It Could Happen Here Weekly 256

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file: Israeli Elections and the Palestinians 2026 Elections (The Union Ones) ¡El Chupacabras! Kim Kelly's Morbid Labor Tales Executive Disorder: Lula’s Victory, AI Election Ads, Voter Fraud, Revolt in Albania 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: Israeli Elections and the Palestinians Israel's Elections: What's at Stake? https://www.crisisgroup.org/qna/middle-east-north-africa/israelpalestine/israels-elections-whats-stake, International Crisis Group (Max Rodenbeck, Mairav Zonszein, Amjad Iraqi), 15 October 2026 A Jewish Currents Guide to the Israeli Elections https://jewishcurrents.org/a-jewish-currents-guide-to-the-israeli-elections, Josh Nathan-Kazis, Jewish Currents, 20 October 2026 Occupied Thoughts interview with Sami Abu Shehadeh https://fmep.org/resource/barred-from-knesset-elections-sami-abu-shehadeh-on-the-state-of-israeli-democracy/ Prospect magazine op-ed on the settlers and the state - https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/middle-east/75279/settler-rioters-are-israeli-state-policythrough-deniable-means 2026 Elections (The Union Ones) https://linktr.ee/PamelaSH ¡El Chupacabras! Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore by Benjamin Radford Governing Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacle in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898-1956 by Reinaldo L. Román En Qué Quedó Ep. 6 “El Chupacabras” https://open.spotify.com/episode/2r9ISXwgY7zTpWj2EJWcF1 Radio Ambulante “El vampiro entre nosotros” https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hvdSD4aXHwoOWoMYAdN9x Sucking Vulnerability: Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years by William A Calvo-Quirós https://web.archive.org/web/20230814111741/http://www.barriology.com/uploads/2/3/2/7/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230814111741/http://www.barriology.com/uploads/2/3/2/7/%2023276452/calvo-quiros_sucking_vulnerability_rev.pdf 23276452/calvo-quiros_sucking_vulnerability_rev.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230814111741/http://www.barriology.com/uploads/2/3/2/7/%2023276452/calvo-quiros_sucking_vulnerability_rev.pdf El Chupacabra: Icon of Resistance to US Imperialism Species (1995) dir. Roger Donaldson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MGZnLsPSRc La Operación (1982) dir. Ana María García https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJoWMbRxvM&t=36s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJoWMbRxvM&t=36s La Operación -Background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6XEuu_auR8&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6XEuu_auR8&t=8s https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/se-registran-dos-ataques-del-chupac https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/se-registran-dos-ataques-del-chupac%20abras/ abras/ https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/se-registran-dos-ataques-del-chupac%20abras/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/vieques-puerto-rico-us-navy-base-traini https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/vieques-puerto-rico-us-navy-base-traini%20ng ng https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/vieques-puerto-rico-us-navy-base-traini%20ng https://www.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/68/Documents/Business-Lines/Environmental/Enviro https://www.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/68/Documents/Business-Lines/Environmental/Enviro%20nmental-Restoration/NAVFAC-Atlantic/Vieques/Vieques_Fact_Sheet_03_Depleted_Uran%20ium_in_LIA_Eng.pdf nmental-Restoration/NAVFAC-Atlantic/Vieques/Vieques_Fact_Sheet_03_Depleted_Uran https://www.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/68/Documents/Business-Lines/Environmental/Enviro%20nmental-Restoration/NAVFAC-Atlantic/Vieques/Vieques_Fact_Sheet_03_Depleted_Uran%20ium_in_LIA_Eng.pdf ium_in_LIA_Eng.pdf https://www.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/68/Documents/Business-Lines/Environmental/Enviro%20nmental-Restoration/NAVFAC-Atlantic/Vieques/Vieques_Fact_Sheet_03_Depleted_Uran%20ium_in_LIA_Eng.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/elyunque/recreation/discover-history/us-military-and-el-yunq https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/elyunque/recreation/discover-history/us-military-and-el-yunq%20ue-national-forest ue-national-forest https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/elyunque/recreation/discover-history/us-military-and-el-yunq%20ue-national-forest https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24816374-the-history-of-the-us-department- https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24816374-the-history-of-the-us-department-%20of-defense-programs-for-the-testing-evaluation-and-storage-of-tactical-herbicides-agent-%20orange-in-pr/?q=puerto+rico&mode=document#document/p5 of-defense-programs-for-the-testing-evaluation-and-storage-of-tactical-herbicides-agent- https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24816374-the-history-of-the-us-department-%20of-defense-programs-for-the-testing-evaluation-and-storage-of-tactical-herbicides-agent-%20orange-in-pr/?q=puerto+rico&mode=document#document/p5 orange-in-pr/?q=puerto+rico&mode=document#document/p5 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24816374-the-history-of-the-us-department-%20of-defense-programs-for-the-testing-evaluation-and-storage-of-tactical-herbicides-agent-%20orange-in-pr/?q=puerto+rico&mode=document#document/p5 https://www.elvocero.com/actualidad/otros/las-grandes-sequ-as-que-marcaron-a-puerto- https://www.elvocero.com/actualidad/otros/las-grandes-sequ-as-que-marcaron-a-puerto-%20rico-durante-el-siglo-xx/article_e6a37bce-5269-4040-836d-799a04358fc2.html rico-durante-el-siglo-xx/article_e6a37bce-5269-4040-836d-799a04358fc2.html https://www.elvocero.com/actualidad/otros/las-grandes-sequ-as-que-marcaron-a-puerto-%20rico-durante-el-siglo-xx/article_e6a37bce-5269-4040-836d-799a04358fc2.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/26/mystery-creature-ravages-p https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/26/mystery-creature-ravages-p%20uerto-rican-livestock/b7704250-dae0-4fa3-a886-561db637b463/ uerto-rican-livestock/b7704250-dae0-4fa3-a886-561db637b463/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/26/mystery-creature-ravages-p%20uerto-rican-livestock/b7704250-dae0-4fa3-a886-561db637b463/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-12-03-mn-9730-story.html “Monsters and Messiahs by Mike Davis” “Beast of Borikén" by Julio Anta, Daniel IriZarri, Patricio Delpeche, and Lucas Gattoni Kim Kelly's Morbid Labor Tales https://proteanmag.com/2021/10/31/picket-lines-in-the-graveyard-a-history-of-cemetery-workers-strikes/ https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67168074 https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/dc33-strike-philadelphia-medical-examiners-injunction-20250703.html https://6abc.com/post/retrieval-dead-bodies-is-being-delayed-due-blue-collar-union-dc33-strike-philadelphia-officials-say/16936166/ https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/sacrilegious-bodies-piling-up-at-cook-county-morgue/ https://6abc.com/archive/8511845/ https://abc7.com/archive/8719820/ https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/02/archives/workers-strike-funeral-homes-100-establishments-hit-in-the.html https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/state-fails-to-end-embalmers-strike.html https://thevictorianbookofthedead.wordpress.com/2024/08/28/the-coffin-makers-strike-1872/ https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=pilot18720622-01.2.22&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN----------------------- https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=pilot18720622-01.2.22&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN----------------------- Executive Disorder: Lula’s Victory, AI Election Ads, Voter Fraud, Revolt in Albania https://x.com/aricnesbitt/status/2066923547964928106?a=kc7nT6MWbZZrCG5F3ho&s=20 https://x.com/aricnesbitt/status/2066923547964928106?a=kc7nT6MWbZZrCG5F3ho&s=20 https://x.com/reaganreese_/status/2064370476449669139?a=o_23wNhd8KJXG1_3jd8&s=20 https://x.com/reaganreese_/status/2064370476449669139?a=o_23wNhd8KJXG1_3jd8&s=20 https://x.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/2097325814689743049?a=-BXTLNGkR3wjP9lkgeE&s=20 https://x.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/2097325814689743049?a=-BXTLNGkR3wjP9lkgeE&s=20 https://x.com/AndrewSolender/status/2083629219980960030?a=U6bD8EFjG4McMm-xQCM&s=20 https://x.com/AndrewSolender/status/2083629219980960030?a=U6bD8EFjG4McMm-xQCM&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2096705749774631131?a=9MzOBMvGxcqDqhpGhgA&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2096705749774631131?a=9MzOBMvGxcqDqhpGhgA&s=20 https://x.com/BlueprintFNDN/status/2078957886403670411?a=2Q_B5IADKyInPq5JQKE&s=20 https://x.com/BlueprintFNDN/status/2078957886403670411?a=2Q_B5IADKyInPq5JQKE&s=20 https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2076099238363005194?a=GAD-fsC8RATzjNcbr5s&s=20 https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2076099238363005194?a=GAD-fsC8RATzjNcbr5s&s=20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrw_hLs4O_0 https://x.com/JacobRubashkin/status/2113454492872045007?a=jb16JdrbsG8yhaW1ljI&s=20 https://x.com/JacobRubashkin/status/2113454492872045007?a=jb16JdrbsG8yhaW1ljI&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2094800565452611646?a=wRx4Pm2YJdKDtLMz7Eo&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2094800565452611646?a=wRx4Pm2YJdKDtLMz7Eo&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2091865610233786666?a=q7ts8IGOQNOt_zkiCGE&s=20 https://x.com/NassauExec/status/2091865610233786666?a=q7ts8IGOQNOt_zkiCGE&s=20 https://x.com/AdImpact_Pol/status/2051314128468197851?lang=en https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0093650226142143 https://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/releases-101526/ https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/artificial-intelligence-ai-in-elections-and-campaigns https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/when-ai-campaign-ads-fake-reality https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/us/politics/midterm-elections-ai-generated-ads.html https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/deciding-fake-images-candidates-are-using-ai-political-ads-get-vote-rcna605243 https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2026-10.hjc-dems-staff-report-epstein-and-trump.pdf https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8ly097zw1xwo https://www.daylightsandiego.org/ice-detainee-dies-at-otay-mesa-detention-center-in-san-diego/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/10/27/iraqi-court-sentences-seven-french-isis-members-to-prison/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/10/27/iraqi-court-sentences-seven-french-isis-members-to-prison/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialsharebtn&related=TheNatWorld,NationalComment,LifeNationalUAE,NatSportUAE&via=TheNationalNews https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/2113552255576092815 https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/2113552255576092815?a=mydASAtSuGY7G8V4jaU&s=20 https://sana.sy/en/syria/2353795/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2026/10/27/flavio-bolsonaro-flees-brazil-us/92462116007/ https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3moy4zcl3b52a https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2114740388514697527 https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2114740388514697527?a=lz0ZYjpEWUfTyg19SFY&s=20 https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/netherlands-citizen-arrested-illegally-voting-2024-election https://x.com/TheJusticeDept/status/2113703040444145701 https://x.com/TheJusticeDept/status/2113703040444145701?a=gi4Gbg_06IgsOPCVoCg&s=20 https://apnews.com/article/california-voter-data-justice-department-lawsuit-0305190ba958051bb86741ac00da36a7 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-state-california-over-voter-list https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1466286/ https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1466286/dl?inline https://x.com/USAttyEssayli/status/2113794933236871180 https://x.com/USAttyEssayli/status/2113794933236871180?a=sXmirr6I7u9hpmjSBus&s=20 https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/2026-10-26-Order-.pdf https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-charges-28-foreign-nationals-california-election-crimes https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/10/trump-noncitizen-voting-court/ https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2087950683831931327a=2VozR5e62ZW8NoNmfl8&s=20 https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2087950683831931327?a=2VozR5e62ZW8NoNmfl8&s=20 https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2087950683831931327 https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2087950683831931327?a=2VozR5e62ZW8NoNmfl8&s=20 https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2115228635326242842 https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2115228635326242842?a=5j5r9zaRFvaGQ1jvwuQ&s=20 https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/October/election-charges https://citizens.al/en/2026/09/07/100-days-of-the-flamingo-revolution-the-new-culture-of-civic-protest/ https://www.balkanweb.com/en/On-the-14th-day-of-student-protests--citizens-and-young-people-gather-en-masse-in-front-of-the-Ministry-of-Education./#gsc.tab=0 https://www.tiranatimes.com/albanian-government-tightens-protest-laws-as-crisis-deepens/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.

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  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.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Could Happen Here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today, I wanted to talk about the Israeli elections that are coming up. International Crisis Group published a Q and A on the topic, which I found useful, and we'll link in the show notes. At the top of that Q and A, there's a photo of a Palestinian farmer in Ranthis, a village outside of Hezbollah, walking past his olive groves. And hanging over him are two giant campaign banners. One is Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other is for Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who wants Netanyahu's job. That Palestinian farmer can't vote for either of them. He can't vote in this election at all.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  But whoever wins will help decide whether settlers come for his olive groves, this harvest, whether the army stands there and watches, and whether there's a road outside of his village next year. That's the Israeli election in one picture. It's coming up on October 27th, and for Palestinians, the options range from bad to catastrophic. Now, let me explain why, without burying the lead.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Every serious contender in the Israeli election supports the occupation, and nobody is promising to end the war on Gaza.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Jewish Currents also published an explainer on the Israeli elections that I'll link in the show notes. And the news editor at Jewish Currents writes in that piece that he almost ran the election guide under the headline "The Vote Doesn't Matter." But he says when he talked to Palestinians, he changed his mind. Although the Israeli political landscape is abysmal, Palestinians will suffer different impacts based on who wins. And so, obviously, they're watching this closely. It comes down to two names. Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bezirav Smotrich. Ben-Gavir runs the national security right now, which means the police and the prisons, and he's responsible for a lot of the abuses that have happened. And Bezirav Smotrich, which is the head of the religious Zionist party, he's the finance minister, and he has enormous sway over the West Bank.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Netanyahu losing doesn't end the occupation, but it almost certainly takes those two out of their ministries. If you're a political prisoner or a farmer in some of the rural areas in the West Bank, that is an abstract. An organizer in Yafa, Abi Abushadah, told Jewish Currents that nobody is talking about change anymore. People are just asking, how do we just survive this point in history? That's very bleak, and it's also realistic. Crisis Group frames this as a contest between different right-wing ways of running a country that already controls everything from the river to the sea. The occupation isn't on the ballot, but I think its intensity is. The next government that will take over in Israel starts from a very different baseline

• 5:53Speaker 04

  than four years ago. Israel has taken more land. Gaza and the West Bank have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Cities and refugee camps have been razed. And at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Crisis Group's count, but we know that this is an undercount. The settler movement will stay active, no matter who wins. So the question isn't whether things get better, but the question is how much worse and how fast. Now, let me explain some basics for those of us who don't follow Israeli politics closely. The Knesset, the Israeli legislature, has 120 seats, and you need 61 to govern.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  A party basically needs 3.25% of the vote to get into the Knesset, which is about four seats. Fall short of that, and your votes are essentially burned. They simply vanish. And about a dozen political lists are expected to clear that bar. And there are basically two teams, or two-ish. Team one is Netanyahu's bloc, Likud, and Ben-Gavir's party, which is openly Gahanist, and Smotrich's religious Zionist party, running this time with another one. Moshe Feglin has said on camera, the head of the hoot, that he wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians, and that's who the religious Zionist party is running with. And then the two Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  So that's the coalition that has governed since December 2022, one that Crisis Group says is widely seen as the most extreme in Israel's history. Their shared agenda, as the past few years have made clear, I think, is to expand settlements, push towards formal annexation of the West Bank, stay in southern Lebanon, and push the Palestinians entirely out of Gaza. Likud's slogan this year translates to "The Right or Palestine." Basically, that either you're voting for the right wing, or you're voting for Palestinians. The message is that any other government would hand Palestinians a state. This brings us to Team Two, and maybe you'll see why this slogan is funny. The second team, so to speak, the opposition, is led by Gadi Eisenkot and his new party, Yashar.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Eisenkot is a former army chief. In 2006, he formulated the Dahia Doctrine, basically the idea that Israel wins by using overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure. After October 7th, he sat as an observer in the war cabinet, and he lost a son in Gaza, which earned him real public sympathy. On Palestine, Eisenkot has called the two-state solution "delusional," and he says he very much believes in settling the West Bank. But he has criticized settler violence and the E1 project, and says he'd clear outposts that are illegal under Israeli law. Now, to be clear, under international law, all of them are illegal, but they like to split hairs, these Israeli politicians. Alongside him is Naftali Bennett.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  He's a former prime minister and former head of the Yeshah Settler Council. He's running on a slate with Yair Lapid. And Bennett openly supports annexing Area C of the West Bank. Then there's Abidur Liberman, who's far right, but he's personally done with Netanyahu and has floated the idea of handing Palestinians in a shrunken territory over to Jordan. So again, not give them their own state, just hand them over to someone else. The Jordanians, I'm sure, have not been consulted on this. And then there's the quote-unquote "central left," the Democrats, the Labor-Maretz merger, led by Yair Golan. They're the only Jewish party that even nominally backs two states, but it's two states with long-term Israeli security control over all of it, and they're not talking about

• 9:27Speaker 04

  now or in the medium-term future. They're basically saying maybe a Palestinian state someday policed by the Israeli army. Now, look at what the opposition actually attacks Netanyahu on. They're attacking him on October 7th, and who's to blame? They're attacking him on the cost of living and the draft exemptions for Haredi Israeli citizens. When they criticize his wars, it's not because he's overseen war crimes or genocide, but because he's too soft. Lapid said, for example, that Israel should have bombed Iran's oil and gas facilities. And Bennett wants Qatar listed as an enemy state. Here's how I would put it. The Palestinian question isn't contested in this.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Because it's been settled within Jewish Israeli public opinion. There's near consensus on keeping security control over the Palestinians. The actual debate is about the style of control. Do we want something managed, quiet, out of sight? Or do we want something extreme and turbocharged? Now, at this point, you might be asking, well, is it 20% of the country Palestinian? These are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Where do they fit? Sami Abushadah, who heads Bala, the Palestinian nationalist party, is running with two other parties on the joint list. But Sami Abushadah himself is not on the ballot anymore. And I think what happened to him reflects the condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Right after October 7th, he wrote an article analyzing what had just happened,

• 10:50Speaker 01

  calling the attack a significant historical event. And Ben Gavir's camp then moved to disqualify him under a basic law amendment that bars candidates who support armed struggle, incite racism, or reject Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Now, Abushadah denied supporting armed struggle. He said he was analyzing the events and explaining their significance. He's a lawyer who works on human rights and has decades of experience attempting to work within the system in Israel to represent Palestinian citizens of the state. I'll link in the show notes an interview he did with Peter Beinart for the podcast Occupied Thoughts. You can hear the outrage in his voice over the accusations he was faced with, and by Ben Gavir no less. Someone with a criminal record with multiple convictions for offenses,

• 11:32Speaker 01

  including incitement to terrorism and racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Well, as you might expect, the attorney general backed the ban anyway. And here's where it gets really bad. This wasn't just the far right instigating a campaign against one of the few Arab Palestinian politicians and getting away with it. This was a situation where the whole Zionist spectrum got behind the ban, including Yair Golan of the Democrats, so the supposed left. And of course, here's where the Israeli left and right agree, oppressing Palestinians. And I want to note here, apparently there is a law in Israel that bars incitement to racism. But apply that law evenly and half or maybe more of the current governing coalition would be in trouble.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  But of course, the difference between them and Abushadah is that he's Palestinian. And I'm not even saying he did incite to racism. I'm just saying this is their accusation of him. Now, the Supreme Court was clearly going to uphold the ban. Sami Abushadah mentions how the judges felt threatened themselves. And then they also threatened him with more severe legal action if he tried to oppose this. So earlier this month, he withdrew. And he was trying to avoid a precedent that would make it easier to knock out Palestinian candidates later. The far right has tried this for decades, and this is one of the times it's worked. Orlinoi, a candidate for the joint list and a Bala member, told Jewish Currents that many supporters wanted him to stay in and basically make the court own this decision.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Abid Abushadah, the Palestinian organizer of Femi Afa that I mentioned earlier, he's Sami's relative. He described people waking up sad and humiliated on top of frightened. I moderated a panel with Abid for Jewish Currents Live recently, where he reiterated the sentiment, how heartbroken he was over Sami's decision. And this has ignited the debate again among Palestinians about whether there's any point in participating in the Israeli system if you're a citizen. Because if you stay in, you lend legitimacy to a rigged game. Or you exit and you lose the one lever you might have. Palestinian citizens are being asked to keep voting in a system that basically doesn't want them and showed them where the line is. Now, there's a parallel attempt to disqualify the entire joint list, the number of Arab parties, and Ram, which is an Islamist party,

• 13:45Speaker 01

  as whole parties, and that attempt failed. So they're still on the ballot. But after Election Day, they'll be negotiating with the same parties that helped push their leader out. So which of the Jewish Israeli teams in this election will win the upcoming election? Probably nobody at first.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Rough numbers from the latest polling show that Netanyahu's bloc will likely get around 50 seats. And then the opposition will also likely get around 50 seats. Then the joint list, the Arab parties and Ram, the Islamist party together, will get around 14. And then there's a new right wing, anti-Haredi slate, the reservists. They might get maybe four, and they're leaning towards Eisenkot. So let's do the math. Nobody gets to 61 without the Palestinian parties. Crisis Group puts the odds of either bloc winning an outright majority well under 10%. On paper, that would make the Palestinian parties extremely important. They're kingmakers in this election. But in practice, Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, all of them have said they won't govern with them.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Jewish Currents compares it to the riddle of the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage. If you bring in the Haredim, you lose Lieberman. You bring in the Islamist party, you lose Yashar. Every boat sinks. So here are the four scenarios that Crisis Group lays out might happen. Number one is a hung parliament. Nobody forms a government. Israel votes again early next year. Netanyahu stays on with Ben Gavir and Smotrich still in their ministries until that next election. He doesn't have to win, he just has to make sure nobody else does. Number two, Eisenkot forms a minority government with Palestinian parties backing it from the outside. Now, there's precedent for this. Arab parties in the past have, for example, propped up Yitzhak Rabin from outside his coalition in the early 90s.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Under Israeli law, a government just needs more yes votes than no votes. So Ram, the Islamist party, wants in. They want to be included. The head of that party, Mansour Abbas, his attitude is basically, we're here to govern. Furthermore, the joint list leader, Yussa Jabarin, has offered to be a safety net for any anti-Netanyahu government. The catch is Lieberman. He says he won't sit in a minority government, and he won't be on the side of any Arab party. If you take him out, then Jewish Currents' math puts that coalition at around 49, outvoted by Netanyahu's bloc. So this only happens if Eisenkot decides losing is worse than breaking his promise. Then the third scenario is defections.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  In this scenario, one of the parties or a few lawmakers switch sides. Now, Yashar's list, for example, is full of political newcomers, makes them targets. And another party, Shas, has hinted it could back Eisenkot because they're angry that Netanyahu never delivered their draft exemption. Or maybe there's a unity government with Likud minus the Khanists, which Netanyahu has floated. A number of different ways that that could happen. And finally, the fourth scenario is that someone wins outright. This is possible if several small parties fall under the threshold and burn their votes. But it would mean months of polling were wrong, so we're not sure how likely this is. Now, after a vote, Israeli President Herzog picks someone to try. And they get 28 days, plus up to two weeks more, to try to form a government.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And if that fails, two more people get a shot at new elections. And there's one more wild card. Axios reported that Netanyahu and Trump discussed restarting the war with Iran before both countries vote. The US Defense Secretary was in Israel this week to talk about Iran. And Crisis Group notes some Israelis worry a strike could be used to delay the election. So if something big happens before the election, all of this is basically up in the air. Now, what does this mean for Palestinians? Obviously, for me, the top concern. Let's go place by place, because Palestinians here means people living under very different rules. So first, Palestinian citizens of Israel. They're about a fifth of the population, and their most urgent issue is surviving an increasingly oppressive and racist society and government.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And also dealing with a record wave of organized crime and gun violence in Arab towns that they feel is being allowed to happen under Ben Gavir's watch over the police. And behind that is a deeper fear. Orlinoi, again, Bala member, told Jewish Currents that Palestinian citizens increasingly feel they're next in line, that forced expulsion could come for them too. Crisis Group says Netanyahu's opponents worry he may try to discourage or intimidate Arab voters, as in past campaigns. And turnout in Arab towns is quite variable in this race. If it's high, then the anti-Netanyahu math gets easier. And obviously, it makes sense why he would want to depress their vote. Now, for Palestinians in the West Bank, the situation is different.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Remember that settler violence is the one occupation issue Israel's actually arguing about a little bit? Even Netanyahu has, you know, pretended to condemn what he calls fringe groups, while making every excuse for them, of course. But Crisis Group points out that the worry is mostly about the strain on the army and Israel's image globally. No one in Israeli politics actually cares about the Palestinians being attacked by settlers. And little has been done to stop it. I argued in an op ed beginning of this month for Prospect magazine that the settlers in the state are symbiotic. They work together to achieve objectives using tactics the other side can't use. So the state can continue pretending these are fringe groups while achieving their goal of ethnic cleansing.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  For Israeli politics, the issues of economic strangulation, home demolitions, land expropriation, they barely come up outside the Arab parties. So an Eisenkot government might rein in vigilantes and evict some of the smaller outposts. And of course, that might mean the difference for a Palestinian villager who faces expulsion. The joint list's baseline ask is basically that you need to stop the daily terror. But actually, annexing?

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Area C and doing something about permanent security control and doing something about the fact that Palestinians have no state, that's not on the table. This this has brought support across both blocks. Now, let's turn to what the election means for Palestinians in Gaza. Here, the blocs mostly argue about who should govern Gaza and whether to prop up the Palestinian Authority. The Crisis Group report calls these peripheral disagreements. The far right still talks about expelling Gaza's population and rebuilding settlements there. The opposition doesn't say that, but it also doesn't say anything else. Then there's international pressure. In September, the UK let a ban on trade with settlements. And crisis groups read is that it

• 20:28Speaker 04

  won't really shift Israeli views much in the short run, because Israelis tend to dismiss outside criticism. But they're also not oblivious to isolation. And maybe that'll matter a little bit after Election Day, whoever wins. Okay, one last statistic. An Israel Democracy Institute poll in September found that 51% of Jewish citizens are optimistic about the future of democracy in Israel. But among Palestinian citizens, that number falls to 20%. So it's pretty obvious to everyone that the system is working as designed for one group of voters. Which brings us back to the photo I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the farmer in Ranthies walking under the banner of two candidates, who both agree he doesn't get a state,

• 21:09Speaker 04

  but they just disagree about how hard to squeeze him in the meantime. That disagreement is small, but it's also the difference between the next harvest and a burned olive grove, between a prisoner who gets visits and a prisoner who doesn't. So, yes, let's watch the Israeli elections, but we can't confuse a change of management with a change of the system. That is really not on the table. And if Eisenkot really would rather hand the country back to Netanyahu, then lean on Palestinian votes. You know, the audacity of actually including some of your citizens. We'll learn exactly what Jewish and democratic means in practice. Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care and stay safe.

• 21:59Speaker 04

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• 24:03Speaker 06

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast sometimes about elections, but a different kind of election. Hell, yeah, we're talking union elections. Talking loosely reform caucus-y stuff, kind of, not really, but sort of. Yeah, I don't know. Welcome to a different kind of 2026 election episode. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today, we're talking about some other kind of union election, that's just to say, union election in the IWW. And yeah, here with me to talk about that is Pam Sweetland-Hallis, who's an IWW member in DC, also Andrew D. Ferguson, who's

• 24:46Speaker 06

  an at-large member from Houston, and Elizabeth Koppas-Duclo, an IWW member and is the Associate Treasurer of the Portland branch. Yeah, you three, welcome to the show.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  So, let's start, I guess, by doing a thing we've done a few times on this show, but I think is worth at least getting into briefly here, which is, can you talk a bit about what the IWW is? And I guess, for these purposes, like what it's up to you these days?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the IWW is an all-industries industrial union, which means that we're organized based on what the people working, what the union members make, what industry they're in, rather than exactly what specific job they are. So if, you know, you're an accountant for a school, then you're part of the educational workers. And if you're an accountant for a car manufacturer, your industry is manufacturing, because it's based on, you know, who employs you and not what specific job you do.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not like divided into different, like, trades or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, one, one union, one big one.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. The dream of the IWW is to have all workers in one big union, organized as best we can, so as to maximize worker power, so that we can end the wage system and the need for people to be exploited by a capitalist class by having their labor stolen from in the form of profits. Yeah, something that we emphasize a lot is like workers' democracy or like workplace democracy. So, one thing that, like, the IWW does when organizing, you know, like, building up to

• 26:42Speaker 02

  the industrial, because it's not like you get everyone all at once. You might do office by office or shop by shop, but we don't defer decisions to an outside representative. People tend to be able to vote on things themselves when it comes to them and like what they want to do and how they want to do it. Aside from four national paid employees that just take care of mostly paperwork-style stuff, we are an entirely volunteer-based organization. People engage in this, you know, not as their job, but as in a way of helping their fellow workers, sort of in a mutualistic, mutual aid sense.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  And all power within the union is held by members who are elected by other members in elections like the one that we're running in.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's, I think, like, a very unique aspect of the IWW, in that it is the most democratic of the unions. But both in terms of, like, you know, I guess what you would call, like, shop floor autonomy, where, you know, like, the actual, like, unions themselves get to make decisions on how they're going to run their campaigns. But also, yeah, in terms of the direct election of officials, which is a, like, it's like genuinely staggering that there have been a lot of unions in the US that you know the names of, where you couldn't directly elect, like, the president of the union for a very long time.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think I have a vote in electing the president of the National Educators Association, even though I'm a member of that.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 06

  And that's, like, distressingly very common.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Well, to be fair to our allies in the broader labor movement, a number of the larger unions, the UAW, the AFL-CIO, I believe they do actually elect their leadership from among the members now. So that's not as big of a difference as it used to be.

• 28:46Speaker 06

  It is good, exactly.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  But, you know, there is still, even among those unions, even though they've made that change, they still often will come into a workplace where a group of workers have said, hey, we want to unionize. They will come in with a playbook and say, okay, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three. And if you deviate from this, we're not going to help you anymore, because you're not doing what we want you to do. The IWW is different, because we believe that the people who are doing the work know the best about the work and know the best about what the workplace needs. So we let them lead.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  And we just support them.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  And as a practical matter, because we are, you know, more accepting of the shop floor democracy, we often get a lot of union and unionization efforts that come from places that are overlooked or rejected by the mainstream unions.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Recently, of course, as probably many of your listeners have heard, we, you know, organized an all trans union, which I'm incredibly proud of to have been a part of.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  The organization effort, not the union.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, and like, there's been a lot of service worker union organizing, which also does mean you get a bunch of trans people, because guess, guess who's doing service work? And who's most unions won't organize.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that I meant, when I said that, like, you know, we, we get to represent ourselves, like, folks are talking about here is, I don't know which major union it was, but I know some library workers locally who didn't get to see their contract that, like, I'm using scare quotes here, they agreed to until after the city council had seen it, like, until after it had been fully negotiated, you know, they, they

• 30:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  There's not a lot of participation in that sense. That's, I think that's what's very different from, in the IWW compared to other people.

• 30:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, and like, I mean, we've talked to NNU, or National United, folks on here have talked about, like, their union, like, cutting deals with bosses behind their backs, like that, like, not a thing you can even do here.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Because when workers want to engage in negotiations with the boss, which we don't require them to do, we have an organizing model that doesn't necessarily rely on formal structure or negotiations, but when the workers do negotiate, it is the workers negotiating. The union does not send people in from Chicago, where we're based, to negotiate for them. So there is no possibility that the workers at the workplace can get cut out.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think the other consequence of that, structuring of that decision-making is that it also means that sort of internal elections are very important, even though union elections are, I, we, we finally found a kind of election that has lower turnout than, like, regular elections, which is sort of astonishing, but, Jesus Christ, nobody votes in these, which, yeah, it is especially a problem in larger unions, where, like, you get these, you know, you get these, like, admin caucuses that have been in power for, like, 40 years, and who suck, and who just win on incumbency every single year.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the situation's a little different in the IWW. Do you want to talk a bit about what the elections are, like, actually for, or what people do, and, yeah?

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, right now, there is the North American wide election for the North American Regional Administration, and so that's electing a handful of people for offices. Usually, these aren't all very competitive races, you know, often, these are, you know, races to fill, you know, committees like the Education Department, or the IW Editor, and it's, you know, a matter of, moreover, wanting people to step up, you know, volunteer to do that, than a super competitive race, but typically, GST, the General Secretary Treasurer, who is in charge of finances, not wholly in charge, but who has a lot of

• 32:50Speaker 02

  say over finances and the execution of, you know, the union's constitution, as well the General Executive Board, that's supposed to act as a check on the General Secretary Treasurer, and a, being a board of seven people, it's the, um, sort of highest level executive for the IWW, you know, in, in my eyes, these are, you know, people that are supposed to be acting in the background, largely, the education committees, the General Secretary Treasurer, that facilitate all of the branches and industrial unions being able to execute their own local union democracy, you know, and there are some elections there for treasure and whatnot, but largely, the democratic decisions are made at union meetings,

• 33:32Speaker 02

  and the Secretary for Portland, for instance, like, his main job is just onboarding and offboarding people, he's not in charge of the union at all, he just, you know, facilitates the, you know, kind of secretarial work. Yeah, also, on the ballot this year, like, in addition to what you were talking about, Elizabeth, there's the Gender Equity Committee, which, they do a lot of great things, but they also, you know, facilitate, like, mediations between conflicts and that kind of thing.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  The IW Editor, by the way, is the editor of Industrial Worker, which is our official publication. There are a number of committees, suffice it to say, that do really important administrative work to keep the union running and support our core mission of organizing workplaces, to put workers in power, not bosses, and, you know, when, when these roles go unfilled, the union suffers. When people who are less concerned about the work and more concerned about the status come into these positions, the union suffers. So, these positions are really important, as they would be in any organization, but especially here, because we are trying to do something that is bigger than just, oh, we want a raise,

• 34:42Speaker 04

  oh, we want, you know, more break time, we're trying to actually build worker power in society. And so, we really want to encourage the members of the IWW who are listening to this, as we hope many of them are in your audience, to pay attention to these elections, to look at the options on the ballot, and next year, consider running for any office that takes your fancy.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yeah, also, there will be positions that'll go unfilled, um, after the election, unless there are a freak amount of writing campaigns, so, if you can fill those positions, you can also volunteer for them after the election is up, if they are still vacant.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is one of the classic, like, there's this kind of, like, dialectic is not the right term, but it's what's appearing in my somewhat sleep-deprived brain of, on the one hand, you have this thing where it's like, okay, this is a position that allows you to do stuff, and there's, like, people who want to do it, and there's also sort of the classic anarchist thing of, like, okay, all right, there, there's a responsibility here, and it technically comes with power, but you have to find someone to do it, because, yeah, otherwise, it's just like.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  That, that's exactly right, and it's, it's reflective of broader trends within the IWW as well, because historically, we were inspired quite a lot by Marxist ideas, obviously, but we are structured very much in a, very much a syndicalist way, I'm not going to say fully anarchist necessarily, but we, we take a lot of inspiration from anarchism and how we operate, so, the IWW is very much a, a meeting of the minds there. So it makes sense that we'd have sort of problems from both ends as well.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I mean, syndicalist organization as a method generally came about after the IWW, but I'm not sure that's really that important, um, so maybe don't include that, IBK.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  I love to get into the history of it.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  You're right, that it wasn't necessarily a form thing, I'm not good on dates, but, like, for the nerds out there who want to look into it, like, the IWW kind of was, like, one of the early voices in some of these things, you know, so, like,

• 36:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Syndicalism and all of its flavors, there were a lot of socialists, what, you know, whatever their political tendency was, like, collective control over your working conditions was a central theme, for sure.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Well, I just mean the specific structure of the IWW union, I think, moreover, came about through naturally recognizing the troubles that the IWW encountered, and sort of created its own, uh, idea about how to solve these things, certainly based on previous theory, but in a lot of ways, contributing to future theory that would come from, uh, later workers, and philosophers, you know, anarchist and syndicalist ideas, that's my very brief understanding.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess, I guess what I'm sort of curious about is, I guess, partially, like, what y'all have been up to, and talking a little bit about, like, what the union has been sort of up to recently, and then how that relates to, yeah, like, what you, what you want to see happen at the kind of, like, large-scale level of, like, the national union.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Well, I could talk on a very particularly Portland experience, but, um, maybe one of the two of you would like to talk about the, the larger experiences, uh, first? Well, I mean, I think that's, that's part of it, is that the North American Regional, that it's transnational, spans many, many boundaries, and, you know, most of what the union is up to is the aggregate of what all the branches and at-large members are doing, so, I can speak on my recent campaign in DC, going back to, like, what was it we were saying before, that there's, uh, sometimes the bosses go and make, like, backdoor deals with the unions? Well, I'm a canvasser, you know, I've got a lot of skills, I've worked

• 38:54Speaker 02

  a lot of jobs, but, and for the last seven years, I've been a canvasser in the DC area, and the people that I worked for when we formed our canvassers' union with the IWW a couple of years ago, on their board is the heads in, like, like, union industry leaders of our state, and that absolutely played into, you know, how things worked out for that specific campaign.

• 39:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  But, yeah, I, I've seen campaign a lot, so a lot of what we're doing is organizing campaigns across the country. I think different sections of people are coming together, depending on the locality.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess, I guess I'm curious, sort of, on that level, where, something I run into with the IWW a lot is, like, people know maybe about, like, one thing that the union is doing in their, like, local area, and then there's, like, 16,000 campaigns going on.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, that people just don't know anything about, so I

• 39:51Speaker 00

  I guess what I'm kind of curious about is like, yeah, like, what are you taking from your sort of local campaigns that make you like, want to get involved? And like, what do you want to see out of like, out of the union from that?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Mine are pie in the sky. I mean, like, my, my goals are, you know, I, I mean, first of all, I do want to build up industrial unions, but like, I'm, I'm hoping that we double our membership, triple our membership and like, not just like, growing numbers to have numbers, but have people participating.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  We, you were talking about how we found an election that somehow has lower turnout than all the others. But, you know, that can be turned around if you decide to go out and vote in your local election. And our election period doesn't run for very long, so it's not supposed to take up too much of like you as a rank and file members time. But if you go out and vote, if you vote in the congressional races, for example, your vote might be like, represented as like one in 400,000. Here, you, you are making a much bigger impact when you do that and then take next steps to say, what do you want to see? Like, that's actually been my experience and what I've heard from a lot of people who get good stuff out of the union is it's folks who say, I think we should be doing this.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  You know, like, I have this frustration here at work or whatever. And then you have an avenue to kind of pursue that within the union.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Like, the unfortunate reality is that, you know, a lot of the people who are members of the IWW are, I wouldn't say not awake members of the IWW, they're not active participants. But that means that everybody who does participate has a massively outsized impact. You have a genuine chance to change the trajectory of the union if you get involved. And as far as, you know, what our goals are, why we're running, you know, my perspective as an at-large member, a recently at-large member, because the Houston branch unfortunately had to decharter a few months back.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Because we couldn't find somebody who had the time to be branch secretary, you know, a lot of the experience that we had in Houston was that we were waiting for somebody to come along. Who wanted to organize their workplace, the members of our branch, we were all very eager to help people organize. But none of us were in a situation where we could organize ourselves. So I think there are branches like ours out there who, you know, the problem that they're facing is that there isn't enough interest from the general public to find people who are in a position where they could and want to organize.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  There are branches that are like Portland and like Philadelphia and like Chicago, where they've got a lot of people in them already. They've got a lot of leads is what we call them to, to organize already. They don't need publicity necessarily. They need material support in order to support all those leads. So there's not a one size fits all path here to making the union stronger. But I think all of us who are running together, and it is a broader group than just the three of us, all of us who are running together, want to treat branches as individual branches, want to speak to them, understand their circumstances.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  And provide them with support that they need to be successful, whether that is, you know, more people to help onboard members and process leads. Or whether it is, you know, better support to use the internet to get the word out about, hey, you have an IWW branch in your city. If you want to organize, come do it with us.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  So my perspective from Portland has been sort of based on the just reality of how it's been organizing in Portland. So in Portland, we entered, say, 2024 or so, on a bit of a downturn. We had a couple of campaigns that were moving along very slowly and weren't working on a whole lot else aside from that. As a group, we put together a strategy to increase membership, to find and create campaigns. And to generally just make the union, our general membership branch of, of the IWW, much more impactful in Portland and much more active.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  So we started tabling at any sort of political rallies or, you know, queer events or just, I mean, any, any events that, you know, would, would have us in that, and that we would fit for. And we would, we began to, you know, sign up people, we would talk to people, you know, learn what their workplace problems were. And we started, you know, finding a lot of leads. We started working on a lot of campaigns. We have a number of private campaigns that of course I am not at liberty to talk about.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Fun, fun IWW problem of, sorry, we have a bunch of campaigns you're working on that no one can know what they are because don't want it getting out.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Unless you join. Even then, we, we generally try and keep secrecy on our priorities so people don't get fired for organizing. But, you know, publicly, we have the Muji Workers United, Realm Workers United, Real U Electrolysis Workers United, Burgerville Workers Union, Fried Egg Workers Union, Punch Bowl Workers United, I want to say. Think these are all of our public campaigns. We might have a couple more.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  There's a lot going on.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  It's gone to be a long list. And so we've had a lot of success as an IWW branch and we're really proud about that. And unfortunately, in my experience, working as the assistant treasurer for the Portland IWW and as an external organizer helping these unions. GEB has, and, and general headquarters as a large, has ended up acting more as a hurdle to us than as somebody helping us. Our Realm Workers United campaign got stuck in a limbo regarding the acceptance of it by the general executive board.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  They demanded that we jump through a handful of hoops. I forget the exacts of it. Admittedly, I think some of them were just genuinely needed. But, you know, rather than try and help us in getting everything in order, they would just continuously send us back with no ratification from the general executive board. And Muji Workers United, the, the lawyers working for Muji, were able to put out actually true information about how the IWW has had a ULP filed against it by the workers working for the IWW. We'll probably have to talk about this later. Maybe we won't be talking about it too much. I don't know. This is sort of an aside.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  And we've had plenty of people who, you know, talk about signing up, talk about wanting to sign up. And they're like, I, I love the Portland IWW, y'all are doing great things, but why is 40% of my dues going to National when I have no idea what National does? And it becomes hard to justify it when, you know, we're not able to get monetary support from National, when we are having our campaigns hindered by Nationals for us, like the ratification and whatnot. And when Nationals been often dismissive of the work that we've been doing.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  And so I saw those and I started attending GEB meetings. And what I saw was really disappointing. I think the first GEB meeting I was at, one trans woman was talked over by one of the members of the, of the general executive board. And then when another trans woman asked him to be more polite, he dismissed that other person. And then after that whole frankly rude incident, at the very least, he never apologized. Instead, another GEB member apologized on his behalf to everyone, which I just Wow.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Comes off as very deeply childish. And I feel like unfortunately, this immature behavior has been repeated over and over by different general executive board members. And it seems to be that a lot of them, not all of them have found more interest in common with their fellow executive board members than with the union as a whole. And see themselves, and have sometimes described themselves not as stewards of the union, but as its leaders. That they have been acting with authority to control and dictate how the union is run.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  I can go on about this at length, but you know, it was the disappointment by the general hindrance and lack of support from general headquarters. And the belligerent behavior of some of the general executive board members. That made me realize that there needed to be members of, I think, better character and greater humility running. And to be honest, I don't want to have to be that person.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  But I've always believed that if you see a problem, the first step to solving it is finding someone to try and solve it. And if you're the one seeing the problem, that'll often have to be you. So when we started talking about the problems we are experiencing as Portlanders and how those problems were being reflected to other general membership branches, I was one of the Portlanders that raised their hand and said, I will do this if it means that Portland can continue to do its amazing work. I love the IWW as a whole, but I have given so much of my time, my effort and my life to Portland in particular, and I want to make sure that Poland is able to do its amazing stuff

• 50:01Speaker 02

  without having to deal with national. Nationals should not be an obstacle we have to overcome or opponents we have to fight. It should be our, you know, backup in the corner in case we, you know, need it. And it should be stewarding the, the union along so that, you know, these local, more democratic, more, you know, grassroots organization of the branches and the I U B's can do what they are meant to do.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Well, I, I'd like to pick up from that if I may, if everyone's all right with that. Yeah, go for it. Everything Elizabeth is saying is things that I think all of us running have seen in this current general administration. And it is the impetus for why I think all of us are running. The culture that we have seen of disrespect for members based on their identity, but also just based on the fact that sometimes they don't seem to agree with everything that the officers are saying is a major point of contention in the union. And it drives people away from participating in the NARA level of the IWW.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  And I think that is one of the priorities for all of us running together in this campaign. It's certainly one of my priorities. I am, I am running to restore respect for the membership on the general executive board. One of my major points in my campaign has been that it does not matter who you are. It does not matter what I personally think of you. If you are a dues paying member of the IWW, you deserve a basic amount of respect. And that basic respect involves me not calling you names. It involves me not talking over you. It involves me being willing to listen to your ideas, even if I disagree with them in the end, but being willing to hear you out. And that's how I try to live right now.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  And I think it's really important for our administrative officers to live that way as well. If we're talking about personal stories, one of the issues that I've faced, I was a member of our international committee of working with unions around the world last year. And we had an incident where one of the portions, one of the sections of our union, the incarcerated workers organizing committee, there was some irregularity with their finances. And it turned out that they hadn't been keeping proper records and, and that, that was a serious problem. But the general administration took that as an opportunity to punish them and sort of freeze their accounts for while the investigation was going on.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  They can make very specific transactions, but the rest of the things that they needed at that time were, you know, subject to review or, or not approved. And the international committee, we decided to sort of speak up because we felt that this was a concern of the entire union. We felt that this is a concern of all the members. If this could happen to one organ of the IWW, it could happen to any one of us. And in the process of that, I expressed my personal view that legal compliance is not always the goal. It's, it's not the thing that we should be always striving for. What we should always be striving for is to do the right thing, what is ethical, what hurts the least people.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  And that is a sentiment that I believe is, obviously that I believe is reasonable, but it's a sentiment that I've heard expressed by many people inside and outside of our union. It's not an uncommon sentiment within our union at all. But because I was an officer, it was deemed dangerous. For those who aren't familiar, the, uh, the constitution of the IWW as well as the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 as amended guarantees union members certain rights, including the right to freedom of expression. And despite both the constitution and the LMRDA guaranteeing me a right to freely express my views, in this case, this was a view that I was expressing.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  I was doing so respectfully. I was still removed from my office. And the general executive board had the opportunity to overturn the charges because they were in violation, direct violation of the IWW constitution and of US federal labor law, and they failed to do so. And so that was my personal moment of, okay, this is the last straw. I have to do something to change who we've got making these decisions. Because they're not putting the members first. They're not putting our rights first. They're not putting our interests first. They are doing what appears to them to be

• 54:49Speaker 04

  the easiest option. They, they are doing what appears to them to be what the law demands of them, whether they're correct or not. And, um,

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Allegedly.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Allegedly.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  I think you both like encapsulated that like motivation for running pretty well in terms of like how I've related to it as well. Yeah. For those who don't know, I am running for the G E B along with these lovely people. But my candidacy has been kept off of the ballot. So I'm actually running a writing campaign.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Oh, jeez.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  You know, yay. But yeah, there's something that's really important is just like the common theme is that the IWW is and has always been a diverse and inclusive union. Every good organizer knows that you're supposed to meet people with compassion and be constructive in your, in your solutions for things. So the G E B does many things, but to me, one of the more important things that they're tasked with and are empowered to do is supporting campaigns like Elizabeth was talking about and supporting branch formations.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  So like, you know, if Andrew's area becomes particularly interested in that way again, then it should be that you aren't feeling alienated or excluded when you try to access these things, but that you're being guided and supported. Yeah. When you're interacting with your union.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  And if we can touch on sort of the legalistic sense for a second, I've seen the GST and G E B back up their arguments by referencing a sort of reverence or respect for the law and for the IWW constitution, when of course they're only giving their personal interpretations on the law. And if you, you know, talk to a union lawyer or any lawyer, they will tell you, you know, these things vary and they're dependent on specific circumstances. And it's, you know, a lawyer's favorite two words are it depends.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  Just below this is not legal advice is it depends.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Well, it depends also allows you to get out of giving legal advice.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  The one two punch.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, even, even if they were experts on labor law, you know, they would not necessarily have the correct answer. In fact, the matter is they're not experts on, on labor law. But members of the G E B have acted as if they have the final say on what is and isn't legally correct. And whatever they say is them following the constitution or is them following labor law is just unquestionably what needs to be followed. And so they have sort of used that authority to reach their power beyond what I think it's responsible for the G E B to be doing.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Well, I can go on with, with what they've done with this, but I think just the, the thing I was trying to say, I think I'm trying to get at is that like, I think that there is to some degree a certain amount of legalism that the G E B and GST are following that is guiding what they're doing. But I also think what they want to be doing is guiding their legal opinions regarding matters of the IWW.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  A lot of this kind of comes back to a question that we've talked about on this show a lot. This kind of fundamental question of like what democracy is.

• 58:48Speaker 06

  In the sense of is democracy a process by which you come together and make decisions? Or is democracy a process by which, you know, a group of people is elected and they get to make the decisions for everyone? And it feels like a lot of what is being described here is people sort of wielding their power to like make decisions for everyone and try to enforce them.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  I think it would be fair to describe this as a conflict between those two notions of democracy. I think that our notion is that the members are the ones making the decisions. We appoint people who execute those decisions and yes, sometimes make very small incidental decisions in the process of carrying out our will. But the people who are in the regional administration are not supposed to be making decisions for us. They're supposed to be carrying out our will as the rank and file. And it is our sense that they haven't been doing that. So we are stepping up to say, and we can do this because of how democracy in the IWW works.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  We are stepping up to say, it is time for you to go. It is time for an administration that will follow the membership, not try and leave it.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, that's very true. Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 06

  So I guess in that spirit, what do you want to see the GEB do if you were able to take office?

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my hope is to act as GEB member as somebody who is, you know, somewhat distant and impartial and, you know, connects with the branches and talks to them, you know, as a fellow member and a fellow worker and finds where I can help them, where they want help and where there's confusion. And otherwise, just facilitate the smooth running of the union without much, if any, intervention, you know? I would rather focus on connecting people, connecting different local branches together as they can help each other, connecting people to the different parts of the regional administration that are, you know, dedicated to education and organizing and international connections and whatnot.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  And, you know, otherwise being someone who helps, but does not lead. Yeah, I think what I would like to focus on quite explicitly is, like I said, helping branches form, helping new branches grow, you know, supporting the smaller groups among us. And, I mean, it sounds so dry, but like properly funding campaigns, just making sure things are properly funded, not irresponsibly, you know? I, I like to look at spreadsheets and I like to look at budgets and that's a lot of what you have to do with the GEB. But above all else, I'm hoping that I can, I can learn. Like it's, it will be such a privileged position to be in to like as my job essentially,

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  be in contact with membership and branches and just learn about what's going on with people and what they need.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  My personal goals for a term on the GEB are honestly cultural because at the local level, we're in somewhat of a holding pattern right now. We need to sort of lick our wounds and rebuild, but we, we need people to do that. We need driven people who want to organize. And we believe that frankly, a branch is best built around active organizing already. So we're going to try and foster that at the local level. But really for me, at the national level or at the regional level, rather, I want to, I want to model the kind of officer I want to see. I want to be a respectful officer. I want to be an officer who listens.

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  I want to be an officer who will basically take orders from the membership and, you know, not do what is convenient, but do what is right. And that involves obviously motivated by my personal experiences, defending our members' rights when something threatens those rights and it is in my power to push back on that. I, I will, I will defend our members' rights to freedom of expression. I will defend our members' rights to a, a safe environment in which to express themselves and speak to power, to disagree with power. But at the same time, I want to reach out to those members who I described earlier as being asleep.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  I want to reach out to the people who aren't taking an active role in our union. And I want to see what it is that we can do to make them interested, whether that's at the local level, because there are plenty of places out there that don't have branches, or at the regional level and make NARA basically a place that isn't hellish to interact in. Make the NARA level something that members can participate in without, without fear. You know, maybe I'm shooting too high there, but I think it is a, a change that can be made. And I think that every little bit helps. And I think that modeling those changes on the GEB will help bring them about.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think that's a fairly reasonable set of things to want the national level of your union to do.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just wild and out there.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  I would like to be able to safely interact with the national level of my union. It is incredible, incredibly radical demands.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  And have it like actually support the things that I'm doing at the local level. Oh my God, yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 06

  Like a national organization is supposed to function.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Hot take, organizing can be fun.

• 1:04:29Speaker 06

  You know, many are saying this.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  And it should be fun.

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  And when it's not fun, we need to figure out why and we need to change it. And that's what we're here to do. We're here to make organizing fun again. Hang on a minute.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  That's a bad cadence. Hang on.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Scratch that. If I can pull things back to, to Raewoo, because it's just one I'm always happy to talk about, you know, all of the people who, who are on the picket line at Raewoo, that they were showing up every day. They were there in June and July heat, but they were all always approaching things in a happy and positive way, not because it was easy to do or because it was exactly fun to do, but because everyone there was uplifting everyone else. It was a community that had come together and was based on mutual support and mutual love. And I want to see that in the IWW at large.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  And I also want to be able to, as a, you know, external organizer, be able to say, you know, this is what we do in Portland and this is what we do at National and both of these can help you in this way, not this is what we do at Portland and don't worry about National. They won't help you, but we'll try our hardest to make sure they won't mess anything up for you. Yeah. That's not a good pitch to prospective fellow workers. Well, full circle, that 40% goes to strike funds or they should, you know? That's a much better answer than I'll get back to you.

• 1:06:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. This current GEB has, in addition to other problems, they've, they've also been pretty dedicated budget hawks. You know, they have basically been cutting from every single committee as much as possible. And while I do understand there is a need for, you know, fiscal security and whatnot, I think it's been taken to the point where it's been sort of overriding the needs and community decision makings of the individual committees to the point where just a lot of funding for the things that the committees at National are supposed to do and want to do isn't supportive. And you only really get support if GEB likes you or likes what you're doing.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  I know members of the education committee, they had put together a budget and, you know, list for what they're planning on doing for the year. And GEB said, well, we don't want to support this. Do you want to do something completely different instead? No, then we're not going to fund you. You know, it again, comes back to this question of whether or not you are a steward or a leader, you know? Obviously, no matter what, the people in GEB will have an amount of power. But I think we need to elect people who do not want to use that power and who will not take that as permission to have control over other people.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  And also maybe in the future, we can institute, you know, reforms to decrease the amount of power that GEB can take for itself and that other institutions can take for itself, continue to make the IWW more and more democratic. The IWW is, I'm going to say just pretty definitively, the most democratic union in the country and in Canada as well, but it can always be more democratic. And I think that we can always make the IWW better, as amazing as it currently is. Yeah, if I may, actually, this is something that's, that is really important to me. I don't think there's any place for austerity. In a radical left union.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Or any radical left organization, you can't grow by cutting, you know? Like, there are many creative solutions to times like of downturn. But I think how Elizabeth described it is perfect. To me, there is a difference between fiscal responsibility and using the budget as a boogeyman. I think it's incredibly dismissive and assumes that like myself and my fellow workers are too ignorant to understand numbers when people say, this is a personal experience of mine that I'll I'll ask for like line items on things and they'll say, just look at the budget. And it's like, well, I did. That's why I'm asking, right? It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. There's a huge fund here that's not being dispersed, you know?

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  If that makes sense, to me, there's no place for austerity here. Our solutions will come from other ways of organizing and supporting each other. This current administration has seen a huge downturn in members and therefore in funding. And I don't want to say it's all general headquarters doing. I think a lot of these are trends outside of any members' control. But I don't think that it has to be as bad as it is now. And I think that if we were a union more willing to support its members, more visibly supporting its members, that we would not be having to worry as much about the budget. Because you would have growing membership and therefore increasing funds.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Yes, it is absolutely a policy of austerity that the current general executive board is maintaining. And that's their solution. Their solution is cuts, not growth. And that doesn't work. Obviously, growth cannot be infinite. That's one of the problems that we're running into with capitalism. But, you know, in July 2026, the Federal Reserve estimated that there were 210 million working age people in the United States. We are a union of, I think the largest estimate we've got is 9,000 members. I'm not even sure if that's accurate anymore. So we are not at any point of reaching the limits of our potential growth yet.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  And in terms of specific financial analysis, I looked at our balance sheets, which is something that any member can do. And I sent my analysis in a letter to the Member Bulletin in July of 2025. And from what I saw, I calculated that we could afford to maintain the deficit at the time for six and a half years. Now, that is not forever, but it's certainly not the kind of crisis that this GEB has used it as in order to slash committee budgets and barely touch their own. And it's definitely enough time to turn around our flagging recruitment numbers. You know, we need a GEB that can meet this moment, and that is the kind of board that we want to be.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, one note, I mentioned some ways that we might change the union and improve it. I don't think it's necessarily the GEB's place to make those changes for the members. We shouldn't get in the way of change. We should be able to facilitate it when it happens. But again, we're not in charge. We're not the ones changing the union, the membership at largest. Yeah, it's ultimately the workers, the fellow workers of a union who will change it is a good place to start wrapping up. So there has been a lot of mention of we in this endeavor. Do you all want to talk about who is running and what the sort of campaigns and write-ins are? Yeah, I specifically would like to highlight the write-ins.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  So for a recap, I'm Pamela Sweetland-Allis. Hey, y'all. I'm running a writing campaign, so that means that if you could please write in for GEB, Pam S. or Pamela S. In addition, we have John Hollingsworth running for GEB as a write-in. And Greg Murray from Portland running a write-in for GEB. So to recap that, write-ins for the GEB includes Pam S., John Hollingsworth, and Greg Murray. In addition, we have a fellow worker who, in addition to myself, was obstructed from the ballot, who is running for the Iwok Administrative Assistant.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  They go by Iggy, but I believe their name in a red card is Philip I. or Philip Iggyarto. So, yeah. And then you can find the rest of us in the G O B. Me and Andrew both cross endorsed each other and a whole bunch of other people who are all supporting each other in trying to make this union better.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  Yes, there is a candidate statement section in the October G O B that lists our visions for the union. And then make sure to check the member submission section for our write-in candidates' statements. Because unfortunately, as write-in candidates, they weren't given dedicated space.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we will get a link to that in the description. And yeah, thank you all so much for being on the show and thanks for fighting to make the union a better place. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you for having me.

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  And trans rights are workers' rights. Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

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  It's the rage bait.

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  It feels like it's trying to divide people.

• 1:14:33Speaker 06

  We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.

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  NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

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• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. However, as I think you can tell by the opening music, you're listening to a very special episode today about El Chupacabras.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  I'm Carlos Barrios Polanco, and I'm at an undisclosed location outside somewhere in Puerto Rico, where my only company are the creatures of the night and the sweet music that they make. Also, my dog is here with me, and she's pretty chill.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  The reason that I'm out here is that I wanted to set the scene for this episode by being in the same headspace and meat space as all of those people that claimed to have seen something eating their livestock and draining their blood 32 years ago. And so far, I can definitely see why a person might see something, probably a dog or a mongoose, ripping the throats or biting the necks of their cows, then attributing it to something that they could not explain. If you've spent any time in the middle of the woods, away from the noise and lights of the city, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you. Especially if hundreds of years of colonialism and societal and economic stress have your mind

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  reeling, it would be easy to think that some- Something was stalking you out here, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So what even is a chupacabra anyway? Well, in Spanish, it's called chupacabra, which often gets translated as goat sucker in English, which has always rubbed me the wrong way because it's cabras as in multiple goats. So it should actually be goats sucker. That's just a quibble I've had for ages that I'm happy to share with you right now. I'm sure that I must have seen something about the chupacabra on the History Channel, but my first interaction with the chupacabra as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 direct to DVD movie Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico,

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  which is like really funny to me because it's actually the monster of Puerto Rico and everybody else just ripped this off. I should say upfront that I'm not a believer, although I think the truth is out there. The truth is that the chupacabra is fake, a shape shifting creature of the mind, not an extraterrestrial creature of the night. However, while it's not real, the animal attacks and the hysteria they caused, as well as the enduring obsession with it in some circles, I think, is really interesting because it is kind of the perfect boogeyman manifestation of a lot of the colonial history here and all over the world, honestly. Per the book Tracking the Chupacabra, The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore by Benjamin Radford, which was a huge source for this episode and was way more serious

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  than I expected it to be, there is free versions of this blood sucking beast. The first is the original, the Puerto Rican version that is about three to four feet tall with spines or feathers running down its back that also has some kind of reptilian look to it. It was first quote unquote seen in the small town of Canoanás in 1995. The second is more of a dog slash coyote looking thing that's been seen up and down the American continent, but mostly on the Mexico-US borderlands and Latin America. Several corpses of this type of chupacabra have been found in that area and pretty much every single time it ends up being some type of animal with mange. Meanwhile, the third version is a catchall for any type of unidentified animal

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  that can carry the blame for an unexplained attack pretty much anywhere in the world. For this episode, I'm mainly going to be talking about the Puerto Rican version with a little bit of context here and there about the other versions. So the first quote unquote sighting of the chupacabra occurred in August 1995 in the small town of Canoanás in the center north part of the archipelago. There had previously been attacks on livestock that year that had left them with two bite marks on the neck and without a single drop of blood. But this was the first time that it was seen. The woman who saw it, Madeline Tolentino, claimed that she saw the beast from a window from her house alongside her mother. And she didn't get a sighting of a piece of it caught in the moonlight as it slipped into the darkness.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  No, she got such a good look that she was able to describe it in incredible detail. Per Tracking the Chupacabra, quoting the book Chupacabra and Other Mysteries by Scott Corales, which I cannot find an ebook for, so I'm trusting Radford on this. It had dark gray or black eyes that ran up its temples and went up into its sides. It walked like a human and its arms were quote, drawn back in an attack position as though it were a TV monster, end quote. Keep that in mind for later, by the way. It had long skinny fingers and close cropped hair all over its body and skinny legs that had three separate toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Tolentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say lack thereof. According to Corales's book, she somehow got on the floor from her window and managed to see that its genitals were sealed, even having time to make a joke to her mom about how it might have pooped through its mouth. According to the book, a young boy who worked for Tolentino's husband was also in the house and he sprinted out to catch the beast, even managing to do so and get close enough to perform an impromptu dental inspection because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corales's books, they are truly wild looking. And from what I can tell, they're pretty much all written from the perspective

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  of a person who believes, or at least wants you to believe that the cryptids and aliens described in them are real. Meanwhile, Radford's book is written by a skeptic, a person who's open to the idea, but is actually trying to use a scientific method to see if the chupacabra is real. From reading Radford's book, he kind of has some serious beef with Corales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, Tracking the Chupacabra points out several inconsistencies in Tolentino's statement. First, it moved like a robot, but then it ran, then hopped, then seemed to float. Also, she was watching from the window, but was able to get to the floor to see its genitals.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  It's possible that she said window, but she meant like a sliding door in her house. But yeah, it's improbable. Also, the fact that the boy managed to catch the creature and inspect it is wild. And when Radford interviewed Tolentino in 2010, she said that that never happened. The kid went out to find it, but he didn't actually see it. So it's unclear where that description came from. To let the cat out of the bag quickly, per Radford's book, the creature that Tolentino saw in the darkness was actually a half remembered and more reptilian version of the creature Sil from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. Sil was played by Natasha Henstridge and designed by H.R. Giger.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the guy who designed the xenomorphs is the reason that the chupacabra exists. Tolentino quote unquote, saw the chupacabra in August and Species had come out just a month before in July. And if you look at pictures of Sil and the chupacabra drawn from Tolentino's memories, there's an uncanny resemblance there. I know that this is an audio medium, but I'll publish pictures on Blue Sky whenever this episode drops and you'll see it. Part of the movie had even been filmed in Puerto Rico and one of the first images presented in the film is the Atos Ibo Telescope, a gigantic radio telescope that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017, that had actually been used to send the first ever signals into space in 1974.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Tolentino was even asked about the film, but her reaction was interesting, to say the least. In a 1996 interview with Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez, highlighted by Tracking the Chupacabra, Tolentino said that Sil's resemblance to the chupacabra was quote, really impressive, end quote. And she wondered, quote, how can they make a movie like that when these things are happening in Puerto Rico, end quote. I really do not want this to come off as being mean to Tolentino because we've all seen weird stuff in the woods that we can't explain, told a few friends and then forgot about it. But the reason that Tolentino's tall tale became the myth that it did is because the news media absolutely pounced on her story and took it to insane heights,

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  attributing any and all mysterious occurrences involving cattle mutilation or unexplained attacks or anything along those lines to the chupacabra. Before Tolentino saw, quote unquote, the chupacabras, there had been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the chupacabras and it slowly became a boogeyman that was at the scene of everything that could not have an easy or normal explanation. I should also say that the name chupacabras was reportedly coined by comedian Silverio Pérez, although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolentino's encounter with the chupacabra, she described the chupacabra to artist Jorge Martín, whose drawing made the front page of El Nuevo Dia, according to Tracking the Chupacabra.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  El Nuevo Dia is our paper of record, so this was a big deal. And although I can't find this front page anymore, as a nation, we're pretty bad at archiving the past and it's not really easily accessible online. From reading the book, their coverage seems to have been significantly less sensationalist than other local papers. Although I did manage to find an article from 2010 whose headline reads, quote, two chupacabra attacks reported, end quote. So your mileage may vary. However, the chupacabra reached worldwide fame when talk show host Cristina Saralegui aired a story about the chupacabra on El Show de Cristina, which aired across the Spanish speaking world.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  Saralegui even had the mayor of Canoanás, José Chemo Soto, who was up for reelection to talk about his experience hunting the chupacabra in his municipality, which is something that he became super famous for in that late 90s period. And it helped him a lot because he was reelected all the way to 2004. It was a publicity stunt, clear and simple, but it worked. Per the book Governing Spirits, Religion, Miracles and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898 to 1956 by Renaldo Román, he eventually came to be called Chemo Jones because of his hunt for the blood sucker. It was clear to everyone this was a publicity stunt, but everybody went along with it, including more than 200 volunteers,

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  scores of journalists and off duty police officers that accompanied him on a On October 29th, 1995.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Wait, you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no, it's just ads.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we're talking about the Chupacabra.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Even though not all Puerto Ricans believed in this bloodsucking beast, urban and international media almost always portrayed these rural folks as being a mass of fools that believed in mysticism and this extraterrestrial beast. So there was always a very real class aspect to the whole coverage of this Chupacabra. Per the book Tracking the Chupacabra, quote, "When reading accounts of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico, I often came across phrases like, quote, 'The Chupacabra terrorized the island,' end quote, or, quote, 'Fear gripped Puerto Rico,' end quote, or, quote, 'The island populace was near fever pitch,' end quote."

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  There is, of course, some truth to this description, but mystery mongering hyperbole aside, it is not accurate to suggest that the entire Puerto Rican population, or even a majority of it, was gripped in terror over the goat sucker. Of course, some individuals and groups grew very concerned over the mystery, but most Puerto Ricans, especially city dwellers, went about their daily lives giving little thought or concern to the creature that they had heard about, mostly in backyard gossip and tabloids. If El Novia and Cristina brought the creature to mainstream attention, El Vocero, which is now a respectable newspaper but was a lurid tabloid back then, is what, quote unquote, "created" the Chupacabra in the popular imagination.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  Per Governing Spirits, El Vocero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about Chupacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that in hindsight were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in Tracking the Chupacabra is about a five-year-old girl almost being abducted by the beast, but then she managed to escape, and it raised her IQ to a genius level. This story was seemingly confirmed by a police officer at El Vocero, which saw it fit to print. We're going to talk a little bit more later about people in positions of authority confirming Chupacabra, but this was the type of thing that flooded El Vocero newspapers at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time this was happening, he told me that

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  El Vocero's tabloid-ness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of accidents and murders led people to say that if you squeezed the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per Tracking the Chupacabra, the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by El Vocero, without really any proof or an autopsy being performed. Quoting from Radford here, "It is likely that if the animals' owners expressed any doubts that their animals had been vaporized, the tabloid reporter would have no reservations about massaging the facts and selecting the quotes that would make for a better story. A farmer or housewife who excitedly swears that the goat they found had absolutely been

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  drained of every single drop of blood makes for a better story than one who isn't sure, or who admits he or she didn't really look," end quote. Mass hysteria is often caused by mass media covering an event badly, essentially a failure to perform journalism. Each instance of the Chupacabra getting attention made it spread wider and wider until it was absolutely inescapable, yet very little of this coverage attempted to show that it wasn't real. Any mysterious thing was now the result of the Chupacabra, because it was the new thing that everybody knew about and the creature that everybody was telling you to be very, very, very afraid about all the time.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Actually, the animated 100% real documentary Paranoid Agent deals with mass hysteria spreading throughout Japan as a result of a mysterious boy attacking people with a bat. Highly recommend. El Vocero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact, El Vocero's first year of publication was marked by another vampire creature boosting its numbers. In 1975, there were unexplained attacks in the western municipal of Moca that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El Vampiro de Moca, the Vampire of Moca. El Vocero latched onto the story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabra. Although they were admonished for their coverage at the time by editors from other newspapers, they said they were just reporting the stories out, just the facts. Although they later acknowledged it did lead them to reach a circulation of nearly 90,000 in their first year, according to Governing Spirits, which is a fuck-ton for a small tabloid in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than 3 million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with El Chupacabra by analyzing El Vocero's actions during the time of El Vampiro de Moca. Both times, they knew that by focusing on sensationalism and obscurantism, it could

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  make money, which is a lot of the reason that these myths spread. By the way, if you speak Spanish, the great podcast El Hilo did an episode in March of this year about El Vampiro de Moca called, quote, "El Vampiro entre nosotros," end quote. That's excellent and was a big source for this section of the episode. So 20 years before the Chupacabra struck, Puerto Ricans were already familiar with another bloodsucker. And although the natural inclination is to think that the Vampiro de Moca is just the Chupacabra, from what I've read, people mostly view them as two separate creatures that show there are unexplained things going bump in the night in Puerto Rico, and that the

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  government was either mostly powerless to do something about it, or largely uninterested in doing so. Speaking of the government, there's an even older story than the Vampiro de Moca that had already created a strong association between the government and vampirism on the archipelago. First, to set the scene, Puerto Rico has been an important US military stronghold since the late 1930s because of its strategic location that allows the military to project force towards Latin America. The archipelago eventually became an incredibly important part of US military strategy in the Atlantic. At its peak, there were 20 separate installations that occupied roughly 13% of all arable land

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  in the archipelago, per a master's thesis written by Robert Jordan in 2008 for the University of Texas at Dallas titled "El Chupacabra: Icon of Resistance to US Imperialism." The biggest installation was the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, which was eventually closed in 2004 but was reopened last year. The US military also occupied the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, which they used for all types of training, including using it as a bombing range. Per The Guardian, they dropped up to 3 million pounds of ordnance in Vieques per year. This includes 263 rounds of depleted uranium tipped munitions that were, quote unquote,

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  "accidentally expended during a training exercise on February 19th, 1999," per Navy Facilities Command. Today, about 2/3 of Vieques are natural reserves that the public can't access because of all the unexploited ordnance there, and its people have sky-high cancer rates compared to the rest of the archipelago's population. I talk a little bit more about all this in my episodes about US colonies, so check that out if you want to learn more. Vieques and Culebra were so important to US military strategy that in the 1960s, the US government attempted to purchase the entirety of the two island municipalities for bombing practice. This would have involved moving the nearly 9,000 people that live there to another part

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  of the archipelago, as well as exhuming all the bodies in the cemeteries, some which had been there for over 200 years, and re-burying them somewhere else. Because of this wild and weird ask, the negotiations were codenamed the Dracula Plan, Plan Dracula, by Puerto Rican officials. Although the plan never came to pass, per El Chupacabra: Icon of Resistance, this early association between the US government with a bloodsucking monster was prophetic for the way it viewed the bloodsuckers to come. Before I continue citing all the ways US presence influenced the Chupacabra, it's

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  worth noting that the Navy left Culebra in 1975 and Vieques in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And per Jordan's thesis, Chupacabra sightings dropped off massively after Puerto Ricans were able to wrestle more control over their land from the US. But you know what you can't wrestle away control from? These products and services. And also, I'm sure they won't suck your blood out like the Chupacabra, but maybe watch out a little bit.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we are diving into the origin story of the Chupacabra. Since the Chupacabra came into the popular imagination, its origin has always been linked to the US government. The most prominent rumor goes that it was created for genetic experimentation on extraterrestrial life at a secret laboratory in El Junca, which is the largest rainforest on our small archipelago. Many people consider it to be the last bastion of pristine and untouched Puerto Rico. And while that's not really true, it certainly is beautiful, and hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes to reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chupacabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in El Junca, there

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  were definitely strange experiments taking place there, but of the man-made horrors beyond my comprehension variety. There are two big ones. The first was related to Project Plowshares, wherein the Atomic Energy Commission was attempting to, quote unquote, "peacefully employ atomic explosions to create canals and harbors in Panama." As part of this project, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico injected trees and other vegetation in El Junca with radioactive isotopes to see what would happen to them. Meanwhile, the second big one is the testing of Agent Orange, Agent White, and other tactical herbicides there and in six other locations, because our vegetation resembled that of Southeast Asia.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  According to a document titled, quote, "The History of the US Department of Defense Programs for the Testing, Evaluation, and Storage of" of tactical herbicides, end quote, written by Alvin L. Young in 2006 and submitted to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. As far as I've been alive, there's always been rumors of creepy things going on in El Junco. It's a popular spot for UFO sightings as well, which people often attribute to the presence of US military installations there. It's worth noting that El Junco's facilities were also used as a guided missile operations control unit in a joint surveillance site in the latter half of the 20th century, which is part of the reason that people always thought there was some secret spy shit going

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  on that was calling the aliens to El Junco. Actually, my dad has this story that he's told me and my siblings maybe a dozen times over our lives where him and his best friend were confused for Men in Black at an El Junco stargazing slash UFO event because he was wearing aviators at night and a bomber jacket. Just the type of beliefs that can be inspired by something you can't quite explain. The Chupacabra being from a secret facility also ties in well enough with the plot of species, which inspired that first sighting. Lauren Derby in a paper titled, quote, "Imperial Secrets: Vampires and Nationhood in Puerto Rico," end quote, says that, quote, "The Chupacabras reflects a contradiction very

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  peculiar to Puerto Rico, which is a very small island with an extraordinarily pervasive array of US military installations, most of which are called as top secret and therefore declared off limits to locals," end quote. Per Derby's paper, quote, "This proportionate number of Chupacabra narratives have been generated by the inside class outsiders who have some access to the secrets of power or police its margins. Those were close enough to touch the walls and halls of power, comma, the skin of the secrets and yet are still denied real access," end quote. These are mostly retired army personnel or police. I would wager to guess that, like many other cryptids, the tale of the Chupacabra was

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, El Chupacabra was a psyop. You heard it here first. Tales of government experimentation weigh heavy on the Puerto Rican mind. In 1931, the American doctor Cornelius Rhodes, who worked on Puerto Rican patients, wrote a letter saying that he had, quote, "done his best to further the process of extermination by killing eight and transplanting cancer into several more." Although an investigation found no evidence of unethical human experimentation, the rumor that he did inject people with cancer cells remains very permanent in Puerto Rican society.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, between the 1930s and the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials, with support of the US government, pushed a massive campaign of sterilization because of fears of overpopulation. Women who got La Operación, the operation, as it was colloquially called, were promised a solution to poverty and economic stability. Many were also led to believe that the operation was reversible, but this proved not to be the case. About a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized during that time. There's a very good documentary that I'll link in the sources called La Operación by Ana Maria Garcia that talks about the sterilization campaign. Really recommend you take a look at it if you're interested in more context. Although both the peak of militarism and La Operación happened decades before the

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  first Chupacabra sighting, it's within this belaise of government secrets and conspiracy and US colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacabra bursting out of the woods and laying waste to livestock came about all throughout the archipelago. It's worth highlighting that economically and socially, things were not going very well for Puerto Ricans at the time that the Chupacabra myth started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid 1994 to 1997. Per reporting from El Bosero, it's respectable now, I swear. This drought was one of the worst for PR in the 20th century, and it reached its peak in 1995. It caused 300 million in damages and approximately 165 million corresponded to the agricultural

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  sector, AKA the rural communities who owned the livestock that was being attacked by the Chupacabras. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Mariling hit Puerto Rico in September 1995 as a category two hurricane and caused about 2.5 billion in damages between PR and the US Virgin Islands and 13 deaths between the two. At the same time, rural communities who largely depended on agriculture to sustain themselves had been forced to leave that work behind and move towards industrial jobs as part of Operation Bootstrap. This fragmentation was built on by the encroachment of urbanism throughout much of the region surrounding the capital municipality of San Juan.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  It's important to point out that Canaona's has experienced marked urban and commercial development over the past 30 or 40 years, to the point that what the municipality is most known for, to people like me who don't live there, is because of its gigantic outlet mall that started construction in 1998. Meanwhile, Orocobi's and Moro's, where the first unexplained livestock attack happened, are still isolated rural communities that have been more or less forgotten by the central government, to the point that in 2019, Moro's had to sue our central water utility because of continued lack of access to potable water. So when rural communities composed mostly of lower or middle-class people started seeing

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  their livestock, a kind of physical manifestation of what little wealth they had, being attacked by something, it caused a panic. And within that panic, the Chupacabra emerged as the quote-unquote "real thing" that was hurting them, that they could theoretically find and stop versus the growing environmental, societal, and economic crisis built on top of centuries of colonialism. Through the creation of the Chupacabra, people were able to maintain their collective identity and impose a sense of control at a point where they felt powerless. Per tracking the Chupacabra, quote, "It was within this desperate environment of perceived US intrusion and imperialism that the symbol of the Chupacabra became the vessel into

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  which many of the rural people of Puerto Rico poured all their fears and apprehensions about the strange industrial world seemingly frust upon them by the United States. However, those rural municipalities of Puerto Rico where the US lacked a major military or economic presence during this drought period did not receive any visits from the Chupacabra. Furthermore, large urban areas such as San Juan, where industrial or service-based livelihoods were less affected by the drought found elsewhere in the country, did not report sightings of the creature," end quote. In a sense, the creation of the Chupacabra also left the government that was not doing anything at all about the crisis its people were facing off the hook.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  For Chemo Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into reelection for free more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and the random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs, the Chupacabra was a way to explain their misery, but it didn't provide a solution to their problems. They were left to fester and just have to take even more pressure onto themselves. The other countries in Latin America where Chupacabra sightings were also reported after the Christina Show aired were also suffering from economic and social turmoil at the time. In Mexico, the agricultural industry was suffering because of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Per an essay by William Calvo Quiros titled "Sucking Vulnerability: Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years," NAFTA caused the Mexican government to change their constitution to allow the privatization of communal land, which displaced several rural communities. It also deregulated import restrictions and caused an increase in unemployment. The reality of a monster attacking them was undeniable. It wasn't just chickens and goats, but entire communities were displaced because of NAFTA. Similar things were happening up and down the American continent. In the US borderlands, the myth of the Chupacabra came to embody the government's war against

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment. The historian Mike Davis described the Chupacabra phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them. Quoting Calvo Quiros here, "At a base level, monsters and the phasma-goric allow for the out-of-this-world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community. Therefore, as a collective entity, the Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society."

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  However, as Jordan talks about in his thesis, the Chupacabras can also be seen as a symbol of resistance against the very imperialism that kind of created it. The Chupacabras was a creature so powerful that it could escape the ever-present eye of the state and the encroaching militarism that was affecting Puerto Rico at the time the alleged sightings were happening. Culturally, this has remolded the Chupacabra from predator of the night to protector in some stories, like the comic Beast of Barikeng, where the Chupacabras is actually physically fighting colonialism. To wrap up, Puerto Rico has always had vampires on it, except that they've never been beasts. The most visible of these vampires is the simple mosquito, a vicious bloodsucker that

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  I've been attacked by at least once in the course of writing this essay. It is the deadliest animal in the world and is a victim of dengue fever in my youth. That shit sucks ass. Meanwhile, the second vampire is the continued colonization of the archipelago that has stripped it of so many resources for centuries and continues to do so to this day. Colonialism has always been vampiric, extracting as much as it can with little care to the corpses it leaves in its wake. Although the Chupacabra mass hysteria died down at the turn of the century, the forces that shaped its creation are still here, and they've become even more acute, whether

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  it be the unelected fiscal control board imposed by the US government or corrupt Puerto Rican officials. There have always been vampires walking among us. They're just not beasts. They look just like us, and their system of oppression has harmed more than any single Chupacabra ever could. Thanks for listening.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  You can find me pretty much everywhere online at Vakero2XL. That's about it.

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• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  I turned off news altogether.

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

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  It's the rage bait.

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  It feels like it's trying to divide people.

• 1:49:57Speaker 06

  We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.

• 1:50:02Speaker 07

  NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

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• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Kim Kelly, and I'll be your host for today's episode. I'm a labor journalist and author of a book called Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. One of my self-styled superpowers is finding a way to link labor history with present-day goings-on. I'm not an official historian, but I've read a lot of books and talked to a lot of workers. And that's how you find all the good stuff, anyway. I like to say that every story is a labor story, and that ethos can be applied to basically any scenario, especially if you dig down deep enough.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  Autumn has finally come to the East Coast. I'm talking leather weather, dead leaves, cool temperatures, and a blessed end to the infernal sunshine that has plagued my days for so long. Those of us in my neck of the woods are preparing for mischief night, and Halloween itself is only a few nights away. It's a good time to tell stories around a campfire or in a darkened room. Though, if your spare cabinet's still in the shop, your headphones will work just fine. Now, since I've already got you in my clutches, let's get into a little morbid labor history. And admittedly, there's a real dearth of genuinely spooky labor actions out there, in the modern day or otherwise. I mean, we

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  haven't seen any vampiric work stoppages or witches' strikes, though I wouldn't put it past the Etsy coven to eventually get organized. And the only real monster we can point to as workers is capitalism and its bloodthirsty minions in the employer class. There's a historical fantasy novel called The Factory Witches of Lowell that looks pretty cute and does involve a witches' union, but I'd rather take this in a more concrete direction, shall we say. Let's talk about gravedigger strikes. So, a quick note on language. Gravedigger is clearly way more fun to say, but the proper term is cemetery worker. The classic horror movie trope of the disheveled, shady, creepy

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  gravedigger with his shovel and medicine cackle doesn't quite apply these days. And I'm sure today's cemetery workers don't really appreciate that stereotype. There are no midnight resurrections or bloody shovels lying around anymore. This is municipal work, really. Nowadays, cemetery workers operate heavy machinery to perform burials, to maintain cemetery grounds and dig foundations for headstones and monuments. These are skilled workers whose world straddles maintenance, construction, and landscaping, and a lot of them are union city workers. They're first on the scene to ready the grave and the last to say goodbye once everyone else leaves. It is tempting to romanticize the gig, especially

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  if you're a morbid little freak like me, but even with the aid of modern advancements, digging graves remains hard, dirty, intensive, physical labor that can wear down the body and take a mental and emotional toll on the worker. There's still a lot of dead bodies involved, after all. Given the nature of their work, cemetery workers are no strangers to cooperation on the job, nor are they afraid of collective action. There's a long history of gravediggers going on strike, though it's truly a wonder that any boss has ever dared to push them to that point, given the kind of leverage that these particular workers wield. Strikes are meant to be disruptive, and there are few things more guaranteed

• 1:54:47Speaker 02

  to disrupt a city's normal operating procedure than a rotting pile of unburied corpses. That's what happened in 1949 in New York City, when tensions rose between the trustees of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Queens and 250 of its cemetery workers. These workers were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics who earned about $60 a week, around $700 in today's dollars, for a six-day, 40-hour work week. After a breakdown in contract negotiations between the bosses and the unions, in which the workers were pushing for a five-day, 40-hour work week, higher wages, and overtime, the union called a strike for January 13th. I don't

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  think it was a Friday, but it would be very satisfying if it was. So, the work stoppage lasted for just under two months, and in that time, a thousand bodies went unburied. Cardinal Francis Spelmet, Archbishop of the city's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, summoned 200 untrained college students from St. Joe's Seminary to fill in as scabs. One can only imagine how well these kids, who are far more used to flipping Bible pages than engaging in any kind of real heavy toil, adapted to chipping graves out of the cold winter dirt. But it's not exactly the kind of assignment you can turn down if you're trying to be like, like an extra-special kind of priest, you know? I was raised Catholic. I feel like I can be as rude about these dudes as I want. Sorry, Grandma.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  The strike caused a stir among the city's Catholic labor activists, particularly the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Catholic Worker Newspaper, and its founder, the renowned Catholic anarchist labor activist Dorothy Day. Still waiting for it to be sainted. It's coming. I can feel it. She personally took up the cause, both at the cemetery and outside the Cardinal's residence on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, and delivered food and medicine to the strikers' families. Dorothy Day wrote directly to the Cardinal, emphasizing the economic hardships the workers faced and asking him to go to them, conciliate them. "It is easier for the great to give in than the poor. They are hungry men. Their

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  only weapon has been their labor, which they have sold for a means of livelihood to feed themselves and their families." The '70s being what they were, what had begun as a pretty straightforward dispute over time and money morphed into a really ugly, weird squabble over communism? Conservative Catholic leaders red-baited the union members because "union," and the Cardinal decried their tactics as "communistic." And now the workers got really pissed off about this because they hated communism, too. And they took an anti-red oath to denounce communism in the middle of their strike. And they also, at the Archdiocese's insistence, disaffiliated

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  from their union and joined the more conservative AFL as members of the Building Services Employees International Union. So, they, like, got red-baited out of their union, and they still didn't even really win the strike. They eventually went back to work on March 12th and picked up their shovels in defeat. But it would be far from the last time America's gravediggers would call the bosses' bluff. In 1975, 1,700 members of the local 365 of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendance Union followed the lead of their predecessors and struck for higher wages at 44 cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. By the end of that 27-day strike, the workers had

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  won a small wage increase, and 1,400 bodies were waiting to be buried. Absent from those piles were the dead of the Orthodox Jewish community, whose faith requires burial within 24 hours. In recognition, the union had invited the loved ones of deceased Orthodox Jews to Enter the cemetery and bury those bodies in accordance with their religion. Picket lines are sacred, but so are a lot of other things too. The next year, gravediggers from cemetery workers local 265 on the west coast launched a four-month strike that shut down 10 California cemeteries, including in Colma, a small town near San Francisco that had, quote, "500 living residents and hundreds of thousands of graves."

• 1:59:07Speaker 02

  The combination of manual labor, low pay, and cemetery-specific occupational hazards continued to spur cemetery workers to strike throughout the 80s and 90s. A few years earlier, a massive wave of strikes had overtaken the UK during 1978 and 1979's winter of discontent. And a group of cemetery workers in Liverpool had found themselves embroiled in a conflict that would become the subject of feverish national attention. Those 80 workers were the members of GMB, a general trade union, who had decided to join the thousands of other public sector employees who were already in strike around the country at the time. Unfortunately, those other workers' absence was a little less visible.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  And the backlash to the cemetery strike was brutal. The workers were demonized in the press and condemned by art school Margaret Thatcher herself. Photos of unburied bodies ran on the front pages over headlines screaming things like, "Now they won't let us bury our dead." Members of parliament called the strike an outrage to human decency. It was a lot. So the workers decided to end the strike after a week and a half. They were worried that their actions were hurting everyday people instead of the government that was causing so much suffering. Conservative politicians seized on the strike's shocking imagery to batter the Labour Party. It swept into power in the next election, all of which allowed Margaret Thatcher to eventually launch her own war on the working class.

• 2:00:34Speaker 02

  In 2021, with Thatcher safely rotting in her own grave, Liverpool's cemetery workers threatened to walk out again. But this time, they managed to strike a deal at the 11th hour. I have a feeling no one wanted to repeat that whole situation. As each of these strike actions and many more besides have shown, cemetery workers and the work they do are absolutely essential. Without them, neither the living nor the dead can find peace. And the vital importance of that work should leave no argument over whether they should be paid fairly and treated well. Greedy bosses who have refused to recognize that have done so at their peril. Remember, gravediggers know where all the bodies are buried. Who do you think put them there in the first place?

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Speaking of unburied corpses, cemetery workers weren't the only unionized workforce that has had to navigate a truly cursed minefield of bad bosses, public horror, and decaying human remains during a labor dispute. Here in Philadelphia, we got a front-row seat to that particular balancing act last summer during the huge Astme DC 33 municipal worker strike that effectively shut down a good chunk of the city for eight very sweaty days in July. The most visible of the workers who went out came from the sanitation department. A heatwave was pummeling the city when they walked out on July 1st. And if you think Philly's a little grimy on a normal day, you should have seen and smelled the wreaking mountains of trash that accumulated in what seemed like mere hours.

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  Being the deep-thin, serious city that we are, we obviously dubbed them Parker piles after our evil mayor. The sanitation workers weren't the only municipal workers who went out, though. The strike also included clerical employees, library staff, street pavers, water department workers, and the medical examiner's office. That last one made a real big splash real quick. Because you know what the medical examiner is in charge of? The city morgue. Now, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the 160-bed facility was filled to overflowing within the first 48 hours of the strike. Look, Philly's the best city in the world, but we do have our problems. And among those problems are, you know, sometimes people get murked.

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  The city morgue is a pretty busy place. Now, during the strike, during those first awful 48 hours, the remaining staffers were left scrambling to find room for 180 bodies. And they ultimately had to double up on space, squeezing two cadavers into each bed. While the workers who usually handle death investigations and body transportation were on the picket line, grieving families were left in the lurch. In one especially horrific moment, the body of a 19-year-old gunshot victim was left bleeding in the street for hours before someone came to pick him up. By day three of the strike, the city had had enough. They forced the medical examiner's office back to work via court injunction, setting a threat to public health and safety.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  You'd think the mayor and or cronies at City Hall would have maybe taken a minute to look into what had happened in other recent morgue-related strikes, or even into what had happened back in 1986, when the Philadelphia city workers had launched another massive strike that included medical examiner staff. If they had, they might have realized just what a terrifically bad idea it can be to piss off the people who take care of all the dead bodies. Chicago folks might know where I'm going with this. Let's talk about the Cook County morgue scandal. In 2011, a string of institutional failures at the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner Illinois had led to a truly unbearable work environment for both the workers and the human remains they were charged with handling. Among other factors,

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  funding cuts and changes in policy for handling infant remains and the unclaimed bodies of the dead had led to a staggering pileup of cadavers. At the time, CBS News reported that 400 adults and 100 babies were being kept in a cooler meant for 300 bodies total. A whistleblower leaked photos of the carnage to the media, who predictably blew it up into a massive public scandal, which seems pretty fair, honestly, when you read some of the workers' quotes on the subject. As one said, "There are so many bodies in there now, they can't keep it cool enough." "The stench is like nothing I've ever seen. I think it's sacrilegious." Photos showed bodies wrapped in plastic, haphazardly stacked on wooden shelves,

• 2:05:12Speaker 02

  while others were left rotting on the floor. Like, it was, it was fucked. It was really, really bad. And a worker told the public about it, and some stuff changed. Shout out to the whistleblowers. Health hazards aside, it's just really fucking grim to hear these stories and to think about someone's grandma or granddaughter or mom left in that condition because someone in an office somewhere decided that those greedy corpse handlers could get by on a smaller budget. The state labor department dinged them with 21 safety and sanitation violations after this all came out, including exposure to hepatitis B, blood splatter,

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  and a failure to protect workers from the risk of being hit by falling bodies. The resulting reforms, purges, and mass burials that followed the whole affair make it sound even more like something out of an indie horror movie, but that's bureaucracy, baby. We've jumped from the graveyard to the morgue, and now it's time to make a stop at the funeral home. To bounce back to New York City, I want to shout out one of its other particularly ghoulish postmortem labor conflicts. For whatever reason, there have been a lot of corpse-related worker actions out there, like, more than really seems reasonable, but with so many of the living being pushed out of New York every day, I guess it makes sense that even the dead can't always find a decent place to rest.

• 2:06:39Speaker 02

  So back in 1964, on October 1st, over 400 embalmers, undertakers, and funeral directors from across the five boroughs went on strike. Classic strike action, they're calling for higher wages, better pensions, and a 35-hour work week, which does sound like a pretty big ask for the 60s if you don't think much about what their workdays actually looked like. And forget that they're only making 122 bucks a week. When talks broke down between members of Local 407, of the funeral directors, embalmers, and undertakers union, who are part of the SCIU Extended Universe, also, if anyone can find a t-shirt,

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  I will give you, not a lot of dollars, because I don't have a lot, but I would, let me know. I will haunt eBay for the rest of my days if I can find a Local 407 shirt.

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  But when talks broke down between the union and the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, workers at 100 of the busiest, most high-profile funeral homes in the city walked out, which left their supervisors, funeral home executives, and owners to handle the avalanche of bodies that were quickly left in their wake. It's funny, after only eight days of getting their hands dirty, the bosses were absolutely exhausted and dying for their workers to come back. So they backed down. The embalmers came back to work with an immediate wage increase and a bunch of other goodies, too. As we've learned, as far as leverage goes, it's hard to argue with a rotting corpse. One last

• 2:08:14Speaker 02

  little tidbit I'd like to share before we go our separate ways comes courtesy of the Columbarium, an extremely fun newsletter about death from writer and death educator Becky Robison. I saw her post about this story a little bit ago. I had to hit her up for more details. Labor ghouls of a feather flock together, I guess. So, 1852, 200 of New York's coffin makers went on strike. Now, it may have been the Gilded Age, but it still stunk pretty bad back then, especially in the summertime when diseases like cholera, smallpox, and typhoid ran rampant. The poor bastards working at the city morgue would have killed for the kind of refrigeration setup they had in Cook County, but at the time, the best

• 2:08:57Speaker 02

  they could do was to keep their stiffs on ice. Literally, they would have used ice-lined wooden boxes called corpse coolers to keep the deceased and their loved ones by proxy as comfortable as possible before the funeral. You can really only do so much. The coffin workers were well aware of this fact and used their leverage, there's that word again, to ensure that when they joined the strike, their impact would be felt immediately. But this wasn't just a coffin maker's strike. They were part of a much bigger labor action that pulled together thousands upon thousands of workers from across 30 different industries from all over the city to call for an eight-hour workday. That movement had been bubbling

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  for years at that point, with smaller local wins in New England inspiring workers in other regions to take up the rally and cry. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. That 1872 strike drew over 100,000 workers in total and scared the bejesus out of the corporate titans and city elites, who were suddenly faced with the harsh reality that, gosh, there really were a whole lot more workers than there were of them. They responded accordingly, weaponizing the police department. Piano man William Steinway personally hired 300 cops to protect his factory, very fancy, forcing lockouts and basically doing whatever they could to knock the fight out of the strikers.

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  The workers won eventually, and that strike would prove to be just one more bloody stepping stone towards that eventual victory. The coffin makers had the last laugh, though. By the time that strike ended, 125 of the 200 strikers had forced concessions out of their bosses, which, given the way Victorian bosses tended to react to workers' labor demands, is pretty incredible. The unique nature of their employment as death workers saved them once again. As the Chicago Tribune wrote of the coffin makers and their strike at the time, quote, "We see no escape from his clutches. We can resist the bricklayer by not building houses. We can offset the calcamine by refusing to whiten our walls.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  We can checkmate the servant by doing our own work. But unfortunately, as far as our pockets are concerned, we have got to die, and we have got to be buried. And if the coffin maker persists in his demands, we know of no way in which we can refuse to patronize him." I'll leave you with one final quote from that same article that I just love, not because of his intention, which was essentially whining about the coffin makers daring to demand to be paid fairly for their essential work, but because the Tribune accidentally makes a great observation about how fucked up it is that we're forced to spend every moment of our lives worrying about paying bills. You're right, 19th century newspaper hack, unions are cool, and the necessities of life and death should be free for everyone.

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  Quote, "It is not enough that man, worm of the dust, must be perplexed and worried in life, must be reminded at every turn that this is a veil of tears and that all is vanity, but even after he is dead and no longer exposed to tailor's bills and house rents and butcher's bills and pew rents and servant calism and the thousand natural shocks that flesh his air to, there are still a class of men left who can worry his ghost." So that was my spooky labor Halloween episode for you. I hope you liked it. Thank you for listening. Now go give your boss a scare for me. Have a happy Halloween.

• 2:12:42Speaker 05

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• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  I turned off news altogether.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

• 2:13:17Speaker 04

  It's the rage bait.

• 2:13:20Speaker 05

  It feels like it's trying to divide people.

• 2:13:24Speaker 06

  We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.

• 2:13:29Speaker 07

  NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

• 2:13:40Speaker 06

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• 2:14:09Speaker 01

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• 2:14:45Speaker 06

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Kiljoy, who is joining us for our spooky, slightly spooky, but also kind of regular edition of Executive Disorder.

• 2:15:08Speaker 05

  Ooh, class war.

• 2:15:11Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:15:14Speaker 05

  The specter of the taunt in Europe.

• 2:15:17Speaker 06

  We're covering the week of October 21st to October 28th, not actually covering Halloween because that hasn't happened yet, but what can you do?

• 2:15:27Speaker 05

  Halloween's a season now, Garrison. It's months.

• 2:15:29Speaker 06

  That's true. That is true. That is true.

• 2:15:31Speaker 05

  I'm pushing for it to consume Thanksgiving.

• 2:15:33Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:15:34Speaker 05

  I'm so down. Halloween runs until solstice. Yeah, straight into Saturnalia.

• 2:15:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:15:40Speaker 05

  Sick. I love it.

• 2:15:42Speaker 06

  James, do you want to begin with some short stories?

• 2:15:45Speaker 05

  Let's do it. Okay, so, starting, I guess, in this hemisphere, about 1,000 troops from El Salvador have deployed to Haiti this week. The deployment came after four Salvadoran members of the UN Task Force went missing after they were ambushed and jumped out of their burning vehicle on the 18th of October. Bukeli says that these people weren't on a combat patrol, that they were Air Force techs who are returning from a market when they got ambushed. I won't comment. Four bodies have been handed over, they were handed over fire, and one of these NGOs that does like extraction work in the region, they were found burned and the NGO recovered them. I'm not quite sure if they were like alerted

• 2:16:28Speaker 05

  that they were burned bodies or not. Bukeli came, these are not the missing personnel, and he posted a picture of a Chadian soldier's ID, but allegedly that Chadian soldier is alive but was injured and lost their ID in a mission. But Bukeli came that the bodies did not match the age or height of the lost Salvadoran personnel. Either way, it continues to be really desperate for folks trying to get along in Haiti, and I don't think the El Salvador military are going to make that much better for them. Another person has died in immigration detention. This death occurred in Core Civics Oti Mesa facility, which is here in San Diego. Daylight San Diego confirmed this. ICE hasn't published anything on its

• 2:17:09Speaker 05

  news page yet. Like, there were rumors earlier this weekend that someone has died. Daylight San Diego got- Got confirmation, but I haven't seen anything yet on the ICE news page, so we don't know who that person was. At least I don't. Next, an Iraqi court has sentenced seven French Islamic State members to prison in the first verdict of a trial involving 47 accused Islamic State fighters. Because the international community manifestly failed to set up tribunals since a collapse of the territorial caliphate, the accused and the victims have faced massive delays in getting justice. The big worry for European Union States here seemed to be that their citizens would be sentenced to death, right?

• 2:17:51Speaker 05

  Some French citizens were sentenced to death in 2019, but their sentences were commuted. In this case, these people were sentenced to prison, not death. The United States, of course, helped transfer thousands of suspects from Syria when the STG and the SNA began their offensive against the SDF earlier this year. And in this case, Iraq is beginning these domestic trials of accused foreign fighters. Meanwhile, talking of Syria, both Jordan and Israel have conducted operations inside Syria this week. The Jordanians bombed what it claimed were Islamic State remnants responsible for an attack on a church in Jordan on the 26th of October, which killed nine people. Israel, the IDF, killed a young

• 2:18:31Speaker 05

  man with an intellectual disability and hearing problems during a night raid in Syria. They claimed that he kept approaching them, and so they decided to kill him. Inside the country he lived in and that they don't live in? Inside the country that they were illegally invading, along with all the other countries that they are illegally occupying, yes. There was like a really massive funeral for this man. It's deeply fucking sad. It's one of the thousands of horrific crimes against humanity that IDF likes to do about every week. So yeah, that's all not the most happy stuff for me, but that's all I got for small things. The hunt is still taking an ass-kicking every fucking day, man. But so that's nice. In Myanmar, to be clear. In Myanmar. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:19:15Speaker 05

  I mean, it's nice to see them losing. I guess they've also decided to, maybe I should report this. They've started to deploy their senior officers to the front lines. Previously, their tactic was that the officers would plan the assault and then send conscripts in to die while they remained in the rear. And it seems that senior leadership is getting very pissed off at their absolute dedication to using World War II tactics in 2026. There were people doing opposed amphibious assaults and getting mown down with MG42 machine guns. Like, they're, yeah, they're doing unsuccessful D-Day every day. It's tragic that that many conscripts are dying, but hopefully some of those officers find their way to the front too. Can line all them up.

• 2:19:56Speaker 06

  I want to mention two things that we'll probably cover more next week. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have released a new report on Trump's ties with Jeffrey Epstein, which contains details about Trump's involvement in Epstein's trafficking operations, and a new rape accusation against Trump made by a former beauty pageant contestant. Earlier this week, Trump instructed the DOJ to block the certification of Alaska's election results if the Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Pultola, wins Tuesday's election. The White House's preemptive justification is that two different people named Daniel J.

• 2:20:40Speaker 06

  Sullivan Jr. and Dan S. Sullivan are both on the ballot, Dan S. Sullivan being the Republican incumbent, who is marked as such on the ballot. Alaska also has ranked choice voting, so if there's any confusion, voters can scribble in both Daniel and Dan Sullivan. We'll see what comes of this next week. Robert, do you want to do our first considerably not spooky story, unless you want to consider Flavio's disappearing act? Miami.

• 2:21:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of spook in that, I guess, but no, this is actually one of the happiest stories we'll have to say. And honestly, this is like the happiest I've ever been to be wrong and the happiest I've ever been to like, more accurately, read a bunch of sources that wound up being wrong. Because a couple of weeks back during my segment on ED, I talked about Lula's disastrous first round against Flavio Bolsonaro for Brazil's presidential election. And it went almost as badly for Lula as it could have gone. Neither side won outright. Obviously, Flavio winning outright would have been worse, but Flavio got more votes than Lula. Nearly all of the other candidates who got meaningful numbers of votes during that first round were further right even than Flavio and a

• 2:21:58Speaker 05

  lot weirder than Flavio. There was only like one left-wing candidate besides Lula that like got a notable really amount of votes, and it was still very small in the grand scheme of things. And so the assumption was that, obviously, for the second round of voting, you expect that people who voted for kind of other right-wing candidates and the left-wing candidates, they'll mostly coalesce behind whoever got the most, kind of on that broad side. That's generally how you expect things to go. And so because most of the other candidates who'd gotten meaningful numbers of votes were further right, the assumption was, well, if Lula's going to pull a win out in the second round, he's going to have to turn a lot of these right-wing votes, and that just doesn't seem like it's going to happen, right? There was a lot of, the sources that I was reading said it's essentially, it seems essentially impossible for Lula to pull out a second round win, like

• 2:22:43Speaker 05

  based on what we're seeing and how previous Brazilian elections are going. Something unprecedented would have to happen for him to win, and something unprecedented did in fact happen because Lula won last weekend. Woo! And he didn't just flip out an absolute, like, barely eking out a win. This wasn't a case where, well, it was kind of close the first round, and Lula just sort of barely managed to edge his way ahead of Flavio. Lula won by almost 3.6% in the popular vote. Like, he doubled his margin of victory from his reelection in 2022. Why did this happen? Because the flaws in Lula's last administration didn't go away, and the fact that Bolsonaro nearly wound up right back in charge is proof of that, right? It points to the fact that Lula and the Brazilian left have a lot of work to do. And there's some other issues

• 2:23:28Speaker 05

  here. The most recent elections also handed Congress to the far right, so Lula is going to be fighting Congress basically from the moment he takes office. But the fact that Lula is president means that there's a fight to be had. You know, Flavio's not going to be able to, among other things, force out a bunch of Supreme Court justices who ruled against his father and stack the court in his own favor. There's a bunch of shit Flavio's not going to be able to do. Yeah, putting Lula in prison again, which is a thing that is weirdly not discussed, but like, yeah, this was, this was an election that was loser goes to prison. Like, that's a big part of this. Oh, Miami. In Flavio's case, it was losers go to prison because he had committed a bunch of crimes he was actively being investigated for.

• 2:24:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, and Lula was, they'll send Lula to prison again for bullshit because... Because fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. But this was a loser goes to prison kind of election. You are right about that. So in the next few days, we're going to have an episode from a Brazilian activist who is part of the massive grassroots campaign to turn things around for the second round of voting, and that's going to be the majority of our coverage on the subject, because obviously the person that we picked is a lot more qualified than any of us to talk about this sort of stuff, living there and having been a part of this. So we'll have more detail for you on what exactly happened later. But for the purpose of this episode, there's a couple important things I want to go over that are important in terms of like, understanding how this all happened, like how Lula was able to pull out a win. One is that people

• 2:24:53Speaker 05

  got galvanized by terror at what a second Bolsonaro, well, Flavio Bolsonaro, which was seen as an extension of like Jair's presidency, what that would actually mean. And they had weeks to marinate in that anxiety, and that helped motivate a major get out the vote effort, right? A lot of people who had been kind of, well, I don't want to vote because I'm disappointed in Lula, or I'm just not motivated to vote, like, a significant number of people were willing to come out because of what the stakes were. But a massive reason as to why things worked out for Lula comes down to the fact that he and his team fought a lot smarter this time around. Bolsonaroesmo, as one of my sources pointed out, because I've talked to a few Brazilians about this election and like what happened during this

• 2:25:35Speaker 05

  like couple of week span of time, and several of the people I talked to pointed out that Bolsonaroesmo relies heavily on being able to propagate their message through a bunch of different mouths and make whatever issue or scandal they think will get them power to go viral, right? The US MAGA right works basically the same way. You have a bunch of people who are all ostensibly independent content creators and media people who are all taking marching orders, probably from the same couple of like Signal groups or whatever, where somebody says, hey, we're angry about trans people doing this this week. And then suddenly you have like 40 different people all putting out the same message and it goes viral, right? That's like a major thing in the United States on the right, and it was a big part of how the Bolsonaros like did what they were able to do. Like, it was a major messaging thing that they engaged in. Lula teamed up with

• 2:26:20Speaker 05

  a guy named Andre Janones to come up with a counter to this media strategy. Janones started out as a lawyer for the poor and went through a mixed political awakening. This is not a guy who has had like a straight shot to helping the left win an election. Did initially, when he was a much younger man, joined Lula's party at one point, the Workers' Party. But then after that, he joined a far-right party that was run by Carlos Bolsonaro. In 2018, he was the federal deputy of a centrist party. But then in 2022, after he had kind of an abortive presidential run himself and decided not to go through with it and declared himself for Lula. Yonones' background helped him to develop a shit-stirring strategy that was used to great effect. The big thing this guy's been talking about for a while is

• 2:27:04Speaker 05

  the left can't win unless we're willing to do some of the dirty shit that the right is doing, right? Like, we have to actually get down into the muck and try some, basically some dirty tricks in order to make shit work. And that's very much what happened. He created a WhatsApp channel called Lula's Army, which he estimated would need about 10 million subscribers in order to guarantee Lula a win. It wound up with more than 11 million subscribers. Andre was the only person who could make posts there, and he used it to issue orders to his millions of followers about what to do online and in social media. And these were, among these kind of standing orders were do not engage with far-right narratives. Don't talk to these people, don't argue with them, don't respond to bait posts, not even to like dunk them. Block all of the shit that you see from these guys to cut off the flow of attention to the fascists.

• 2:27:48Speaker 05

  And at the same time, flood the internet with stories that are useful to Lula's campaign. These are not just like pro-Lula messages, there was a lot of like, in some cases, bordering on conspiracy theorizing about Flavio Bolsonaro and the stuff that he had gotten up to, like pointing out his ties to Freemasonry, right? It was all stuff that would go viral and that would make fellow far-right assholes look bad. This channel, Lula's Army, was cited as a major reason for Lula's victory by everyone I've interviewed so far and by Lula. At the like, their victory party, he specifically like shouted out General Yonones as like the guy who had been the architect of a lot of their online strategy. And this was very much framed as like, this is the far-right's place of strength, is the internet and like virality.

• 2:28:30Speaker 05

  And if we're going to actually beat these people, we have to be willing to like, take the fight to them in this domain and win. And this was very much like, Lula's Army was very much an attempt to do that. I want to quote from an anonymous source, or a source that I talked to that wants to remain anonymous, but to provide to me some of his thoughts on like what had happened and what had worked from this online strategy. One of the things I thought was interesting, he described Yonones' thesis to me as, "We can reverse SEO and election through mass action." What I have witnessed from afar is basically millions of politically disengaged, normie working people saw this kind of small-time politician make some Instagram video about how they personally could change history by blocking your Chud Bolsonaro cousin, printing out some articles to show your unconvinced auntie,

• 2:29:13Speaker 05

  searching things like "Flavio Bolsonaro defended murderer of child" on Google repeatedly until national newspapers were forced to mention it. He was literally doing little courses and videos like, "Guys, practice with me. Anti-Lula clickbait, swipe away, don't click, don't argue, don't screenshot and quote tweet, just swipe away like this." And now all these people have been posting for days, like, "I have social anxiety, but I've been sleeping four hours a night to go talk with people all day. My life has changed, I think we'll need to be doing this for years to crush the fascists." This person expressed to me that they doubted at one point whether what was going on was any different from like the common social media delusion of thinking, "Oh, if I like retweet the right stuff, maybe it'll change politics." But this concerted activism did change politics, because people were not just engaging with shit that inspired

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  or pissed them off based on their id, they were acting strategically to block and deny the enemy terrain in which to maneuver. Here's another quote from that source. One of his tips, he's talking about Yonones, one of his tips slash directives was something like, "Okay, we will post about topic X, but we will avoid keywords like Lula, PT, which is Lula's party, because Meta has muted them, and instead we'll use the hashtags of the enemy." So like clockwork, searching hashtag "I'm with Flavio22" or something on Instagram got you a wall of people doing the L fingers for Lula. It's all very signal-jammy, while also completely low-tech, like Americans just shooting flock cameras and all, lol.

• 2:30:40Speaker 06

  I've never been more proud of my people.

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  I hope that becomes a new American, like, international thing, you know? Like, they dress, they wear the fucking real tree camouflage and they shoot flock cameras.

• 2:30:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's our new stereotype.

• 2:30:52Speaker 04

  A flock camera is not safe.

• 2:30:54Speaker 06

  This is our new Goku, is the international like communication.

• 2:31:01Speaker 05

  Now, as I said, we'll have a more detailed explanation of what happened soon. It's important that you know, and one that I did want to point out is like, one reason why they were focused on having, hey, we've got 10 million people, start searching for like the same things, the same terms to make them go viral. Some Brazilian major news stations had like developed a kind of, like a daily thing they would do of like, what's trending online?

• 2:31:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:22Speaker 05

  And so if you have 11 million people in a WhatsApp group and you can make whatever shit you want about like the guy you want to defeat trend, that's a really powerful tactic, you know?

• 2:31:32Speaker 06

  If there's anything I've learned from using Twitter, Brazilians love to post.

• 2:31:37Speaker 05

  They're huge posters.

• 2:31:38Speaker 06

  They're pussy-ass people, yeah. They are some of the most online people I've ever encountered.

• 2:31:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Speaker 06

  But as much as like this sort of like organized posting strategy was like a major aspect of this, of this election and this organizing, which it was, there was a few other things you mentioned about like,

• 2:31:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 2:31:56Speaker 06

  printing off things to give to your aunt and like other, other like in-person engagement, like having every person go out and like try to either flip someone that they know,

• 2:32:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:32:06Speaker 06

  or talk to people who have like, who've like checked out of the political process and like harassed them into voting.

• 2:32:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I've even seen cases of people just sort of convincing their Bolsonaro-supporting relatives to like go on vacation during the election.

• 2:32:23Speaker 06

  That's pretty funny.

• 2:32:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was a wide-ranging and creative effort, and I think this is really important. A lot of the stuff that was being done through Lula's Army is not what you'd traditionally call ethical. Certainly not in like American politics. I don't have a problem with it, but this is getting down into the muck, right? Like, this is not like clean fighting, this is not going high. This is seeing what the far-right's been doing for the last decade to get into power and going like, "All right, well, two can play at that game, motherfucker." You know, like, I think that is important to acknowledge here. I'm seeing a lot of people online going like, "This is proof that all we need to do is vote." And I was like, "Well, no, the first round is proof of what happens when all you do is vote.

• 2:33:07Speaker 05

  The second round victory is proof of what happens is when you get fucking creative, you know?" Anyway, we'll have a more detailed explanation of everything that happened soon. It's important that you know right now that after his defeat, Flavio was ordered to turn in his passport because he was actively under investigation for a bunch of crimes related to corruption that he definitely committed.

• 2:33:26Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, tons of them. And after initially trying to get the election results rescinded, Flavio gave up on that, promised to return in his passport, and then fled the country. It looks like Marco Rubio helped orchestrate all of this. Basically, my understanding is he stepped into Argentina and then got on a flight that eventually led him to the United States with the help of the State Department. A senior State Department official told USA Today, "The State Department will issue visas to Flavio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States." And sure enough, a few hours after that, he landed in Miami.

• 2:33:59Speaker 06

  Like father, like son.

• 2:34:00Speaker 05

  Like father, like son.

• 2:34:03Speaker 04

  I love that, like, the list of asylum and fucking refugees who accept is white South Africans and people whose last name is Bolsonaro.

• 2:34:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're great on that.

• 2:34:12Speaker 06

  This is my, my one initial criticism of Lula too, which is, as, as the great Marxist historian C.L.R. James said, "The rich are only defeated when they are running for your lives." He forgot to add, "You have to actually catch them." You have to catch them before they can run.

• 2:34:26Speaker 04

  I gotta wonder where he was watching the election party from, right? Like, to have easy access to a land border where he can walk across.

• 2:34:33Speaker 05

  He must have been, yeah, really making sure that he had that figured out ahead of time, yeah.

• 2:34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, he covered his back there.

• 2:34:40Speaker 05

  I know, Lula had a good response when it came out that Flavio has fled. He stated at a rally, "This is what the Bolsonaro family is like. Brazil is their second nation, the US is their first."

• 2:34:51Speaker 04

  That's a fucking dunk, that's good.

• 2:34:53Speaker 05

  We'll see what happens and how the US regime uses Flavio. Will Chamberlain of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is supported by Peter Thiel. And I want to note that Ginny Khan is the person who made me aware of this. She writes for the Bucks County Beacon. But yeah, he recently put out a statement saying, and I'm gonna read from Will Chamberlain's statement. "Flavio Bolsonaro's passport was canceled, he was forced to flee the country by Lula. His brother Eduardo has an arrest warrant for lobbying against the US. It's time for the Brazilian left to face the full force of American diplomatic and economic sanctions until they stop acting like a banana republic." And he's basically encouraging the United States to treat Brazil "like we treated Russia after the expanded invasion of Ukraine,

• 2:35:37Speaker 05

  including visa bans on government officials and also quadrupling tariffs on Brazilian goods." Chamberlain ended his message by saying, "The Brazilian regime should look carefully at what has happened to Venezuela and Cuba, and remember that this hemisphere belongs to the United States of America." So.

• 2:35:51Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't like that.

• 2:35:52Speaker 05

  I don't like that at all. We'll see where that lands.

• 2:35:55Speaker 04

  That's a Don Row doctrine. Yeah. That's a new and advanced level of Don Row doctrine, actually. This hemisphere belongs to is wild.

• 2:36:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Speaker 06

  It was interesting how kind of slightly tepid Trump's reaction to Bolsonaro losing was. Like, he didn't, he didn't echo Bolsonaro's claims that the election was like rigged or stolen, but also said, "I didn't take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world. Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked really bad to me." But he didn't really elaborate much more, like, he could, he could have gone a lot harder. And it's like, "I didn't take sides," is his like, is the main, his first main response.

• 2:36:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:37Speaker 06

  I assume he was like, "All right, well, if they'd thrown a coup, we would have supported it." But he didn't throw a coup, so fuck it.

• 2:36:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:43Speaker 04

  I think he also doesn't like to be associated with failure.

• 2:36:45Speaker 06

  He doesn't like a loser. And he lost by 4 million votes.

• 2:36:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, dude took a fat L.

• 2:36:50Speaker 06

  Lula had to like catch up by like 2.5 million votes, and then won by 4 million, it's crazy. Like, it's hard, it's hard to dispute that. Even like the extended voting hours because of issues on voting day only, only netted him like, like 30,000 votes, 35,000 votes. And that election extension was requested by both Bolsonaro and Lula.

• 2:37:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, but Flavio Bolsonaro has pretended he didn't ask for it.

• 2:37:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, and he, I think, announced today that he's like the rightful president of Brazil from Florida, so.

• 2:37:24Speaker 05

  Sure, yeah, great, keep that grift going, get those 4 million people out of the way.

• 2:37:28Speaker 06

  Maybe the coup's still to come.

• 2:37:30Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I mean, who knows what kind of shit they'll try? But also, Brazil is not Venezuela.

• 2:37:36Speaker 04

  Well, he's got to get on the list. At some point, they're gonna try some shit in Cuba, right?

• 2:37:40Speaker 05

  So like, Cuba, that's another one where they might be able to at least accomplish their initial goal of like kidnapping and excising the people they want to get out of the country.

• 2:37:49Speaker 04

  Rubio made a fantastic.

• 2:37:50Speaker 05

  Tweet like trying to recruit CIA operatives. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah. Yes, yes. But I don't think you can do that with Brazil. The big ass country. Yeah. Very big country. Yeah. This was certainly the most exciting kind of election turnaround that we've seen. And like you said, it's going to be a hard fight for Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil because they are dealing with a very, very far-right Congress. Yeah. But at least there will be a fight. It's a fight. Yeah. Yeah. We have a game. All right, let's hear from Bolsonaro. It's new Cologne.

• 2:38:39Speaker 05

  All right, we are back. And what we are talking about now is non-citizen voting. Very scary. This qualifies as a spooky, it's a spooky segment. Yeah, yeah, I heard it's a big deal. Yeah, this is what's going to destroy the democracy. And I feel strongly about borders. Maybe that's what Bolsonaro is going to go for, you know? He's the only one who's going to get caught voting. Well, unfortunately, Margaret. Well, not the only one, Margaret. Some people have already been committing voter fraud. We're going to hear about that after we hear, well, actually ISIS News page yesterday announced that they had arrested a legal permanent resident for voting in the 2024 election. Joyce Pitts, they allege she's a Dutch citizen living in Pennsylvania, who cast a ballot illegally in 2024.

• 2:39:23Speaker 05

  She's one of nine people charged in a statewide investigation. Nine people. So, yeah, if anyone's keeping tabs, just, you probably won't need more than your fingers and toes. And you will, actually. Meanwhile, the DOJ is claiming that 20,000 non-citizens are on California's voter rolls. In a post on X.com, the everything website, the White House asserts this number as an absolute. But in the criminal complaint made by the DOJ, it's not a criminal complaint, actually, but in the complaint filed by the DOJ, they are referred to as, quote, "likely non-citizens." And this is a super important distinction. Yeah, yeah, this is incredibly important. We're going to find out why, but. Lest us forget Nevada.

• 2:40:06Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, right there. And I think where none of them turned out to be non-citizens who are voting. It's worth noting that the DOJ is attempting to get California to sequester ballots from its 20,000 likely non-citizens, right? Saying that they could influence the outcome of the election. It's worth noting that they filed this on October the 15th. That is less than a month before polls close, right? Well into early voting in some states. The list was sent on a thumb drive to the state, and the state failed to review said thumb drive within 48 hours as the DOJ asked them to. The DOJ is asking California to sequester these ballots and it's trying to go through the courts to make them do it.

• 2:40:49Speaker 05

  Whether or not they will have to do that is currently being decided in court by Judge David O. Carter. O is his middle name, the initial of his middle name there, not, it's not like a, like the way that an Irish person would have their name. But I was just confused for a long time about this, but I couldn't find an apostrophe anywhere and it took me a while. Yeah, honestly, if your middle name starts with O, I feel like you kind of gotta go by your middle name or cut it out entirely. Yeah, just, it's either way, but a very confusing way to present one's name. On Monday, the Ninth Circuit dismissed the Trump administration's appeals, saying, quote, "The United States failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider its application for a temporary restraining order. For that reason, we lack jurisdiction over this appeal. So we grant the county's motion to dismiss this appeal and deny as moot the United States' emergency motion for relief."

• 2:41:34Speaker 05

  So in this case, the county would be LA County, right? They're trying to force the counties to sequester these ballots. The county's saying, no, we're not going to do that. In the hearing the day before we recorded this, on Tuesday, Judge Carter, gonna just use Carter from now on, asked First Assistant United States Attorney Bilal Asseely, "Why? If the issue was so big, they had not charged more people." CalMatters has some good courtroom reporting on this. Quote, "If it's that big, you've got a remedy for goodness sakes," the judge said. "Go out and indict." Carter, who has previously denied the DOJ's request for the entire voter rolls at a state, also said, quote, "Some of these may be very valid voters, and that's my concern about disenfranchisement." He indicated that he's likely to appoint a special master to look at evidence,

• 2:42:19Speaker 05

  which will not happen before November 3rd. He did seem to indicate that he would be ordering the feds to stop intimidating local election officials, saying, quote, "This court believes it would be wise for any threats to state or county election employees cease immediately." What a formal way of saying, like, I'll fuck you up. Yeah, yeah. The court believes it would be wise if you were to step back. Yeah, immediately. Yeah, that is a very judgy way of saying, come at me. Like, oh, don't, or I will come at you. So let's talk about that intimidation. On Friday, the DOJ sent letters to all 53 California counties, according to reporting in the New York Times. The letters contained a subset of the 20,000, they say,

• 2:43:03Speaker 05

  and gave election officials 48 hours, 48 hours from Friday, that's the weekend, to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not, it's a quotation. It then went on to say, if, quote, "Citizenship status cannot be confirmed, we request you immediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate, not cancel, those individuals vote by mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined." It seems that they tried to cut up the list by county here. Inyo County, for example, Northern California, got two names, neither of whom had been issued ballots. Mendocino, according to the registrar, who was interviewed by the Times, got the wrong list. Quote, "It's from another county," she said. Incredible.

• 2:43:45Speaker 05

  The feds requested sensitive personal information, like social security numbers, to determine eligibility. And social security numbers do not correspond to someone's citizenship status necessarily. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, there are certain points within your citizenship journey where you can get very, like an ITIN or an SSN, but that is not like a, that's not like a black white, as you say. The feds also sent a letter to the Office of the Council, so that, I'm saying Council SEL, not Council CIL for Los Angeles County. Like legal counsel. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's just in the audio format, I'm trying to distinguish between the two, right? They sent this letter to the Office of the Council of LA County, and included a statement, quote, "If persons knowingly tabulate ballots

• 2:44:30Speaker 05

  cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as non-citizens, they risk becoming aiders and abetters to a federal crime." Yeah. Bill Asseley posted a very similar message to X last week, saying, quote, "It's simple. California has not verified citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are non-citizens on their rolls. Knowingly processing non-citizen ballots is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 611, Section 611 and 2. We hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law." Yeah, they're just, they're trying to scare local officials into taking away people's ballots. Exactly, yeah, they're trying to scare people out of voting and scare people out of taking votes.

• 2:45:12Speaker 05

  This comes after Trump, in June, at a rally, said he asked United States attorneys to, quote, "Look into the state's voting practices."

• 2:45:19Speaker 03

  I called up the very powerful, very good US attorney in California, and I said, "Do me a favor. Take a look, they're trying to steal that election, too." I guess they called up. Over the next week, he was definitely going to lose, but the US attorney called. "We want to check your votes." About an hour after the call, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won, so.

• 2:45:41Speaker 05

  We did trim a little diversion that the president went on in the middle there about the local US attorney being present. So the DOJ has also brought in California charges against 28 foreign nationals who it claims voted or registered to do so. There are various charges here, right? In some cases, they're charging people with lying on their naturalization application, either lying and saying they hadn't previously committed a crime for which they had not been prosecuted, or lying and saying that they fraud, they had not fraudulently claimed to be a US citizen when they had. Not everybody here actually voted. In some cases, they registered to do so. I was kind of just looking demographically at this group. Obviously, it's people who are not born in the US, right?

• 2:46:26Speaker 05

  But they tend to be older folks, I noticed. Like, I think the youngest person was 30. It's very easy to register to vote, and I could maybe see how it'd be possible that someone who didn't have English as their first language or the best command of the language could accidentally do that. But I didn't know about any of these cases. The DOJ says they're all legal permanent residents, as was the case in Pennsylvania. I want to move on now to another case of misrepresentation of illegal voting practices. This one takes place in Hennepin County. And it involves serial. Streamer of his own crimes, James O'Keefe, because he is at it again.

• 2:47:10Speaker 05

  This shit is wild. Have any of you seen this video?

• 2:47:13Speaker 06

  I have not watched the video yet.

• 2:47:15Speaker 05

  We're gonna go on a fucking journey together, friends.

• 2:47:18Speaker 06

  No, but I just want to acknowledge that O in this case is part of the last name and not a middle initial. I know everyone's confused, so.

• 2:47:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, well, really, we're mixing it up with O. Yes, in this case, James O'Keefe, that is, that is his last name. And his, his colleague, Cam Higbee, they represented themselves, misrepresented themselves in Minnesota by entering polling places and representing themselves as registered voters. Quote, James Edward O'Keefe, 42, and Cam Higbee, 26, both face felony charges of unlawful voting and identity theft in the primary in Minnesota, according to an Hennepin County Attorney's Office press release that came out this morning.

• 2:47:56Speaker 06

  These are like right wing trolls.

• 2:47:58Speaker 05

  Yes, James O'Keefe, probably most famous for his Project Veritas stuff back in the day. I think they kicked him out of Veritas, something to do with the finances.

• 2:48:07Speaker 06

  He's the guy who killed Acorn. Wait, do people even, no one remembers Acorn? Never mind this.

• 2:48:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's like 15 years ago. Yeah.

• 2:48:15Speaker 06

  Dawn, yeah, it's the dawn of time. Yeah. Oh, I have like separate reasons I'm mad at Acorn from 20 years ago, but from the opposite direction. Oh, yeah, very funny. It's like, they also sucked, but he killed Acorn.

• 2:48:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm guessing you have little that you share, Margaret.

• 2:48:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Speaker 05

  It is amazing how much shit just goes down to Hennepin County. So what happened here is that O'Keefe and Higbee entered a polling place and they wanted to draw attention to a practice called vouching. Vouching has been established for a long time in Minnesota. It allows a registered voter to vouch to someone who perhaps has recently moved to the area, right, to say, hey, I'm coming in, I'm a registered voter, you got me on your list, this is my neighbor, they want to vote. O'Keefe obviously thought this was a, offered a wide opportunity for fraud, and so.

• 2:49:05Speaker 06

  So he committed fraud?

• 2:49:07Speaker 05

  Yes. Not only did he commit fraud, Garrison, he filmed himself doing it. And then he posted it to X.com, the everything website. A video posted to O'Keefe's X account with the opening credits seeming to identify him and the other people as members of the Citizen Justice League. Shows him dressed up in what he calls traditional Muslim attire. He's wearing a thobe and Higbee in niqab.

• 2:49:33Speaker 06

  Fuck.

• 2:49:33Speaker 05

  Garrison, if you could just play the first 34 seconds.

• 2:49:36Speaker 06

  I've never been more excited to watch a James O'Keefe clip.

• 2:49:39Speaker 05

  You're gonna see some shit, but fuck. I mean, like, they're not sticking the landing on this.

• 2:49:45Speaker 04

  I'm James O'Keefe and this is vouching for seven other Muslims at a Minneapolis polling booth.

• 2:49:51Speaker 04

  We're going in to this location and I'm gonna say that I'm vouching for them. The name is William Pomeranz.

• 2:49:57Speaker 07

  The question about the vouching program, yeah, vouching, I can vouch for them, but they are not registered. That's okay, that's fine. Can I bring five more from up to eight people? Okay, that's, that's a good thing. We go back and we get Rishno and Ernesto and Mohammed.

• 2:50:18Speaker 04

  In Minnesota, you can show up on Election Day and vouch for up to eight unregistered voters.

• 2:50:26Speaker 06

  Pretty incredible stuff.

• 2:50:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, you guys can't see this, O'Keefe is wearing a Halloween tier outfit and affecting an accent.

• 2:50:34Speaker 06

  It's like a level of racism that like.

• 2:50:39Speaker 05

  There are several things that I think he might be doing that he's filming in a polling place. I don't know what the rules are on like recording consent in Minnesota. Higbee in the cab, as you heard there, is the one using the cover name Ernesto. O'Keefe is the one using the affected accent in the video. Can we play 40 to 45 to see what's going on with Ernesto? You guys can probably guess, but.

• 2:51:07Speaker 06

  I'm slightly less excited as I was a few minutes ago. You've made me a cry.

• 2:51:13Speaker 04

  Members of the Justice League dress up in traditional Muslim attire, including a transgender wearing a burka.

• 2:51:21Speaker 04

  And put this vouching law to an extreme test on Primary Day, August 11.

• 2:51:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:51:27Speaker 06

  Not a burka, but that's all right. They're also putting on, they're putting on brown face, by the way.

• 2:51:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yes, that, that's what I wanted to add, Mia, is that they did include footage of them applying brown face.

• 2:51:38Speaker 06

  There's a lot to unpack here. Like, they're putting on brown face and I don't, I don't think that's the most racist part of this. Yeah. This is a spooky week section. This is my fucking night. God, the fact that I have to live in this world is fucking spooky week.

• 2:51:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is the most American Halloween thing to do to find an incredibly racist costume that is also offensive in myriad other ways.

• 2:52:00Speaker 06

  No, we've learned that the most American thing to do is to put on camo and shoot flock cameras. These people are doing it wrong.

• 2:52:05Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:06Speaker 06

  They don't deserve to come to America, these white people who were born here.

• 2:52:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.

• 2:52:14Speaker 05

  So later in the video, you see that the poll workers have very clearly worked out that something fucking weird is going on.

• 2:52:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:52:22Speaker 05

  Because they are outside filming O'Keefe and his crew and following them back to their vehicle. Higbee hides in the footwell of the vehicle as they peel out and attempt to do the same thing at another polling location. O'Keefe attempts to construct this as evidence that they know that the vouching system is wrong and not that they know that the group of people in brown face are probably up to some weird shit. I'm quoting again here from the presser. Minnesota law clearly states that no individual shall intentionally misrepresent the individual's identity in applying for a ballot, depositing a ballot in a ballot box, or attempting to vote by means of a voting machine or electronic voting system. Well, Mr. Higbee and Mr. O'Keefe did not sign the oath.

• 2:53:05Speaker 05

  Both men intentionally misrepresented their identities in applying for ballots, press release said. The person O'Keefe impersonated only found out once the video was released.

• 2:53:16Speaker 06

  He was posing as like a real person.

• 2:53:18Speaker 05

  Yes, that is a person, that is a registered voter in that precinct.

• 2:53:21Speaker 06

  Oh my God, this is a federal crime.

• 2:53:24Speaker 05

  William Pomeranz is a guy.

• 2:53:26Speaker 06

  Holy shit, Jesus Christ. That's wild. I didn't know they actually did it. I think they actually stole someone's identity. Holy shit. It's funny, and it, and it didn't work. The poll people were like, no, you're fraudsters.

• 2:53:41Speaker 05

  Well, they didn't say that because O'Keefe never actually did the thing. He never actually signed the oath, right? You, you attest that these people are residents, right? Like, just as one might enter into any other contract, this is a fairly well established thing that happens in law. You, you can attest to things, right? So in this case, he, I'm guessing he thought he wasn't stealing the identity because he didn't sign the contract, but.

• 2:54:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:54:04Speaker 05

  Pomeranz found this when it was sent to him by one of his students.

• 2:54:07Speaker 06

  Jesus.

• 2:54:09Speaker 05

  Can we just play like 8:59 to 9:05 when the poll workers work out what's going on here?

• 2:54:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16Speaker 04

  That's the biggest scam, I think, is that you can, as long as you know their name and their address, you can show up and vote in their name, no verification required. It looks like we may, the problem's gonna be free.

• 2:54:27Speaker 04

  You want me to ask, check it out now? What we could do is just reposition. He's gonna go alert somebody. Is he work there? And the white shirt told this shit about. I can't tell first you mean. Oh, yeah, they're recording.

• 2:54:49Speaker 06

  Holy LARP, oh my God. Yeah, can't let them get close.

• 2:54:53Speaker 05

  I love that at the moment, he's saying you could vote without having an ID. Several poll workers have already followed him to his vehicle.

• 2:55:00Speaker 06

  And also just like the, the, just the hypocrisy of I can film them and they can't film me.

• 2:55:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, the whole thing.

• 2:55:07Speaker 06

  They're filming us, get down. I don't expect better from them, but. You're, you're, you're posting it on Twitter. Yeah. What do you think this is gonna do?

• 2:55:16Speaker 05

  James O'Keefe, serious journalist, never thought to ask a lawyer, what if I do a number of federal crimes and then video them?

• 2:55:23Speaker 06

  The world is just that Simpsons meme of like filming this crime spree is the best idea we've ever had. Videotaping this crime spree. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:32Speaker 05

  So amazingly, O'Keefe's most recent tweet reads, siren emoji. Calling all election judges, county clerks, poll workers, and watchers, are you serving in the upcoming election? We want to connect with you to help ensure transparency and integrity in the electoral process. Send us a DM with your name, contact info, and the best time to reach you. He then links to the video in which his alleged crimes are recorded.

• 2:55:55Speaker 05

  Great stuff.

• 2:55:55Speaker 06

  Well, I'm glad that we were able to catch at least someone doing voter fraud.

• 2:56:00Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, the big problem is former Project Veritas people in this country undermining democracy.

• 2:56:06Speaker 06

  Oh, boy. Excited to see how this court case plays out. So I'm gonna do an actual. I think authentic, classic spooky week style segment and talk about doppelgangers. Rather than ghosts or goblins, zombies, werewolves or vampires, the only spooky creature of sorts that I've ever been kind of scared of, felt like the heebie jeebies about is the doppelganger. The idea that you suddenly happen to encounter an apparent double of yourself, whether just a glimpse for a short second or maybe an extended encounter with someone or something that looks exactly like you. And I'm not talking about like lookalikes here. Not talking about someone who just kind of resembles you. I mean, like you wake up in

• 2:56:51Speaker 06

  the middle of the night to use the bathroom and as you walk down the hallway, you see another version of you standing there. Or you're like cutting through like a crowded sidewalk and you noticed as you kind of pass by someone, you turn, you turn back because they look just like you. But then they're lost in the chaos of random passersby. That's the sort of doppelganger I'm talking about. So-called scientists say the odds of someone having the exact same facial proportions on like a scale of like eight features is like 0.11%. Not very likely that you, that you experience someone with the exact same features as you. But again, I'm talking about more of like a

• 2:57:32Speaker 06

  high strangeness type of situation here. So although this scientifically not likely to happen in the meat space, flesh world, online, digital doppelgangers are now quite plentiful. According to a report from the Wasleyan Media Project, which tracks data on political ads, they identified at least 220 political ads from the 2026 election cycle that were generated, at least in part, using AI. And of these 220 ads, about half contained AI deepfakes of real politicians. And this is a growing industry. Just this year, more than $137 million has been spent

• 2:58:17Speaker 06

  on AI political ads compared to less than $50,000 in 2024. And that $137 million figure is quote, "almost certainly in undercount, given that it is difficult to detect uses of AI", per Wasleyan Media Project. This report found that 81% of AI-generated ads were sponsored by Republican candidates or groups, while only 12% of the ads are sponsored by Democrats. And a lot of the groups or candidates using these ads might not have a lot of funding, right? A lot of smaller campaigns may turn to AI when they are tight on cash because what could have

• 2:58:59Speaker 06

  costed millions to produce now costs essentially nothing. Which is not to say that candidates with big budgets don't also use AI. They do. But this is part of why you saw so many like AI ads during like primary house races, because a lot of those candidates might not have as much money as the big name senate races. Now, these AI ads have shown up all across the country, at least in 34 different states, with most being found in Oklahoma and Texas. And just 27% of these ads contain a disclaimer that the ad featured AI-generated content. Let's go through some examples because since, since kind of this spring, I have been saving AI

• 2:59:42Speaker 06

  ads that I come across in the wild because I think they are fascinating. I don't like the future. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. I'm so excited to count fingers. A June ad paid for by Michigan State Senator Eric Nesbit stars a deep-faked Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, colluding with an AI version of who I think is supposed to be New York Governor Kathy Hochul, as they conspire to register illegal aliens to vote. Email here.

• 3:00:12Speaker 01

  The numbers are a disaster. We don't have enough illegals. Don't panic. I know someone who can help. Hey, what's up, Gretch? Don't worry, we got Michigan covered.

• 3:00:23Speaker 01

  Oh, don't forget to register to vote. Free bus rides for illegals.

• 3:00:38Speaker 06

  So that's the general vibe of stuff we're dealing with. Where we live in a satire? God damn. If that feels kind of like confused or chaotic, that's because it is. And that goes on for a whole other minute. That's, that's less than one third of this ad. I'm, I'm invested. I need to know how he saves America. It's pretty cool. The GOP Senator Eric Nesbit then drives a tractor to intercept this caravan of quote unquote illegals on their way to vote. Then ICE pulls up with guns drawn. Oh, cool. And then at the end of the ad, the Statue of Liberty comes alive and grabs Zohran Mamdani and Abdul al-Sayed. Some interesting notes here. When Zohran starts talking, completely different voice than he talks in the rest of the ad. Yeah.

• 3:01:24Speaker 06

  Also, AI Zohran calls the blonde woman Gretch. Gretchen Whitmer they're going for? Yeah. As in, as in Gretchen Whitmer, even though like the text accompanying this ad and per the visuals, she is supposed to be Secretary Benson, not Gretchen Whitmer. So a little, a little confusing. Great stuff happening here. Yeah, that's definitely my problem with it. Yeah, it does scream the kind of attention to detail you want is someone who gets to decide what the law is.

• 3:01:52Speaker 01

  Michigan law requires me to tell you that this video was generated completely by artificial intelligence. It has been manipulated by technical means and depicts speech and conduct that did not occur.

• 3:02:01Speaker 06

  But that's, yeah, that's the general kind of vibe that we're going to be dealing with. For people confused, that was supposed to be a bald eagle, even though that's not what a bald eagle sounds like. Thank you for that clarification. I almost was gonna make that particular note that all of the sounds we have for bald eagles are not bald eagle sounds, but yeah. I'm glad that the AI continued in the great American tradition of getting that wrong. Yeah. Also, in June, a Trump-aligned organization, Citizens for Sanity, spent six figures on a 15-second ad of Talarico in a maidress singing a quote unquote "trans kids" version of a few of my favorite things. I feel like I'm being hate-crimed by being on this show. Yeah, this, sorry Margaret, you've come on a rough. No, no, it's all right.

• 3:02:44Speaker 05

  Changing the gender of all your offspring.

• 3:02:47Speaker 06

  This is. These are a few of my favorite things. So this does not have a disclaimer that it's AI, even though it's maybe not impossible to tell by looking at it? Yeah, the apron dress doesn't have strings. This is kind of one of the more lo-fi ads compared to what we will see in the next few months. Because in September, Ken Paxton released his own AI-generated ad depicting a deep-faked James Talarico sitting at a home desk, reading paraphrased and abridged quotes from Talarico from like years past that are all stitched together with things he hasn't said. Some of these quote unquote quotes are being scribbled into a King James Talarico Bible.

• 3:03:30Speaker 06

  I'll play this clip here and I know this is, you know, visual content. I will link the list of these ads below at the top of the description. If you want to, for some reason, watch them all yourself. If you too want to annihilate your brain cells and like feel your soul physically drained from your body, which is the experience of watching this.

• 3:03:55Speaker 05

  In the beginning, God was non-binary and he wasn't a Christian. And God said, "Let there be six genders," and there were. Then God so loved the world that he gave us his only son, who was a radical feminist and never asked people to worship him. Look, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.

• 3:04:14Speaker 04

  James Talarico, wrong for Texas. America is not a Christian nation. And wrong for America too. I'm Ken Paxton and I approve this message.

• 3:04:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. A lot of the things Talarico is saying there are things that are just like biblically accurate and like true. Yeah, that's Elaine Pagel's whole shit. Like, "God's not a Christian." What? I know, right? There's a lot of stuff that's just like accurate and like true, but that's besides the point. With the way that they're stitching all these things together into sentences he didn't say, and then having his likeness say them, this is, this is bad for democracy, right? This is, this is not a good thing to do. And this ad in particular is pretty photo-real, at least compared to some of the others highlighted in this episode. It's funny that riots are illegal. Like, this is more destructive to our society than fire is.

• 3:05:07Speaker 06

  I'm just gonna, anyway, uh huh. Yeah. And there's teeny, teeny tiny text at the very end of the video that reads, "Certain video content depicted in this advertising was generated by artificial intelligence." Certain video content? Yeah, all of it. The whole video, dog. Yeah.

• 3:05:25Speaker 06

  Now, following the lead of Iran state propaganda, a few candidates like Doug Bastler in Seattle have AI-generated Lego-style animations, as well as political ads like riffing on adult-animated sitcoms. And we couldn't sit and laugh at how bad these are, but because they are not deepfakes, I'm going to skip them, but I will link two examples below. Again, if you want to check these out yourself. Before the Florida primary this summer, Ted Cruz linked super PAC called Frontline Action paid top dollar to broadcast AI ads targeting Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate, James Fishback, during the World Cup. One of these ads has groups of people showing up to Fishback's

• 3:06:07Speaker 06

  house for an anti-Israel party, including who is supposed to resemble Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Columbia campus protesters, Hassan Piker, and Code Pink activists. Hell, yeah. As well as Vladimir Putin, and finally some like Iranian state officials, who then slash an Israel party cake with a sword. The ad says, "Is this really what you want your Republican Party to look like?" Sounds like a pun with the word "party." Because some of those people are right-wing people, right? I know I live under a rock, but that's a list of people that's right-wing people that they're now trashing. Okay. Some of.

• 3:06:50Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I mean, Ted Cruz has had like an extended beef with Tucker, Candace, and by extension, Nick Fuentes for the past few years. Over Israel? Over Israel, yes. Okay. And like, as weird as this ad is, it's not nearly as weird as the other anti-Fishback ad made by this Ted Cruz-linked super PAC depicting two fishermen who catch a, what I'll call a "talking Fishback fish." What? God damn it.

• 3:07:21Speaker 06

  Big mouth. White genocide is real. Oh, God. And I'm running for governor to stop it. On my first day, we will suspend the enforcement of the unconstitutional antisemitism law.

• 3:07:32Speaker 04

  You want to throw this fish back? We can't throw this fish back. He'll ruin the other fish.

• 3:07:38Speaker 07

  Fishback, what do we do? Election Day, keep James Fishback out of office. The frontline action is responsible for the content of this advertising.

• 3:07:46Speaker 06

  If you watch any of these, you've gotta look through the show notes to find this one.

• 3:07:51Speaker 04

  I'm gonna see this in my nightmare.

• 3:07:53Speaker 06

  This has so many layers of I don't even know who's criticizing what about what. I mean, this is, this is the pro-Israel part of the Republican Party fighting back against the griper anti-Israel part of the Republican Party, which Fishback was kind of the main representative of. Okay, thank you. And like frontline action seems to specialize in like the sloppiest of AI slop ads, right? Like this stuff looks almost indistinguishable from those like creepy vegetable fruit like cuckoldry videos that you may have seen if you like ever scroll Instagram. Those were popular a few months ago. I've missed those. The visuals of these is kind of of a similar quality.

• 3:08:34Speaker 06

  And in September, they released an ad targeting Abdul El Said titled Family Values, showing Abdul, his sister, and Hassan Piker in his Mao suit and a kaffiyah, playing a quote, "Death to America" board game about destroying, quote, "The West." I fucking wish.

• 3:08:54Speaker 07

  The destruction of Israel and the West isn't just a game for them, it's a mission. His sister hates everything about America. His pal Hassan Piker thinks America deserved 9/11, and his father-in-law founded a charity tying to the Muslim brother.

• 3:09:08Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 3:09:08Speaker 07

  El Said isn't playing games, and his family is wrong from mission.

• 3:09:14Speaker 06

  I'm starting to think that the Republicans are racist.

• 3:09:18Speaker 04

  It does look that way.

• 3:09:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this last image is a framed family portrait with Abdul, four women in the cops, and again Hassan Piker, whom Abdul is not related to, this is, he's not part of Abdul's family. But no, this is the most like post-9/11 style anti-Arab racism.

• 3:09:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's 2001 gutter racism, like the unfiltered shit you used to get with people talking about nuking Iraq, like.

• 3:09:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's great.

• 3:09:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:09:47Speaker 06

  Half of these ads is kind of in that vein. An ad that came out this month from a GOP candidate for Congress in North Carolina uses AI-generated video to attack Democratic candidate Jamie Agar for hosting drag performances at his barn in 2019. And what's really insidious about this ad is that the first five seconds of the ad are actually manipulated media, using real footage of Agar with a pride flag artificially added to the background. And then this real footage is used as the visual basis for the rest of the AI ad with him like dancing with various famous drag queens, with no disclaimer that the drag queen footage is fake. I hate election years.

• 3:10:32Speaker 06

  There's this sort of like blending of reality in ads like this, which is like extremely dangerous. But the single candidate that's utilized AI ads the most is Republican candidate for New York Governor Bruce Blakeman. According to the New York Times, Blakeman has posted at least 22 AI ads since April. He's been just pumping these videos out. Yeah. From more traditional ads, just like replacing stock footage with more like cinematic AI visuals, to short little films or short videos of AI constituents talking about how bad New York has gotten under Kathy Hochul, to of course, deep fakes of Hochul herself. Blakeman's use of AI deep fakes has been rather innovative. One ad from September takes the form of a pharmaceutical commercial starring AI deep

• 3:11:17Speaker 06

  fake Governor Hochul and what is supposed to be Mayor Mumdani.

• 3:11:21Speaker 01

  Introducing Kathy, the political delusion pill for New Yorkers who'd rather not think about what four more years could actually cost them.

• 3:11:28Speaker 06

  Before Kathy, I worried about things like tax, utility bills, crime, and whether families could afford to stay in New York.

• 3:11:34Speaker 01

  And now?

• 3:11:36Speaker 06

  I just say it's someone else's fault.

• 3:11:38Speaker 01

  It's working.

• 3:11:40Speaker 04

  Side effects may include chronic wallet shrinkage, higher tax, higher utility bills, higher costs, shrinking paychecks, business leaving New York, uncontrollable government spending, sudden urges to defend socialists, and other financial complications.

• 3:11:52Speaker 06

  Every accusation is a confession.

• 3:11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:11:55Speaker 06

  Like many others, this ad contained no AI disclosure in violation of New York law. Blakeman produced another ad in the form of a retro TV commercial, also starring AI deep fake Hochul, where she offers free healthcare to, quote, "illegal immigrants, sex workers, and homeless drug addicts." And that is supposed to be a bad thing. Yeah.

• 3:12:18Speaker 06

  Based on all the ads I've watched, which is more than I've included in this episode, I sort these AI deep fakes into three sometimes overlapping categories. First, there's demonstrative or like descriptive AI, basically using AI visuals in place of real photos or videos in more traditional ads. This is kind of using AI like customized stock footage. Yeah. Footage that looks and feels relatively realistic, like someone standing next to AI Trump at the White House, or a deep fake of a candidate reading quotes directly to camera with just like a plain white background.

• 3:13:01Speaker 06

  But because of its simplicity, this type of use could actually be the most deceptive. A deep faked candidate reading a quote direct to camera without the context of why they said that quote could dramatically change its meaning and could be more easily mistaken for authentic footage. And then there's this other type, just like skits, right? This is what we've seen with the Fishback ads. And this is, you know, deep fakes of political opponents usually acting in some sort of satirical sketch or narrative scenario. These could be either dramatic or comedic. They sometimes have like a brief plot that leads to a climax. This is most similar to what we would call like AI slop, things that are much more easily recognizable as AI.

• 3:13:47Speaker 06

  And I think part of why these sorts of skits are so common is that for the sort of laws that are trying to regulate this sort of thing, there is First Amendment carve-outs for satire and parody. And so a lot of these ads could legally, arguably, be considered some form of parody. And that argument gives them a little bit of wiggle room. But there's another category of ad, which I'm gonna call like an AI scandal ad, a little bit of that like drag queen barn ad I think would fall into this, and that's AI generating footage to visually implicate opponents in some sort of political scandal, whether by dramatizing an event that did happen but with deceptive framing, or just depicting something completely fictional. A few months ago, in Executive Disorder, I talked about that NAGA Kentucky ad with

• 3:14:31Speaker 06

  AI-generated footage of Republican Representative Thomas Massey holding hands and getting dinner with AOC and Ilhan Omar, followed by like surveillance-style footage of them checking into a hotel room. With the ad being themed around Ilhan Omar and AOC and Massey are in a throuple together, and Massey has betrayed Trump.

• 3:14:52Speaker 05

  Thomas Massey caught in a throuple in Washington. He's cheating with the Squad on the America First movement. Massey voted with the Squad against Trump's tax cuts, as he voted with the Squad against finishing Trump's wall. He voted with them against hiring new border agents. Well, this is worse than adultery. It's a complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives. On May 19th, fire Thomas Massey. NAGA Kentucky is responsible for the content of this advertising.

• 3:15:22Speaker 06

  Massey has said that this ad did trick people into thinking that he was in a real throuple with these people, because the footage is actually pretty convincing. For someone who's like older than like 60, Yeah. it could be hard to distinguish that this is not real footage, especially when they put like these like filters on it to make it look like it's surveillance footage of them checking into a hotel room. Currently, 31 states have laws regulating the use of AI and deep fakes in political ads. Maryland has banned misleading election-related deep fakes entirely. And California and Texas have banned the publication of deceptive or harmful political deep fakes 30 days prior to an election. Minnesota has a similar law. But other state regulations just require a disclosure if AI was used.

• 3:16:06Speaker 06

  And obviously disclosures are not enough for this problem. And those don't, those don't even get followed half the time. But we need to get as close as we can to just banning AI ads entirely. There are currently two bills seeking to federally regulate, quote, "deceptive AI" and "AI in politics." These are pending in Congress and probably won't pass anytime soon, at least certainly not until there's a new Congress. And for these bills to succeed, they do need to be written carefully, because if they're overly broad, they could be struck down on First Amendment grounds. Lastly, I'll mention, there was a 2026 study in Communication Research, which found that even when participants knew a video of a political figure was an AI deep fake, that

• 3:16:49Speaker 06

  deep fake, quote, "still has the intended delegitimizing impact on the attacked politician by lowering support for the targeted candidate." So just because these ads aren't necessarily convincing all the time, doesn't mean they don't have negative effects. So yeah, doppelganger is pretty scary. Yeah, I've heard of a Butlerian Jihad.

• 3:17:12Speaker 06

  A lot of that going around these days.

• 3:17:15Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 3:17:17Speaker 06

  Speaking of ads, hopefully not AI-generated ads, it is time for one more ad break.

• 3:17:35Speaker 06

  And we're back. And I know what you all are thinking. You're thinking Margaret hates everything, and that's not true. I like widespread revolt. Also, I like Sophie's outfit. I wish all of you

• 3:17:48Speaker 04

  Halloween.

• 3:17:48Speaker 06

  out there could see. That's incredible, actually. That's legitimately crazy. Sophie as Princess Peach.

• 3:17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's amazing. It's so nice to see someone just wearing an outfit that isn't racist and it's just nice. So rare in my line of work.

• 3:18:06Speaker 06

  So, countries all over are doing a widespread revolt thing right now. That is happening. That has been going on for a couple of weeks, depending on, well, a couple of months, depending on how you're going to be paying attention to this. And Albania is on the list of countries with widespread revolt, but it's one of the ones that no one covers, despite the fact that it has the coolest flag of the countries that are covered in this particular way. Although, I probably just like medieval-looking things. It actually... Yeah, well, is it cooler than Nepal, though? Whoa, isn't Nepal in revolt? Nepal, I guess you could consider the first one of these from like a couple of years ago. Okay. Yeah, no, no, that's true. That's true. The dragon flag is cool as hell. We've got to acknowledge that. I mean, the one with the machete and the...

• 3:18:48Speaker 04

  Talking about Mozambique?

• 3:18:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the best flag in the world. We just have to acknowledge that. The machete and the AK. I don't even like a hammer and sickle all that much, although I recognize it as a good icon. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so Albania is on this list, and people don't know shit about Albania. And so I thought I would talk about the revolt in Albania. And this is going to be a situation that is entirely unfathomable to the American mind. There are two major political parties, only two, and one of them is center-left and one of them is center-right. And they're both corrupt as fuck, and they're both privatizing the shit out of everything, and they're the only... It's funny, because it gets called a regime, because they are the only parties that have been in power for like 30 years?

• 3:19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:19:33Speaker 06

  Anyway, think on that.

• 3:19:34Speaker 04

  It gets called a regime because it's like east of some delineating line, maybe Poland, right, where everything...

• 3:19:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. And it also is a regime. No one likes it. That's why they're having this big revolt.

• 3:19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:46Speaker 06

  The cost of living keeps rising, and conditions are getting worse. People are mad about their country sending aid to Israel. They're mad about the destruction of the environment in the name of rich people having fancy shit. They're even mad at like Jared Kushner has released all this. And they are tired of the violence of the police and of their voices not getting heard. So they are in pretty open revolt right now. And I'm still working on building more about this. I've basically just spent the past couple of days talking with comrades in the area. They're like busy, and there's like stuff happening, you know? And so they're like sending me some things, and then like here's 170-page book about the neoliberalism of our country. And I'm like, okay.

• 3:20:28Speaker 06

  Albania is a small country. It's about 2.5 million people. It is a one-quarter of a New York City, depending on how you're mapping New York City's metro area. And it's in the Balkans. It's northwest of Greece. Albania was once part of the Ottoman Empire, declared independence in 1912. Communists liberated the place from Nazis in 1944. And then they did a communist dictatorship that overall has not looked nicely upon even by the modern left wing of that country, right? So people aren't like, oh, I miss when everyone was Stalinist. That's not really what's happening here. It got multi-party elections in 1991. The communists lost their first election in 1992, which put a guy named Sally Barisi in charge. And I have only been reading, and I have not yet talked in person.

• 3:21:12Speaker 06

  So I'm going to mispronounce important names here. It put a guy named Sally Barisi in charge. Mia, you're the most likely to randomly know this guy's actual name. Ah, yeah. Unfortunately, I strike out after Hoaxa. Without paying any... It's cool. I didn't put Hoaxa in here because I had no idea how to pronounce that name. Who was the main communist? Yeah, he was the communist dictator. Went from Maoism to the Maoist got too far right, so he became Juce, and then built a bunch of bunkers. The whole thing, fiasco. Oh, this is the bunker country? This is the bunker guy. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

• 3:21:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is bunkers. People know bunkers in a Norman Whiston. I should point out before someone goes onto reddit.com that I am aware that Albania is not to the east of all of Poland.

• 3:21:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. All right. So Sally Barisi is still a player in this story, the guy who won in 1992. He was a big anti-communist reformer. It's a majority Muslim country, and he basically unbanned religion. He privatized the fuck out of everything he could. And then, under him, literally half of the country's wealth was invested into a series of pyramid schemes. Oh, really? And so everyone gave all of their money to these pyramid schemes, because they had just gotten out of communism. And so people were like, oh, I know what you can do with your money, but guaranteed returns. And probably all they've ever been hearing is like guaranteed returns. That's what people tell you about the stock market in America, you know?

• 3:22:35Speaker 04

  Well, and like people did get rich in like Russia, right? Like grabbing a bunch of previously nationalized shit. Like that's how some of the oligarchs came to be.

• 3:22:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:22:43Speaker 04

  So like you can see it happening, and like it's very fertile terrain for this shit.

• 3:22:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not like half the country are fools, right?

• 3:22:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:22:50Speaker 06

  But the pyramid schemes, it's not a very stable form of society. They collapsed, and it fucked everyone over, because so many people had invested in these shore deals. So Albania had like basically a civil war level of revolt against corruption in 1997. It wound up with its current constitution. But it still has a fuck-ton of corruption. It went on to join NATO in 2009. It's not yet in the EU. It's a candidate country. It has been for about 12 years. And Sally Barisi, the guy who let all this bad shit happen under him with the Ponzi schemes, he ends up prime minister again from 2005 to 2013. But then, ever since then, he's the Democrat Party, the Democratic Party. They are the center-right party.

• 3:23:30Speaker 06

  Then the center-left party, the Socialist Party, has been in charge ever since 2013, under the direction of a guy named Eddie Rama. And he has been prime minister since 2013. He's currently on his fourth term, and he is corrupt as fuck. Rama came to power by being, oh, and you all will like this, Rama came to power by being the popular socialist mayor of the biggest city in the country, the capital, Tirana. And he won everyone's hearts by repainting the city vibrant colors to move away from like the drab Soviet era. So he was like, I've done civic improvement, and I'm the socialist mayor, and everyone loves me. And that's how the Socialist Party was able to come to power. But then he changed nothing.

• 3:24:08Speaker 06

  And he's fully into privatization and corruption, just like the other guys. And he's fully in bed with organized crime, it seems like. Obviously, people like to argue about this. And press freedom is terrible there. Everything is just getting bad. About a third of the country has emigrated. There's about 1.1 million Albanian-born people living elsewhere.

• 3:24:29Speaker 04

  Jeez.

• 3:24:30Speaker 06

  And to quote an as-yet unpublished piece from some comrades in the Balkans, quote, "For years, Eddie Rama has used his power to seize control over every sphere of social life. Much like under the government of Sally Barisha, oligarchs have forged close criminal ties with those in power." Oh, and then the worst thing about this man, he's a podcaster.

• 3:24:51Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 3:24:52Speaker 06

  Oh, no. Yeah, he has a podcast.

• 3:24:55Speaker 04

  It's just the way it is now. Yeah. Gavin Newsom, too.

• 3:24:58Speaker 06

  So, that's the setup. Why are there big protests? And one of the reasons I want to do this, people feel, and Albania feel, pretty misrepresented in the West, and it's like, everything I've read has been like, it all started in France and it's spreading. And that's like...

• 3:25:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:25:11Speaker 06

  No. Not really... I love the France revolt, don't get me wrong, but like every country has its own reasons it's doing this, you know? So then Jared Kushner, I hate that I finally have to learn these people that you all talk about in your day job all the time, and this is why I do history for a living. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, he visits Albania, and he sees a cool island called Sazan, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. And it was undeveloped, and it was protected. It was protected wetlands. It was like, don't fuck with this island. We all love it. All that's there is an abandoned military base. And he's like, "But my dad is Trump, so what if I want to put a really fancy resort there?" And also, a big part of the protected area of the wetlands on the mainland as well.

• 3:25:55Speaker 06

  So Rama personally visited Kushner and was like, yeah, fuck it. All right, we'll figure it out. We'll figure out a way to make this legal. And so they passed a law that was like, just kidding, rich foreigners can bulldoze our protected wildlands. And people didn't like that. So in May, at a protest against the playgrounds for rich, right-wing tourists that should have been a protected ecosystem, a protester was dragged and beaten by a private security guard, who then put a gun to the guy's head, right? And all of this happened in front of the cops. Everyone's like, why aren't you doing anything? And they're like, I don't know, because we're the cops, right? We're corrupt. And this was the spark.

• 3:26:30Speaker 06

  But the protests aren't about the resorts. They are and they aren't. This is the spark, but the fuel is decades of corruption, privatization, rising costs of living, mass emigration, and a sense of powerlessness, right? All protest movements have been captured by one political party or the other, going back for decades. And so now you have the flamingo protests, and they're called that because flamingos live in those wetlands. And they're very explicitly against both Rama and Barisha. Barisha is the opposition leader still, and he keeps trying to be like, oh, these are totally my protests. Everyone loves me. And best I can infer, I'm still waiting on confirmation, I believe that when his people show up to try and co-opt the protest, they get pushed to the outside and sometimes literally thrown in the river.

• 3:27:17Speaker 06

  We gotta start doing that, trying to hijack protests? And so it is and isn't a Gen Z protest. This is a whole generation of people who've only ever known the Rama regime, and they see no future in themselves, so they are out there protesting. And for 130 days, it was a big peaceful daily protest, which was a whole new kind of protest. It was a little more of an Occupy-type thing. People would go out every day, and they would like have a kind of carnival air, right? And the one rallying cry, uniting the crime, because all different types of people are there, all types of different demands, the one rallying cry is Rama to prison, Barisha to prison. So they want the head of both their political parties in fucking jail for decades of corruption.

• 3:27:58Speaker 06

  Which reminds me of the Argentinian protest chant from 2003, "Que se vayan todos." They all must go? I think it's 2001. Is it 2001? I trust you far more than I trust me with remembering things like that.

• 3:28:14Speaker 06

  And they came into my head. Yeah, no, totally. They all must go, right? Yeah. They must all go to prison. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Parentheses. So that 130 days of peaceful protests were just ignored by the government and or repressed, right? And so finally, on October 13th, the students were like, man, fuck this shit. And so they had, they threw a student's strike and the protests have escalated ever since into a genuine uprising. And the, the way it's presented by the people that I'm reading and talking to is like, the only question is what we're going to do when the Rama government falls. Like, they believe they are going to win as of time of recording last I talked to some people, right?

• 3:28:57Speaker 06

  And the government has been attacking people in the streets with all the usual shit, chemical weapons, water cannons, baton rounds, they took out somebody's eye, they're kidnapping people in the middle of the night, there's plainclothes officers attacking people, arresting people, people are being beaten inside of the jails, they're passing all of these new laws specifically to punish, now it's no longer illegal just to break shit at a protest, but if you're in a protest where anyone breaks shit, you can get in trouble for that. And this isn't stopping people. As for who is doing it, quote, I'm quoting this unreleased thing that is not, this is not the fine finished translation, and I'll be covering this more on some of my shows as I get more information. As for who's doing this, quote, "Students and pupils, trade unionists, parents and

• 3:29:39Speaker 06

  children, political groups and leftist political parties, sports fans, right wing groups and nationalists, a whole host of people from diverse spheres, ranging from educators to social media influencers." And quote, "There is no clear vision for what should follow the fall of the Rama government, nor is there a defined strategy for how the resistance might continue. But one thing is certain, there is no turning back." Nice. And public gatherings are being restricted, people are being told they can't leave the country, which is unconstitutional according to Albanian law, you're not supposed to be able to prevent people from leaving the country. And it seems like there is a chance that this will turn into a thing where people form assemblies and build counterpower.

• 3:30:23Speaker 06

  And if so, we might see a real revolution and not just one party replaced with another. I am a cynical enough person who's seen a lot of uprisings around the world where I'm not specifically holding my breath. But I fucking, fuck yeah. And in the meantime, Rama refuses to sit down. He's like, "I'm willing to talk to you all." But everyone's like, "No, get the fuck out." And he's like, "No, I'm willing to talk to you." So he set chairs up in front of his office, is it like as a symbolic, like, "Come talk to me, sit down, we'll have a conversation." So they, they set the chairs on fire. Oh, yeah. Incredible. No, no. They're not talking to this man. They are the power, they are the people, and they want him fucking gone. That's what I got so far. By the time this comes out, it might be completely different because even my news is about two days old.

• 3:31:08Speaker 06

  Nice. All right, Princess Peach is, uh... I believe blessing the Albanian revolt is what's just happening with Sophie right now. Yes. Orthodox Princess Peach. You all are gonna be so sad this is not a video show because Sophie is fucking killing it. Yeah.

• 3:31:28Speaker 06

  Well, I got a Headless Horseman costume for my dog. That's perfect. I'm just gonna wear one of my onesies like I always do. Anyway, that's what I got for this week. I have a bunch of other podcasts, one's called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I talk about history, except I also sometimes talk about modern revolt. I actually talk slightly less fast on that. And I also do Cool Zone Media Book Club, which you probably know because it's in the same feed as this particular show. But also, on Halloween this very year, I have a spooky collection of short stories called The Folk Tales of Lowland Sakhan that comes out from tangledwilderness.org, from Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness. And it is only six bucks and it is the most beautiful zine and it has five of my stories in it. And you should preorder it because preorders are awesome. Oh, yeah. And if you like my fiction, which you have no way of knowing if you do, because

• 3:32:13Speaker 06

  I didn't say anything fictional, I told you about some other stuff. I am, need to eat, I'm done. Okay. Magic. If you're listening on the day this comes out, I'm doing a book talk in San Diego on Sunday at the Garden Center in Mission Hills, Through the Fall Bookshop is what the place is called. If you would like to email us with a news tip, [email protected]. Some of you marketing people still trying. Admire the tenacity, not gonna work.

• 3:32:43Speaker 06

  Put a trans girl on your spooky couch, I don't know. We reported the mostly scary but not always scary news.

• 3:32:57Speaker 04

  We reported the news.

• 3:33:03Speaker 01

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

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