans?

  weapon. This was thought to most likely occur over Crimea. A 2022 US intel assessment independently estimated 50% odds that Putin would order a nuclear strike if the defenses around Crimea began to fail. Russian nuclear doctrine today supports the use of atomic weapons against an existential threat, and as Kieran Monks writes in a piece for iNews, "Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Rybikov said this morning this meant encroachments on Russia or its territorial integrity by aggressors, including those who may possess such weapons, could prompt us to use these weapons in the worst-case scenario. The loss of Crimea, which Putin calls an inseparable part of Russia, could technically reach that threshold,"

• 2:32:37Robert Evans?

  said Dr. Pavel Podvict, a senior researcher and specialist on Russia's nuclear forces at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Now, my understanding of the situation in Ukraine is that Crimea is not under imminent danger of being retaken by Ukrainian forces, somewhat unfortunately. However, the vagueness of Russia's nuclear line being an existential threat means that they might well decide one day that diesel refining facilities count, given the centrality of oil exports to their economy. Sergey Karagunov, head of a defense industry think tank in Moscow and former advisor to Putin, is among Russia's largest nuclear hawks. He's recently argued for limited nuclear strikes on Ukraine's European allies. I bring this up not because that's a scenario

• 2:33:19Robert Evans?

  I'm discussing today. If Russia nuked a NATO country, that would be a de facto strike on a nuclear power and would likely end up being much worse than my nuclear January 6th theory. I bring this up because comments like this from Russia have contributed to an unfortunate trend in US defense circles: serious discussion about the need for expanded low-yield tactical nuclear options. And folks, remember, when we're saying low-yield nuclear weapons, we're still often talking about stuff at least on par with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, if not still considerably more powerful. Those count as low-yield weapons today. For most of our lifetimes, the US has focused its nuclear research and buildup on what we might call "big civilization-ending doomsday nukes." I'm using a little hyperbole there,

• 2:34:03Robert Evans?

  but not much. Most of our standing nuclear weapons are strategic in nature. That means they're very big, and they're meant to deter an enemy from launching a full-scale nuclear attack on us. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates that about 94% of all actively-deployed US warheads are long-range strategic weapons. As Gabriel Hunrada noted in an article for Asia Times, "This makes tactical nukes a 'small, specialized component of overall US nuclear posture.'" You and I might consider that a good thing, because any nuke small enough to use safely is likelier to get used. However, when defense planners hear "the US has very few tactical nukes alongside news articles about Russia threatening to

• 2:34:43Robert Evans?

  use small tactical nukes," a funny thing happens. They begin to worry about a gap between our capability and that of an adversary. Fears of that gap have been further exacerbated by recent significant modernization of China's nuclear arsenal. In the last few years, the Chinese military has massively increased the quality of their nuclear weapons and the related equipment, the delivery devices and such. I'm not going to go into a nerdy, fear-mongery deep dive about the exact capabilities of these new tools. That doesn't really matter today. What does matter is that in August of 2026, US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby initiated a policy review of the nation's nuclear posture. The stated

• 2:35:24Robert Evans?

  goal of this review is, per coverage by Breaking Defense, "focused on providing more 'options' for the White House." Undersecretary Colby expressed the need for what he called "rational nuclear options" to deal with the changing threats from China and Russia. And, as Hunrada wrote in his article, "The policy review comes amid longstanding US DOD concerns over foreign deployments in low-yield warheads, which risk leaving the US without proportional nonstrategic responses. An expansion in the number of, and potentially the in-theater deployment of, low-yield nuclear weapons does not guarantee their use. Low-yield nukes have been deployed to hot zones or potential hot zones before, albeit decades ago during the height of the Cold War. But I have trouble looking at this current administration

• 2:36:08Robert Evans?

  in the US and so much of the bombastic, kill-obsessed rhetoric that comes out of the Department of War these days, and believing that the terms "low-yield" and "tactical" won't be interpreted as "safe to use." In fact, there's a real chance that just by accepting the need for more of these weapons and deploying some near-conflict regions, we'll start a countdown whereby some of our current defense thinkers convince themselves there's a ticking clock, and they need to find a target for a low-yield nuclear strike to prove we've got the guts to use this thing. If that sounds far-fetched, I want you to think back to April of 2017, when the US conducted an airstrike in Afghanistan using the largest non-nuclear weapon we've got: the Moab. There were some logical reasons for such a strike. ISIS fighters were using

• 2:36:52Robert Evans?

  a tunnel network, and the Moab is meant to penetrate and take out such underground targets. That said, there's no evidence this facility or the 36-ish ISIS fighters killed in the blast represented a threat to US interests in the region necessitating such a dramatic response. Many pundits suspected the real reason we dropped this big bomb had more to do with Trump's campaign promise to bomb the shit out of ISIS. Faisal Purves, an analyst for the military intelligence forum Stratfor, told vice's suspicions, "When you drop a bomb that weighs 21,000 pounds, that's so big. I think a part of it, or some part of it, is the messaging and the symbolic significance that the US is sending out to countries such as Russia, that we are the premier military in the world. We are the biggest power. We have the tools and weapons to show you that this is the case."

• 2:37:38Robert Evans?

  Well, the same man who dropped that bomb is back in power now. We are fighting a losing war with Iran that has endangered his power. Back in April of 2026, President Trump threatened Iran by saying, "A whole civilization will die tonight if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened." More recently, he's mused that Iran might take out Los Angeles or San Diego with a nuclear weapon someday, which he viewed as a small price to pay for the permission that would give the US to annihilate Iran in return. We'll keep talking about this, but first, here's some ads.

• 2:38:21Robert Evans?

  We're back.

• 2:38:23Robert Evans?

  If more low-yield nuclear weapons are built and deployed, they will become, in startlingly short time, just another option on the menu for military planners. We might expect decades-standing traditions against using such weapons to count for something, but as you're aware, Pete Hegseth has purged a huge number of veteran leaders from the Department of Defense. Similar brain drains have occurred across all of our primary national security institutions. There are fewer, cooler heads to prevail. Hegseth has also made lethality and kill count into our military's primary measure of operational success. More to my point today, the entire Trump administration runs on social media. Truth Social, Twitter, and TikTok aren't just organs the regime uses to disseminate

• 2:39:05Robert Evans?

  propaganda, they are where Donald Trump and his advisers go for information and to take the pulse of the nation. Let's consider one possible chain of events. Some months from now, Trump orders a tactical nuke deployed with our forces attacking Iran. The plan isn't to use it, but to threaten the enemy and generate a groundswell of rage among Trump's domestic enemies, which is always something he thinks about. Soon after the weapon arrives, Iranian forces score a major hit. Maybe one of their ballistic missiles strikes and damages a naval vessel, killing soldiers. Maybe they hit a base and cause an unprecedented loss of lives and materiel. Such a strike is not impossible. It could happen tomorrow, and it would not need to debilitate or cripple our military forces long term to provoke Donald Trump into a nuclear response.

• 2:39:49Robert Evans?

  All it would need to do is embarrass him. As footage spreads of fire raging atop an aircraft carrier, or a burning frigate listing at sea, or wounded and dying US soldiers near a base, Trump's followers begin howling for blood on social media. One cry sounds out louder than all the others: "Nuke the bastards." Trump might. Such a strike would be unlikely to cause an immediate apocalyptic cascade into nuclear war. There would be international outrage, but not outright retaliation. Even so, in a stroke, Trump would have dissolved any remaining stigma against the use of nuclear weapons in war. This would make Russia much likelier to use a tactical nuke in Ukraine.

• 2:40:31Robert Evans?

  It might change Chinese calculations, RE Taiwan, but what it would inarguably do is make nuclear weapons a normal, conceivable, usable tool of conventional war. I don't know how long it would take the breaking of that taboo to generate a larger nuclear war, but I believe after this point, such a future would become almost inevitable. It is still quite possible, even likelier, that Russia would be the first nation-state to break the taboo and use a tactical nuke for the reasons I've just outlined. This might lead to a similar outcome worldwide, although I'm less certain of that Russia is considered an international pariah to many in ways that the United States still isn't quite. That said, I have no doubt that the ultimate chain of events leading to such a deployment

• 2:41:14Robert Evans?

  would be just as stupid as they would be in the United States. China feels less likely to be the direct cause of such a deployment. Their nuclear policy originated from Mao Zedong. He did not love nuclear weapons, calling them "a paper tiger" and talking shit on the US and the USSR for building so many of the damn things. When China became a nuclear state in 1964, Mao stated the only use for "this thing," his term for the bomb, was to deter other nuclear-armed countries. As a result, China has always had an official "no first use" policy with their nuclear arsenal. This differs from the US and Russia, who operate by "launch on warn." In other words, if we think you're going to nuke us, we will nuke you. China's official policy is "minimum deterrence."

• 2:41:59Robert Evans?

  That's generally translated to mean, "we keep our arsenal at the minimum level necessary to deter our adversaries." However, in an article on the evolution of China's nuclear posture, the website DEFCON Warning System notes: "This declaratory posture also embodies China's strategic ambiguity. For one, 'minimum deterrence' remains undefined. Chinese officials have never quantified what a minimum nuclear capability means in practice. Is it a few dozen warheads able to strike back, a few hundred? As China's arsenal grows, the goalposts appear to shift. Similarly, what constitutes an arms race is left vague. Beijing's current buildup, by far its largest and fastest ever, ostensibly does not violate its pledge to avoid arms racing, at least in its own view.

• 2:42:41Robert Evans?

  Crucially, China's nuclear doctrine has begun to stress achieving strategic counterbalance with other powers. Though not officially defined, this phrase suggests Beijing sees its nuclear forces as vital to shaping the global power equilibrium. It implies a more assertive role for nukes, not merely to deter an attack on China, but to offset the overall military might of rivals, particularly the United States. This nuanced shift in language contributes to uncertainty. Does counterbalance mean China seeks nuclear parity with the US, or simply a survivable second strike? The lack of clarity keeps observers guessing."

• 2:43:15Robert Evans?

  Now, I know I bring any of this up with the interest of fear-mongering over China, but because the questions and ambiguities outlined in that segment are a real cause for concern to the defense analysts who study China, not just for the US government, but over in New Delhi. The Indian state is locked in a continuous, low-level border conflict with China, alongside their border conflict with Pakistan, also a nuclear-armed state. Both China and India have been extremely careful to avoid bringing nuclear threats to the table, but that only underlines how much leaders in both nations fear the possibility. And over on their border with Pakistan, nuclear threats have come up recently. 2025 saw a large skirmish between India and Pakistan that included cross-border aerial raids.

• 2:43:58Robert Evans?

  After several days of this, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary issued a statement on May 28. "We will not hesitate to use any weapon in our arsenal to defend our territorial integrity." This was interpreted as a nuclear threat and caused a massive international ruckus, which prompted a spokesman for Pakistan's government to clarify that that was not the intent. We all lucked out that the May 2025 conflict did not occur at the same time as another uptick in hostility between Beijing and New Delhi, but it's easy to imagine something like that might occur. In the event of such a conflict, Pakistan would rely heavily on their naval forces, armed with nuclear weapons, to complete the third leg of their nuclear triad. Having a "nuclear triad," which means having separate land, sea, and air-based weapon

• 2:44:42Robert Evans?

  systems that can deploy nuclear weapons, is considered the gold standard for nuclear deterrence. Most nations that have one fulfill the third leg of the triad with nuclear-armed attack submarines. The most advanced of these are, inarguably, the deadliest weapon systems ever devised by man. Pakistan is generally considered to be the nuclear power with the least reliable protections for their arsenal. These have long inspired fear that Pakistan might lose control of a weapon, or that rogue elements of their security services might give one to a terrorist group. That's not my concern here. One of my sources for these episodes was an article in the Defense and Security Analysis Journal. Its authors point out that in recent years, Pakistan has done a decent job of sealing some of the former security holes in their nuclear weapons systems.

• 2:45:27Robert Evans?

  However, as one researcher noted in 2014, "parts of Pakistan's nuclear management system, like its command element, have been reasonably transparent. Other parts, like the physical security and surety, human reliability, elements have been at best translucent. In many areas, there were only bald assertions that programs and methods have been put into place, with very few details provided." One of the parts of their management system we know least about is the rules under which shipboard nuclear weapons operate. In theory, any nuclear weapons used by Pakistani forces would have to be authorized by a special ten-man committee. It's believed, but not known, that some systems require both a civilian and military key to be provided in order for the weapons to become operable.

• 2:46:10Robert Evans?

  This is because Pakistan's military has a long history of outright running the shop. Today, civilian leadership is meant to have much more oversight. One example of this is the fact that all air- and land-based nuclear weapons in Pakistan are stored separate from their delivery systems. This makes them harder to steal and makes it more complex for, say, rogue military leaders to get a hold of a piece of the arsenal. But we already know that Pakistan's naval nukes do not work exactly the same way. Per that journal article, quote, "Little information is available for the naval leg of Pakistan's deterrent, currently based on the Babur-3 submarine-launched cruise missile. First test fired in 2017, and described by Pakistan's inter-services public relations as a 'second-strike capability' because of its naval requirements, the Babur-3 is assumed

• 2:46:54Robert Evans?

  to be pre-made and contained within a vertical launch system or similar canisterized device." Procedures meant to inhibit the use of nuclear weapons outside authorized uses are called "negative controls." We do not know what negative controls Pakistan has for their naval weapons. It is entirely possible the military remains in total control here, and justifies that as necessary for guaranteeing their ability to launch retaliatory strikes against India. I want you to think right now about a fun new development in technology that we've all witnessed: the growth of generative AI tools that can convincingly mimic both human posters on social media and create believable fake videos, including fake news videos.

• 2:47:37Robert Evans?

  These and similar tools make it possible to flood any region with targeted disinformation and make it seem legitimate, at least for a short span of time. Earlier this year, in March of 2026, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a theoretical article by Herbert Lin. He's a Stanford fellow and expert on cyber warfare operations, who in 2016 worked for the Obama administration. Back in the 1980s, he was a staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee, so he's a guy with some knowledge of this area. The article he put together envisioned several scenarios in which AI tools might help cause or exacerbate a nuclear conflict. None of his scenarios involved anything like Skynet. The dangers he foresees from AI come not from its intelligence so much as its ability

• 2:48:20Robert Evans?

  to automate the production of targeted bullshit and influence the decisions of political leaders. And speaking of targeted bullshit, here's some ads.

• 2:48:41Robert Evans?

  We're back, and I was talking about an article for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, written by Herbert Lin. One of his scenarios envisioned a blockade of Taiwan in which the Chinese military deployed an army of AI chatbots to lie about military maneuvers in order to create the impression of high military readiness to deter US intervention. I don't consider this specific scenario very likely, but I do think he's on to something with passages like this. The accounts adopt personas of professionals or students isolated by the crisis and connect with foreigners through the full suite of channels described above. These spaces attract not only their regular users, but also journalists, analysts, and even mid-level Pentagon staffers looking for unfiltered intelligence. In one instance, a bot mimicking a 28-year-old engineer named Li Wei claims, "I saw convoys

• 2:49:26Robert Evans?

  with TELs heading east, DF-26s probably," referring to mobile transporter or rector launchers used to launch ballistic missiles and land-based dual-capable DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, before adding, "Sirens everywhere, evacuation's starting." Then screenshots start flooding the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, amplified by coordinated sock puppets. The bots adapt seamlessly to queries, cross-referencing real-time US open-source chatter for added plausibility. A user of Tinder, a dating app in Washington DC matched with Wang Mei, a fabricated nurse in Zimen, who relays her alleged eyewitness panic about explosions near the port and prepping of hypersonic weapons, which alliance with the partial satellite imagery glitches

• 2:50:07Robert Evans?

  caused by Chinese jamming, and begins to see doubt in US intelligence assessments. State media subtly echoes these stories, framing them as grassroots outrage at US provocation. In the United States, some of this material migrates into expert discourse. Open-source intelligence analysts, journalists, and think-tank experts incorporate screenshots and chat logs into maps, timelines, and situation reports, and present them on cable news and in policy briefs as independent confirmations of missile movements. Congressional staffers and allied governments cite these products in their own assessments, generating a feedback loop in which fabricated chats appear as triangulated multi-source evidence. I think the only weakness of Lin's article is his focus on scenarios that lead to mass

• 2:50:48Robert Evans?

  nuclear exchange, and in his insistence on considering nation-states as the only relevant actors in most of these escalation cycles. But the basic process he outlined there, a bad actor flooding regional social media with disinformation designed to look like OSINT that suggests an imminent attack, that's entirely possible, and you wouldn't need a nation-state-level actor to pull it off. Let's say you have a well-funded, non-state group of ideological hardliners. Let's imagine them as partisans of India or Pakistan, right? You could also imagine they're just trolls, eager to add confusion for the lols. Or more insidiously, you could imagine them as motivated to pull off a massive score gambling on world events by betting on a limited nuclear attack and then making one happen.

• 2:51:33Robert Evans?

  Returning to our hypothetical border conflict between India and Pakistan, let's imagine another outbreak of actual shooting, like May of 2025. Imagine whichever of those hypothetical non-state groups you like to pick floods the region with reports of Indian nuclear forces mobilizing or even weapons inbound. This would occur alongside the already nightmarish disruption of communication and command and control that will occur during such times of conflict. Is it so crazy to imagine that one of those Pakistani ships chooses to fire its payload? There's a very good reason why most nuclear-armed nations do not give military leaders direct control over how and when to fire these weapons. We don't know how Pakistan governs the use of their naval nukes, not really, and that

• 2:52:18Robert Evans?

  means we cannot discount such a possibility. The kind of decisions made in nuclear war planning tend to come with a timer of less than a half hour. New weapon systems, like hypersonic missiles, have shortened that even further. This means any decision about when to deploy nuclear weapons is likely going to be made on a very short timeframe by frightened people. Another equally terrifying vision of that scenario could lead China, Pakistan, and India to each conclude, based on a mix of real movements by neighboring forces and a flood of AI disinformation, to activate and position their nuclear arsenals just in case. Once you have nuclear weapons assembled, deployed, and aimed, the odds rise exponentially that something might go wrong, even if no one chooses to fire them.

• 2:53:03Robert Evans?

  And the same sort of concerted digital disinformation attack executed by a state or non-state actor could happen today, during literally any tense international situation with a potential for nuclear escalation. As I said, my interest here is not in an apocalypse narrative, but in the possibility of a limited nuclear fuck-up. Let me propose another that might occur in this situation. In the US, all nuclear weapons are built to be what's called "one-point safe." This means the weapon has a probability of less than 1 in a million of causing a nuclear detonation if the weapon explodes unintentionally. We have had nuclear weapons destroyed in plane crashes, and so far, they have never

• 2:53:43Robert Evans?

  detonated in a proper nuclear explosion on accident because they're one-point safe. Other nations do not necessarily abide by the same safety rules in their nuclear weapons, and we simply do not know if Pakistan's nukes are safe in the same way. Imagine then, as the border conflict heats up, Pakistan's military assembles their arsenal and begins flying it in theater. A plane crashes or gets shot down, and the weapon inside detonates in a proper nuclear fireball. Every one of my nuclear fuck-up scenarios relies on terrible decision-making. Clear-thinking civilian and military leaders do not take the kind of risks that would lead to a nuclear January 6th.

• 2:54:24Robert Evans?

  Alas, clear-thinking civilian and military leaders are thin on the ground these days, especially where I live. As I noted earlier, the decision-makers in any of these situations, regardless of national identity, might have only minutes to make their decisions. They'll be frightened and probably sleep-deprived. And what do frightened, sleep-deprived people turn to these days when they need to get work done? That's right, AI. In a CNN article from earlier this year, Katie Lilis and Zachary Cohen write, "Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics, and supply chains."

• 2:55:06Robert Evans?

  Just a few months ago, back in the spring of 2026, one member of the intel community, an analyst, asked one of these chatbots to analyze intelligence around a Chinese vessel sailing to the Middle East. The bot was likely an internal tool, but as one senior US official told CNN, "The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick." Said bot did what bots do best: it mixed a bunch of different sources together to create a product for its user. Its analysis, based on a mix of OSINT and secret intel, concluded that the Chinese ship was carrying components used in the production of nuclear weaponry. The analyst asked his AI tool to take its finding and produce an intelligence report, which was sent up the chain of command. Since the vessel was headed in the general direction of Iran, and since China does sell

• 2:55:51Robert Evans?

  conventional weapons to Iran, this sparked a panic. Per that CNN article, "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air," one of these sources and another source familiar with the incident said. There was only one issue: the AI chatbot that analyst used had hallucinated. Every piece of that report was wrong. China was not sending nuclear weapons equipment to Iran or anywhere else, because of fucking course they weren't! But we came calamitously close to attacking a Chinese ship with military force due to that hallucination. In January, Pete Hegseth gave a speech outlining our Department of Defense's new AI strategy.

• 2:56:35Robert Evans?

  He insisted, "We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI." All that says to me is that these tools will only become more critical to the production of intelligence products than ever before, and we know they'll continue to hallucinate, too. This change isn't just happening in the United States, it's occurring in governments and militaries all across the world, and it's happening at the same time as some nuclear-armed nations seek to expand their low-yield stockpiles. Simultaneously, the US war against Iran and the ongoing war in Ukraine have made it clear to every nation-state actor that the only real guarantee of national sovereignty is a nuclear arsenal. More nations will work to acquire nukes in the near future.

• 2:57:18Robert Evans?

  This means more nuclear weapons and more conflicts where they might get used, alongside an even wider proliferation of tools like the ones I just described. I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here, because again, that's not really the immediate worry. The worry is that a mix of increasing acceptance that it's okay to use small nukes, and increasing reliance on these AI tools, alongside the conflicts that we have always had between nations, will lead to a situation in which a very limited nuclear fuck-up not only is disastrous to people on the ground near wherever it occurs, but changes the very nature and all of the decision-making calculus in the world that we live in. I hope it doesn't happen, but it's what I'm thinking about these days. That's everything for today. We'll be back tomorrow.

• 2:58:11Speaker 01

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• 2:58:41Speaker 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. No child should ever experience that.

• 2:59:25Speaker 03

  And we were babies.

• 2:59:27Speaker 00

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

• 2:59:33Speaker 04

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

• 2:59:39Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him.

• 3:00:10Speaker 04

  Cyber stalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation.

• 3:00:15Speaker 03

  And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. Yes, department! It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:00:46Robert Evans?

  This is Daryl Bell.

• 3:00:47Speaker 05

  And I'm Kadim Harson.

• 3:00:49Robert Evans?

  And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lives and so many others. A Different World.

• 3:01:04Speaker 05

  We're sharing never-before-heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives.

• 3:01:11Robert Evans?

  We're also discussing the arts world and pop culture headlines with plenty of laughs along the way.

• 3:01:17Speaker 05

  We did a movie called School Days. And me being... A trained actor.

• 3:01:21Robert Evans?

  You got, you get the first shot. So I took the trained actor. Go ahead.

• 3:01:24Speaker 05

  And you being the dude that said, "Hey, Spike, on the street, you saw him coming out of the bathroom or something?" And say, "Hey, Spike, put me in that movie."

• 3:01:32Robert Evans?

  Coming out of the bathroom.

• 3:01:33Speaker 05

  I might have made that up. So don't miss the start of something great.

• 3:01:36Robert Evans?

  Listen to A Different Worldview with Daryl and Kadim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:01:49Speaker 05

  Vampires, minotaurs, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, A Romance Podcast. So join me, Sajana Baskar, and my co-host Tyler McCull as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the Villain Edit author, Rosie Dannen, joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, sentient object romance expert, Racy Delgado, takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assign Tyler some homework to read Siem Nescosta's Morning Glory: Milking Farm. And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert,

• 3:02:33Speaker 05

  Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales, because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, A Romance Podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:02:53Robert Evans?

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and Sophie Lichterman. Not allegedly. Yeah, no, that's definitely Sophie. But you can't prove it to me.

• 3:03:11Speaker 03

  I can prove it's you.

• 3:03:13Robert Evans?

  Sophie. You have no idea where I am, Sophie, or what I'm doing.

• 3:03:18Speaker 03

  I know exactly where you are, and I know exactly what you're doing.

• 3:03:22Robert Evans?

  This is the first episode where we're testing AI Robert. Oh, no. We're not testing, there's no AI Robert. Don't yell at me on Blue Sky. It is shit. No, you'll know there's no AI Robert because they would have trained an AI Robert on, like, this subreddit and all of the different jokes that I can no longer do because people have taken me too seriously. Like, if I start talking about a child hunting island, like, you'll know it's the AI me. It'll pull, like, a bagel-throwing reference from, like, nine years ago.

• 3:03:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, all of a sudden, you start talking about Doritos like you did 10 years ago.

• 3:04:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, talking about Doritos like 10 years ago, or talking about the Jamie Lachas murder thing, which I don't do anymore because now there's a real serial killer in the area that people were making comments about. And being like, "Was it Jamie?" I'm like, "Guys, there's really people dead." We don't keep the bit up at this point.

• 3:04:14Speaker 03

  All right, Gary.

• 3:04:16Robert Evans?

  This episode, we're covering the week of October 7th to October 14th. And we're actually going to jump straight to our first main story. Last Thursday afternoon, October 8th, ICE shot a 28-year-old man named Oscar Belgal in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, which is physically located in the Bronx, but technically in the borough of Manhattan. Oscar was in a car with his five-year-old son. Per video released by the NYPD, around 4:00 PM, just in the middle of the day, masked, plainclothes agents, some wearing yellow construction vests, ran up to a parked car with guns already drawn.

• 3:04:59Robert Evans?

  The driver, Oscar, started backing away, and then an agent began hitting the car windows with the butt of his gun. Oscar then pulls into the street and drives off screen as agents point their guns at the windshield. The actual shooting itself is not captured on this video, but I'll play it here for us to reference. This is security camera footage.

• 3:05:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the things that was, like, noticeably unsettling besides all of it was the fact that, like, these guys were dressed like crossing guards?

• 3:05:34Robert Evans?

  Like, construction workers, crossing guards.

• 3:05:36Speaker 03

  They had, like, on normal clothes and then just like a...

• 3:05:39Robert Evans?

  High-vis vest.

• 3:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, you know, if somebody in a high-vis vest and a machine gun comes towards me, that's scary.

• 3:05:49Robert Evans?

  They look like, like, especially the guy with the long gun, he looks like a mass shooter. They look like fucking mass shooters. Like, I would not assume those were police officers, and I might take steps to defend myself in that situation because they just look like fucking mass shooters.

• 3:06:02Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 3:06:03Robert Evans?

  Mayor Zora Mamdani said, quote, "There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents. School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children," unquote. So according to the NYPD, at least one agent fired seven shots. We do not have footage of the actual shooting. As I said, Oscar's five-year-old son was in the backseat of the car. Now, thank God, he is physically unharmed, but of course, he still had to watch masked men with guns run up, shoot his dad in the neck, and drag his body away. Jesus Christ. DHS Secretary Mullen said that agents were not aware a kid was in the car.

• 3:06:46Robert Evans?

  Uh-huh, because they didn't care, or check.

• 3:06:50Speaker 03

  Shoot first, ask questions later.

• 3:06:52Robert Evans?

  The child's mother told Governor Hochul that her son is traumatized and won't talk. Quote, "The child is not speaking."

• 3:07:01Speaker 03

  That's terrible.

• 3:07:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, sure, of course, Jesus.

• 3:07:06Speaker 03

  That's horrible, you guys.

• 3:07:07Robert Evans?

  I mean, I can't really think of anything worse that could happen to a child than to watch their parent shot in the neck at random when, like, in a normally safe situation like that? Jesus Christ. ICE has still not released body cam footage of the shooting. DHS has said that they were conducting a, quote, "targeted enforcement operation", and that Oscar, quote, "weaponized his vehicle." This is the thing they always say when something like this happens.

• 3:07:36Speaker 03

  Spoiler-plate-ass statement.

• 3:07:38Robert Evans?

  DHS also claimed that after ICE shot and arrested Oscar, agents, quote, "rendered first aid and then took him to the hospital." This is a lie. This, this did not happen. This is a, this is a plain, a plain-faced lie from DHS. Body camera footage released by NYPD from when they first got to the scene, when the cops got to the scene, show Oscar just sitting in the street, bleeding out, with his hands handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by ICE agents who are just standing in a circle around him, offering no assistance. Yeah, and they do this all the fucking time when they shoot someone. They just like stand there and handcuff them. The NYPD rushes over in this footage, picks up and carries Oscar, who now appears

• 3:08:19Robert Evans?

  to be going unconscious. They take Oscar into a squad car, they render aid, put pressure on the wound, and drive him to the hospital down the street. Do you know how hard it is to have less concern for human life than the New York Police Department? My god. Like, that's astonishing. That's, that's, that takes some work. Jesus Christ. We're reaching average Los Angeles Sheriff's Deputy levels of empathy here. Like, it's shocking. Yeah. It's like, it's like the CPD detectives they brought in to do torture after 9/11, like, that kind of shit. We don't really know, like, what would have happened if NYPD did not get to the scene as quick as they did. Because, I mean, in, in, in the body camera footage of them,

• 3:09:00Robert Evans?

  of them carrying Oscar, like, his, his body is, is fully limp. Like, he is, he's, he's out of it. He looks like he's been shot in the neck. Yeah. No, NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation prior to this point, prior to the shooting. Quite frankly, this kind of shit isn't what they do. They do other bad things, but they don't just, like, shoot and, like, charge people's cars with guns when they're, like, driving away from school with their, like, that's just, that's, this is so much of an escalation above, like, our normal police bullshit, is what I'm saying. DHS has tried to justify their targeting of Oscar, calling him a, quote, "criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic." Great.

• 3:09:39Robert Evans?

  And pointed to prior arrests and a criminal conviction for grand larceny, and claim Oscar's, quote, "associated with a gang." That's the word they keep using. Associated or association. They won't, they won't even say he's like a member. They'll say he's associated with the gang. Yeah. I'll play a short clip here from the mayor's press conference later that evening, just down the street from the site of the shooting. There is no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a five-year-old in the car. There is no explanation. We are standing here, so close to the site of where this actually took place, and look at how many people live

• 3:10:24Robert Evans?

  right here. This is a residential neighborhood. We are right here by a subway. And the pretext of ICE is, in their words, "to keep this country safe." How is it keeping anyone safe to have, as you just heard from the police commissioner, individuals wearing construction vests, in masks, with long guns? Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents, or if they are simply attacking someone on the street. And when it comes to ICE, it begs the question, what's the difference? There is no explanation for this. After the shooting, soon-to-be DSA Congresswoman Daria Liza Avila Xavier quickly went up to the Bronx and saw that federal agents were going door-to-door, quote-unquote,

• 3:11:06Robert Evans?

  "collecting evidence," and trying to question residents about the shooting, writing down people's names and numbers. So, Daria Liza followed behind these HSI agents, informing residents that they did not need to speak to or answer questions from these federal agents. Meanwhile, soon-to-be former Congressman Adriano Espaillat and Oscar's own family weren't allowed to see Oscar at the hospital. Jesus. Now, outside the hospital where Oscar is being treated, a few hundred New Yorkers gathered to protest ICE and the shooting of one of their neighbors. Earlier in the evening, ICE vehicles were driving through protesters, but pretty quickly NYPD arrived to do crowd

• 3:11:47Robert Evans?

  control and clear the street for vehicles to enter and exit the hospital. This led to violent shoving matches over metal fence barricades that NYPD was trying to set up around the street. Daria Liza moved to this protest, and she was trying to de-escalate conflict, but NYPD got very aggressive, and Daria Liza was shoved to the ground by a community affairs officer, the NYPD blue shirts, the ones that are, you know, so supposed to, like, like, de-escalate conflict at protests. Yeah, like, average example of community affairs, is shoving congressperson to the ground. Now, I arrived at the hospital just after this, the first big clash over police

• 3:12:27Robert Evans?

  barricades, during which NYPD arrested five protesters. After that, things seemed to settle down for a little bit. The crowd got smaller, and about, like, a little over an hour later, just before 11:00 PM, police rapidly cleared the street again, pushing protesters onto the sidewalk as a small caravan of feds departed the hospital at dangerously high speeds. They were zooming by. We have no right to be here! This is our life!

• 3:13:04Robert Evans?

  ICE just, uh, pulled away. The crowd chased them a little bit. It's 10:40 PM. We've got a group of NYPD now leaving the area, and the crowd is falling behind, yelling at them as well. Again, NYPD splitting off into two, two directions. Now, Oscar was in one of these vehicles, leaving the hospital. After the feds left the hospital, the crowd continued to dwindle to about 40 people, who then marched up over the bridge to protest in front of Zoran's press conference. At the press conference, Zoran said that, "For the past two hours, he had been on the phone negotiating with

• 3:13:49Robert Evans?

  President Trump and Secretary Mullen for Oscar's release," but that those negotiations were unsuccessful. I think it is worth noting here that, earlier this year, Trump did release someone from ICE custody, following a request by Mayor Mamdani. With the cries of protesters heard in the background, the mayor reiterated calls for ICE to be abolished, saying, quote, "ICE is rotten to its core, operates with impunity, so is chaos and terror across our country, and they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could have ever claimed to save." I stand here not just as the mayor of our city, but as someone who is proud to

• 3:14:29Robert Evans?

  be an immigrant in our city. And I know that these kinds of raids, this kind of terrorizing of this city, leaves the 3 million immigrants of this city asking if they are safe here, if they belong here, if this too can be their home here. We will not normalize ICE's viciousness. We will not accept its cruelty. We know, and I have said this directly, whether to the president or to the public, ICE undermines public safety. It makes us less safe. New York City will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers, and we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward, time and again. This is

• 3:15:13Robert Evans?

  an agency that must be abolished. Commissioner Jessica Tisch then gave some more details about the shooting, some of which I've already echoed, but also read off Oscar's NYPD rap sheet. Average Commissioner Tisch move. Including two prior arrests, one for robbery, which he pleaded guilty to and received probation, and another for drug possession. When Zoran got the microphone back, he again undermined ICE's legitimacy, and said that, while negotiating with the president and Secretary Mullen, he requested ICE agents leave the scene entirely, and demanded that ICE stop its enforcement actions in the city. There is no justification for what we have seen today, and we know that what we

• 3:15:56Robert Evans?

  have seen today is but a microcosm of what ICE does on a daily basis across this country. How can that be how we describe public safety? It can't be. And I've shared that with the president, I've shared that with the secretary. This city wants ICE out. We want ICE out of our city, ICE out of our schools, ICE out of our hospitals, ICE out of our streets, ICE away from our kids. We want that because we want to keep the city safe. We do not need them to do so. All they do is terrorize the city. Now, the people chanting outside the press conference weren't just protesting ICE, but also the NYPD and Zoran himself, with chants of, quote, "Mamdani is complicit."

• 3:16:39Robert Evans?

  Most of the ire directed at Mayor Mamdani was due to NYPD facilitating ICE ICE's exit by clearing protesters in front of the hospital off the street before the agents sped off. After leaving the hospital, DHS moved Oscar to New Jersey and then back to New York, where he's currently in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center. On Monday, Oscar's lawyers released a statement, quote, "Mr. Belgal is living through an unimaginable nightmare. While he is currently in solitary confinement, a bullet remains lodged in his neck. The left side of his face is numb, and he can barely hear out of his left ear. Fuck. Doctors have told him he urgently needs surgery."

• 3:17:24Speaker 03

  Awful.

• 3:17:26Robert Evans?

  A federal judge has also temporarily blocked Oscar's deportation. The day after the shooting, Dari Lisa called for NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to step down in a statement, quote, "Last night, the NYPD and Commissioner Tisch violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies and fueled the Trump administration's attempts to demonize our communities. The NYPD's Strategic Response Group, or the SRG, must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down." New York City DSA also released a statement, of which I'll quote a small portion of, "ICE's devastating shooting of a New Yorker in front of his child cannot stand. Neither can the NYPD's attack on New Yorkers who stood up for their neighbors.

• 3:18:11Robert Evans?

  ICE is a terrorist agency that must be expelled from New York City and abolished. Jessica Tisch must get ICE out of New York and end NYPD complicity with these terrorists. If the Commissioner can't put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired." Unquote. Now, initial reports claim that SRG, the Strategic Response Group, was deployed to handle this protest at the hospital. And this is notable because Zoran ran on disbanding the SRG. And right now, any SRG deployment must get approval from City Hall, according to reporting from Politico. So the idea that Mumdani personally sent the SRG to crack skulls of anti-ICE protesters

• 3:18:53Robert Evans?

  fueled a lot of the anger coming from protesters that night. The SRG, or the Strategic Response Group, is a specialized unit within the NYPD, which focuses on counterterrorism, but also policing protests. They're sort of the city's de facto riot cops. The unit has been long criticized for violently suppressing political protest. The SRG did not respond to that protest, though. Instead, NYPD sent officers from Community Affairs, as mentioned, and the Transit Bureau's, quote, "anti-terrorism unit," which doesn't need City Hall's direct sign-off.

• 3:19:34Robert Evans?

  So while Zoran did not personally send the SRG to crack down on this protest, the violence from NYPD demonstrates that this issue is bigger than just one specific unit. But there is this larger question of, like, crowd control at these protests, and I think this question demonstrates the diverging interests on the part of protesters and City Hall. Some protesters want no NYPD crowd control. People want to directly fight ICE, and they're willing to put their body on the line. Yeah. Even if that means they might get hurt. As we've seen in other cities, physical confrontations against ICE could result in DHS sending more

• 3:20:15Robert Evans?

  troops to New York, possibly triggering a political crisis, which some on the left also desire. There is a sort of accelerationist bent towards some of these protests. They kind of want this political crisis, and they want to directly fight and oppose ICE. On the other hand, for someone in Zoran's position, there's a desire to prevent ICE agents from hurting more people, whether by running people over or shooting more New Yorkers. I think all of these questions definitely exist in the shadow of Minneapolis. And furthermore, the mayor wants to limit the amount of DHS and ICE agents deployed to the city. So to that end, NYPD may end up doing some level of crowd control to limit protesters' interactions with ICE to avoid provoking a larger deployment.

• 3:20:58Robert Evans?

  So even if protesters and Zoran have similar ultimate goals vis a vis ICE, their respective positions lead them to contradictory impulses. Zoran has said that he will not justify the use of force against protesters on Thursday night and told MSNBC he'll be conducting a review of the entire 24-hour period, quote, "from the ICE shooting to the NYPD response to the incident and the ensuing protests, to ICE's use of a privately-owned parking lot as a staging location, to every tool that we have at our disposal to keep New Yorkers safe." Unquote. And on one of those last parts, AOC has also mentioned this, that ICE has been using

• 3:21:39Robert Evans?

  the rooftop parking lot of a Target in the Bronx to stage before going out to do arrests. And that's something that electeds are looking to crack down on if they can. But Zoran has said that there are no plans to replace Commissioner Tisch, pointing to her history of uprooting NYPD corruption and the later Adams administration and the record-low number of murders, shootings, and shooting victims. But Zoran has reiterated multiple times this week his intention to disband the SRG and said he will provide an update on that timeline in the coming months. Also, to the dismay of the police union, the mayor announced this week that his administration will be conducting the first comprehensive review of NYPD use of force policies and

• 3:22:22Robert Evans?

  practices for the first time in a decade and will crack down on officers getting out of misconduct proceedings by retiring before disciplinary action can take place. After this was announced, there was a very angry statement from the police union about this. And because New York has already ended qualified immunity, the biggest thing City Hall could do to undermine police power is to move certain public safety and administrative roles outside of the NYPD, which Zoran wants to do with the Department of Community Safety, but that has faced budgetary constraints, especially following the discovery of the $12 billion deficit left over by Mayor Adams. Now, 10 months into his administration, Zoran has not been eager to spend political capital

• 3:23:07Robert Evans?

  taking on the NYPD. Where he has been spending political capital, it's mostly been to strengthen labor, investing in the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, creating and enforcing a new click-to-cancel rule to crack down on impossible-to-end subscriptions, winning hundreds of millions of dollars for delivery workers, fighting to pass the Delivery Protection Act to strengthen Amazon workers' right to unionize, and partnering with labor unions to modernize the process of applying for city jobs and launching the mayor's Office of Worker Power. This is in addition to universal childcare and the rent freeze, which just went into effect earlier this month. But after attending protests this week, my general sense is that when it comes to NYPD

• 3:23:49Robert Evans?

  and ICE, protesters want more than just, you know, well-worded statements and these reviews. They want to see, like, more actionable change, whether that's using his position as mayor as a sort of bully pulpit to rally the masses against ICE or employ more direct measures to protect New Yorkers from ICE. What those measures may be is not entirely clear. And if the left wants to be effective in agitating for larger social change, beyond making just general demands of electeds, it may be worth closely considering why an elected is taking certain actions, the constraints of their power, and the contradictions inherent

• 3:24:29Robert Evans?

  to holding office, so that those not in office can apply targeted outside pressure to counteract the pressure coming from the federal and state level and just the pressures of governing itself. Though firing Tisch may please some of Zoran's left-wing base, more broadly, it is politically risky and could damage Zoran as he tries to enact his economic agenda while contending with a centrist governor and a very hostile federal administration. From City Hall's perspective, choosing to go to war with the NYPD right now could undermine Zoran's ability to protect New York from ICE, whether by limiting the scale of ICE operations or ideally keeping ICE out of the city entirely.

• 3:25:11Robert Evans?

  Of course, none of this means that people should stop protesting, that protesting is the crucial thing that could apply pressure here, but it's also going to have to be more than 400 of New York's most left-wing protesters. It's going to have to require, like, mass engagement. But the thing I wanted to emphasize here at the end is that, like, a socialist elected to an executive position and a protester and an organizer outside of government are very different kinds of political actors, whose positions strongly influence the actions they take or may be inclined to take. Protests supply an important pressure on city leaders to pursue certain aims, but our political analysis must take account of the balance of forces within the state. Is anyone else have any thoughts on this?

• 3:25:55Robert Evans?

  I'm sure Mia does. Yeah. Well, I think, like, part of what's happening here on a broader scale is that, like, one of the reasons that ICE has been successful over the last, call it, like, three or four months in significant escalations of raids, and we've talked about this a little bit on this show, but there have been huge escalations in raids in Texas and raids in Florida, and there's also been kind of beneath the notice of people who are there a really significant escalation in places like Minneapolis, but they're doing it quietly. Yeah. Like, they're not fighting with protesters. They're going in, they're grabbing people, and they're leaving.

• 3:26:39Robert Evans?

  And I think this is one of the things the protesters are thinking about to some extent, which is part of why their calculus is different in the mayor's office, because, you know, one of the things that's been allowing all of this to happen is that ICE has been able to do this smoothly. Yeah. The fact that they'll do it smoothly, quietly, and without disturbing, like, the broader public order is a big part of how they've been able to really ramp up rates without the kind of mass resistance that we saw earlier in the year. And, you know, but this leads you to, like, a structural problem with, you know, like, with the position of someone holding office, which is that, like, A, holding office in

• 3:27:20Robert Evans?

  the US does not give you a monopoly on violence because the police are effectively a semi-independent force, and, you know, you can do oversight on them to some extent, but, you know, as long as you're sending them there, even if you tell them, hey, don't beat up protesters, like, they're going to go beat up congresspeople. And then you have a secondary problem, which is that, like, if you're running the government of New York, your job is to maintain public order. Yeah. And... The way that you defeat ICE is through breaking public order. And this puts you inherently in tension with the state itself, in a position where Mondani ends up being aligned, but structurally with the police trying to do protest control. Right?

• 3:28:05Robert Evans?

  And this is just, this is just sort of like the structural limits of what kind of power you actually hold in the United States when you are elected? Because, yeah, I was like, no, like, we're keeping on fucking Adams-era police commissioner because if you want to try to have the body that's nominally enforcing your legitimacy on violence, like, you have to go to war with people who can, like, fight you. And that's, that's just, that's just like a huge structural problem with power in the American government. Yeah, and Tish was also, like, retained, essentially following requests from Hokel as a sort of, like, sign to Hokel that, like, Zoran will still be like a competent administrator, essentially.

• 3:28:50Robert Evans?

  It was, it was, it was assigned to her to kind of get her on board during the general election. Yeah. And then also, you know, extract economic wins and revenue from the state so that Mondani can have the funding for things like universal childcare. And it's, that was one of the calculations that was made. And he did, like, announce his intention to retain her during, during the campaign. So this wasn't, this isn't necessarily one of his campaign promises, the way abolishing SRG is. Yeah. And what she seems to be still trying to work on, and you can apply, but as we see from, you know, NYC DSA, Zoran's political home, a pressure can still be applied on both of these things. Yeah. And, and should be, and that pressure is necessary, even if that means you're going to be going against someone who is like, you know, an economic ally, right?

• 3:29:35Robert Evans?

  In terms of, in terms of how he's trying to run the city. But there's, they are, there are going to be these contradictions that part of the left winning power in these places means we have to deal with those contradictions. You have to go through them, not just avoid them. You can't just avoid conflict here. You have to pursue it with, like, focus and determination. I think sometimes, at least in conversations in New York over the NYPD aspect, I definitely do not want to distract from, you know, the ICE, the ICE angle here, as there is a man with a bullet still literally in his neck. Yeah. And I hope that that gets some more focus in these next, next few days. Yeah. Because that situation has not resolved itself.

• 3:30:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In the episode description, I will link New York City's immigration resources, the immigration legal support hotline, the intake form for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative for people facing the threat of detention or deportation, as well as the Know Your Rights Booklets that the city offers in multiple languages. It's time for us to go on an ad break, and then we will return for more news, because

• 3:30:55Robert Evans?

  it has been a busy week. We are back. Let's now go through some of our small things here. Mia, do you want to start us off? Yeah, so speaking of the filmed shooting of people in America, Pete Hegseth has announced that he is, yeah, planning to livestream the execution by firing squad of the 2009 Fort Hood shooter. He announced this by quote tweeting a CBS News tweet about the Pentagon's plan with

• 3:31:38Robert Evans?

  a quote tweet that says, quote, "Correct." And that's, that's how it was announced by the US government that we were going to execute a man by firing squad, a thing that the military hasn't executed someone in 65 years. And livestreamed. The livestreaming part specifically is, that is 30s lynching shit. That's crazy. Like, to be honest, I don't support the death penalty for the military. Like, the state shouldn't be doing that, in my opinion. But among death penalty options, I don't care about, like, a firing squad. Like, it's, I actually think that's more ethical than the fucking lethal injections they're doing. But livestreaming? It's depraved. It's sick shit. Yeah. That also just more so points to the brutality

• 3:32:20Robert Evans?

  of lethal injection, despite it being this, you know, thing that's marketed as like, as like peaceful and like civil. Yes, I'm not saying it's nice to shoot people. Yeah, it's also horrible. It's much worse than shooting them. Like... Yeah, the fact that lethal injection is by all accounts actually a more horrific way to die. It's a nightmare. Then, then a literal firing squad is itself crazy? If you know what you're doing, a bullet's quick. But, I mean, this, the livestreaming thing is insane. Yeah, it's horrible. Like, obviously, there's been widespread condemnation of this. The people who have been really in support of this have been a bunch of the worst Silicon Valley fascists. There was a quote from Palmer Lucky, who is one of the founders of Andrial, which is

• 3:33:03Robert Evans?

  a Silicon Valley weapons manufacturer we've talked about, they make drones, they make a bunch of other shit. He said, quote, "And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary, it is normal, good, and aligned with our natural order that it has not been done here in 60 years as an indictment in and of itself." And the thing I would say about this is, to everyone who wants to do this, like, are you sure you want to live in the world where you've opened this door? Yeah. Like, are you sure you want what follows? Do you want us to talk about livestreaming executions? Because I will tell you, I don't think a lot of Americans want to watch this execution

• 3:33:48Robert Evans?

  livestreamed. But there are some executions I can imagine a lot of Americans would want to watch on a livestream. Read up on your Chichescu is all I'm saying about this. Look at your poll numbers and read about Chichescu. Yeah. You can't help but think of, like, when our term comes, we shall make no excuse for the terror. Yeah. I, I'm there, baby. I've never understood those words so much as I do now. Yeah, it's like, I would prefer that that door remains shut, because I don't think you should be publicly executing people. I don't think you should be publicly executing people on livestream. But like, you're opening this fucking door. If that's what we're doing, like, it's like, I can, I can agree, perhaps the country would be better if everyone couldn't buy an AR-15.

• 3:34:32Robert Evans?

  But you opened the door, so I have, like, six. Right? It's also, it has been reported that Trump is debating canceling the livestream only after he learned that the shooter was paralyzed, which is very interesting. My God, every now and then you get like a little insight into the fact that Trump does have some kind of moral schema in his head, and it's always baffling when you get a hint of where, how it really looks. Like, it's always just completely unhinged. Yeah. I mean, that just might be an optics thing, too. Like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is, yeah, that is an optics thing. But like, that, it's, it's showing his awareness of the moral component and the optics. Yeah, exactly. It's just nuts.

• 3:35:17Robert Evans?

  It's just like, that was your line, huh? Maybe. Like, okay. Oh, God. All right. Quick update here. On Thursday, President Trump did, in fact, cancel the planned livestream of the Fort Hood shooter's execution. Moving on, on Monday, DHS and HSI Homeland Security Investigations raided the DC home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. This follows confirmation at the midterm RNC from Secretary Mullen that there is an investigation into the allegations of immigration fraud made against Omar, based on a years-old racist conspiracy theory.

• 3:36:00Robert Evans?

  After the raid on Monday, Ilhan made a statement, quote, "I'm okay. Make no mistake, this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced," unquote. It's also worth noting, like, we're coming up on the election. And this is the shit that's happening right now. Quick update here. Shortly after recording, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration's investigations into Representative Omar is specifically aimed at building a case to strip her of her US citizenship and ultimately deport her.

• 3:36:45Robert Evans?

  We will likely talk about this more next week. I do want to take us a little bit further from the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There's a long, ongoing conflict there between the Congolese government and the rebel group M23, which is backed by the Rwandan state. Eric Prince and his mercenary corporation Vectus have been contracted by the Congolese government to fight against M23. What I'm talking about actually happened on September 17th, but we just found out about it within the last couple of days. During intense fighting in the Menemwe Highlands, a group of Prince's mercenaries were ambushed and roughly 20 of them were killed or injured.

• 3:37:27Robert Evans?

  This came after a clash earlier in September in which several Colombian contractors were killed. During this most recent ambush, a New Zealand military veteran was killed. And an American named Tim Kennedy, who was a former Green Beret, and then after being a Green Beret, a former UFC fighter, was badly injured. I think he got shot three times in the leg. Sounds like there's a good chance he'll lose a leg, but I don't really know for certain. And was evac'd and wound up eventually at a US military hospital in Germany. So there's a couple of things about this. First off, I've seen people being like, why is the US military paying for the healthcare for a mercenary? Because he's a veteran. It's not weird that he went to a military hospital, right? He's entitled to that, to healthcare of that kind.

• 3:38:09Robert Evans?

  The bigger issue is that Eric Prince has a mercenary corporation that's active in the Congo. Things do not seem to be going well for Prince or for Vectus in the Congo, although, again, we don't know, like, we just know 20 injured and killed. I don't know how many killed. I don't know what their nationalities were. They're not a real military, so they don't have to tell anybody that shit, right? Yeah. Once James is back, I'm sure we'll, we'll put together an episode covering in more detail like what's happening in the Congo, because that's important and it's not really a topic we've, we've covered a lot on this show. As a little bit of a fun note, because this really pissed off a lot of people on X, the everything app, like a lot of right-wingers who are angry that, turns out, US Special Forces guys aren't nearly as badass without air support. Yeah.

• 3:38:49Robert Evans?

  They can just get killed in the jungle like anybody else, because bullets don't discriminate on how much training or whatever you have, how cool you look in pictures. So this started a discourse that ended ultimately with a poll and a week-long discussion as to whether or not all of Europe in 1939 could conquer modern 2026 Africa. 78% of X voted they believe 1939 Europe. Let me tell you something, folks. This is objectively true. Anyone who knows anything about modern 20th century warfare will tell you. It wouldn't take all of Africa. Egypt alone could wipe out 1939 Europe to the man militarily without a single soldier landing in Africa. They have Rafale fighters.

• 3:39:29Robert Evans?

  They have 1,100 Abrams tanks. Even if you were to take somehow and magically transport all of the tanks of, in Europe in 1939. And remember, in 1939, none of the cool shit from World War II existed yet, by the way. The German army, I mean, it ended the war horse-based, but it was really horse-based in 39, right? If you were to take all of the tanks, every armored vehicle, and put them against just Egypt's Abrams tanks, and by the way, there's 600 T90 tanks or something like that in Algeria. I don't know how many Abrams tanks fucking Morocco has, but it's a lot. But if you take just Egypt's Abrams tanks, there was not a single man or vehicle portable weapon on the planet that could pierce Chavam armor in 1939. It would let, like, the, the battle would be over in seconds.

• 3:40:13Robert Evans?

  Anyway, one of, one of the more amusing pieces of derangement online lately. Oh, God, I just love it when people are crazy. That's what I got. One of the other things that James, I assume James will want to talk more once he gets back, is early this week, JD Vance, as part of his fraud task force, announced big crackdowns on H1B visas at Microsoft and J1 visas at universities. So this is something that does deserve more dedicated focus in a future episode. Netflix this week has laid off about 1,000 employees. It's roughly 6% of their workforce.

• 3:40:53Speaker 03

  Oh, it sucks.

• 3:40:54Robert Evans?

  Before Paramount acquired Warner Brothers, Netflix was trying to acquire Warner Brothers. Yeah. In election news, but an even cooler kind, Sean Fain and his left-wing slate at United UAW just swept the United Auto Worker elections. We are the incumbents now. Yes, yes. Just totally demolished. And look, do, do some of us find it entertaining that his name sounds a lot like the Irish political party Sinn Fein? Of course.

• 3:41:26Robert Evans?

  That's all I have to say.

• 3:41:29Speaker 03

  How much did he win by, Gary?

• 3:41:30Robert Evans?

  Sean Fain won with 67.98% to runner-up Rich Boyer's 14%. Nice work, Rich. Obliterated. Nailed it. You really, you really hit the zeitgeist there, my man. You think that, like, regular politicians have incumbency advantage? You have never seen a union election. Oh, my God. Especially a union election for a guy who, like, made things better in the union. Like, damn. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's just a Catholic school in Oregon that fired their football coach because he, like, won by too much. Oh, yeah. He was like, he was like scoring points when it was just kind of like mean. I feel that way about Sean. It's like, okay, man, did you really need 67% of the vote?

• 3:42:13Robert Evans?

  For details, by the way, that, that, that guy ran an onsite kick before halftime up 57. So that's some sicko shit, but also. I did not know Sean had game like that. Yeah.

• 3:42:27Robert Evans?

  Starting this week, the White House has a new press secretary, Katie Zachariah, and I'll be the first to say, she's doing great. She's amazing work, you know, no notes. I think we can move on, right?

• 3:42:41Speaker 00

  I adore my family. I love them. They are my priority. They, I, I love being with my kids. The idea of not spending evenings with my kid, is, kids are, is completely unacceptable. So my president, or excuse me, my husband. That's a, that's a good one. My husband is out here.

• 3:43:01Robert Evans?

  Incredible. Oh, my God. Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Is she the one that was, like, claiming to be a lawyer? Yes. Yes, in China. In China. She passed the bar in China? Which, let, let me, let me be clear. No, she didn't. Like, I would That doesn't sound real, but okay. I would bet my life she did not pass the bar in China. Like, I am that certain.

• 3:43:27Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:43:27Robert Evans?

  Like, I, I am as certain of that as I am certain that 90% of people who write about Taiwanese politics can't name three Taiwanese cities. Like. I don't know, Mia. She seems to have a pretty solid grasp of foreign policy. Let's hear her Mandarin. Here's her talking about Venezuela. He had a historic one-day war, and now we are, have a booming economy and a great relationship with Venezuela. Incredible.

• 3:43:54Speaker 03

  I'm looking forward to covering her. I don't know what you're talking about. This is gonna be great.

• 3:43:58Robert Evans?

  By the way, for, for people who can't see this clip, the amazing part is she, when, when she stops before she says Venezuela, she is looking down at the page. She looks down at her notes. To remember what country she's talking about. Got it. Incredible stuff. We could do a whole episode about this, about this first press conference. There's some, there's some, there's some great clips going around if you want to have fun. God. Less fun on the afternoon of October 7th in Sacramento. A day after the county began mailing out ballots, an SUV pulled up to a USPS mail truck. A masked man got out of the SUV and stole trays of mail from the truck. Residents have reported their mail-in ballots are now missing.

• 3:44:41Robert Evans?

  Great stuff happening here. Love this country. A few days later, the National Guard were videoed standing in front of ballot drop boxes in DC. They claimed that they were not legally guarding the boxes, because that's illegal. Uh huh. But they were meandering in front of ballot drop boxes. Yeah.

• 3:45:07Speaker 03

  God.

• 3:45:08Robert Evans?

  Not great stuff, just a few weeks before the election. Lastly, while addressing a MAGA crowd in Tennessee, Trump made this very accurate comment.

• 3:45:22Speaker 03

  No, it's true. No, there's such love. It's like. Like.

• 3:45:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it's amazing. When you stand up here, it's just like the love. I could say the stupidest things and you clap, you know, I love you so much. I'm sure. But we don't say the stupidest things. We say things of common sense. Uh huh. Clapping.

• 3:45:50Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 3:45:51Robert Evans?

  He knows his fans. What can you say?

• 3:45:54Speaker 03

  Certainly does. And, uh, speaking of fans, I have a segment here for us. Uh, it is sports season for me. And with the WNBA and MLB playoffs going on and the NBA season starting, it's exciting.

• 3:46:07Robert Evans?

  I have not approved this message.

• 3:46:09Speaker 03

  Fuck off. It's, it's exciting for me, but it also means I'm exposed to, uh, television commercial advertisements.

• 3:46:14Robert Evans?

  Oh my god.

• 3:46:15Speaker 03

  Besides the.

• 3:46:15Robert Evans?

  It's so bad.

• 3:46:16Speaker 03

  Besides the alarming number of sports betting ads, a new trend I'm upset about is AI ads targeting seniors. Uh, let's take a, take a listen. Can you go to my calendar and find me a half an hour tomorrow so I can mail some of these cookies to my grandson? I've added a post office trip at town. All right, let's say we're ready. Chat GPT boys. Chat GPT boys got a whole lot more useful. It's no longer just answering questions. It's better at getting things done.

• 3:46:49Speaker 03

  Let me show you an example. Can you go into my finances and let me know if you see any duplicate charges? Sure. Checking your accounts. Okay. It looks like you're paying twice for a magazine called Sound and Stereo. Well, that's odd. Can you cancel the duplicate and send an refund? Of course.

• 3:47:05Robert Evans?

  So you're just giving it access to your bank details as an old person? That doesn't seem like it'll lead you to getting scammed anymore.

• 3:47:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was pretty angry when I first saw it and I thought I was being irrationally angry, but now I think I'm just rational and that it sucks.

• 3:47:18Robert Evans?

  I can't think of any way in which a chatbot that pulls for its answers from places like Reddit and the social internet would spread like bad advice on what old people should do with their money once it has access to their bank accounts. I can't imagine that causing a problem. So I don't see what your issue is, Sophie.

• 3:47:36Speaker 03

  From the New York Post quote, "It's very concerning," says Dr. Stacy Wood, clinical neuropsychologist and professor at Scripps College. "Older people are maybe less aware of the algorithm's power, like how they work. It's really hard for them to discern what's credible and what's not." Older people are also taking up AI en masse. Pew data from February found that a full 23% of senior citizens use chatbots and 42% of those aged 50 to 64 are the same. And you know, like keeping up with tech is not necessarily a bad thing. But Dr. Stacy Wood says it's slippery slope. As people age, Wood noted, they also tend to be more likely to believe something is true because it is simply repeated to them over and over and they're generally more susceptible to sensationalized and highly partisan content.

• 3:48:21Robert Evans?

  I can say the dumbest things and you people would clap for me.

• 3:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:48:25Robert Evans?

  One of the issues, as you stated, Sophie, is that like, it's actually more important, I think, for the elderly to be aware of what AI is capable of than a lot of other groups because they're being targeted so relentlessly by different kind of AI-based scams. Unfortunately, that usually gets translated into you should be using AI, which is going to make a lot of these people more vulnerable to scams.

• 3:48:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, like, I don't like that there's this like trend that AI can, can replace like human to human contact for our seniors.

• 3:48:53Robert Evans?

  No.

• 3:48:53Speaker 03

  You guys, uh, Gare and Robert, you saw a number of products at this year's CES that were targeting seniors in that way.

• 3:49:01Robert Evans?

  We saw one or two reasonable ones and a lot of bad ones. Yeah.

• 3:49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and you know, I guess slippery slope, but this commercial comes on a lot with different versions of seniors, almost always seniors that are women doing things and you know, the chat GPT or whatever AI helping them. I just don't see a reason why chat GPT should have access to these people's calendars, finances, that kind of a thing. I don't see this ending well for so many folks. It lacks security and I'm angry about it and I wish it wasn't a trend that I see increasing, but that seems to be the path we're going on.

• 3:49:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:41Speaker 03

  That's all I had on that. I just felt it was worth mentioning because it was on my mind.

• 3:49:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Another story that's come out this week is that a bunch of anthropic researchers are now, or at least there's been stories in San Francisco. And you should always take this stuff with a grain of salt, but this is consistent with a lot of internal conversations that a lot of them have been taking up smoking because they're like, AI will cure cancer, right? And this has been occurring alongside, like, there was just an interview with an AI researcher on, uh, the Delphi podcast for anthropic, who said he's enjoying his last six months. Part of the issue here is that if you try to engage with what these people are saying, then you wind up sounding to a lot of folks like you're just like ignoring the potential of AI and the things that it is actually capable of doing.

• 3:50:26Robert Evans?

  But you have to engage with what the people making it are saying. And everything that the company's making this stuff is saying, it's nuts. It's bullshit. It's lies and it's insane. And that doesn't mean that these are not incredibly powerful and very dangerous tools. They are. They are extraordinarily dangerous. Because among other things, they have automated the ability of small groups of nation states, of non-state actors to carry out massive digital attacks with a level of penetration and speed that was not possible before. And that's a huge problem. These things are very capable tools. It, it's just that everything being said by the people making them is insane bullshit. And it makes it very hard to have reasonable conversations about what should be done. Anyway. That's a really good point. Fuck these guys.

• 3:51:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:12Speaker 03

  Let's, let's go to ads real quick.

• 3:51:14Robert Evans?

  Enjoy these hopefully non-AI products.

• 3:51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:51:28Robert Evans?

  And we're back. And, uh, I think it's time for us to head south of the border, that is, south of the Polish border, to talk about Ukraine. I don't know why I decided to lead in that way, but I did. Baffling. Things have unfortunately been very spicy in Ukraine over this last week. Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and he had made a deal to release 300,000 tons of Russian diesel fuel to, quote, "the American and global marketplace immediately." This came as a massive surprise to everyone because last month, Trump signed a massive sanctions law to stop Russia from making money selling oil and gas to fuel their war against Ukraine. The midterms crunch is really hurting.

• 3:52:10Robert Evans?

  It's really making strange, not strange, but I guess normal bedfellows. All of this seems to be in response to continuing disastrous polling numbers of Republicans in the midterms. An AP NORC poll published on October 1st showed that most Americans disapprove of Trump's war with Iran and blame him personally for higher gas prices because he's why we have higher gas prices. He has destroyed a generation of work to try to tell people the president does not control gas prices by finding the only possible way. He, no, he really did. He definitely did. This is the first time that's been true. This is like the first time we've been in what is effectively a recession. You can say, no, it's directly as response of the current policies.

• 3:52:52Robert Evans?

  Like literally direct, like, like, I mean, obviously the 2008 crash, a lot, Bush did a lot to do with it, but most of that didn't hit until, anyway. You know what I'm saying, right? I did that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So Trump's goal was to make a deal with Putin to lower diesel prices in particular, as diesel prices have been debilitating to American farmers who tend to support Trump. And I think also just a lot of the ads that have been running with farmers being like, Trump fucked me are really bad for, for Donald and for MAGA. In addition to the immediate 300,000 tons of diesel promised to be released, another 500,000 tons of Russian diesel were to be released by Russia in November and 1 million more tons were to be released immediately hereafter. It's not actually clear if this is any kind of formal deal or if any of this is like actually promised anywhere, what these numbers are based on.

• 3:53:37Robert Evans?

  A lot of what Trump says is just like nonsensical, like, so he says that like in November, we'll get another half million and then another million immediately hereafter. And then 3 million more tons within a short period of time. That's not, what, what are you, how much fuel is supposed to be released? This might just be market manipulation genuinely. This might just be market manipulation. It's entirely possible. As that probably leads you to believe, there are serious doubts as to whether anything like what Trump has promised is possible to get out of Russia right now. And I, we'll talk about the ethical and like the Ukraine stuff, but I'm just talking about like, can they do this? Right? Like, do they even have the ability to get this fuel on the marketplace? For an article in the LA Times, quote, "Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski questioned whether Russia could deliver at all,

• 3:54:22Robert Evans?

  citing his embassy's reports of fuel shortages even in Moscow and serious sources saying Ukraine has damaged about half of Russia's refining capacity." He asked on X, "So where will the surpluses for export come from?" Now, while he says half of Russia's refining capacity has been damaged, that doesn't necessarily mean that like they're down by 50%. The IEA, the International Energy Association, estimates that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have cut Russia's diesel output by 30% or so. That also could mean that their like gas fuel output is, is by more and it averages to 50. I don't fully know. I don't know anyone has other than the Russian government exact numbers on how much Russia's like refining capacity has been damaged. Russia's deputy prime minister has tries to repost claims like what the Polish, uh, deputy minister said,

• 3:55:07Robert Evans?

  uh, foreign minister said, arguing that Russian exports would rise in November and December as previously damaged refineries returned from maintenance. And obviously I don't doubt that the Russian state is actively repairing and refurbishing damaged facilities and they, some of them will come back online periodically. But they also will continue to face targeting from Ukrainian drone strikes. This current phase of the war is largely focused on deep ranging drone strikes into Russian territory with retaliatory drone swarms and missile attacks from Russia into Ukraine as the front remains locked in a relatively stable position. Ukraine's hitting 1,500 miles beyond the line of contact now with drones, which is nuts. Like that's air power levels, right? Yeah. There's a lot of kvetching about like, oh, AI is going to change warfare. We've already seen the biggest change in warfare that I think will occur in my lifetime.

• 3:55:52Robert Evans?

  Maybe I'm wrong, but it's drones. Careful, careful what you wish for. Yeah. I may be biased because a drone tried to kill me once, but I have trouble imagining something altering the experience of the regular soldier on the ground more than drones have. Robert, I'm so excited for. The plague weapons. We'll see. Obviously, I'm not counting the possibility of like currently illegal weapons like biologicals or nuclear weapons becoming like regularly deployed, right? Yeah. Immediately after Trump announced this deal, Ukrainian President Zelensky issued a furious statement on his nation's behalf. In Kyiv, a protest gathered at the memorial to fallen soldiers in the Maidan to express their anger. Within a matter of hours after Trump's announcement,

• 3:56:34Robert Evans?

  Ukraine hit the loading terminal to Russia's Nova Shakhtinsk oil refinery, causing a massive fire. For weeks prior, Trump had begged Zelensky to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, even as Russia has continued to hit Ukraine's energy infrastructure. When news broke of this new Ukrainian strike, Trump reacted with fury, telling Ukraine that it needed a new president and blaming Zelensky for losing 30% of your country. He claimed 2 million people had been killed in a war that never should have been started. I agree, Putin shouldn't have started the war. Trump has repeatedly stated his belief that it wouldn't have occurred if he'd been president, you know, when Biden was. I think that's nonsense. By the way, his number is also wrong. Russia currently controls about 20% of Ukraine's territory, not 30%. We don't have

• 3:57:17Robert Evans?

  official death tolls for this war. We know Russia has lost at least about 500,000 soldiers killed, so it's reasonable to assume Ukrainian civilian and military fatalities would be somewhere in that ballpark. I should also note that Trump made this announcement, you know, complaining about Ukraine hitting Russian energy infrastructure and promising to buy Russian diesel directly after 20 civilians in Ukraine were killed by Russian strikes, including three children. Russia has continued to devote significant effort to striking Ukrainian civilian property and infrastructure. On October 13th and 14th, Russian strikes cut power to more than 600,000 Ukrainians. This came just four days after Trump licensed imports of Russian diesel. It also came after an energy ceasefire that Trump unilaterally announced during the weekend in response to

• 3:58:01Robert Evans?

  Ukraine's strike on that binary. Trump was like, there's an energy ceasefire now, nobody's striking, and then there were strikes. He was like, well, nobody's striking diesel. And then there were more strikes, yeah, right? And Zelensky pointed out on Monday that Russia had already violated the ceasefire. Since his announcement, Trump has escalated his efforts to defray blame for the high cost of gas, and his current strategy is blaming high diesel prices in the States on Ukrainian resistance. He is, in speeches, he is saying like, Ukraine is why your diesel's so expensive, which it's not. And again, they've been fighting in Ukraine for years. Diesel prices didn't skyrocket until Trump decided to fuck with Iran. Yep. On October 11th, Ukraine also struck a facility belonging to Yandex, which I would casually

• 3:58:43Robert Evans?

  describe as Russian Google. This facility hosted a massive supercomputer, two massive supercomputers, actually, used to train neural networks. It also part of like the Yandex facility there was like a military research facility. By any term, this is a valid target in war, by the way. Just, I wanted to make that clear. The strikes caused massive disruption to Yandex services across Russia. Yandex is an interesting company. The founder, Arkady Veloz, was not willing to fall in line and support Putin after the expanded invasion of Ukraine. He went so far as to condemn the war. This forced his exit from working in Russia, and a deal was arranged in 2024 to put Yandex under Kremlin control. This is why Arkady wins my least problematic Russian billionaire award. The strike on that Yandex hub was Ukraine's third

• 3:59:25Robert Evans?

  major hit on Russian tech infrastructure in four days. It cut access to huge numbers of services for Russians and people, not just Russians, right? A number of countries that border Russia, including countries that are worried about getting invaded by Russia, Yandex is still like an important service for them. And this was not just like they lost access to Google, they lost access to like ride sharing apps and like AI, like all their AI apps. Like it did a bunch of damage to just like people being able to use the internet the way that people are used to in the 21st century, not just in Russia, but in bordering countries. This has caused confusion online. In the immediate wake of the strikes, reports began to spread that Yandex going down had cut bot traffic to huge portions of the internet.

• 4:00:05Robert Evans?

  That is objectively true. What bot traffic means is often misinterpreted. Specific claims were made that traffic had plunged for OFDAY, the the German far-right party, that like their people commenting and like pro OFDAY boards and stuff had like fallen off a cliff, and that the conservative subreddit, you know, was also down, that there were no more MAGA bots online, that the Russian bots were, had declined. And evidence for these claims was posted in the form of CloudFlare graphs that purported to show plunging bot activity. And again, some of those graphs were real, some of them weren't. There is plunging bot activity. The problem is that, and I I made a joking comment about like, this is why we should keep air striking data centers, and and then tried to follow it up by claiming

• 4:00:48Robert Evans?

  like, look, guys, I don't, no one has to abide by the truth in politics anymore. Like, why should we? Right? But the reality of the situation is that bot traffic did drop precipitously as a result of this attack. CloudFlare reported that Yandex bot traffic is like 0.4% of the max number of HTTP requests that had been reported over the prior two weeks. But that doesn't mean there are fewer Russian bot accounts on the internet, right? I'll refer to an analysis by Brandon Beeb that he put together on his Substack that does a good job of explaining the disconnect in many people's understandings. The bots that dropped are mostly Yandex's own search engine crawler. They aren't troll accounts. No primary data shows that Russian social media bots went offline. None shows that Engagement Reform UK, the OFDAY,

• 4:01:32Robert Evans?

  or MAGA accounts fell because of the strikes. Here's what matters. In CloudFlare's language, a bot is any automated web request. Nearly all automated traffic from Yandex's network is Yandex bot. It's search crawler, which is Russia's version of Google bot, right? So that's what has declined. Now, while the people who are saying like, no, it's wrong that like Russian bot, you know, influence operations collapsed as a result of these strikes, that's also led some people to say like, there's been no impact in Russia's influence operations as a result of these strikes. I can't imagine that's true. It's just not true in the way people online assumed it is, right? Like, they they lost a massive access to a massive supercomputer center that the military used, right? This has certainly done

• 4:02:12Robert Evans?

  some degree of damage. It's certainly frustrated some, to some degree, some of the shit that the Russian government does online. It just hasn't gotten rid of all of the bot accounts, because that's just like not how any of this works. No, like, there's not like a Death Star you can blow up that like make Russian influence operation go away. Like, no. It's bad for Russia that these got struck, right? They prefer that not happen. And that will presumably have impacts that are broader ranging and that are probably kind of obscure to us on a number of their operations. But it's not as simple as all of the bots went away. That's just not what happened. Interesting. Interesting and informative. So let's close with a segment I am calling

• 4:02:53Robert Evans?

  Dispatches from a World in Revolt, with the starting claim that, yeah, we're kind of back, by which I mean, we're kind of back in what appears to be at least the beginning of another global era of mass protests along the lines of sort of 2011 or 2019, 2020. We have talked about some of these protests on the show. We're going to be going through a few areas that have seen large protests here. Today, we are mostly going to be focusing on India. Now, previously on the show, we've talked about the massive wave of student protests in India under the banner of the meme Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after a Supreme Court Justice calling unemployed youth their cockroaches. So it's a play on the BJP. It's

• 4:03:36Robert Evans?

  like the BJP, but it's the CJP because it's cockroaches. Okay. With with that out of the way, those original protests from a few months ago have sort of won. The CJP declared victory recently after forcing the resignation of the Minister of Education after government officials leaked the answers to standardized tests. But, comma, protests in India have continued, and they have continued over the BJP's attempt to remove 130 million people from the voting rolls? Now, Mia, I I've never done a number before. Is that a lot of people? That that would be the 12th largest country on Earth. That is larger than the population of Japan. It is slightly, slightly less than the population of Mexico, but they are trying

• 4:04:21Robert Evans?

  to, trying to strip from from the voting rolls. The rhetoric coming out of the BJP is, in a lot of ways, very similar to the rhetoric you see from fascist parties around the world. They are screaming about like illegal Muslim aliens casting fake votes. And so like, basically, they're doing on the scale of 130 million people, a thing that like you see in the US where they go through the voting rolls and like purge everyone with a non-white name. And here, it's like, yeah, they're purging people with Muslim names at the scale of the 12th largest country on Earth. So in response to this, India's, I would call them largely feckless opposition parties, actually finally did some-

• 4:04:59Robert Evans?

  And they deployed their so Congress, which is like the main INC. Are India's main opposition party. They are the like, they are the party that is like the party that did Indian independence. And they have connected their legacy to Gandhi. And so they deployed their one strategy, which is throwing Gandhis at the problem. So they staged a protest outside of the electoral commission. That's that's not honestly an enjoyable mental image. I'm just I'm just savouring that for a second. Literally physically is what they're doing. They threw Raul Gandhi. How many Gandhis we got? Get him out here. They have a lot of Gandhi descendants. Like they got a lot of his family tree. Thick on the ground, the Gandhis are these days. That's good to know.

• 4:05:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So they, they, they Raul Gandhi and his sister, who's also in the party and is like a high ranking party official, Raul Gandhi is like the opposition leader. They went and were nominally, they were trying to like, they went to the electoral commission. We're trying to talk to the guy who's in charge of the electoral commission. And they got arrested like multiple times. There's a bunch of scenes of like Raul Gandhi trying to like crawl out of a bus that he was being held in. This, this is like, uh, this was like a week ago Wednesday. Yeah. On, on, on October 7th, or maybe it was, it was October like 6th or 7th. Basically, it was, it was last week from when, when we were recording this. And this has led to a bunch more protests, including the CJP, like the cockroach party, like going out against these electoral purges.

• 4:06:24Robert Evans?

  But it's also led to a sort of astonishing level of repression in India, and particularly in the capital of New Delhi, that has turned it over, over the last weekend into effectively a fairly overt police state. On Saturday, Indian police arrested the founder of, of the cockroach party as an attempt to try to stop the protest. There was a huge militarized police deployment in New Delhi itself, trying to stop anyone from being able to assemble and form protests in the first place. They've also shut down the mile long road to Junter Munter, which is uh, ba- ba- basically this, there's, there's, there's a road there that has been a massive site of protest since like the nineties. Basically, whenever someone's doing a protest in the capital, you do show up here and you do a protest on the street

• 4:07:08Robert Evans?

  and you like occupy the street for a while. And this was also a huge hub of, of the cockroach movement. It was a giant sit in here. And like the entire street has been declared like not a valid site of protest by the police. And the police have been trying to funnel protesters into other sites around the city that are like significantly further from the center of the city. Man, sometimes the, the, the just international like reflex of solidarity between police officers is just really beautiful, you know? It's always the same, the same move. No, no, no, you can't do it there, though. Can't do it there. Sorry. This is just free speech zones. Like, sorry, sorry. This is not a free speech zone. Yeah, it's a free speech zone. Yeah, they always do this. Like, oh, but there. No, it's fine what you're doing, but not there. Yeah, yeah.

• 4:07:52Robert Evans?

  Like over the weekend, there was, there were these massive attempts to stop the protests. And that did kind of cut down on numbers. But on Monday, the 12th, the Congress party, the terminology is mildly confusing to Americans. But yeah, like a lot of like Congress, uh, political leaders and a bunch of protesters were able to take the streets again on Monday. On Tuesday, cockroach protest leaders like tried to retake that street. And a bunch of their leaders got arrested after trying to take the main square. The protests do not seem to be slowing down as of now. Congress has been trying to turn this into a sort of sustained attempt to challenge Modi's rule. I think even, even as he's trying to, you know, purge 130 million people from the voting rolls, which would be the end, if anything, even remotely like democratic in the Indian system.

• 4:08:37Robert Evans?

  This is a real moment of weakness for him and the escalation of these protests has been very damaging for the regime, even after they were kind of able to like slow down and stop the original cockroach protests. Now that's been reignited and Congress has been throwing their base into it. So we're going to continue to fill you in on what's going on there. Do they have any like specific demands when it comes to the voter role purchase? Yeah, the, the main, the main one, obviously, like they want, they want everyone like put back in and they want the, the chief of the electoral commission to resign. Okay. Though those are the demands that everyone seems to agree to. Basically, Congress and the cockroach protesters aren't

• 4:09:21Robert Evans?

  one to one overlapping political bases, right? So Sure. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's a bit complicated there. But yeah, tho- those are, those are the, the main demands that we've seen so far. I want to turn to Europe, where we've also seen continuations of, well, both the protests in France and Spain, there were large French student protests over the weekend. I've seen numbers that suggest it was down to about 160,000, down from like 300,000 the week before. You know, and obviously the police have continued to attack student protesters. Things are still really bleak. There's like a horrifying picture of like a kid getting crushed by a gate that a bunch of like a giant metal gate that a bunch of cops are pushing. Yeah. So they're, they're still doing absolutely horrific stuff there.

• 4:10:05Robert Evans?

  We've did a larger episode about this earlier this week. Now, the student protests have also begun to spread, although kind of in small forms as of this week. We've seen versions of them break out in Greece, Albania and Belgium. Greek protesters, student protesters put up tents in Stigmata Square, which is another historic protest site that was, I mean, it's been the core of a hundred million protests, but it's notably was one of the places that was the core of the protest in 2011, which, you know, I think links back in a lot of ways to the ways that the protests in Spain have been reoccupying a lot of the like 2011 historic protest sites. The Albanian ones, I think, have been pretty small so far. The ones in Belgium are interesting

• 4:10:49Robert Evans?

  because there have been kind of multiple fairly large protests going on. There, there was a student protest on Monday, but then also earlier in like last week, there was a giant anti austerity protest. There's about like 10,000. Well, it was about like 10,000 people. Pretty large, much smaller than the sort of full scale stuff in France and Spain. But also, yeah, similar cops have been attacking them fairly significantly. The cops arrested 10 people, like nine of whom are minors. So the student protests are very, of a very similar sort of composition of like, it's like these high school students going into revolt that you see in France. Meanwhile, in Spain, there was like another massive round of the giant protest they've been having. A bunch of the occupations are still going.

• 4:11:31Robert Evans?

  We're probably going to talk to James next week, a bit more in detail about what's been happening there. I think it's also fairly notable that there's been a pretty significant attempt by the, okay, so this, this is where we have to make a distinction between Socialist Party and like Socialist. The Socialist Party government of Pedro Sanchez, with the caveat that in Spain, the Socialist Party has been kind of the equivalent of the Democrats for like many, many, many years now. They're like, the Socialist Party was like one of the two parties that were like the protests in 2011 were like against, which led to the formation of Podemos. That's a whole other story. But Pedro Sanchez has been trying to use these protests to save his government, even

• 4:12:13Robert Evans?

  though it has also been his government that like has, has been presiding over this, the housing crisis and these evictions. Um, but he's been attempting to co-op the protests in order to save his flagging electoral things, which like obviously, yeah, it would be worse if the far right took power. And that's kind of what things have been looking towards, but Yeah, I guess. And like the far right killed two like pro tenant bills in parliament like earlier this month. Yeah. And then he's kind of used that and the protests Yep. to call for an election. Yeah. And but this has also been paired with attempts to sort of like directly co-op the protests themselves, which there's been a whole bunch of stuff around that there that we can get into more detail with later. But that's a dynamic that

• 4:12:55Robert Evans?

  we're going to see frequently here. I mean, you, you don't often get one as blatant as the like, hey, this is the government that did this. That's like now trying to use your Rupert to do something. But yeah, this is, this is a very common dynamic in protests like this. And yeah, we're going to be seeing it more and more as protests continue and we will let you know what other places start having mass protests. Like, I'm just going to briefly note, there were some like also education protests a little bit before this in Chile. There's been anti Bolsonaro protests happening all over Brazil. But yeah, we will keep you updated as we get more like really large protest waves. Yeah. All right. That doesn't, for us here at It Could Happen Here,

• 4:13:40Robert Evans?

  if you want to send James a marketing email, you can do so at [email protected]. Yeah, he loves He will hunt you down with predator vision. Do not send marketing emails to him. That email is actually for news related, uh, tips and information. Put a trash girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news.

• 4:14:08Robert Evans?

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

• 4:14:13Speaker 03

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

• 4:14:35Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

• 4:15:14Robert Evans?

  Folks, there's important news. There's depressing news.

• 4:15:17Speaker 05

  And then there's the news we actually want to talk about.

• 4:15:20Robert Evans?

  On our podcast, Bananas, we search far and wide for all the news stories that make you say, what, what? And then we tell you all about them.

• 4:15:28Speaker 05

  Doorbell prankster that tormented German resident apartments turns out to be a slug.

• 4:15:33Robert Evans?

  Ding dong.

• 4:15:34Speaker 05

  New episodes drop Tuesdays with more than 400 episodes to catch up on.

• 4:15:38Robert Evans?

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

• 4:15:45Speaker 05

  In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:16:16Speaker 05

  On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi.

• 4:16:35Robert Evans?

  I'm Kai Wright.

• 4:16:36Speaker 05

  And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:16:46Speaker 03

  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. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy.

• 4:17:04Robert Evans?

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 4:17:08Speaker 03

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

• 4:17:15Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.