It Could Happen Here Weekly 257

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file: Hope & Dirty Tricks: How Lula Beat Flavio Bolsonaro Election Rumors and Conspiracism Catching up with the status of Kurdish groups in Iran Executive Disorder: 2026 Midterms Edition Executive Disorder: GOP Blame Game, Trump/Epstein Report, Paraguay Ousts President 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: Election Rumors and Conspiracism https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/26/trump-reward-reporting-voter-fraud https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/harassment-public-records-requests-bombard-uw-truth-seeker-after-jan-6-hearings-cameo/ https://uwcip.substack.com/p/election-rumor-rundown-october-24 https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/minnesota-charges-conservative-activist-okeefe-influencer-higby-after-voting-2026-10-29/ Catching up with the Status of Kurdish Groups in Iran https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg Executive Disorder: GOP Blame Game, Trump/Epstein Report, Paraguay Ousts President https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/10/how-mamdani-canceled-cop-city/416903/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/04/nyregion/pied-a-terre-mamdani-appeal-win-home-tax.html?smid=url-share https://apnews.com/article/port-strikes-arms-shipments-france-greece-italy-4a8813406fd51b91b3b7d17826c1883d https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg/status/2117641211909730538?a=ri24O90ueHp7eYgCoDc&s=20 https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg/status/2117641211909730538?a=ri24O90ueHp7eYgCoDc&s=20 https://x.com/war_noir/status/2117581845755773246?a=P0quWPGQ6wjaX70NPOQ&s=20 https://x.com/war_noir/status/2117581845755773246?a=P0quWPGQ6wjaX70NPOQ&s=20 https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/26/26A624/431463/20261102111302952_California%20Application.pdf https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/united-states-v-california-2/ https://2026.electoral.dsausa.org/ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/senate-results https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/how-trump-lost-midterms-33cf9fd4?st=EQm4gx https://x.com/justinbaragona/status/2117780696626257981?a=Q68Ma2bBhMU2LKxTVkk&s=20 https://x.com/justinbaragona/status/2117780696626257981?a=Q68Ma2bBhMU2LKxTVkk&s=20 https://x.com/JDVance/status/2118004988433641835 https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/2117614591060721973?a=A5arnEBUOHurQE3jSg8&s=20 https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/2117614591060721973?a=A5arnEBUOHurQE3jSg8&s=20 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2117612993139585093?a=dprbLi0Afsej7Jh14ko&s=20 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2117612993139585093?a=dprbLi0Afsej7Jh14ko&s=20 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/04/desantis-calls-midterm-bloodbath-an-extinction-level-event-for-republicans-01148705 https://x.com/politico/status/2117840712855113793?a=5vZ3flWUbvcJyTvleyU&s=2 https://x.com/politico/status/2117840712855113793?a=5vZ3flWUbvcJyTvleyU&s=2 https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/11/05/congress/bernie-sanders-launches-medicare-for-all-push-01151604 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2117887743443505646?a=tif1VPo4NuwejhijsNY&s=20 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2117887743443505646?a=tif1VPo4NuwejhijsNY&s=20 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/6199505-house-investigations-trump-administration/ https://x.com/atrupar/status/2118335426968616973?a=tRXmF86Rp3SEkpIuB_E&s=20 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2118335426968616973?a=tRXmF86Rp3SEkpIuB_E&s=20 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/15/paolo-zampolli-fired-state-department-trump-01121739 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-democrats-call-for-special-counsel-to-investigate-trump-s-ties-to-epstein/ar-AA2g6UnX https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/judiciary-democrats-report-details-mounting-evidence-linking-trump-to-epstein-s-criminal-activities-and-doj-s-cover-up-specific-accounts-involving-11-women-provide-more-evidence-of-potential-sex-crimes https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/318-garment-factories-closed-amid-labour-unrest-over-7-lakh-workers-leave-workplaces https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/national-international/paraguay-president-santiago-pena-resigns-following-bank-collapse/4102079/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Speaker 02

  I turned off news altogether.

• 0:35Speaker 03

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

• 0:40Speaker 04

  It's the rage bait.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  It feels like it's trying to divide people.

• 0:46Speaker 06

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

• 0:52Speaker 07

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

• 1:04Robert Evans?

  This is the moment, baby. This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question. Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game and those who just want to watch from the sidelines, eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  dog in you. Underdog. At least you're dog. Terms may apply.

• 1:35Speaker 04

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

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Hey, everybody. Robert here, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And it sure looked like things in Brazil were about to fall apart a week or two ago. But then Lula won the second round of the presidential election in a real shocker of a vote. Now, we've talked about this on this week's ED, but immediately after the vote, I started chatting with some Brazilian folks that I had knew and had met online, people who had been both just kind of grassroots activists, you know, part of the effort to get Lula reelected in the second round of voting, and folks who had had, you know, positions of somewhat, you know, a little more influence in the media and whatnot, all to talk about like what had happened and how it had worked. And obviously, I didn't feel like I was the best person to put together a comprehensive article about that.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  And so that's why I was really grateful to run into Caio Almendra. Caio is a former opinion editor for The Intercept Brazil. He's a writer at Superstructure with Julian Field. He's one of the hosts of the Vera Casacas podcast and an Alameda Institute researcher. He's a really cool guy, and he wrote this article, which I am going to read to you. This is Caio's article about what happened in Brazil and about his own experiences. I'm reading it because English is his second language, and we figured this would be a better way to reach more Americans with what had happened, because the strategies with which Lula won the second round of voting are really important for people to understand in like 21st century politics. This is not going to be just relevant to Brazil and Brazilians. Anyway, here's Caio Almendra.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  On the night of October 5th, 2026, the Brazilian left received horrendous news. Bolsonaro had won the elections, increasing its bench in the Chamber of Deputies by 23 and in the Senate by 14. There's a real risk that they might get the majority needed to amend the Constitution or even to impeach Supreme Court justices. With so much power in Congress and the prospect of controlling a nine out of 11 supermajority on the Supreme Court, nothing seemed capable of stopping the implementation of the most radical parts of Flavio's authoritarian agenda. Because Flavio Bolsonaro's platform called for billions of dollars in budget cuts, which would inevitably gut public education, pensions, and public health care, because his father

• 4:11Speaker 04

  had attempted a coup and his platform included granting amnesty to him and all the insurrectionists, as well as impeaching all the Supreme Court justices who voted for his arrest and firing the federal police officers involved, because he spouted the worst rhetoric of penal populism, advocating for chemical castration, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, and legalizing the death penalty, and because of Flavio's countless ties to organized crime, specifically the militias, a type of mafia that keeps favelas in a permanent dystopia and their residents under the thumb of local petty dictators. The future felt terrifyingly bleak. Lula, despite leading in the polls, had performed poorly. Flavio Bolsonaro, the PL candidate, looked as though he had almost won in the first round.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  The votes were still being counted, and Lula was recovering part of the vote share. In every bar and venue where the left, myself included, had gathered, people watched the election results. In Praça do Salvador, dubbed Rio's Little Havana because of the left's overwhelming influence in the neighborhood, not unlike New York City's commie corridor, the atmosphere felt like a funeral. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch the results, but with every vote tally update, the mood grew heavier. To make matters worse, so many people had gathered there that the street beer vendors ran out of ice. It was going to be a night of terrible news, solaced only by warm beer. Many were tracking the count on the Electoral Court's mobile app. Whispers like, "Did you see what's happening in Minas?" were constant.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Nicolas Feria, a far-right influencer, something like a less overtly white supremacist, more transphobic Nick Fuentes, had swept 3 million votes, dragging 20 deputies into Congress along with him. The left hadn't won a single Senate race in the Southeast, and Rio de Janeiro would once again be governed by an unknown backed by the militias. Not far away, a lone drunk Bolsonarista was shouting, "It's Lula! It's Lula! It's Lula back in prison!" My friends living abroad kept asking me through WhatsApp, "What now? Hunger all over again? Videos of people eating cow carcasses?" Those videos showing the misery and starvation under Jair Bolsonaro's government hit the Brazilian diaspora in Europe, the US and Australia particularly hard. My uncle in Texas texted me, and I tried to comfort him.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  As a progressive living in Texas, he's usually the pessimistic one. But that day, the pessimism was palpable, almost like a haze that smelled of warm beer. The left had grown slightly in size, but the far-right's crushing victory over the center-right meant that no one could help thinking the worst. People spoke of a defeat that would affect 220 million Brazilian citizens for at least a decade. A group of law students from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, a public university in the small city of Niterói, sort of a New Jersey to Rio de Janeiro, grabbed all the banners and stickers they had and started a march against Flavio's fascism and in defense of Lula's government. They probably had no idea what this would lead to, or how that small gesture was the rolling of a snowball down a massive mountain.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  The first-round campaign was remarkably listless in Brazil, a rarity, especially in a presidential election year with Lula on the ballot. Lula's third term was similarly lackluster. The main hallmarks of his third administration were reviving programs abolished by Jair Bolsonaro and prosecuting the January 8th insurrectionists who refused to accept Jair's defeat. On the eve of the first round, the campaign team, sensing trouble ahead, took bold and hugely popular measures. The first was banning sports betting platforms, bets, in Brazil. Brazil is the world's largest market for online betting, despite being the 10th-largest economy globally. Gambling addiction affects 11 million Brazilians. These betting apps were originally legalized under Michel Timmer, who took office after an unsubstantiated impeachment against Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  The ban had 3 to 1 approval in Brazil. Had it gone into effect, it would have meant that, on average, every Brazilian would now have 40 reals more in their pocket, the equivalent of a meal at a good restaurant. However, it came too late, just days before the first round. Still, it was enough to spark enthusiasm among the activist base, focused on the lives of the poorest, as he was during his first and second terms. The main issue was pessimism. The vast majority of the Brazilian left went to sleep on Sunday, October 5th, believing Lula's victory was now mathematically impossible. All other candidates besides Lula and Flavio were right-wing, with one even to the right to Flavio. The radical socialist left received 200,000 votes, a tiny fraction of the 2 million votes Lula needed to turn around.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Robert again here, and we'll continue with the story, but first, we've got a break for some ads.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  And we're back, and I'm going to continue with Caio's article. Early in the week, however, things began to shift. Every optimistic content creator, including the writer of this episode, started going viral on social media. On the Monday after the election, Filipe Abal, Gabriel de Vann, and the author of this article recorded an episode of the Virecasas, the Turncoats, podcast titled "Bora," or "Let's Go." The tone was straightforward: "We are three white, sishat, left-wing guys, the stereotypical Brooklyn podcast, and we simply do not have the right to give anything less than everything we've got to win this second round. Nobody gets to stop. We'll do whatever it takes, and this talk about it being mathematically impossible to win is pure nonsense."

• 9:31Speaker 04

  I went as far as making a bold prediction: "History is in our hands, and Brazil's second round could be the first domino to fall in a wave of far-right defeats across the Americas. The US midterms would be the second." Two days later, I would repeat that exact phrase on Fear and Loathing in Brasilia, Brazil's biggest left-wing podcast, only for the host to reply despondently, "I hope so, Caio, but it looks tough." The same day, I repeated the line as a guest on an episode of Chapo Trap House and was met with a swarm of foreign doomers on social media. As if local pessimism wasn't enough, the second round was now importing doom and gloom straight from the US into my life. We didn't expect the positive response that the episode of Virecasacus would bring. On top of becoming one of the most viewed episodes of the podcast, it was one of the most commented on.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Dozens of people wrote to us, saying they had regained their hope and proudly sharing the votes that they had managed to flip. It was a tiny fraction, of course. Lula needed 2 million votes, but it was a great indicator of what was to come. Record-high abstention rates were good news. Another reason for hope was the public's low awareness of who Flavio really was, compounded by the complete absence of debates in the first round. Flavio hadn't attended a single one, and the only collective memory people had of him debating was his infamous 2016 collapse on live TV. This created a strong expectation that in the second round, Lula, a seasoned debater since 1989, would easily dominate the debates and swing a massive number of votes. Despite his strong showing in the first round of voting, Flavio was an exceptionally weak candidate.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  In the 2016 mayoral election, Flavio finished in fourth place after he fainted and soiled himself during a live debate. Within the Bolsonaro family, he was the closest to organized crime and major corruption scandals. Thanks to a miracle of media spin, the largest recent corruption case in Brazil's history, the Banco Master Ponzi scheme, had been framed as ambidextrous, meaning it supposedly involved both the left and the right. It was a blatant lie. Leaked audio recordings proved an intimate friendship between Flavio and banker Daniel Vorcaro. Vorcaro had donated money to Jair Bolsonaro's biopic starring Jim Caviezel, a project developed by Flavio. Vorcaro was affiliated with the Lago Ina Church, a recent megachurch that experienced meteoric growth and was deeply tied to the P L, right-wing party.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Flavio was a silent partner in a betting platform, Lake de Vorcaro. They even shared a business partner: Willard Tomasz. By the way, if you found it strange that the same group owned a church, a betting company, and a bank, all classic vehicles for money laundering, well, your suspicions might be spot-on. Allegations that this whole rapidly growing complex was a money laundering scheme for organized crime are well-founded. Willard Tomasz, for instance, was the largest better on the Blaze platform, accounting for 50% of the company's profits by spending 6.6 billion reals, roughly $1.2 billion. There's no way he is not a hidden partner of Blaze, and that's a money laundering scheme. Even so, the mainstream media blackout on the topic shielded Flavio.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Only the small alternative media ecosystem was talking about it. To make matters worse, Flavio's presumed future economy minister was appearing in the media to lay out her platform. She proposed ending Bolsa Família, the income transfer program that lifted millions out of poverty during Lula's first terms in office. She backed blocking the reduction of the workweek from 44 to 40 hours, a campaign that had originally gone viral on TikTok, led by a black gay TikToker who had just been elected federal deputy, in a campaign which Lula had embraced earlier this year. Added to that were wage freezes and billions of reals in budget cuts, echoing Milei and Doge, which the left quickly realized would come straight out of healthcare and education. And she was not the only person in Flavio's circle damaging his image.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Flavio himself was not a particularly religious person until he needed to consolidate support among evangelicals to gain leverage within the Bolsonerista coalition and secure his nomination as the candidate. To that end, the pastor Flavio allied with was especially radical. As a result, the pastor had taken deeply anti-Catholic stances, such as demanding that Brazil strip Our Lady of Apuricida, one of the few black saints, of her status as the patron saint of the nation. Despite evangelical influence on the right, the majority of Brazil remains Catholic. Furthermore, the Afro-religious minority also reveres Our Lady of Apuricida, syncretized with the Orisha, Oshun. Still, fear only gets you so far. The Democrats spent all of 2024 trying to fear monger liberals into organizing, and it fell flat.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Fear simply isn't enough. The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza pointed out that "if fear is anxiety about a future bad outcome, and hope is that exact same anxiety about a good outcome, and given that all anxiety hinges on uncertainty, fear and hope are just two sides of the very same coin." On Wednesday, October 7th, barely two days after those UFF students spontaneously marched in a super-rare first-round demonstration, students from all over the state of Rio took over the streets at a massive rally. The shift from sheer dread into rising hope was officially underway. By Thursday, everyone was talking about how huge the student march had been. That same day, Lula gathered influencers and newly-elected young leaders to recalibrate the online campaign.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Despite a few bumps along the way, like tanky YouTuber-turned-congressman Yonah Manuel calling out Lula's campaign for being totally lost, the digital side started getting its act together. Lula switched to posting raw selfie videos, hitting Flavio much harder. The campaign launched an intense calendar of street actions, maybe the most relentless schedule Brazil has ever seen. Which brings us to the bizarre story of Andre Janones. Janones came from a poor background, working as a bus conductor to put himself through law school. While in college, he joined Lula's Workers' Party, PT. Working as a lawyer in a tiny town, he took on healthcare access cases, suing the state and health insurance companies to secure surgeries, medical tests, and other procedures. By constantly pushing the state for improvements to the public healthcare system, he earned

• 15:21Speaker 04

  the nickname "The People's Inspector." In 2012, he left the PT to join the far-right PSC, which at the time was the political home of Carlos Bolsonaro. He chalked it up to ideological differences, which might just be code for "I'm an evangelical, I can't sit in a party rooted in Catholic left and Marxism." That said, a good amount of opportunism goes a long way in explaining this change, too. In 2018, he supported the truck driver strikes. This was an ambiguous event in Brazil. Formerly, it was a mobilization against President Michel Timmer, who had taken office following the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor. However, midway through to the end of the strike, individual truck drivers started returning to work, making its nature as a lockout look glaringly obvious.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Employer strikes organized by a trucking company owners are not only illegal under Brazilian law, but they also carry a tragic history in Latin America. They were weaponized to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile and Joao Goulart in Brazil. In 2018, Janones was elected federal deputy under the Avante, a party so centrist that its name literally means "forward." In 2022, he announced his presidential run, but on the eve of the campaign, he declared his endorsement of Lula during a livestream. From that moment on, he would become one of Lula's most loyal fedain. Throughout this whole chaotic political process, Janones's charisma and his knack for understanding the Brazilian internet were his greatest asset. Today, he is a member of Brazil's True Green Party, allied with the socialist left of PSOL,

• 16:47Speaker 04

  and home to Marina Silva, Lula's minister of the environment, who brought Amazon deforestation down to near zero. Back in 2022, Janones's influence was real, but it got somewhat exaggerated thanks to the viral spread of the "Cultural Janonism" meme, originally coined on Twitter by environmentalist Mauricio Angelo. Cultural Janonism was essentially dirty political warfare, the kind of mudslinging the left usually had moral scruples about engaging in. Janones was the only one who exposed Bolsonaro's ties to Freemasonry, and therefore Satanism, setting off alarms across his evangelical base. He was the only one driving the narrative that Bolsonaro was a cannibal, and he was the only one who turned a video viral in which Bolsonaro, right in the middle of a xenophobic

• 17:28Speaker 04

  rant, claimed a 14-year-old Venezuelan girl had flirted with him, fueling accusations of pedophilia against the president. Basically, Janones invented Dark Woke. The US copied him. Lula's margin of victory in 2022 was so razor-thin that many ended up hailing Janonism as the desperate playbook the left required to pull off a win. With Lula's base feeling lost, terrified, and clinging to tiny glimmers of hope, Janones became an undisputed leader. The sentiment was, "We may not understand what he's doing, and we might even disagree. We might not even like him, but we trust that he wants Lula elected and that he understands online political warfare better than any of us, so I'm going to obey whatever Janones asks." Janones set up a broadcast group on WhatsApp, a channel where only he had posting rights,

• 18:12Speaker 04

  dubbed "Lula's Army." Through written posts and quick videos, he handed out daily marching orders to everyone in the channel. Almost every single day, part of the job was scaling up the group's footprint, pushing for non-stop member milestones. In one clip, he claimed that if they hit 10 million members before Election Day, Lula was guaranteed to win. It was like handing out water in a desert. The channel exploded in size, entering the second-round runoff with 11 million subscribers. And we'll talk about what came after that, but first, I've got to run to ads one last time.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  And we're back, and I'm going to continue with Caio's piece. The tasks assigned in the channel, the Lula's army channel, were not focused on gaming the algorithm like a digital marketing agency would, but on torpedoing all of Flavio Bolsonaro's efforts on the internet. The primary rule was, do not engage, block onsite for every politician, influencer, viral content, or hashtag coming from the far right. While Bolsonarismo relied on the highly effective tactic of message redundancy, where multiple different figures post content in various formats to push the exact same political agenda, Yonona's tactic was the exact opposite: everyone sharing the exact same piece of content. This flooded the zone. More than a strategy to convince people on social media, it was a strategy to disrupt

• 19:34Speaker 04

  the normal functioning of social platforms, which, as reported, heavily favored the far right. News that meta-directly interfered in the election, boosting views on Flavio's content while suppressing Lula's, remains an international scandal. In addition to gamification, Yonona's heavily relied on strategies driven by curiosity and psychological teasers. At times, the tactic was simply to spread the phrase, "Who is Marina, Flavio Bolsonaro", without even explaining to his own followers what the message was actually about. The result was intense public curiosity about a story that was yet to break. In this specific case, Mariana was the pseudonym of a Ukrainian refugee who was sexually trafficked by Daniel Varcaro. All this made it completely impossible for Flavio Bolsonaro to land a single viral narrative during the entire second-round campaign.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  If the internet serves as infrastructure for the far right, Yonona's used his army to blow up that bridge. His persona, naturally, spawned endless memes. His trademark habit, starting every video screaming, "Folks, urgent!", and closing out calls for mass sharing with, "Bless this out!", became running gags across every bar, embraced by people who, even as they poked fun at him, executed his orders religiously. At the same time, the channel drove grassroots, ground-game persuasion tactics: "Reach out to three Bolsonaro voters today and send them this breaking story on Flavio's latest corruption scandal", or "Find an older Lula supporter who skipped the first round and talk to them about what this election means for the next generation". Exotic vote-flipping tactics also turned into memes: gay men exposing the marriages

• 21:02Speaker 04

  of closeted Bolsonaristas, people taking their Bolsonarista families on weekend trips during the election, saying, "I might not vote, but I'm taking away 10 of their votes", and people hiding the photo IDs required to vote, all racked up quick likes. Throughout this entire process, fear was slowly flipped to its other side: hope. Knowing it became overconfident, the first-round defeat had been far too brutal for that. Yet the rallies grew progressively larger and more joyful, eventually becoming the largest wave of demonstrations in the country's history, surpassing the far-right mobilizations for Dilma's impeachment in 2016, the Free Bus Fare protests in 2013, and the marches for redemocratization in the 1980s. The direct coordination between Yonona's and Lula, who were hosting livestreams together constantly, helped the calls for demonstrations go viral.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  So, did Yonona single-handedly save the campaign? Again, he might be riding on more credit than he actually deserves, simply because he was such prime meme material. Erica Hilton, a socialist trans woman representative who racked up 1.6 million votes, dwarfing Yonona's 78,000, built a similar network that grew to 2 million strong. If Yonona's hadn't been in the picture, hers might easily have scaled to 11 million, or maybe even higher. What Yonona's did can't be reduced to some master strategy hatched by a solitary genius. He was an unlikely figure who stepped into the void left by a crumbling campaign, channeling the raw fear and hope energy of millions of people. This isn't a great-man theory of history, it's a story of how intense popular energy takes wild, unpredictable turns when there's no traditional structure around to channel

• 22:32Speaker 04

  it. A sense of moral duty to prevent Bolsonaro's victory, coupled with the collective gratification of building a win through popular mobilization against the Bolsonarismo that has plagued the country since 2016, completely exploded. For a decade, the Brazilian left watched, stunned and helpless, the effects of thousands of underground Bolsonarista WhatsApp groups. One day, your neighbor would tell you that a satanic ritual had been performed at the presidential palace. Suddenly, your aunt would start talking about the government wanting to rewrite the Bible to remove homophobic passages. Another day, your grandfather would swear that the government had handed out dick-shaped baby bottles at public nurseries. Stratospheric corruption figures were thrown around out of nowhere. Being in a space free from all that, free from fear, standing together and fighting

• 23:14Speaker 04

  for a social transformation everyone believed in, became addictive and contagious. Images of massive marches comforted tired hearts. None of this was a cure for fear. Throughout this whole process, inside every single one of us, there was a lingering dread that Flavio would be elected, slash billions in social spending, persecute political opponents, and execute the Doge-mille agenda. The left knew that Trump's second administration was stronger, more absurd, and far more terrible than the first. We saw the cuts in pediatric cancer research and the money flowing to ICE raids. However, if fear and hope are strictly speaking the same thing, we must understand that both can be paralyzing, freezing us in place. Yet, there is a virtuous cycle that turns action in the present, rather than anxieties

• 23:58Speaker 04

  about the future, into a collective effort, transforming the fear-hope coin into a potent force for mobilization. Sometimes, you just need a peculiar guy to step up and fill the political vacuum of a lost, headless campaign by shouting, "Urgent! Bless this out! Now!" All right. Yeah, that's what we've got for you today. If you're wanting to look into the author of this episode, Caio Almendra, you can find him on Blue Sky at caioalmendra, C-A-I-O-A-L-M-E-N-D-R-A dot bluesky dot social. Yeah. Thanks again, and we'll be back tomorrow.

• 24:39Speaker 01

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• 25:41Speaker 06

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Kevin Foster, and today is Election Day in the United States, provided you're listening when this comes out. Rather than talking about candidates, races, ballot measures, all the things there will be plenty of chatter about, I want to have a discussion about the ongoing problem of election rumors and misinformation. The 2026 general election will have no shortage of rigged election rumors and conspiracy theories. The lead-up to the election has been full of erroneous claims of non-citizen voting and mail-in-voting conspiracism, frequently from the president himself. About a week before the election, Trump announced on Truth Social a $1 million bounty for reports of voter fraud in the current or previous elections that lead to a conviction.

• 26:26Speaker 06

  I don't expect any of this to slow down. In fact, it may well get worse in the coming weeks. From coordinated efforts to undermine faith in elections, to unofficial alt-government-agency accounts conspiracy posting, it's going to be a mess. Which is exactly why I brought on a few experts to help parse through the flaming garbage pile that is the election rumor mill. I interviewed Stephen Prohaska and Danielle Lee Thompson of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, or CIP. Prohaska is a sixth-year PhD candidate studying disinformation, and Thompson is the research manager for CIP, leading a team studying institutional communication and rumors around US elections.

• 27:09Speaker 06

  Their research is a bit different from many academic institutions and involves a lot of rapid-response work. It has also gotten them in hot water with a cast of election deniers, including Project Veritas, who unsuccessfully sued some members of CIP for their reporting on allegations of voter fraud in 2020. For those who don't know, Project Veritas is a far-right organization that promotes disinformation and election conspiracism. It was founded by James O'Keefe, who, according to Reuters, recently filmed a stunt in Minnesota with right-wing influencer Cam Higbee, landing them both with felony unlawful voting and identity theft charges, proposing as registered voters at polling places during Minnesota's August primary.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  That's not really relevant to the episode, I just think it's really funny and ironic. But anyway, I want to be clear: I'm not saying in this episode that we have completely free and fair elections. We don't know what's going to happen today or in the upcoming weeks, whether ICE will intimidate people at the polls, what Trump will post, et cetera. This episode is about trying to understand what's happening and how not to pour gasoline on the fire. So, without further ado, here's the interview.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  I want to talk a little bit about your typology around elections. Why do you use the word "rumors" to describe all these things that are popping up around the election? What's the difference between that and misinformation or conspiracy? And I think this would also be a good spot to talk about some of the "spot the lie" kind of methodology that you have. And Danielle, you can kick us off.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  So, I think if you look back 10 years ago, there was a really interesting moment where we had a lot of new things happening in American society. A new president who was super-populist, AKA Donald Trump. We had these online platforms that... Brought quick information into the palms of our hands in this very intimate way. And folks were really wondering, like, why did this election happen? What's going on? There's hate speech on the internet that's super visible. There's false information on the internet that's super visible. And I think that there was a real interest across society, whether it was civil society, academia, journalism and other kinds of.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  You could think of it as like ivory tower truth organizations interested in confronting this informational challenge. And so I think at the moment, folks oftentimes fixated on how like information was true or false. Like, oh, my gosh, Trump is saying all these false things. Oh, my goodness, someone said this like terrible thing that we need to moderate and we need to like figure this out this problem. So there was a lot of, I think, at the time, folks who jumped on this bandwagon of talking about information as like a disinformation problem or a narrative disorder, or like all of these ways in which we could solve across not just elections, but also public health or climate or other things like this challenge of the public getting false information

• 30:19Speaker 02

  from smaller outlets or individuals because broadcast media and journalism had just become, I mean, quite frankly, a little bit more under attack or consolidated or going out of business. It's like the nature of how we get information was changing so rapidly. Now, I think like our team, the founders of our center, Kate Starburn and Emma Spiro, had gotten their career starts studying crisis informatics. So this is how information flows on the internet during crisis moments. And they framed it very early on as the study of rumor during crisis events. A rumor is an unfounded claim or speculation that doesn't necessarily have evidence, or maybe it does have some evidence that isn't verified yet.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  But rumors are really normal things during a crisis event. Like, everyone wants to know, who did it? What did it? What happened? What's going on? And everyone has a take. It's like playing a game of telephone. And there have been studies for basically the past hundred years of how rumoring dynamics work in American society. Now, sometimes those rumors can be true, they can be false, or they can be somewhere, and most of the time somewhere in between. Right? Disinformation is the intentional spread of false or falsified information in order to mislead the public or to gain or something for gain, some sort of coordination. Right? So there's like an intentional element.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Misinformation is the spread of false or misleading information, but not necessarily with that intent. So sometimes we're, we've all been guilty of sharing some sort of post online that might be AI generated. Then we find out later that it was AI generated. Oh, my goodness, like I accidentally spread some misinformation online.

• 32:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  That's very different than intentionally spreading like that piece of information in order to mislead the public.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  It's the Pink Panther at the Paris protests and stuff. Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, but a rumor actually is maybe a little bit more honest to describe what we're studying in the moment because we don't know the intent oftentimes of people spreading certain kinds of information. So it's, it's sort of one more honest in these rapidly unfolding moments of high levels of uncertainty, like elections, to call something a rumor, because we're not the ones to like make that call about the intentionality of that information. Although there's definitely a lot of signs sometimes to what might be a coordinated disinformation campaign versus not.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  But yeah, so like we've, we've basically been doing this work so long that we have identified six ways that rumors can be potentially misleading. So I'm happy to sort of pass that off to Stephen if you wanna talk about it.

• 33:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Before I jump in that, I'm just gonna emphasize the point Danielle made there that like, because we're doing rapid response work, we are looking at rumors in real time. We don't know facticity, we don't know intentionality. So as far as like the primary construct for the work that we do in the rapid response setting, rumor is what we are looking at because there's so much information that is uncertain at the time of spread. So just to emphasize that it's really a very useful tool for us. Yeah. That has roots in crisis informatics. As Danielle mentioned, we've spent a lot of time looking at election rumors in particular. When we first started in 2020, we didn't actually know everything that we were getting into. There's a lot of stuff that was novel to us. We were researchers, we had some familiarity with rumors in general, online spaces, but we didn't know as much about elections.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  And so we started seeing very similar rumors. And even when rumors weren't using the exact same claims, they often seemed to mislead in fairly predictable ways. And so we've, we've actually just published this in our Substack, what we call the six ways that rigged election rumors mislead. To just like start at the outset, there are cases where there is no evidence to support a particular claim. However, most of the time in the work that we do and the rumors that we look at, it's pretty rare to have these things that is either fabricated or no evidence. There's usually some sort of like photo or video or the picture of a ballot or a lawsuit that is catalyzing rumoring. It often involves these misinterpretations of the evidence that is available.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Uh, I think one of the things that we saw last election cycle, and we're seeing again this election cycle, are rumors about Starlink. For example, we're saying there, I think some folks, especially I think that there's like Elon Musk documentary coming out, claims about somewhat incriminating looking texts about lasers in space, which gets into the realm of conspiracy theories. But in the, in the work that we do, when we see rumors, people will see that, you know, Musk seems to have some sort of conflict of interest. They connect it to voting machines or statistics. And then they start coming up with these theories about, you know, that there's no like solid evidence, but they're coming with these theories about how, yeah, maybe there's Starlink lasers that are manipulating voting machines. Yeah. The next category here would be like fake or falsified evidence.

• 35:18Speaker 06

  So this is the truly, oftentimes I think when talking about AI, this is what people are really worried about. So deepfakes, which is like synthetically generated videos or photos that look real, but are AI generated. And again, this is one that is like, it's, we've seen it and they are increasingly prevalent, certainly compared to 2020. But it's not the primary driver of the rumoring that we see in the, in the work that we do. We're often sometimes seeing kind of low quality photos or videos that are catalyzing rumoring or official in this, in current environment, oftentimes official statements or actions from the administration. And that lead audiences to become either supportive or skeptical of the things that are being said. I think the misinterpreted evidence is, is the next category for us.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  And misinterpreted evidence, I think, is one of the more common ones that we see where we see, I think, for example, someone might be ballot harvesting is one of the tropes or the most common claims here. Ballot harvesting actually is an interesting example because there are, there are states that allow what is legally called ballot harvesting, which is the ability to drop off multiple ballots, usually for a family member. But that is decided on a per state basis. However, it's been kind of wrapped up into a larger narrative that ballot harvesting is illegally and intentionally perpetrated primarily by Democrat organized groups to collect ballots from different individuals, oftentimes homeless spokespeople in like retirement homes,

• 36:41Speaker 06

  certainly commonly non-citizen voters, and that people are illegally dropping off these allegedly false ballots through ballot harvesting. So that's the, a little bit on the, on the term there. Yeah. But oftentimes the evidence for that is like the picture of a, of someone dropping off multiple envelopes that is inherently ambiguous. So it's not really, it doesn't support the claims that people are making based off of the evidence that spreads. Yeah. I think a lot about the, I can't remember if this is 2020 or one of the later elections, but I think a lot about the election worker moving the bin full of votes or ballots under a table. And then everybody freaking out online about that, that strikes me as Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  misinterpreted evidence or like you see something that, you know, could suggest, but it, it just ends up spinning up based on narratives that people sort of propagate.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  We say at the CIP, everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. So elections are confusing, trust me, even on this team.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Rules, there are rule changes and because in the United States, election rules and laws are adjudicated at the jurisdictional level. Like we've literally thousands of different cases and rule systems and machines in this country about like how people vote. So it's different state by state. And there's a lot of weird objects or protocol or procedures that people don't know what's going on. So things can look very suspicious, especially when there's like a mundane object, like a backpack or a box. And someone takes a picture of that, they, oh, my gosh, they put the ballot in the backpack or the bag or the box, and then they moved it. When that's actually just like a really mundane thing that's part of somebody's procedure.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  But you can wrap that up in intentionally mischaracterized way to create this impression that something nefarious is going on when it's just business as usual, actually.

• 38:46Speaker 06

  I think, you know, I wanna talk at some point about malevolent actors in all of this and where this starts to drift into broader conspiracism. But I think it would be valuable to just take a second and talk about this election. You know, what is new in the election rumor mill? I am curious about the, something you mentioned with Trump saying he's gonna offer a million dollars for people for reporting fraud or something like that, this fraud.gov. Can we talk a little bit about what's happening right now?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Stephen and I were just talking about this beforehand and there are a couple of things. So I'll sort of list them out and then we can go deeper. One is the power dynamics are different. Trump is president this time. He has control over the executive branch and DOJ and has Access to like powerful lawyers who can sue states. That's different, right? The power dynamics have changed. That has meant that, secondly, we see a lot more rumoring on the left. And in left-leaning or pro-democracy communities who are really anxious around how our elections are going down and if the federal government will interfere. So there's a heightened sense of anxiety.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  So that a lot of the rumoring that we used to see on the right around ballot machines and like screens switching votes. Or which we saw last week in Tennessee with Dolly Parton's sister saying that voting machine screen was switching her vote, like when there was a revenue and she voted how she wanted in the end, like there's like hyper anxiety on the left. So that's like the second thing. And then the third thing I would say is also we have the addition of prediction markets and prop betting that are playing. So that also has added another layer of visualizations and speculation that can be used as evidence of like, oh, my gosh, well, the odds were that

• 40:45Speaker 02

  we see this in the Brazilian election, Bolsonaro was gonna win. And then all of a sudden the odds flipped. Lula's winning and the odds are for Lula. It must not, someone must have interfered with this when prediction markets are just betting markets. They're not official polling.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  So I think like there are these three things. And I know Stephen has done some work on like the power dynamics of election conspiracies as well. I didn't know if you wanted, like, we can like go into in depth on these three things if you would like.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it could be worth diving into. And I just, you have me thinking about like Kalshi and Polly Market and all this. And it's just how unbelievably frustrating it is to me, this narrative that these are accurate sources of information or because collectively people have put their money on something. For some reason, that is now considered a good actual odds maker. We're talking about, you know, random political gamblers on the internet. I just, it makes me go crazy. But you did also bring up the, you know, the Dolly Parton sister case where she was, there was speculation around if this machine in Tennessee was switching a vote. But it seemed like this was boiled down largely to touchscreen glitches and errors, which

• 41:59Speaker 06

  obviously this is a serious problem. But I do notice it seems like there is this trend of the misattribution of intent around these different errors in our election system. And I'm curious about how social media makes that worse. But also, yeah, we can, we can dive into some of the things you mentioned as well, too. But.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I'll say like, you know, we were talking about the six ways rigged election rumors mislead. And there are those three other ways that we didn't finish, which was like, there's real evidence with real voting issues. Right? So the problem is, as in the case with Dolly Parton's sister and her touchscreen not working. Some folks would exaggerate the impact and say, oh, my gosh, this must only be happening to Democrats. Or, oh, my gosh, this is only going to happen to Republicans and then it's going to change election results. When in the end, Dolly Parton's sister cast her ballot the way she wanted to pass. So there's not like a huge impact on election results necessarily. The second one is ignoring the remedies. Like there are backup paper ballots in those cases. There are things that are going to solve those problems.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, by the time you even hear about the rumor, it might have already been solved for. And then the third is misattributing the intent, like saying that this is part of some sort of nefarious conspiracy. When it's not like, oh, for instance, ballots being dumped in a dumpster. You know, we see this in Washington State this week, right? Someone saying that this must be an intentional part of election suppression by Republicans, putting these ballots in a dumpster somewhere. And that's usually just not the case, like that intention isn't necessarily there. So I would say like, those are some things to really keep an eye out for. There are always anomalies or challenges or things that break or things that happen during elections. But the ways in which they actually impact votes and outcomes,

• 43:45Speaker 02

  ignore remedies or misattribute the intent or make it seem like this big conspiracy thing. It's just not necessarily, that's how it misleads the public. And that's where you can kind of get wrapped up also in fretting about things. If you don't slow down and really think, okay, what's really happening here?

• 44:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, I think to add on to that, there's kind of two distinctions to make here as well. There's, right now, we're talking about rumors. I think one thing to call out is oftentimes these ways they mislead, they coexist within a single rumor. So, you know, the machines flipping votes, for example, we see rumors like that. And they'll be like, okay, this is suspicious. And they start exaggerating impact, which usually ties into this intent. So it's like, oh, this is primarily impacting conservative voters or Democratic voters. And therefore it must be the goal of the Trump administration or the Democratic Party that's leading to this, this targeting. So these ways are ways that we have articulated how we see how rumors mislead. But they often are misleading in multiple ways at the same time. They resonate with these larger narratives.

• 44:48Speaker 06

  So there's no single rumor that just exists in a vacuum. When we see these rumors spreading, they're resonating with political rhetoric. And so to have the, you know, machines flipping vote in a larger political conversation about election integrity, about claims and like all across the political spectrum, we're seeing claims of fraud or people being afraid that different parts of the election administration are being manipulated. And so these rumors, then they exist as these plausible explanations to explain things that we don't fully understand. And I think maybe one of the things to emphasize and separate then is the rumoring from election administration itself. Where oftentimes, just because someone doesn't know what that remedy is, that doesn't mean there isn't a remedy. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a security or a safeguard in place to make sure that votes are counted,

• 45:32Speaker 06

  to make sure that that malfunctioning screen doesn't disenfranchise someone, doesn't prevent them being able to vote. And as Danielle said, in those cases, people were still able to vote. It's just, it didn't work as perfectly as we would want it to work. And I think it's important to remember, elections are really complicated. When we look at elections in the United States, they are not centrally run. Every state has districts that are running it based off of their local laws and regulations. And so this is a very complicated process that involves both electronic systems, human organizations, and a lot of things that have gone through a lot of vetting to get into place. And election administrators, it's their full-time job to make sure that those safeguards are in place. And even with that, things do go wrong. It's just part of, every system is imperfect. Things will naturally go wrong.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  And the goal is to make sure that there are safeguards in place, backups for remedies when things don't work out the way we want them to.

• 46:34Speaker 06

  I imagine this has, like you mentioned, power dynamics. This interfaces a lot with that as well. I am still sort of stuck on this idea of Trump paying, what did you say? He offered to pay people a million dollars to find, to report fraud or like.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 06

  Could you elaborate on that? What is that exactly? Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Like, right before we stepped into this interview, Trump posted on Truth Social that there would be a million dollar reward for anyone who reported fraud in this or previous elections. And he instructed folks to go to fraud.gov to do so. Now, fraud.gov has existed for a while now. It's like a way to report like welfare fraud, Medicare fraud, contracting fraud, like all sorts of types of fraud. And it's sort of like part of this participatory effort to like get the public involved in engaging in essentially like a hunt for fraud.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  But what's ironic is we could not, so we can, this is serious, but Pina Peters, who was a quote unquote, election integrity activist in Colorado in previous election, who had like intentionally essentially committed voter fraud and was indicted and charged and imprisoned as, with felony offense for election fraud, essentially.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Oh, my God.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  And then was, had her sentence commuted by the Democratic governor. Colorado recently, so she was let out of prison. Like, would would someone who reported that get a million dollar reward?

• 48:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  So I think it's like important to note that there's a lot of showmanship here. There's the bark and then there's the bite of the the powers that be. The bark is saying, oh, my gosh, there's so much election fraud. Look at, you know, we saw last week in California, look at the 20,000 person list of alleged non citizen voters. Oh, my gosh, look, every day we have a new DOJ, DHS and White House press release saying that we have arrested or charged more alleged non citizen voters. But in fact, our analysis has shown that it's sometimes they're repeating the same names that they were repeated the day before last week. But it creates this what's called a media theory, like a pseudo of that.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Like, you're trying all this attention to this perceived problem when it's a drop in the bucket compared to actual impact on elections. Or these are allegations, they're not proven. There's something about that's different this time when the president and his administration are using their power and their legitimacy as heads of entire departments of justice to make these allegations that seem a lot bigger than they in fact are, or just misleading entirely. And that is incredibly challenging and problematic. And that's why it creates that anxiety amongst left and liberal folks

• 49:41Speaker 02

  that president might interfere or intervene because with bounties essentially being posted for election fraud. Who isn't who to be afraid of that? But I think the important thing to remember is the numbers game here. Like, at the end of the day, this is a massive country with election administration carried out on a hyper local level. And as we've noted, like, you can make these allegations that you're going to essentially sue Alaska to stop certifying its election because there are two guys with a similar sounding name on the ballot. And maybe people will be confused, like, we saw that last week, right? That's like a kind of spurious lawsuit right there that doesn't seem to have much precedent.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  But the fact that there's this constant like bark, bark, bark, bark, like more problem, more problem, more problem. When it's like, kind of maybe the same problems that keep being repeated. It makes your eardrums bleed. So like, the bark is just sort of hurting, even if it's not a direct bite, like, direct federal interference by sending, say, ICE to the polls. So these are like different things and we have to remember to like turn the volume down and focus on what we can do. And that's like what we say in our suggestions to election officials, to journalists, to creators, to always go back to what you can do to protect your vote, to vote early, to make sure to track your ballot. Each state has different tracking mechanisms to make sure that your ballot got counted, to drop it off in secure locations, right?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Like, all of these different things that you can do to make sure that your ballot is is safe and counted. Instead of getting caught up in these larger narratives, which we don't want to deny are very frustrating and create this sense of insecurity and mistrust in our elections. But to just remember the numbers game here. And a number of people who are going to cast their ballots versus the small number that are being accused of this fraud is very, very different.

• 51:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, to add on a little bit of detail to what Danielle has already mentioned here, particularly around this, like motivating people to look for evidence in the power dynamics here. We have seen that kind of call to activate these audiences to go out and look for evidence. That is not new. What's new right now is the the power that the folks who are making those calls have. There's a group called the Election Integrity Network, which is run by an election denier named Clayton Mitchell, who has had this like national kind of activist organization that's trying, has been doing very similar work. So they've been recruiting volunteers to look for evidence of perceived fraud. They amplify that evidence. And oftentimes, it's the type of thing that we see in our work, where they look at an ambiguous picture

• 52:19Speaker 06

  and it shows something completely different from what they think it shows. You know, when you have enough people who are engaging in this, it can create the illusion that something real is occurring. So a lot of this is like retroactively trying to find evidence that supports the claims that have been made that are genuinely unfounded. So for for example, when we look at claims of non citizen voters, which is one of the the largest narratives that we see in the work that we do. Brendan Center did a study to try to look at the number of non citizen voters that actually vote in elections. And there's like point 00001% of voters are non citizen. So it's like, yeah, okay, occasionally there's a case that I think Danielle mentioned that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have had these press releases where they're arresting in a very public way.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 06

  These these folks who are there alleging, but have not proven, but they're alleging that they have voted illegally in elections. So they're using that to create the illusion that something exists when the reality is the evidence is just really sparse. It's just not the issue that they're saying it is. And so it comes down to this numbers game. And but there's a difference when we look at social media, when we look at media dynamics in general. Very often, people aren't looking at the statistics directly. They're taking people's word for it, that this is an issue and the stories, they can be very salient and they spread. And those are what drive rumors are are these like very sensational stories, things that that feel that maybe make us feel outraged or or sad or angry or some sort of emotional response to it. We wrote a piece in 2024 where we outlined some of what we call the evidence generation infrastructure.

• 53:44Speaker 06

  And this was under something that we call the three Cs of election contestation. So the first one was convince, which is convincing people that election fraud was happening. The second one is collect, where they go out and collect evidence of this perceived fraud, which is kind of what we're talking about now. And the second part is contest. So funneling that evidence into lawsuits into these political narratives that then mobilize audiences and find ways to both contest elections legally and rhetorically on the political stage.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  And so we see this intersection of governance of now law enforcement, of court filings, as well as the political sphere, where we see that what has historically remained constrained the political sphere of contesting elections rhetorically, but now it's it's seeping into many of these other spaces as well. But it all creates the illusion that something exists that doesn't actually exist. That's the end of what I've included from the interview, and I hope it was helpful for some of you. I find personally, as a journalist who mingles with the content creation and social media spaces, it's very frustrating to me how fast these rumors can propagate on social media. And I feel it's best if we can avoid becoming unwitting agents of misinformation.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  I'm stealing some language from the CIP team, but some questions they said that are worth asking are, why am I hearing this? What are the incentives behind it? Does this contribute to someone's clicks, clout or cash? Again, rumors can be true, but I guess it would be nice if we didn't all accidentally drive each other fucking crazy in the next few weeks because I'm certain there will be people trying to do so intentionally. We have to assess the validity of rigged election claims and slow things down, especially amid a discourse that feels as if it's growing more and more conspiratorial. It's bound to be an exhausting process and I wish you all luck.

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• 57:17Speaker 04

  Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. I'm very lucky to be joined again today by Vladimir Van Wilgenberg, who's a repeat guest, longtime journalist and reporter on Kurdistan and a very excellent source for this stuff. How are you doing today, Vladimir?

• 57:30Speaker 07

  I'm doing well, thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to be interviewed again by you.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course. Thank you for your time and thanks for staying up so late. I guess, like, to begin with, we should recap the situation of Raja Lati Kurdish groups, armed groups specifically, right? Who they are, and I realize we could take an hour to just explain who they are.

• 57:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  But like, can we briefly explain to people who they are and for the most part, where they are right now?

• 57:59Speaker 07

  So basically, this Iranian Kurdish opposition parties, they have been active for a very long time. I mean, they have a long history in fighting with Islamic Republic. And most of them, they were exiled a few years after they were military defeated by Islamic Republic after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. And since then, they have been exiled in bases and camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. It's a large number of Iranian Kurdish parties. So if I would mention all the acronyms, you will be very confused.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 07

  But there's a number of them and they have camps around the province of Arabiel and Slemani. And they have been targeted several times, hundreds of times during this February war.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 07

  And there were around 19 people, members of this Iranian Kurdish parties. They were killed by Iranian drone strikes and missile strikes during this war. And currently, they are sort of stuck in between because Iran is demanding that they are removed from Iraqi territory. And then you have the Iraqi Kurds that don't want to be seen selling out the Iranian Kurdish.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Fellow Iranian Kurds by kicking them out or giving them to Iran. So the Kurds are a bit stuck in the middle. And then you also have the withdrawal from the US-led coalition. Although the US-led coalition was mostly defending the US bases, they were not defending Iranian Kurdish parties. But sometimes they were taking out some drones or missiles that were going into the direction of Iranian Kurds. But that could have also gone into the direction of, for instance, the consulate or the coalition base that is not there anymore. So that's like sort of a an overview. Yeah, I think that's a good overview. And so we're now in this position, right?

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Where these groups have bases close to the border, but in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, on the Iranian part of Kurdistan for the most part. But in recent days, people maybe will have seen that there has also been some conflict with one of these groups inside of what is now Iran, right? Can you explain a little bit of what's going on there and who the actors are in that case? Yeah, so I was telling you about the acronym soup of Iranian Kurdish factions. But one of the factions that have been active is Pejak, which actually is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party from Turkey, which is engaged in a peace process with Ankara.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  So there have been some clashes with Pejak using drones in response to Iranian operations in the border areas of Iran, which is actually very close to the area where they have bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan, near Panjshuin in Halabja province, on the border of Iran. So they have underground caves there and tunnels and they have people there. And since also the February war, there have been some occasional clashes between both sides. There was also a ceasefire actually between Pejak and Iran in the past, which was brokered by Iraqi Kurds. But despite of the ceasefire, always even before the current war between the US and Iran, there was always tensions between Pejak and Iran.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  And recently also, there was a death sentence for one Iranian Kurdish activist close to the Pejak and Iran. Recently reaffirmed the death sentence for that female activist. So there are still sort of these tensions on the border. And Pejak is also one of the few Iranian Kurdish factions that has a lot of experience with drones. And that's also due to their links to the PKK and also to the STF. So the PKK and the STF are basically the brother and sister parties of the PKK. They have this experience of fighting with drones. For instance, in Syria, the STF fought with drones against the Syrian government and other factions.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  And also the PKK, they have been using drones and they have been experimenting with drones in the last few years. But there's now a peace process between Turkey and Ankara since 2024. And the PKK has said, we're going to disband. So they are in this process. But at the same time, that leaves out what is going to happen with the Iranian Kurdish brands, which is the Pejak. Yeah. And now the situation is unclear what is exactly what's going to happen with. Of course, we don't know if there's going to be new clashes between US and Iran. But at the same time, there have been some clashes between this group, Pejak, and Iran. And there also have been actually assassinations carried out by Iranian Kurdish political parties

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  against Kurds working with the Iranian government and also others. So that's also have been like sort of a silent, small insurgency brewing in the Kurdish majority areas of Iran. But we should also not forget that this has always been brewing. There have been always like movements and attacks and assassinations and protest movements. For instance, the Gina Amini protests movement that erupted over the death of a Iranian Kurdish lady in Iran by the morality police also sparked like this huge widespread protest, which also spread to the Kurdish areas. And where Iran actually accused the Iranian Kurdish opposition parties of being involved in that.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  So, yeah, there have been always protest movements and unrest in Kurdish areas that were often ended with a crackdown by the Iranian state. Yeah, like even in January, when we saw the biggest protests over the last, you know, couple of years, there were some, like I remember the PKK were posting videos of them, which is another of the acronym soup parties. Were posting some videos of them like shooting at police stations and it's like a rising falling tide. Yeah, yeah, like in January, there were this anti-government protests that started in the bazaar of Tehran. And Kurds mostly stayed out of these protests in January because also there was this idea

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  that it was more monarchists that were involved in these protests. And, you know, the monarchists are also very strongly against any form of Kurdish autonomy. So the Kurds mostly stayed out. There was like, I think, one strike. And you also had the PAC Kurdistan Freedom Party that was saying that they were carrying out some actions in some areas like around Keremashah and some other areas in that area around Keremashah and Melek Shah and some other areas. So it was a bit confusing, like if some of these reports were true. But the Kurds in general were not very much involved in those protests as they were, for instance, in the past in the Gina Amina protest movement where they were much more involved in.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  And in which also in response, Iran started to carry out drone strikes against Iranian Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan at the time. Yeah. So, yeah. And they continue to, like on the anniversary of Gina Amini's murder. I can't remember if it's the anniversary of her murder or her arrest, but they called like a general strike this year, right? And then the IRGC sent significant numbers of troops, like even to block the route to her grave, if I understand correctly, like so people couldn't gather there. Yeah, and there was also dispute again, which was the disunity of the Iranian opposition about the father of Gina Amini using like a Kurdish flag in a social media post. Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  So it's also, Iranian Iranian opposition is very much disunited, what we saw, despite the opportunities they had, which is very different, for instance, from the Iraqi opposition. When the Americans moved to remove the Saddam Hussein regime, despite all of the differences they had, the Shia, the Kurds and some other Iraqi opposition parties, they sort of united at the time. But in Iran, we haven't seen, there were some attempts like that in the past, but they basically fell apart. Yeah, it also shows the disunity and the disorganization. But it's also very difficult, of course, to organize an opposition in exile when you're not on the ground.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  And also when the neighboring countries do not accept the presence of such groups on their territory, for instance, which is very different, for instance, if you compare Iran to Syria, where in Syria, the Assad regime pissed off so many of its neighbors. So many of its neighbors, even if they were not completely 100% actively supporting insurgent groups against Assad regime, most of them were sort of tolerating it or allowing it to happen. So there was a lot of Gulf states and Turkey and other countries that supported basically the Syrian opposition against Assad regime. But for instance, in Iran, we never had such a situation, even Turkey, despite that there's a large Turkish-speaking ethnic group. In Iran, you have Taziris and Turkmen that you don't really have.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  Turkey was not supporting the overthrow of the Iranian government, for instance, or the other countries neighboring Iran were not so much happy. And even, for instance, the Iraqi Kurds were also not very much happy to become a target by Iran for having such a campaign, for instance, against, that you had all these reports that the US and Israel were actively arming Iranian Kurds across the border. And then we saw statements recently, there was a forum, an annual forum in Arabia called the Meri Forum, where Iraqi Kurdish leaders were saying that this was very bad idea and that they were against it. And that actually that the rival ruling Iraqi Kurdish parties, the PUK and KDP, they both agreed

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  to basically close the border and to prevent any attack from Iranian Kurdish parties towards Iran. And also that they coordinated on that fact, although they didn't even form a government yet to get there, despite of elections taking place in 2024. They both sort of saw the threat of such a plan from Iranian Kurds to move towards intervening basically in Iran. And they really opposed that plan and they also were allied in that in Turkey. Turkey was also opposed in it because they were afraid of a second Rojava, you know, a second Kurdish autonomy on their border, like what happened in Syria. Yeah. I mean, even in Iraq in the beginning, when the US overthrew the Saddam regime, Turkey was also opposed against the US intervention because they were afraid of that.

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  But now they sort of de facto accepted this Kurdistan region in Iraq. But in Syria, it was much different, they never accepted it. Yeah. So that's why it's all interconnected to each other and it's very complicated. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like Turkey, it's still making military incursions into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, like to defend or like defend its borders, even though it like, yeah, it's de facto accepted the KRG.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  We should talk a little bit about how the impact of, like specifically, actually, the impact of American journalism has been in this situation, right? Because we had early on in the conflict, we had this rapport, I think there was a Barak Ravid thing, and then there was a Fox News thing, Barak Ravid works for Axios, about like, oh, the Kurds are amassing at the border and they're ready to invade. Iran, right? Or like even like people from Iraqi Southern Kurdistan are are preparing to like liberate their Kurds in Eastern Kurdistan and Iran. And like that reporting had very real consequences for Kurdistan, right? For Iraqi Kurdistan. Yeah, obviously, it made Iraqi Kurdistan more a target for Iran. And there were like

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  1,000 drone and missile attacks on the Kurdistan region since 28th February. Yeah. And you saw, for instance, that report of, of, I think it was Fox News reporter that was like posting on X that saying that, oh, the Iraqi Kurds are now like going towards the border and attack. I'm not sure whether the information was coming from, but I think it was actually the opposite. It was probably the Iraqi Kurds going to the border to stop such an attack. Seal the, oh, yeah. To seal the borders. And that was actually revealed during this last forum, the Mide Forum in Erbil, where they were actually talking, the Iraqi Kurds were actually talking quite transparent about all what happened, basically.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  And they were saying, actually, we send people to the border basically to stop such a basically threat and to tell Iran like we are not a threat to our neighboring country. So I think, yeah, there was, there was like actually some of the reporting made the situation worse, but also I'm not sure if there were people in the Trump administration leaking that on purpose to undermine such plans to, for instance, use Iranian Kurds to attack Iran, because it was a fact that Iranian Kurds, they did get some support. And there were some data that they received any weapons. But the Iranian Kurds were sort of preparing for the potential scenario of getting like air support and moving into Iran and attacking the Iranian government.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  But then I think Trump, he changed his mind at the last moment. So in the beginning, Trump was saying like, it's a good idea. I think he told Reuters at the time, it's a good idea that the Iranian Kurds do that. And then later he said, well, it's not a good idea. I think they should not go into Iran and attack Iran. It's not a good idea. They're good fighters, but they should not do that. So I think it was also like a lobbying effort by, for instance, the Turkish government. There was like a lot of reporting that the Turkish president, Turkish President Erdogan at the time, just directly called Trump and told him, this is not a good, good idea. Don't do that. And one time also Trump, he said something weird, I think in a press conference, he was saying that if Turkey would have a choice to choose which side of the war they will be, they would rather be on the other side of, of, of the conflict.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  So I think with that, he indirectly sort of suggested that Turkey would be willing to intervene if, for instance, Israel and the US would support Kurds against Iranian state. He didn't say that directly, but sort of, I think it was more about that. I don't think that Turkey would intervene on behalf of Iran against Israel and the US if there's not like a sort of thing that they fear, which is a Kurdish autonomy in Iran on its border, supported by the US and Israel. So I think, I think it was like a reference basically to that, that they were, Turkey could have basically that they were not really serious about that, but they were basically saying just what, for instance, in Syria in the past, when the US was supporting the SDF, at that time, Turkey said, well, US, if you continue to do that, we maybe one day gonna

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  jump in and cross the border and, and attack the Syrian Kurds and you better find a way to get out at that moment, like, because we're gonna go, one night, we're gonna go and, and come into Syria. And that's actually what they did in the end. After a peace process broke down between Turkish Kurds and the Turkish state after 2015, they launched like three or four big Turkish cross-border military offensives. And they're still there in Syria at, at the moment. So, yeah, and they did the same in Iraqi Kurdistan, but there was no US support for the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan. But Turkey also did like several military incursions for longer periods of time. And they, they actually increased their number of bases in

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  in the border areas in Iraqi Kurdistan and actually were able to remove some PKK positions from the area because of their superiority in drones that they have developed over the recent years, which is much more difficult for insurgents to fight against drones than against like regular airstrikes. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and yeah, we saw that in Syria, right? Like, and very directly, like, I mean, we can look at the, the, the first Trump administration and see like a phone call between Trump and Erdogan that leads to US withdrawal, that leads to Turkish attacks on Syrian Kurds. Like, Trump has previously expressed a lot of admiration for Erdogan, but like, like everything else, he kind of goes back and forth. He also kind of

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  at one point, he was speaking very negatively about Iranian Kurds, like making this statement that they had been supplied with weapons in January, that they had been stolen or sold. I forget exactly what he was saying. It was a very strange press conference. Yeah, he was saying that they stole the weapons and it was basically saying like Kurds are good fighters, but they fight only when they get paid and this kind of things, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah, which was, which was very confusing because as, as I mentioned, at that time, there was not like a very big protest movement in the Kurdish areas. And also, it would be difficult to get weapons to protesters in other areas because you have to cross this large territory. Yeah. Inside Iranian territory. Not that the Kurds don't have smugglers or something like that. There's a lot of

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  cross-border smuggling of a lot of goods and stuff, you know, alcohol, which is banned in Iran and and other stuff. I mean, it gets crossed over the border. But it would have been difficult just to like bringing large amounts of weapons into Iran and then give it to protesters. It looks nice on paper, but it's, it's, it's, it's difficult if you don't have, you know, people on the ground, you know, like, I mean, the US, they have also supported insurgencies in the past or, or other movements. For instance, the SDF, when the Syrian Kurds, for instance, were fighting ISIS, the US were like dropping weapons by planes in crates. And some of the crates also ended up in ISIS hands because it's difficult to control the weather, you know, that they can belong and so somewhere else.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  But with Iran, of course, this is a very different picture, a very large country, hundreds of kilometers of border areas, mountainous areas, much bigger than Iraq, for instance. So if you don't have people on the ground, it's difficult to, if there's not like a safe zone or something, or like an area where Iranian military doesn't have control, to give support to those groups. But Iran at the time controlled still all the territory of Iran. So if there's no area that some group controls, it's, it's difficult. Yeah. And of course, the US still lists the PKK, in so much as PKK is still a thing, and the PJ, I'll try and like not use the Kurdish word pronounced, I get the PJAK as terrorist groups, as foreign terrorist organizations.

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, actually Obama put Pejak on the list also, like PKK was already listed, but Obama at the time. Yes. I think because of the talks with Iran at the time that he gave them sort of a maybe because there were some reports at the time also that Pejak was reading with Americans. So maybe it was sort of a reassurance to Iran. Yeah. And they haven't really changed their stance on that. But this leaves these Kurdish Iranian opposition parties in a very difficult position, right? Especially you, you sent me this thing today where an Iranian diplomat had said that they were being kicked out of Southern Kurdistan, is that right? Or handed over to Iran? I can't quite remember exactly what they said. Yeah. So there was this agreement in between Iraq and Iran in 2023,

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  after this Gina Amini protest, that Iran was like convinced that Iranian Kurds were involved in that. So after 2026, we saw that there was all this reports that Iranian Kurds were receiving arms and, and even Iranian Foreign Minister, he talked about that in an interview, that he basically contacted the Turks and Iraqi Kurds to prevent that from happening. So what Iran prefers is that those Iranian Kurdish opposition parties that have been in exile and in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan to basically be removed. Like, for instance, what happened with the Mujahid Al Khalk, which was removed in 2016 because of Iranian pressure, but also because of, of the US that wanted them gone because they were creating issues.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  So Mujahid Al Khalk is also an Iranian opposition group and they have armed members and they were moved to Albania. Yeah. So Iran prefers something like that, that they are moved out to Europe or that they are surrendered to Iran. And that's also now actually a process now between the PKK and the Turkey. Because Turkey is now discussing an amnesty for PKK and they said, we're not gonna accept the PKK leadership to come back to Turkey. So where are they gonna send them? So now they're talking about sending the PKK leadership, for instance, to Europe. Oh, wow. As part of this peace talks between the PKK and the Turkish state. So what we saw during this recent forum in the Mide Forum, that the PKK leader, Bafal Talabani, he was an Iraqi Kurdish leader. He was saying like, we can't do something like that with Iranian Kurds also.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  What is happening with the PKK, that we do something like that. And the Iranian Kurds said, well, we don't have any talks with Iran, or we have no idea what there's no process at, at the moment going on. I mean, there were peace talks in the past between Iran and Iranian Kurdish parties, but in the beginning, actually Iran assassinated Yeah. some of their leaders during these talks in Europe. There they tried again in 2019 and also have been talks between Pejak and Iran. But some people say that was mediated also by the Iraqi Kurds at the time. This was around, I think, 2011. So, yeah, they have all this history, but the fact is that the Iranian Kurds said, well, we are not aware of any talks.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  But it seems that the PUK leaders may be thinking that this PKK process with Turkey could be replicated with Iran. And that then Iran stops its drone attacks. Because, for instance, Turkey, in the past, Turkey was carrying out a lot of drone attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan, also in Sinjar, on the PKK and PKK affiliates. Yeah. And there were like, almost like, weekly drone attacks by Turkey. But once the peace process started after 2024, we saw around, I think it was around 2025 or before that, that almost all the drone attacks, they stopped, basically. So there was no more artillery, there was no more drone attacks by Turkey. And I think that sort of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership, sort of like, thinking of the replicating that with Iran.

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  But also today, I saw an interview with an Iranian Kurdish leader who was saying that you should not like compare us to other Kurdish areas. We cannot be compared, the Iranian Kurds cannot be compared, for instance, with the Kurds in Turkey, because that's a very different political issue. Also with this attacks, you know, like, they're thinking of replicating that. But the issue is that in Turkey, you have PKK, you have the Turkish state. But in Iran, you have like Kurdish political alliance of six parties. And then you still have some other Iranian Kurdish parties that are not part of the alliance. Yeah. So you have like this large number of Iranian Kurdish parties, which have maybe around 10,000 or more fighters, some people say even more. So I think that's why it's a bit more complicated than in Turkey.

• 1:20:20Speaker 04

  Because in Turkey, they can talk with Ocalan, who was in jail, the leader of the PKK. Yeah. But if it's with the Iranian Kurds, who they talk to? And the Iraqi Kurds are basically offering themselves as a mediator. But the issue is then, what are you going to do with all these different political parties? And then, of course, they want to have something in return. So it's complicated. And at the same time, you have the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad saying, well, we already made a deal with Baghdad, they're going to be removed or given to Iran. And today, there was also a KRG official and Iraqi Kurdish official who said that he was not a part of the meeting in Baghdad. So he had no comment on that specific issue. Yeah. So, yeah, it's like very, very complicated, the situation.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been such a fractured year, I guess, for Kurdistan, like, starting with all the developments in Syria at the very start of the year. And then, like, I feel like immediately following that, we saw a lot more unity. Like, even to the point where there were like some PUK anti-terrorism forces who went to Hesekah, I think, like during that time when the STG was advancing towards a majority Kurdish cities in Syria. I think there was a misunderstanding about that thing. Okay. The PUK already had like this counter-terrorism forces for a long time in Syria, and they were basically already there. But then there was some social media that were suggesting that they were basically being sent to support the STF against Damascus.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  But I talked to people from the PUK side and they said, no, no, it was not, it was not like, sort of, I mean, there was a lot of cross-border solidarity, you know, Iraqi Kurds. Yeah. Supporting also dialogue between Syrian Kurds and Damascus, both from Erbil and Slemane. But like actively involved in supporting like STF military, I think that was only mostly against ISIS and not against Damascus. Okay, yeah, so they were still there, like, on that anti-ISIS mission, like, which was ongoing for them. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Yeah. It was interesting just to see like the move to using not the STF flag or the PYD flag, but like the green, yellow and red Kurdistan flag, right?

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  And like a sort of more unified moment for Kurdistan. And now we're sort of back in this place where the various states that divide Kurdistan have been able to like fairly effectively play the interest and safety of one group against the interest and safety of another group, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah, I mean, there was a lot of cross-border solidarity at the time. Even you had the Iranian Kurdish party saying that they were willing to send their forces into Syria if they would receive a request. So, and there were also a lot of volunteers coming, like Iraqi Kurdish volunteers, they were crossing the border and they were there.

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  But then, of course, the agreement was made and then the fighting stopped, so they mostly returned to Iraqi Kurdistan. Right. It's not that anyone stayed there. No, yeah, I think most, yeah, I think most of them definitely came home pretty quickly.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  So, like, going along now, like, this still happens every, every month or so, right? Someone on Twitter will be like, oh, the Iranian Kurds are gonna rise up against the Iranian regime. Like, I guess it's an easy way to generate revenue if you're one of those people who has the blue tick on Twitter now. And mostly it's people who have never paid attention to Kurdistan before and like, well, again, right? Like, it's just a lie for attention. But like, it seems almost less likely than it was a year ago, right? Like, the US has not really done much to assist them. The bombing that the US has done has not degraded Iran's capacity to suppress, like, revolution internally, right?

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  Like, it seems like we're not moving any closer to a situation where we're likely to see any kind of open conflict in Iran. Is that a reasonable, like, conclusion? Yeah, I think like in February, when they started bombing in February, March, that the Iranian government was quite weak and especially the Kurdish areas. I mean, they were like basically Iranian soldiers and IGC, they were basically like hiding in mosques and stuff. They were trying to avoid airstrikes. Yeah. So at that point, they were very weak. So I think at that point, the ability of Iran to suppress any Iranian Kurdish insurgency would be very difficult. But the Iranian Kurds were basically waiting for, to see what US and Israel will do.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  And if they're, if they were serious and nothing happened. I mean, there were some airstrikes in Pirancha, Shah, near the border, but that didn't really materialize in anything. And then I think now that the question is like, does Trump really want to have like a full regime change? Or is the fact that he rather is looking for that Iran just say like official, I mean, Iran already says, we don't have a nuclear, we don't have ambitions for a nuclear weapon. Yeah. But that's not enough for the US. US, they want Iran to stop all this like nuclear enrichment and this kind of things and all these sites and stuff. They want to be destroyed or removed or whatever. So I think that's like the main goal of the US.

• 1:25:41Speaker 04

  And Israel rather has the regime completely gone, but they cannot do it by themselves only. Yeah. I mean, the Israeli prime minister is talking about that a lot, but they cannot do it by themselves. Yeah. The question is like, if there's gonna be a new round of strikes, conflict after or before the midterm elections in the US, how they're gonna look? Yeah. But I think personally that Trump is not so much interested in, he was hoping that Iran would have like sort of a Venezuela effect. Yeah, I agree. Like, they killed like several Iranian top leaders, they killed the supreme leader. And they were thinking that the Iranian government would like quickly collapse and that they could like do something with Kurds and maybe install

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  either monarchist or someone friendly, like someone in the Iranian government would basically surrender completely to US demands. And that basically they would have like a new Venezuela and oil business would start and they could continue. But they didn't realize that Iran is like a very ideological government. And it's not like Venezuela, which is a very different situation. And basically that idea was sold to Trump that it would be quickly over, but it was not over very quickly. And now they're sort of stuck in this conflict that's not ending and could continue until even a new government comes and after new elections, you know, after

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  and not even after the midterm elections, a very big chance that this will just continue, even not like a full-scale conflict, then still there will be tensions. Unless there's like an agreement between the US and Iran. Yeah. So it really depends on what will happen. So I think personally that if the US will do something, probably it will be like, again, like a very big strike or something on energy or nuclear sites and stuff. But will it be like a ground invasion? No, I mean, he's not gonna send ground troops. I mean, they could also do something, what they did with the Syrian Kurds, that you have this small special forces supported by airstrikes hitting the Iranian government and then pushing them out from certain areas, like what happened in Syria with ISIS. But so far, I mean, there's no indication of that.

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  So probably it will just be like a very big strike again. Yeah. All over Iran. And then again, you're gonna have like talks, but I mean, just airstrikes are not gonna remove the Iranian government if that is the strategy. And also, it's very unlikely that Iran will make any concessions unless there's like a very big threat to the future of the Iranian Islamic Republic. If there's like a very big uprising or there's literally Kurds marching on taking Kurdish territory or something like that. Something like insurgents taking areas like Baluch and Kurds and others. Yeah. There's really something that they think, oh, we're losing territory, for instance, what happened.

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  When you had, for instance, the British and the Soviets in a long time ago, that they basically controlled certain areas of Iran and created an Azeri and a Kurdish republic. So at that time, Iran was basically partially occupied by the Brits and the Soviets at the time. So that's something they would, maybe then would, they would make concessions. But currently, it's unlikely, so there probably be still may, there probably gonna be more strikes. But the Iranian Kurds, if, for instance, if the US and Iran reach a deal, then Iranian Kurds, they will probably be under more pressure from Baghdad, from Iran and Baghdad and to basically be removed from Iraqi Kurdistan.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Although it's unlikely that Iraqi Kurds would just easily accept such a thing because there's also this ban Kurdish national sentiment that you know that if you remove those Iranian Kurds without their approval or their acceptance, that could also create like Kurds being unhappy to say, oh, why are you betraying the Iranian Kurds, you know? But if it's like a peace process, what's just happening now between PKK and Ankara, where the PKK itself is saying, oh, we're gonna disband and we have these negotiations with the Turkish government, then it's gonna be different. Right. So it can like move into many, many directions, but of course, everybody doesn't know what is exactly gonna happen, so. Yeah, I think it's important to keep an eye on this stuff and I think it's good

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  that we've given people a better basis to understand it because the reporting in the US media on it has not been great. And I think, yeah, as you said earlier, right, like, sometimes the US will just refer to the Iranian opposition, but there really is no unity there, like the, even after the killing of Gina Amini, like, we had these big protests about the death of a Kurdish woman, and the opposition cannot even agree on what her name is, right? Like, they want to use her Persian name. Yeah. And I think that's a pretty good indicator of like where they, and like, the Iranian monarchists cannot help themselves but like go on Twitter and make like, just extremely big, big, it's the wrong word, but like, it's very clear that they and the Kurds are

• 1:30:36Speaker 04

  not in the same place at all, and like, that they don't consider any sort of Kurdish autonomy to be compatible with their goals. Yeah, well, actually, even Pahlavi, he was calling on the Iranian army to fight the separatists or something like that. Yeah. And he didn't even control any territory, any ground, so, I mean, like, it's different from Syria where you have this large Sunni, uh, Arab insurgent movements, uh, that were fighting against Assad regime. They actually had manpower to fight against the Kurds and they did several times, uh, even before the fall of Assad. Yep. And then when they took over the Syrian state, then basically they put demands to the Kurds that you either integrate into the Syrian state or it's gonna be war. Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 04

  And that's actually what happened, ended up in a war in January, and in the end, Damascus won with support of Turkey and also because the West abandoned, um, their alliance with the STF and they choose Damascus because, you know. Yeah. They want to send back Syrians to, to, uh, from Europe to Syria and. Yeah. The US wants to do business deals. Uh, so, I don't know, like, maybe Pahlavi had something similar in mind, you know? Although it was actually interesting that the Iranian Foreign Minister claimed that Pahlavi sort of have accepted to lose control of Kurdish areas in exchange for getting control over Iran, uh, central state. Interesting, I hear. He was saying that in an interview, but that was never confirmed or denied by Pahlavi.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  And also, seeing his hostility towards Iranian Kurdish political parties and their alliances, you know, doesn't really look like that, that he sort of accepted such a thing. Right. Uh, because if it was like that, they could have formed an, an, a sort of Iranian opposition alliance, you know, between monarchists, Iranian Kurds, Mujadine Khak, this, um. Yeah. Uh, this other group or, or other groups, but they never did, you know, there was never really, uh, a big alliance, but Iranian Kurds themselves, they formed an alliance and they also have some contacts with some other Iranian opposition factions. Mm-hmm. But it's still very much disunited. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's helped everyone get a better sense of where things are at. If people would like to follow more of your work, you do do a really good job of keeping

• 1:32:47Speaker 04

  people updated on Kurdistan all over, where can they find you online if they, if they want to do that? Well, I'm, I'm mostly active on X, basically, and I write for different outlets. I write for Kurdistan, Croen, New Region, Middle East, and some other outlets, so there's a large number of them, but most of the stuff I always post on my X, um, so that's where I'm mostly active also, trying to follow the whole regional conflict, uh, which is ongoing, you know, and spreading to Yemen and then other areas. Yep. What's your handle there if people want to find you? It's basically my name but with a V, so it's, uh, at X, it's like V V A N W I L

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  G A N B U R G, so it's easier to write it on a screen than. Yeah, we'll put a, we'll put a link for people. Spell it out. A lot of consonants coming out, people. Yeah. Thank you very much for your time this evening. I think that, that really helped people get a better grasp of how things are in Kurdistan. Thank you. You're welcome. Have a good day.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

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• 1:34:24Speaker 07

  This is the moment, baby! This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question. Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game and those who just want to watch from the sidelines eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that [dog barking] dog in you. Underdog. Unleash your dog.

• 1:34:54Speaker 04

  Terms may apply. It could happen here! That's not how we open the show?

• 1:35:05Speaker 06

  Welcome to Executive Disorder, our special midterm election 2026 edition, where we're gonna talk about everything that we can in the next hour and change.

• 1:35:16Speaker 04

  Uh-huh.

• 1:35:17Speaker 06

  I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, Kevin Foster, and special Texas correspondent, Stephen Monachelli. Welcome, everyone.

• 1:35:27Speaker 04

  Yes, welcome back to the show, everybody. Stephen, I'm so glad we made the decision several decades ago to embed you in Texas, knowing that years later, we would start a media network and need a correspondent in Texas for the 2026 midterm elections. The long-term planning really paid off. Yeah, yeah, we actually went and scouted you like they do with like NBA players when you were like a little kid, like, yeah, this one, this one. Someone's gonna take that seriously! Someone's gonna take that seriously! Oh, God! Yes, we're looking for the LeBron James of podcasting about the news.

• 1:36:01Speaker 06

  We will get to Texas shortly, but, you know, similar to LeBron James, the elections this year saw a super tall blue wave, something that they are calling a blue tsunami.

• 1:36:18Speaker 04

  Blue-nami, come on. A blue-nami. Yeah.

• 1:36:21Speaker 06

  All right, guys, um, all right. So, Democrats have completely dominated in the midterm elections.

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  They sure did.

• 1:36:31Speaker 06

  Outpacing the polling, in, in many cases, outpacing most expectations. They are projected to win 258 seats in the House at least, possibly a few more.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 1:36:44Speaker 06

  So at, at the very least, an 81-seat majority, the largest majority either party has had since 1992.

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  Wow. Wow. Fuck me.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  It's an incredible, it's, it's an incredible victory.

• 1:36:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 06

  Unfortunately, we'll have to kind of blaze through some of the House results because the Senate results are.

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 06

  Super, super important as well, but obviously, the House race was kind of in the shadow of this redistricting effort done by Republicans and some Democrats. The GOP wanted to flip about 15 House seats through redistricting, and how many did they flip? Zero, zero seats. It's, it's, it's stunning.

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  Now, Garrison, is zero a large number?

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  No, no, it's actually one of the smaller numbers.

• 1:37:24Speaker 04

  Really? Oh, this is interesting. Okay, thank you, thank you for that context.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  In fact, one could argue, we've gotten into negative number territory because Democrats did not just hold on to those cherry-mandred seats, they went on to flip at least 35 more.

• 1:37:39Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. Good God.

• 1:37:41Speaker 06

  Winning all 28 battleground districts identified by NBC, at least 11 flips in the New York Times' most competitive districts, and that's an undercount because the New York Times isn't counting any redistricted district.

• 1:37:53Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:37:54Speaker 06

  And then another 10 flips in districts that Republicans expected to win, and then another nine flips in districts Republicans expected to win easily, a lot of those in North Carolina, which Democrats just obliterated the Republican Party in North Carolina. It's a bloodbath.

• 1:38:12Speaker 04

  North Blairina, as they call it now.

• 1:38:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right, that's, they're actually, they were just announced a few hours ago, that's what they're changing the state's name to.

• 1:38:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, this, the Carolinas haven't gotten hit this hard since the Civil War. Like, it's crazy stuff.

• 1:38:29Speaker 06

  Like, there's so many House races we could, like, focus, focus on, I do want to highlight. It is expected that Lauren Boebert will no longer be a congressperson come January.

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is. Fuck, yeah. God, that's, mm. That's just.

• 1:38:49Speaker 06

  She is currently trailing by 6,000 votes. They're still counting.

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  Hearing you say that is like the auditory equivalent of like biting into a perfectly cooked piece of steak. Like, it's just glorious. Oh, God, that feels good.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  The other, other thing I want to mention, because we've reported on, on this, on executive disorder this past year, Max Miller, the, the Republican congressman accused of some very horrific familial abuse. That was, that was like covered up and by the Republican Party in general.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  Real monster shit.

• 1:39:21Speaker 06

  He has lost by almost 10 points. He is out. Brian Poindexter is in. That's in Ohio. This was a race that, that Miller was expected to win, and he did not. Other big, like, Trump House districts, we have Indiana 5, Kentucky 6, North Carolina 6, and Ohio 10, which Democrats won. You know, these are like 20, 30-point shifts away from Trump's performance in 2024.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  Christ almighty.

• 1:39:50Speaker 06

  It's, it's pretty incredible.

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, in general, I expected the House to flip.

• 1:39:57Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  And have, I think most people did, and have like somewhere between a slim and like a solid lead for the Dems. And the Senate was kind of like, there's a decent chance it would flip, but it was gonna, I don't think anyone really thought this would happen. Even, even when the polls were showing it, I couldn't.

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:40:14Speaker 04

  It's been so hard to trust them, right? Like, the, the fact that they undercounted the Dems is certainly not, like, I'm, I'm incredibly happy. I just, I couldn't let myself believe it was going to go this well. And I'm still kind of in shock that it did. Like, this is, this is nuts. I felt like I didn't know what to do with myself last night. I'm so used to everything just being bad. Yeah, right. And like, I was remembering last election. I'm like, I don't know how to feel. Yeah. Good, I guess, but. Yeah, I mean, there's, obviously, there's bad news, as we'll talk about too, but just, I, I don't know. I felt like the need to take a second on air to go like. Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah.

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  That went pretty well.

• 1:40:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, we could talk about this more in the voter trends section, like specifically. But, I mean, yeah, this is like a total reversal of the 2024 election.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 06

  On almost every metric. Now, as Robert mentioned, Democrats were expected to win the House, not by this much. And again.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Not like this, but yeah.

• 1:41:13Speaker 06

  The tally is still, is still being counted. But, so when I say they're expected to get around 258, 260, not all those have been, have been confirmed yet, but that is the NBC projection, which they're projecting more confidently than the New York Times, which is a bit more conservative in their projections.

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. They've done well enough that, like, the outstanding, obviously, the races that aren't called yet matter, but none of them matter in the sense of determining what the Dems will be able to do or not, probably.

• 1:41:39Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:41:39Speaker 04

  Like, the margins are so big that these, like, last couple of seats won't shift the, obviously, it matters, but won't shift the overall battle.

• 1:41:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Speaker 04

  Which is crazy.

• 1:41:50Speaker 06

  The big question was what was gonna happen with the Senate.

• 1:41:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 06

  Dems needed to net four to five seats, getting to like 51, 52, considering, you know, J.D. Vance and John Fetterman, you know, to counteract their, their votes.

• 1:42:03Speaker 04

  Better Vance.

• 1:42:04Speaker 06

  So they would have to claw back a fair number of seats. As of Wednesday afternoon, Democrats have secured 54 seats.

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  53, right, with Fetterman being not a Democrat.

• 1:42:16Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, Fetterman, to X account, has gone suspiciously quiet this morning. Tragic, tragic. He's in mourning. A lot of his friends lost.

• 1:42:24Speaker 06

  And Democrats could win upwards of 56 seats.

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  Alaska, and the surprise possible flip of the night, Mississippi, which we'll get to in a sec.

• 1:42:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:35Speaker 06

  Between like seven, eight, or nine flips. It's incredible.

• 1:42:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's bonkers.

• 1:42:40Speaker 06

  Like, we have, I've not seen a Senate, a Senate race like this ever.

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  No, no. No, it's probably, it's more like, I, I remember, I'm sure, like, some of us who are older remember, like, 2008, right? And like the Obama election. 2008 and 98, too, I think, was another shellacking for the right. But yeah, evidently, nothing to this extent. No. Like, this is remarkable. And then the incumbent party tends to do worse in midterms, yeah, but not to this extent, like.

• 1:43:07Speaker 06

  No, getting 50, getting possibly 56 Senate seats.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  This isn't doing worse. This is like end of days. Yeah, extinction level event, to quote Ron DeSantis.

• 1:43:18Speaker 06

  As, as, as Ron DeSantis says, an extinction level event for the Republican Party.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank God. Yeah.

• 1:43:27Speaker 06

  Let's, let's talk about Michigan, one of the big races of the night, Abdul Al-Sayed versus Mike Rogers. This was an open seat previously held by a Democrat. And Al-Sayed held this seat for the Democrats. He won 53 to Rogers 45, a seven-point win.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

  The entire GOP apparatus, and frankly, a big portion of the Democratic establishment mobilized against Al-Sayed hard on like a national level.

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Speaker 06

  All right, he became this sort of like poster child of this whole election cycle, Republicans hoping that painting him as an extremist, by doing that, his candidacy could like negatively affect Democrats in races all across the country. And that did not happen at all.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  Nope. It's the same kind of deal with, like, if we really focus on Hassan Piker, that'll scare everybody away from voting for the Democrats. Didn't, didn't work.

• 1:44:17Speaker 06

  Didn't seem to work. And if, if you get, look at the voter demographic numbers, seemed like the opposite may have happened.

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  Uh, I would be remiss to mention that Haley Stevens decided to endorse the, the quote-unquote nightmare, her words, Mike Rogers, like, two or three days before the election because of, uh, Al-Sayed's anti-Israel stances, and essentially threw her career away for, I guess, probably some AIPAC money. I, I was gonna say nothing, but.

• 1:44:45Speaker 04

  What's she gonna do with it?

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  But, yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  She, like, self-immolated as a career politician. Buy the flight to Israel. Yeah, right.

• 1:44:53Speaker 06

  That does seem like what she, that's kind of her only option.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Join Netanyahu.

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  She's been kicked out of the Democratic Party.

• 1:44:58Speaker 04

  Well, Netanyahu might, might not be in power all that much longer, depending on how things go over there. She doesn't have to join him in Parliament. Join him in the International Criminal Court if she wants to. Sure, she, she might build a win. Yeah.

• 1:45:09Speaker 06

  Moving on to Maine, another race with a lot of focus, Troy Jackson versus Susan Collins, who's held this seat for, uh, I want to, what's this, 200 years? That can't be right.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  Since 1776, yes. Yeah, actually, I mean, she, she very famously stood with Washington at, at Yorktown, you know?

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 04

  So, so have a little bit of respect, you know? She's a veteran we're talking about. Signed the Declaration of Independence, Garrison.

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  And come election night, Union Lager and former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson unseated. Longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins, who defied the polls in 2020 when she held on to her seat that year. Jackson has won by about eight points, close to Kamala's margins against Trump. This is a huge win for Labor and like the Bernie wing of the Democrats. And, you know, just getting Collins out of there is, uh, just, uh, feels good. Feels, feels good.

• 1:46:02Speaker 04

  Good, man. Yeah.

• 1:46:04Speaker 06

  One of the seats that Democrats expected to flip was in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, the man who has never lost an election, going up against Mike Watley for a, a previously Republican-held seat. And former Governor Cooper did flip this, winning 60, 40. Like I said, just North Carolina, total bloodbath. Trump won this by three. And, I mean, down ballot races, the, you know, House races, state legislature, just really, in North Carolina, it's the bluest you've ever seen. What's much more surprising is the neighbor down south, South Carolina, with Annie Andrews against Darlene Graham, the Republican incumbent.

• 1:46:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:46:46Speaker 06

  Democrat Annie Andrews lost a US House race to Nancy Mace in 2022. But last night, she beat short-term Republican Senator Darlene Graham, flipping the seat formerly held by late queer icon Lindsey Graham, who served as a senator since 2003. In 2020, he won by 10 points. Trump won the state by 18 points in 2024. Andrews won by four. So that's what, like a 22-point swing from, from 24 to 26?

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 06

  Annie Andrews is like a, is like in-between moderate and progressive. She ran on like a public healthcare option, right? Not Medicare for All, but a, a public option. Abortion rights, education funding, banning corporate PAC money, cracking down on congressional stock trading, term limits, AI regulation, border security, and path to citizenship while keeping families together.

• 1:47:40Speaker 04

  Is she one of the dignidad act people?

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  I don't know what that is.

• 1:47:45Speaker 04

  Okay, I, I don't want to divert the episode too much. It is a thing that, like, Blue Dog Dems and some Republicans, including Florida Republicans, have been trying to introduce for a long time, that would effectively create an underclass of people who had no pathway to citizenship and had a right to remain. And they tend to couple this with border security and be, it's like a faux amnesty, almost.

• 1:48:06Speaker 06

  Okay, okay. Her exact platform does not go into that level of specificity.

• 1:48:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:48:12Speaker 06

  Uh, I will say, coupling path to citizenship with border security has been like kind of the most, one of the most common talking points across these, like, swing, across these swing states.

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  What exactly that means once they're in office.

• 1:48:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Speaker 06

  Is kind of a black box.

• 1:48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have failed to reform our immigration policy for decades and decades and decades, which is how we got to this fucked up situation that we're in. So like, yeah, we're gonna cross that bridge when we come to, obviously, I will report on it when it happens.

• 1:48:39Speaker 06

  Another thing to cross, hopefully sooner than later, is the trans issue and the way that's been weaponized in these past few elections. And last month, Annie Andrews did release an ad directly opposing, quote, "biological men in women's sports," and, quote, "gender surgery for minors" in response to a swath of attack ads against her. They, this ad is not good. This is bad. This is bad. And it is handled much worse

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  than other candidates handled this, like Sherrod Brown, who also faced a wave of, of ads attacking, attacking him and the Democrats. For the support of trans people. And he released an ad calling the Republicans pedophiles. Now is his response.

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:21Speaker 06

  Instead of throwing trans people under the bus. And Sharon Brown won. He beat incumbent Republican Senator John Husted, who was occupying Vance's seat in Ohio. Sharon Brown's a former senator, a progressive populist. Brown won by about five points, over 200,000 votes. In 2022, Vance won by six points. Trump won Ohio by 11. Sharon Brown, I think, handled this as well as any better than any other kind of swing state Democrat. Much better than Josh Turek, who handled this the worst, the most kind of anti-trans, one of these swing state Democrats. In Iowa, Josh Turek beat Ashley Hinson in a open seat held by Republicans. Turek won by five points.

• 1:50:07Speaker 06

  Trump won the state by three points. Remember, there was that late polling with like the with the infamous Selzer poll that put Kamala like ahead in the in the 2024 election. Selzer wasn't wrong. She was early. She was two years early. That's the that's the election Twitter joke. Because Iowa is not as much as North Carolina, but did did shift blue and shifted blue in house races and special elections these past two years. But Josh Turek, the new senator, is definitely more of a moderate. He's a self-proclaimed, quote, prairie populist. Whatever, man. While campaigning, he moved the farthest to the right on trans issues.

• 1:50:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:47Speaker 06

  He definitely bought the hardest into this kind of gender war stuff.

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  I just prairie populist. What? What the hell?

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  Populism for like agricultural, like workers, small businesses, small farms. I hate prairie populist because he is he is a moderate.

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Speaker 06

  But I mean, a lot of these guys are running on like affordability populist-esque kind of messaging because that's that's really what has shown to be successful.

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  Mary Peltola had a pretty anti-trans ad towards the end of her campaign.

• 1:51:19Speaker 06

  She is also one of the more moderate ones. Yes, this is in Alaska.

• 1:51:23Speaker 04

  This is Alaska. Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 06

  Who definitely ran as a as kind of, I would say, probably the most conservative out of all of the the swing state Democratic senators in Alaska, just like in in general, like in general, the most most conservative out of all of these Democratic candidates.

• 1:51:39Speaker 04

  Like Alaska will always be different, right? Like, she's one of the

• 1:51:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  few indigenous women who was like running for Senate. And she ran with some stuff on like fishing and stuff like that, which which would be more radical.

• 1:51:52Speaker 06

  Fish, family and faith, I think, are like her main her main like

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  What a country.

• 1:51:58Speaker 06

  campaign slogan.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 06

  Man, drop the last two, and I agree. I'm on board.

• 1:52:04Speaker 04

  Fish, just fish.

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  Just fish.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, we've spoken about this on this podcast before, but we, as always on Behind the Bastard, someone holding a fish, you got to support them. But, yeah, it will be a long time. It takes a long time for us to get the votes in in Alaska. So it'll be a while before we know about that one.

• 1:52:21Speaker 06

  Correct. So we know South Carolina, Iowa, Ohio. These are all flips.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  Alaska could be a flip in the next day, few days.

• 1:52:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:52:32Speaker 06

  Peltola is right now about like 60 votes ahead with 77% of the vote in.

• 1:52:38Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:52:38Speaker 06

  She's expected to gain.

• 1:52:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Speaker 06

  Gain in in her lead, but she's sitting at 48.2. So depending on how that goes, this this might result in a ranked choice instant runoff.

• 1:52:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  And I've not looked into this this race specifically. And the opinions that I've seen from my like election people have kind of gone either way of whether whether that runoff would benefit her or hurt her. This is this is the race with the two Dan Sullivans, the Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, Dan Daniel Sullivan Jr., the the non-Senator, who who did receive not like totally insignificant part of the vote. Based on how close this race is, like I said, like 70 vote difference.

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. I feel like if I had been in Alaska, I might have just like, I've no idea about Dan Sullivan Jr.'s policies, to be clear. But like, when you're presented with someone like either Republican candidate or the Democrat candidate doing transphobic bullshit, like, maybe you're just having a laugh and voting for Dan Sullivan Jr., like an act of abstention.

• 1:53:41Speaker 06

  I think that's more likely than people who mustook him for being the Republican. The idea of people voting for him as a sort of joke or protest candidate is certainly possible. So that's part of sort of these like ranked choice calculations. If Peltola is ranked second on some of those Sullivan Jr. ballots, right, that that'll change that'll change the game as opposed to assuming that all the Sullivan Jr. votes in ranked choice will go towards Senator Sullivan.

• 1:54:07Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:08Speaker 06

  And that's why it's hard to predict exactly what will happen with this race.

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  Yep. Ranked choices is, well, it offers some benefits, but just like it can sometimes take a little bit longer. I will say, I think, is extraordinarily condescending to suggest that people in Alaska don't understand what incumbent means.

• 1:54:25Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  Like, it's it's just a fucking nothing burger. Like, it just, I don't know. I find it incredibly like, yes, snooty and condescending to suggest that people are that fucking dumb.

• 1:54:35Speaker 06

  The one other race that we don't quite know the result yet and is possibly the most shocking result of the entire night is in Mississippi, which might somehow become Blississippy, with Scott Colum against Sidney Hyde Smith, the Republican incumbent. Right now, this race is tied at 48.9 with Democratic candidate Scott Colum up less than 100 votes, with about 44,000 votes to be expected still still to come in. And these are going to be mostly coming in from areas where the Democrat column has performed well. But a lot of these are going to be mail-in and provisional ballots, which can be counted up to five days after the election. So we probably won't know the results of this till like Saturday.

• 1:55:20Speaker 06

  This is a super shocking. This deserves its own kind of deep dive. I did see one of Column's ads circulating, which which targets cost of living and affordability. The ad is this clip of Sidney Hyde Smith being asked on like a news show, like what people should do about like the price of of beef getting so expensive. And she said that people should, quote, "pick another protein." And this ad just totally skewered, skewered her over this insane like elitist like response.

• 1:55:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a let them eat cake for half of America.

• 1:55:57Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  Like.

• 1:55:58Speaker 06

  And the the crux of the ad was all these like, you know, actors playing constituents saying, "Pick another protein. No, I'd rather pick another senator." And that's the that's the ad.

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 1:56:10Speaker 06

  So that's Mississippi. We will we will learn if these, if both Alaska and Mississippi flip in these next few days. One state that did not flip that I will mention, Florida, with Angie Nixon going up against Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent in Rubio's former seat. This race was way closer than Democrats expected. This is like a two to three point margin, just like over 200,000 votes. If Dems did more spending in this race, it could have been even more competitive. Like, the fact that Nixon did so good in Florida is a testament to her as a candidate and her like direct ground game.

• 1:56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 06

  But she got just completely outspent, like just just just demolished in in terms in terms of ad spending. But a really, I think, a good show for her. I'm excited to see what she does in the future. She's a strong, a strong labor candidate. Unfortunately, a few days before the election, the head of the Teamster, Sean O'Brien, endorsed Ashley Moody, the anti-labor candidate. Get O'Brien out of there. He sucks.

• 1:57:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:15Speaker 06

  Get him out. Sean O'Brien, fuck off. Anyway, there's there's two other flips that we should talk about. And it's time it's time to put on my little cross necklace, time to revert back to my childhood Protestantism because Methodist Minister Adam Hamilton flipped Kansas, beating Republican incumbent Senator Roger Marshall by five points. Just two years ago, Trump won Kansas by 16. Marshall won the Senate race by almost 12 points in 2020. Adam Hamilton ran on cost of living, strengthening the right to organize, regulating data centers, abortion rights, banning algorithmic price fixing, combating fraud and scams, targeting seniors, protecting their health care,

• 1:58:01Speaker 06

  term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court, and banning congressional stock trading, and also banning like politicians from using prediction markets, which is like a, you know, a new kind of addendum to all these congressional stock trading measures.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:58:16Speaker 06

  The Kansas flip is, I know, something that the Republicans were increasingly worried about these past few months, moving ad spending over from North Carolina, which they kind of gave up on, into Kansas. But it wasn't enough. Now, there is one other big win for Christian Democrats. And we will talk about that after this ad break.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  And we're back and the stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. I was waiting to see if you were gonna do the clap, Stephen, and you didn't. You let me down. You let me down.

• 1:59:04Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. No, no, I, I'm sorry. I just, I, you know, it's with the zoom, the timing, it's always off with the claps.

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  This is the first time I have been really shocked by an election in Texas. I had come around to the fact that Talarico had a really good chance of winning. In fact, was probably going to win and he did. Everything else that happened surprised the shit out of me. Yeah, we should probably start by talking about Talarico.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  I mean, what an absolute bloodbath of an election this was.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  Just a disaster.

• 1:59:37Speaker 04

  I mean, so Talarico uniquely performed among Texan candidates, I think, in competitive races. He crushed Ken Paxton by 12 points. And, you know, that could be attributed to Talarico being a good candidate. Could also be attributed to Ken Paxton being widely regarded as the most corrupt guy in politics in recent history.

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  The devil incarnate.

• 2:00:04Speaker 02

  Aiden McLaughlin with Vanity Fair went to a Republican Party event at like a fancy steakhouse, Butterworth's in DC. It was like an election night party. And, you know, obviously the Republicans were expecting it to go bad, but it went so much worse than they thought. And like the schadenfreude in this article is outrageous, but especially like the point in the article when Ted becomes clear that Talarico is going to beat Paxton by like a sizable amount. And here's a paragraph from that article. "As LL Langley's 'Choose in Texas' blared through the speakers, two men at the bar lamented the cruel irony of the song playing as Talarico's comfortable lead expanded over Ken Paxton, his Republican challenger. 'I'm not trying to crash out,' said one of the men, a Republican organizer of the party, 'but we nominated Hitler with Down Syndrome, and guess what?

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  He lost. He lost. And now we lose a Supreme Court justice. It's a fucking disaster.'" This is at an official Republican Party event. This Republican's just called Ken Paxton. Hitler with, which like, there's a lot of things wrong with that, but wow.

• 2:01:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  Like the candidness.

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it was, it was an issue early on. People, you know, were worried that Paxton was a uniquely deficient candidate.

• 2:01:18Speaker 02

  And he was.

• 2:01:18Speaker 04

  Relative to his alternative, John Cornyn, who beat in the primary, but the margins in this race.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  Cornyn would have lost.

• 2:01:25Speaker 04

  It just so large.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:27Speaker 04

  Cornyn, even Cornyn would have lost. It would not have mattered if it had been Cornyn or Paxton, but for it to have been Paxton, it really added a lot of sugar to that schimp Freud sauce that they were tasting in that article. And the way that they campaigned towards the end was pretty despicable. I mean, they unleashed a whole set of dirty tricks. You mentioned the trans issue earlier, Garrison. That was this, the last streak of the campaign all throughout October. It was either bogus allegations that Talarico was in a mental hospital in Ohio, which had been ginned up by like an account that is run by like a criminal old woman, but it's like using an AI-generated

• 2:02:11Speaker 04

  young woman's face. Classic stuff.

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  Sick.

• 2:02:15Speaker 04

  And that like got amplified by official campaign operatives incredibly. And when that was quickly batted down, it just became all about trans issues and Paxton had interviewed on TV saying that's what they think their best line of attack is against Talarico. And, you know, consequently, they leaned into that and now we're, you know, trying to figure out still who sent 3 million fraudulent mailers to Texans purporting to provide support to trans kids, but it was really actually just Republican operatives. So it was like a desperate election for these folks.

• 2:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:52Speaker 04

  And the issue is no longer resonating with Americans.

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  At least in Texas, in the same, in the way that it maybe was four years ago. And I mean, Talarico was expected to be the one out of the pack probably to win, but I don't think anyone called it with this level of just obliteration on the Republican side.

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, and it, you know, it's important, obviously, like, gas prices are a big part of this, especially for Texans, like when you tell them you can no longer afford to drive for gigantic diesel trucks, that pisses them off. It's bad for agriculture. It's bad for, I mean, like, cost of living is a part of this. Another part of this that I think has not gotten enough attention nationally is what Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott, the governor and lieutenant governor, did to the school voucher program in 2025. Like, they worked very hard to ram through a school voucher program that was not super popular in a lot of like rural school districts, like, because I, I think people just saw the danger it was going to do to their local schools. And he had to like really, Patrick especially

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  had to like basically threaten a lot of like local legislators in order to like make this happen the way they wanted to. And I think that cost them a lot of like political capital too, going into this. And it, and it really was like this churn of both Patrick and Abbott's decisions over the last, like, they've been in power for so long and so much has gotten worse. So you can't campaign and I'm gonna fix everything when I've been in power for a decade. And then Trump making the situation just all that more calamitous. And I, I do agree, Stephen, that like, I think that Cornyn would have lost too, but part of me wonders, did Paxton being such an obvious criminal, so obviously corrupt, and that being front

• 2:04:41Speaker 02

  and center in like the part, you know, the, the most funded election in the state, which was the election between Talarico and Paxton, like, by far the most money was spent on that, and it got the most attention. Did the fact that Paxton was in the limelight as such a scumbag also maybe drag down enthusiasm for the Republican Party in a broader way of like, I'm wondering where there are people, you know, just kind of habitual Republican voters, like a lot of my family, who were just looking at Paxton and the way he was, you know, his past and the way he was performing this election and going like, I don't want to do this anymore. You know, as that compounding with the cost of living, compounding with the war, like, I, I really do think, I, there is a stew of sickness that got boiled up by

• 2:05:26Speaker 02

  the Republican Party, both in Texas and nationwide. And I think Texas got the biggest dose of it in some ways, right? Because there's so much Republican control, because there has been, the Democratic Party's been useless for so long in Texas.

• 2:05:41Speaker 04

  Zooming out, I mean, it's not just been a decade. It's been over three decades.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45Speaker 04

  Since Democrats have won a statewide seat. So Republicans have had dominance for, you know, as long as I've been able to speak in this state.

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Speaker 04

  And, and so the idea that they aren't responsible for where we are now is incredibly ridiculous.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  Been a long ass time since Ann Richards.

• 2:06:04Speaker 04

  And to your point, Paxton was uniquely bad, but it wasn't just Paxton. I mean, low-energy Paxton, criminal Paxton. We had this guy Beau French, who you may have not heard of.

• 2:06:16Speaker 02

  Beau French.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  He's running for basically a seat that regulates oil and gas on a three-seat commission.

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  It's the Texas Railroad Commission.

• 2:06:23Speaker 04

  Stupid names.

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  Like, it doesn't, does not sound important, but is.

• 2:06:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and so anyway, he, you know, he's running and that, that was an unnecessary seat because they didn't even need to win it to still have a majority on, on the Railroad Commission. And yet, you know, a lot of people went in basically making it seem like he must win. And I'm going to be a little colorful in my language here, but he basically ran on a platform of, I am a Hitler Youth troop leader.

• 2:06:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Speaker 04

  Like, that's kind of how it came across. And so consequently, he was dragging everybody else around with him down. We had another person running for Congress, Brandon Herrera, who's a ridiculous gun tuber, did not successfully moderate his online edginess, said a bunch of ridiculous stuff, wouldn't even walk back some of the stuff that he had said in the past. And, I mean, I think he suffered for it. And also, he was running to represent a district that had one of the most horrific mass shootings at a school in recent history. And, and, you know, he was this guy who's out there downplaying or making light of political violence when it happens to people who he doesn't like.

• 2:07:38Speaker 04

  And talking of like Hitler Youth, he literally dressed up as a Nazi, right? Like, Oh, yeah. I profiled him. I mean, yeah, his YouTube stuff was incredibly over the top, really, really signaling language to extremists, whether it was nods to Rhodesia, to the Nazis, to the boogaloo's, you know, you name it. He really was in that online stew that was happening during the early 2020s. And that's how he rose to fame, you know, for being this edgy guy. And, and now that that has not landed. I mean, I think both him and Beau French mistook Twitter for the campaign.

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  Yep. A lot of people did. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's what I wanted to get to. And I, I think, we'll, we'll talk more about that, I mean, today and tomorrow, I'm sure. Speaking more on Texas, one thing I want to emphasize to people that surprised me, because again, I was open to the Talarico winning and I thought Gina Hinojosa had a chance. She was polling close enough that I was like, she might. It's possible. But I kind of thought it was gonna be limited to, you know, those two big and highly publicized seats. You know, I assume maybe the Democrats will do better than usual at the state level. This is not, what we're seeing is not like a few big seats flip in a year in which like, there's just a lot of things going against the Republicans in terms of inertia wise. Texas flipped. Like,

• 2:09:05Speaker 02

  this was comprehensive across the board, rural districts, a lot of rural districts elected Democrats in a variety of state positions too. Like, I cannot overemphasize how comprehensive this is. Like, the fact that Greg Abbott is out and lost to Hinojosa is, is huge. But one thing that is not getting as much attention outside of Texas and should is that Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, got his ass kicked too. And Dan Patrick is the fucking, like, I've talked about Paxton is like the most corrupt guy in Texas politics. Patrick might be the smartest in terms of like right-wing politics. Like, he is, he's a bad person, but he was a really good politician in terms of his ability.

• 2:09:41Speaker 04

  Ability to marshal power and like votes and get things done. He got in, he started in the Senate in 2006 and was reelected in 2010. And immediately after winning reelection, he created the Texas Tea Party Caucus in the Texas State Legislature. Like, that was kind of like one of his first big political moves. He got elected, he ran in 2014 against David Dewhurst and became the lieutenant governor, and immediately started pushing like some of the most like regressive, like especially on abortion bills. He was the guy who authored Texas's mandatory, and this is when he was in the Senate, mandatory ultrasound bill, which got signed into law in 2011 by Governor Perry, which forced women seeking an abortion to have an sonogram of the fetus taken before the abortion was performed.

• 2:10:26Speaker 04

  Holy shit. Like, that's just one of the fucking hideous things he's responsible to. He's a big charter school guy, and I talked about how he rammed that stuff through. And he's also, one of the things that's really important about him, he's been really good up until now. A big thing he would always do is he would endorse a bunch of like local candidates for like state positions, and he usually won, like his picked candidates usually won. So Patrick had like a massive influence on how the Republican Party's like, like human infrastructure got constructed in the state government. And the fact that his ass is out too, is a huge fucking deal. Yeah. Like, I did not expect him to misjudge the moment and lose this election so badly, but he fucking did.

• 2:11:09Speaker 04

  They definitely walked right into some landmines. I mean, Flock had been a huge issue. Yeah. I mean, nationally, but also in Texas. Abbott was left holding the bag there. Dan Patrick went after pot during the most, you know, liberalized form of pot laws in Texas, where it was actually pretty easy to get it. And you could get edibles, you could get whatever at these stores locally, and it was a kind of a gray market area thanks to the hemp bill. Yeah, yeah, the hemp stuff, yeah. He went hard against that. Yeah. And he pissed off a whole swath of people. It's like the vast majority of Texans, even rural Texans, love. Yeah. Yeah. And that crosses political lines. And so this is kind of, the chicken's coming home to roost.

• 2:11:53Speaker 04

  I mean, this part of the Republican Party that has taken power up until now in Texas was the furthest right version of the Republican Party. They, they have been having this civil war that's been playing out. These huge donors have been, you know, backing these primary challengers and consolidating power within the Republican Party. And, and there's this one influencer who posted this insane video recently, the, the caption was like, "Total chud victory." And in fact, that is what they have. They had a total chud victory within the Republican Party of Texas. Yeah. And, and they confused that victory with the actual general victory, because they

• 2:12:36Speaker 04

  assumed that they had this inertia and they could not be displaced in this way. Maybe they could get a couple seats picked off, maybe they would have to try to get a Senate seat back, but. But Texas will never flip. No. Yeah. So I, I do want to caveat one thing, Robert. You're right to say that this has been a total shift, right? I mean, really major regime change, but the Senate in Texas, the state senate, is still Republican majority. Yes. They still have one majority on the Supreme Court. So. Yes. You know, there's, there's going to be some interesting stuff in the next two years. It's, it's impossible to even really say what is possible at this point. Yes, yes. And I don't mean to say flipped in the terms that, "And now Texas is blue forever." It could, it could, there's a very good chance and probably likeliest that it'll vote for

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  Republican in 2028. Like, I'm not saying that, but like, this is more than just, "Oh, Trump's doing bad this year, so a couple of Democrats slipped in," right? This is, this is evidence of a deep structural rot in the Texas Republican Party, right? And I think it is what you were saying, Stephen. These guys convinced themselves, because the chuds were able to take over and dominate the state Republican Party, and because Texas just kind of habitually elected Republicans, they convinced themselves, "Well, what we're doing is popular and we can never lose," right? And. Yeah. It's not popular. Just as one last bit before we move on of Texas of schadenfreude, so you can really be satisfied with the fact that Dan Patrick is out of his job, among many other shitty things.

• 2:14:03Speaker 04

  In 2016, Dan Patrick, after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, is the guy who tweeted, "Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." Galatians 6:7. That's fucking Dan Patrick, and he's out on his ass. Fuck him. Yeah.

• 2:14:18Speaker 06

  Any other things you wanted to add in, Stephen, from your write-up?

• 2:14:21Speaker 04

  No. I mean, I, I just encourage people to maybe temper their expectations, right? Because, just because of this result, it doesn't mean that anything of major significance will even happen in the next two years. They have a bunch of roadblocks that will prevent some major changes, but I, I think we could see reasonably some moderate Republicans crossing the aisle on some specific issues, maybe pot, for example. Yes. Because those are easy and popular. You know, it, it's going to take at least another election or two in this same trajectory for Texas to really have like a reconstruction type situation at hand.

• 2:15:02Speaker 04

  But I, I do think, you know, these results make me believe that the election two years from now, it'll be competitive. Yeah. It, it depends on who's running, but Texas, it's, it's incredible that Texas is very likely to be a battleground state. Yeah. I feel the same way right now about Texas, honestly, that I do about Brazil in the wake of Lula's victory, and that like, there's a lot of problems. This does not mean it's going to be an easy road, like there's, you know, there's still a shitload of right-wing power in Texas, but it's a fight now. They're not just going to be curb stomping the left, Democrats, whatever you want to call them, for the next however many years. There's actually going to be a struggle over what's going to happen in state politics, and that has not been the case since I've been alive. Anyway, I'm feeling good.

• 2:15:48Speaker 06

  Let's go one more ad break, and then we will return to talk about, I don't know, voter trends, miscellaneous other election news. There's a lot of news. It's a big election.

• 2:16:08Speaker 06

  Welcome back. We just discussed Greg Abbott, who is now out of a job.

• 2:16:15Speaker 04

  I'll grab it.

• 2:16:16Speaker 06

  Sure. You know what? Sure. I'll give it to you. This is, this is your day, Robert. You get it.

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gary.

• 2:16:23Speaker 06

  But there's actually four other Republican governors who are also out of a job, or at least candidates who will not be taking a job, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who will not be the governor of Ohio. Amy Acton will be governor of Ohio. Fuck Ramaswamy. Oh my God.

• 2:16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, what a disgusting campaign. Fuck me. Vivek, it rhymes with loser.

• 2:16:53Speaker 04

  It's, it's amazing to see even a line for like some people in the modern Republican Party. Like, clearly not Trump because he endorsed that ad, but like, the degree to which people are like, "What the fuck, man, on his own side was nuts."

• 2:17:07Speaker 06

  Like, Acton has a lot of problems, a lot of the same kind of, you know, trans issues that a lot of these swing state candidates on the, on the statewide races have. But what the Ramaswamy campaign did these past few weeks.

• 2:17:19Speaker 04

  Disgusting.

• 2:17:19Speaker 06

  It's like so, so despicable that like, I want whatever is worse for him ever, for the rest of his life. Like, it's, it's, it's so gross. He ended up losing by eight points. I hope to never see him again. I, I'm sure I will. I'm sure I'll be sitting here to, uh, two years from now, talking about Ramaswamy.

• 2:17:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's gonna try something. It's gonna be hard to come back from rapping "lose yourself" at like a rally event and knowing seemingly all the lyrics. He sure did lose himself, though. Yeah, and then losing really bad. And then losing. It's, uh, unfortunately, he did not have one shot. He's had two already. He's fucked them both up, but he keeps coming back.

• 2:17:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I wish him only the worst. Georgia, Georgia. Uh, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the race for Georgia governor, beating Rick Jackson, who was running for a previously Republican-held position. Also won by around eight, eight to nine points. Rob Sand beat Zach Lind in Iowa to also claim the governorship for the Democrats. The one that I really did not see coming, or at least didn't have on my radar, is Nevada, where Democrat Aaron Ford beat incumbent Republican Joe Lombardo by about seven points.

• 2:18:39Speaker 06

  These flips kind of go alongside of various, like, state legislatures also flipping, or at least moving towards the Democrats, which is the big trend of the night, around 15 to 30-point shifts towards the Democrats in both, you know, top, top of ballot races and down-ballot races. Dems ended up gaining five new state trifectas after flipping Nevada's governor, the Minnesota and Michigan state houses, the Pennsylvania senate, and flipping the Wisconsin senate and house while holding on to control of the governor's office. And on top of that, balance was shifted to Democrats by winning the Arizona state senate,

• 2:19:24Speaker 06

  the Georgia house, the New Hampshire house and senate, North Carolina's house, and the Texas house, though Democrats fell short of a trifecta in those states. Kevin, do we want to discuss the West Coast?

• 2:19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can start with the West Coast. So, you know, in Oregon, things are generally a little bit boring, not, not a whole lot. Really happened. It's possible that the Democrats might expand a little bit in the state legislature with their super majority, but that hasn't necessarily gotten us a whole lot in the past few years, unfortunately.

• 2:20:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know what you should expect from a slightly bigger Democratic lead in Oregon. That's different from what we've got, which people are not happy with, by the way.

• 2:20:10Speaker 04

  It's been a disappointing time, but I think one of the interesting things is like despite our Oregon governor Tina Kotek is like one of the least popular governors in the entire country. And even still, she

• 2:20:23Speaker 06

  She's very bad at it.

• 2:20:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's really bad at it. And she gained, it looks, at least preliminary results are showing that she actually has an even wider margin on Christine Drayson. So it's, it's just like, it just didn't matter. Everybody just hates.

• 2:20:36Speaker 06

  Mostly Republican poll sponsored polls that showed Drayson ahead during that period of time when she was polling ahead. And I kept, I always felt like that can't be right. Like, I know we all hate Tina Kotek, but that can't be right. They don't, no one likes Drayson.

• 2:20:52Speaker 04

  No, she's, I mean, it's like, I've, I've been to events where they're talking and it's just like, she's just trying to sell like, I am not a crazy Trumper. And it's like, well, we all know you are like.

• 2:21:00Speaker 06

  She was, her big ad that people were really worried about in the Democratic Party because they thought it was gonna work, as some of them did, was, hey, don't worry, I won't ban abortion. Like, she literally ran an ad to be like, I'm not gonna ban abortion if I, if I'm the governor. Trust me. Like, that's not a good sign.

• 2:21:16Speaker 04

  No, God, no.

• 2:21:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Speaker 04

  Other, other than that, like, the DSA candidates held on Portland City Council, and that's, that's a pretty big win for them. And then I think there's one of the, you know, kind of more concerning DSA State House races that I think went to a ballot chase last time with Leslie Munoz. It looks like she is going to win. So they're gonna expand a little bit in the state legislature. And, but that's like, kind of all that really happened in Oregon, as far as I can tell right now. And then in Washington, well, I think we'll probably talk a little bit about the unfortunate prop results in, in California around the billionaires tax, but we did get a win, it looks like in Washington with

• 2:22:01Speaker 04

  the, they voted not to repeal the millionaires tax. So that's a nice little bit of a counter there.

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:22:08Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, the other measure was the school sports by biological sex one, which is really disappointing. Looking right now, it's, seems very unlikely that it would flip back, but basically anti-trans legislation, according to Como News, it's, they said that it's a measure that would require students to undergo a physical exam documenting sex assigned at birth before participating in interscholastic sports, which, Jesus fucking Christ, I, yeah, I don't know how people justify voting on these things.

• 2:22:45Speaker 06

  I don't know. This, this needs to get fucking sued. There need to be, this need, this needs to be a Supreme, state Supreme Court case. Yeah.

• 2:22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. This is a massive. Like, I, another article from KNKX is saying the ACLU plans to fight it with discrimination lawsuits. And there's also questions remaining about implementation. But, yeah, it's, it's even stupider because there was another thing where like, the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, they, they don't even have a count of how many, like, trans students are, there's no, they don't track this. There's like, this could be, like, literally not, it, it's just insane. It's ridiculous. I don't.

• 2:23:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25Speaker 04

  Really disappointing.

• 2:23:26Speaker 06

  Not enough people pay attention to ballot measures. And the fact that this thing won by a few hundred thousand votes, I mean, that is awful.

• 2:23:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Speaker 06

  Then there needed to be more organized against this. And people in general, they need to get, the, the whole ballot measure process needs to be reformed. Like, it's so confusing and it's, it allows people to, to shoehorn all, all, all these things in that don't get the same attention as some of the other, other, like, you know, candidate races do.

• 2:23:55Speaker 04

  No, and they're often like misrepresented badly by the people who are getting signatures to get them on the ballot. And in terms of like, how they're framed. Yeah, even the freezing. Yeah, it's, it's issues, we have a lot of issues with that in the Northwest in particular. Yeah, it's been bad in California, too. Yeah, God.

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  And this Washington, like, trans sports restrictions, not the only one of its kind that passed this election.

• 2:24:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:24:20Speaker 06

  One in Arizona, one in Colorado, and then another proposition in Colorado prohibiting, quote, surgeries to alter a minor's sex characteristics.

• 2:24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:24:29Speaker 06

  Which similarly passed by just like, less than 100,000 votes as of time of recording. These, these are very, these are very small margins, but they did pass. And like, that, that is bad.

• 2:24:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what matters. Yeah.

• 2:24:41Speaker 06

  Which is very interesting, is there was something similar in Missouri, which did not pass. There was a constitutional amendment to repeal the right to abortion and prohibit gender transition care for minors, which did not pass. And this is a really interesting, like, example of something not passing in Missouri, but passing in Washington state.

• 2:25:00Speaker 04

  And you said it was an abortion, was it an abortion ban and an anti, were those two bills or one?

• 2:25:05Speaker 06

  They crammed them together. Yeah.

• 2:25:06Speaker 04

  Okay, well, that, yeah, that, that helps probably explain it. Yeah. Another small thing in the Northwest, I did see that Idaho did not. I was about to mention that, yeah. They also did not, or they blocked abortion access. I forget exactly, James, you might know a little better than me, but. Yeah, it was Prop 1, which Idaho voters would amend state law to establish, like, like a right to abortion up to like, the point where the fetus is viable. Yeah. Idaho, of course, also voted for its state gun yesterday. Not sure how that went down for them.

• 2:25:37Speaker 06

  Are you serious?

• 2:25:37Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. No. Yeah, yes, they did, they did, but they were all bad. None of them are, for one thing, none of them are Idaho guns, although a couple of them were made by a Mormon, and Idaho has a large Mormon population, but Yep. None of them are appropriate because the state gun for Idaho should be the same state gun that I approve of for Oregon, the Life Card, which is a, it looks like a little, like a, like a card you'd fit in your wallet, but it unfolds into a 380 or a 22 or a 32. I think it's a 22. No, they're, they have three calibers now, James. Oh, they have the three calibers. But there's no trigger guard, which means there's nothing between your gun firing and the whirl but air. And I think that perfectly embodies the frontier spirit of, of the Northwest, you know? People seem really shocked by the state gun thing. Tons of states already have state guns.

• 2:26:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Tennessee's is as stupid as, I think it's like the Barrett, like, 50 cal. That's just dumb. That's just like Yeah, sure, Tennessee. Red and shit. Fuck off. One last piece of Northwest election news I wanted to cover. So in the Portland City Council races, because we had several people up for election there, Mitch Green is an economist who represents District 4. And he got earlier this year, a right wing reporter dug up some old tweets from his Twitter in 2022. I wouldn't call him a reporter, but. Yeah, yeah, reporter, quote unquote, right? A blogger, Max Steele. Yeah. Found some posts that he, Mitch had deleted in 2022, I guess in preparation for his political career, but he posted in 2020 and 2021 during the protests. And he had

• 2:27:06Speaker 04

  expressed his pure hatred for the Portland police. And so that got brought up and there was a mad, there were like billboards outside of like, my place and like, a bunch of places in Portland, like, that have like Mitch's hatred of police are also, he was late on taxes once. He had a fire in his yard when he shouldn't have had a fire in his yard. Like, crazy shit.

• 2:27:24Speaker 06

  Like a normal Portlander.

• 2:27:26Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, what a fucking nextdoor.com coded fucking campaign. Massive, like, business lobby PAC spending and stuff. That's all like sheltered and different, yeah, it's, it's crazy. And it didn't work. Mitch won reelection, along with the other people that he was running alongside the other progressives.

• 2:27:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was one of like, the six Oregon statewide DSA candidates.

• 2:27:46Speaker 04

  Partly, I think generally, it was a good response, when he was asked, like, do you still stand by your pure hatred for the Portland police? He said, I would not characterize the police today that way. I know some police officers now because I'm a city councillor. I've met some police officers who I think genuinely care about our city. I do want a world where we abolish the police. That's where I'm, what I'm trying to build. So he kind of hemmed by saying, there's some good ones, but also I want to abolish them. So, I don't know, give, I'll, more or less on balance, good. And I'm glad he won real, I'm glad the fucking massive ad campaign against him didn't work because it was really gross. Anyway.

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  That's all I got.

• 2:28:20Speaker 04

  Funny note on that. I actually wrote a story on my Substack not too long ago about how his donations massively went up after that story ran.

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  It made me wanna.

• 2:28:32Speaker 04

  Should I, should I take us to something positive on data centers?

• 2:28:36Speaker 02

  Yes, let's talk about some good proposition or ballot measures.

• 2:28:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, are we building? I love data centers. Are we building a new one? The short of it is that data center just got absolutely clobbered in this election. According to CNBC, there were 41 data center related ballot measures on the docket across 10 different states, 21 of which were in Ohio, and all but one of those failed, or at least in the direction. So everybody voted against data centers. The one that did pass was in Harwood, North Dakota, where voters went against the charter amendment, which required additional review before city approval of industrial projects, which includes data centers. It's all, a lot of these are like local jurisdictional things. But I think something that was interesting is while a lot of the vote counts are quite small,

• 2:29:24Speaker 04

  in nearly all of the cases, the margins were very wide. I think I was looking at Ballotpedia, and only one of them, I think, was within 10 points. They were all like huge.

• 2:29:36Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 2:29:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:29:38Speaker 02

  Among the people who care about this issue, they really care about this issue.

• 2:29:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I personally am shocked, and I really, I feel like the only explanation for this is that people haven't read quite enough articles by AI company CEOs talking about how their product is going to kill everybody. You know, one more of those will convince people that data centers, more data centers are good.

• 2:29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:01Speaker 04

  It went so poorly for them that even Elon Musk posted last night the data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now, which hopefully. That's as real as everything else you advocate, Elon. Yeah.

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:16Speaker 04

  I think this is just kind of an interesting position for these companies, like with, with Ohio, with 21 of these failing. And they were, I guess, according to CNBC, the most business friendly state in the nation last year. They, OpenAI has a giant project coming in there, but this is just a massive setback. And there was the, you know, the crypto AI and gambling lobby spent hundreds of millions of dollars this year. And so having, and I think a lot of that might, might have gone more into like candidate races. I don't know exactly how this would have worked with measures, but basically this, you know, follows the polling on data centers. And I just think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out with how shaky things are in the stock market.

• 2:31:01Speaker 04

  And it's like, these companies do not need more barriers to building compute capacity right now. That is like really bad for them. And, and this is like, to caveat off of your point, this is something that like, like the AI and crypto industry spent a shitload on this on the midterms, and it nearly all failed, like massive disasters. There's a really good Gizmodo article on this by Bruce Gill, and I'm going to read just a brief quote from that. Crypto and AI-focused super PACs spent $112 million supporting and opposing candidates in the general election alone, according to Tech Influence Watch. As of Wednesday morning, 74.7 million of that spending had gone toward losing candidates or efforts to defeat winning candidates.

• 2:31:44Speaker 04

  The losses came despite an influx of money from Silicon Valley into this year's elections. Overall, crypto and AI companies' employees contributed more than $506 million to political committees this election cycle, according to Tech Influence Watch's estimates. Meanwhile, industry-focused PACs spent nearly $250 million on the federal elections, including primaries. And just the vast majority of that has been completely disastrous. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown won his Senate seat against John Husted, even though the crypto industry put a bunch of money, like $64 million into supporting Husted. $64 million into one campaign by the crypto industry.

• 2:32:22Speaker 02

  Oh, my ape's gone.

• 2:32:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, and that's not all. Elon Musk's backed Senate Leadership Fund spent another $95.6 million on the race trying to beat Brown.

• 2:32:32Speaker 02

  Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good.

• 2:32:33Speaker 04

  Oh. And then Musk's America PAC spent almost 10 million. Like, they lot, threw so much money into beating Sherrod Brown. It just did fucking nothing. So happy. It's so funny. They also put, there was like, the, the AI-focused Building the Future in America mission PAC put almost $5 million into supporting Darlene Graham's campaign.

• 2:32:58Speaker 04

  Good, good bet, guys. Good bet, guys.

• 2:33:00Speaker 02

  That makes sense because out of, out of all these races that I, that I was going through last night, both Sherrod Brown and Annie Andrews had the strongest, like anti-AI stuff, with the exception of Al Sayed, who's had very strong kind of AI policies.

• 2:33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, and they did have some successes, but it was mostly in like not really competitive races. The one that was, that's kind of meaningful, is they did the Defend American Jobs PAC, which was an AI industry-backed one, put like $14 million almost into Senator Pete Ricketts' campaign in Nebraska, and he did win.

• 2:33:34Speaker 02

  That is something I did want to mention. Yes, in, in Nebraska, Dan Osborne was running as an independent on like a working class labor platform.

• 2:33:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:43Speaker 02

  And this was very competitive in the polls, but Ricketts ended up really, really pulling ahead at the end. And so this, this, the Senate seat stayed, stayed Republican. Besides Angie Nixon, this is kind of one of the big kind of losses for the night, you could say. Or at least one of the examples of Republicans being able to hold on to power.

• 2:34:03Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, let's talk about California briefly, right? So I guess the big news out of California is it's not looking good for Prop 40. California overall disappointing, and we will get into this later, but California is what happens when the Democrats feel safe. And what we saw here is like, there are a lot of votes still to be counted in California. I should probably lead with that, right? Right now, Prop 40, Prop 40 was a one-time 5% tax on individuals or trusts that had assets over $1 billion. There are less than 300 billionaires in California.

• 2:34:41Speaker 04

  Currently, no is leading with 55.6% of the vote, according to the AP, 44.4% yes. Bummer. California's ballot had a number of props that sought to directly cancel or invalidate Prop 40, like suggesting that the wealthy were afraid, right? Looking by county, I was, I was looking at a county breakdown of Prop 40. It succeeded in LA County. Otherwise, there are very few, it succeeded in like Alameda County and like Mendocino County, Yolo County, Monterey, like less big urban counties. For instance, it did not succeed at this point in San Diego County.

• 2:35:24Speaker 04

  There was obviously a lot of spending against Prop 40. Gavin Newsom has also been opposed to it, right? California continues to like be a disappointment in every aspect. Like it's, it's very corporate Dems here, right? We didn't really see at a statewide level that swing towards more progressive Democrats that we have seen in other places. In terms of like local races, Mani Van Wiltputt beat Jim Desmond, which Desmond was taking over Daryl Issa's seat, right? Like Issa has been a pretty hard caller. He's not a California Republican. Well, he is obviously a Republican for California, but he's a Trumper for the most part.

• 2:36:05Speaker 04

  Duncan Hunter had previously held a version of that seat. It's been redrawn, right? California redrew a number of districts. But like Duncan Hunter, people will remember, A for being one of the more far-right members of Congress, B for buying flights for his bunny rabbit and spending campaign funds on Steam games, among other things. Respect.

• 2:36:25Speaker 02

  Most useful Republican campaign expenditure.

• 2:36:30Speaker 04

  Sorry. I had to say. Yeah, right. You know what? If, if they, if they took that money and they spent it all on Steam games, I wouldn't complain. You know, there are worse things for them to spend their money on. Generally, California has seen its characteristic, like, like highly democratic, right? I think there were, I'm seeing four House districts that returned Republicans, the rest Democrats, right? California lines were redrawn, and so some of these Republicans have pretty, it's not like a, it's not like a one for one comparison, right? But we, we can look at like how that area would have voted before, but we, we see like strong. Germany, strong results for Republicans where they've won, but everywhere else, big wins

• 2:37:14Speaker 04

  for Democrats. I did want to mention in San Diego news that yesterday, a little election day treat for us San Diegans, the first process of recalling a mayor in California is to publish your intent to serve a recall notice. And a group published intent to serve a recall notice for Todd Gloria. Of course, Todd supporters in the Republican Party have immediately closed ranks behind their guy. But for those who are not familiar, Todd Gloria, San Diego's mayor, another example of what happens in California, where you get people running on supposedly progressive values and then turning out to be massive grifters, liars, and chuds. So the group cited Gloria's failure to address our increasing crisis of people

• 2:37:58Speaker 04

  living on the street and not having access to services, and his persistent real estate grift. It'll be really interesting. I think Gloria, I know this can seem like a small local thing at a time when it's been a massive swing in national politics. Gloria, at least for me, really represents the pro-genocide corporate Democrats who have failed across, who failed in 2024 specifically, right, to inspire people to turn out to vote for them because they seem so out of touch, because they didn't offer solutions to problems that people had. We spoke about this on EDA a couple of weeks ago, right? But Gloria is probably Flock Camera's strongest defender, and he has absolutely refused to concede

• 2:38:40Speaker 04

  on that. When it comes to kind of carceral, out of touch liberalism, I see him as like a totem of that. And so although he will term out at the end of this term, although this recall will be expensive, I think it sends a really important notice to Democratic Party that this kind of aloof, out of touch, giving all our money to the cops liberalism is not what people want in 2028. And I do think there's a real risk of Democrats falling back into well-worn patterns of doing that shit. So he has to be served the recall notice by the eighth, then he has a chance to respond. It won't be until the third or fourth week of this month that people will actually begin gathering signatures. And it would have to be 15% of the electorate from the last election. I'm not sure if that's the last

• 2:39:25Speaker 04

  election when they serve the notice, or the last election at the time that they published it. I'm wondering if that's why they published it on Election Day, because turnout was relatively high for midterm election, right, to get a lower number. But it would be around 120, 130,000 voters that they would need to sign that signature to trigger a recall. And I believe we're still working out if it would be recall then election, or if it would be recall and election, if you see what I mean. So I'll keep updated on that. Otherwise, a fairly predictable and disappointing result in California. We're still waiting on LA mayor. It's very close right now. The last I saw it was like 51 to 49. I don't know if anyone's been looking at it while we've been recording.

• 2:40:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the same. There's about a 17,000 vote difference with still almost half a million votes to come in.

• 2:40:19Speaker 04

  Right. And that's Rahm and leading Bass, which would be a major upset for the corporate Dem contingent.

• 2:40:26Speaker 01

  Wait, did you say Rahm is leading?

• 2:40:27Speaker 06

  Yes, Rahm is leading.

• 2:40:29Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:40:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, by 17,000 votes.

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:33Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, yeah. It looked a lot better for Bass when we went to bed last night.

• 2:40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't check. Okay, that's good.

• 2:40:39Speaker 04

  So, yeah, that will be a big win for the LA DSA.

• 2:40:44Speaker 06

  Hopefully, we'll know by Thanksgiving.

• 2:40:46Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 2:40:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it would be Rahm and winning LA would be a really interesting, like, we've got Mandami in New York, right? Seeing the two, I think the two most popular cities in the US, I would imagine, going both to DSA mayors, I think, would set a really interesting trajectory going into 2028.

• 2:41:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  I can bring some on-the-ground reporting, too. I went, I stopped by the DSA thing in Portland last night, and they were, there's some speculation about them trying to run Mitch for mayor, Mitch Green for mayor, which is, who knows if that's even a good idea at all, but.

• 2:41:30Speaker 04

  No, I think similarly in San Diego, right? Like, who will we get if they recall Todd Gloria? Like, this DSA local politics running on economic issues and local issues has been a positive pathway for them.

• 2:41:44Speaker 06

  This is something we'll talk a lot about these, probably these next few weeks. It's like, what the left should do, or what the left is doing, now that Democrats have this majority. How can people ensure that Democrats will actually do things that are useful once they have this majority? This will be kind of an ongoing discussion these next few months and years, frankly.

• 2:42:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, the immediate thing that needs to happen, and we've already had a couple of newly elected House members make comments along the lines of, like, lawyer up to members of the Trump administration. And that's what I want to see immediately is investigations, right? I want to see investigations. I want to see attempts at impeaching, like, figures, even if they don't go after Trump himself. I want to see, like, a dogged and vicious attempt to enact consequences for, like, Doge, for Pete Hegseth, for people in the DOJ, for ICE, like, whatever they can do, and they'll be limited, obviously, while Trump is president, but I want to see that shit starting now. Like, they need to be striking back.

• 2:42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. One more on California before I forget. Prop 3 is looking good. Prop 3 would extend a tax. The tax enacted in 2012, but it was set to expire in 2031, and that has a higher income tax for top earners. So it's 10.3% over 360 grand, 12.3% over 721 grand individual income. So at least we kept that. A lot of that is ring-fenced for public schools with a little bit of it going to community colleges.

• 2:43:19Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 2:43:20Speaker 04

  So that's a good one.

• 2:43:21Speaker 06

  We'll probably discuss voter trends more also these next few weeks. But, I mean, TLDR, the whole country shifted towards the Democrats by like 15 to 30 points, depending on the district.

• 2:43:35Robert Evans?

  Yes. And again, I'm sure we'll talk more about, like, young people, young men seem to have shifted 28 points away from Republicans towards Democrats, which is crazy, right?

• 2:43:44Speaker 06

  Men, 18 to 29, shift 38 points.

• 2:43:48Robert Evans?

  Jesus, Jesus.

• 2:43:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the numbers weren't even that insane last night, but that came up on Steve Bannon's radio show or podcast, when he was doing his election night coverage. And someone pointed out to him, actually, a majority of young men are voting for the Democrats right now. Like, we've lost them. And Bannon said, that can't be right. Like, those numbers have to be wrong. Because he was so convinced that that was a permanent majority that they'd gained in 2024, that they had captured young men.

• 2:44:20Speaker 06

  Yep. And that's what all their messaging has been. That's all of their fucking, like, based-tongueless memes on Twitter. Their whole comms strategy is like...

• 2:44:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I cannot overemphasize, a huge number of the most influential thought leaders on the conservative right on Twitter convinced themselves that a mix of memes about a gender-bent Draco Malfoy and fucking Anakin Skywalker had handed them the election. They walked themselves into that, just in the same way that they convinced themselves that the trans stuff, or Harambe was how they won in 2016. And the degree to which they keep convincing, and in 2024, they were like, oh, it was the anti-trans messaging that won it for us. The degree which they convinced themselves that whatever this little bubble in Twitter is talking about is what the nation gives a shit about, has really bit them in the ass

• 2:45:10Robert Evans?

  this time, right? Like, they were able to kind of ignore reality, because in general, things were so bad for any incumbent in 2024. But there's none of that shielding left, right? They're left purely with the consequences of their actions and the fact that they have convinced themselves of a fantasy, that weirdos on Twitter who spend all of their time, like, AI-generating fucking images of characters from 25-year-old movies is like the normal American voter. Like, that's what they did. That's part of why they lost.

• 2:45:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

• 2:45:46Speaker 01

  Two years of prefrontal cortex development will go a long way for my fellow young white lads, I guess, hopefully.

• 2:45:53Speaker 06

  Jesus.

• 2:45:55Speaker 04

  I do want to point out that the NBC poll, like, exit polls are pretty fascinating.

• 2:46:03Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:46:04Speaker 04

  And if you look at young voters, 18 to 29, one-third of them said, yes, they consider themselves a democratic socialist. And 99% of those people said they were Democrats, and only 9% said they were MAGA. So who would have predicted that Anakin posting and Malfoy posting would be in parallel with this massive socialist swing? I mean, I don't have to be too vulgar about it, but basically, every older person that gets out of the voting

• 2:46:43Speaker 04

  base is losing, it's like, two-thirds less of a vote for a socialist. And then there's like, you know, many more people who are aging in, who are leaning socialist. So it is dramatically backfired. I mean, it is the entire opposite of what these people wanted. It is truly their worst fears coming to pass, which is just delightful to watch.

• 2:47:06Speaker 06

  No, 17% of the electorate identified as socialists.

• 2:47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:47:11Speaker 06

  It's wild. It's pretty shocking. And I mean, we would be remiss to mention the massive swings in Hispanic votes towards the Democrats that played a big part in Florida, getting Angie Nixon closer, and pushing Tyler Rico way over the edge in Texas. Based on everything ICE has been doing the past few years, this was to be expected, but the extent to which, a 28-point swing, really, really large. Similarly, I mentioned at the top of the episode how Republicans were not able to gain any seats from their redistricting measures. And if anything, that all the redistricting did was enrage people.

• 2:47:49Robert Evans?

  It really pissed people off.

• 2:47:51Speaker 06

  And generate massive, massive black voter turnout. Because Republicans were trying to take away their ability to vote, to have... To have their votes matter.

• 2:48:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:48:01Speaker 06

  And that that caused a huge black turnout and a big, a big swing also towards Democrats. The other thing it did, and this is something that's really funny, is because Republicans were trying to, you know, make more, more Trump districts. What they ended up doing is diluting their own mega Trump voters across multiple districts, which then in North Carolina, because of the big turnout for, for, for Democrats, made Democrats take districts that were previously like Republican strongholds. So it was a complete backfiring of redistricting. They, they diluted their own support by trying to dilute black people's ability to have their votes matter.

• 2:48:42Speaker 02

  No, the, the tighter they clinched their grip, the more systems fell through their fingers, slipped through their fingers. Right? Like it's the

• 2:48:49Speaker 06

  It's all Star Wars, man. The whole election's Star Wars. Yep, yep.

• 2:48:53Speaker 02

  The whole, they convinced themselves, not just that like, yeah, this has been a permanent realignment and now we can do anything. And, and we can laugh about it. We can laugh about how cruel we're being. We can laugh about the people we're killing. We can laugh about the programs we're cutting, the lives we're destroying, and no one will ever make us stand for it, like accountable for it.

• 2:49:13Speaker 06

  They thought they could do all this bullshit the past two years and just get away with it, that like they would not face consequences for it.

• 2:49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, they thought people loved it.

• 2:49:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, they thought they were locked in forever.

• 2:49:21Speaker 02

  Because they thought their entire electorate was like 15% of the Republican Party, who were the craziest people in the world, right?

• 2:49:27Speaker 04

  Get fucked. Yeah. And to an extent, they're still fucking doing it. Like, uh, I'm, I'm not sure if you saw that, like Mark Wayne Mullen, who's like, he went on Twitter today to post deportations will continue.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure they will.

• 2:49:40Speaker 04

  Like, yeah, they will, right? Like, they will go wild with the executive branch shit that they think they can get away with.

• 2:49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:47Speaker 04

  Because why not?

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're going to go as hard as they think they can get away with. The only way that might stop that and mitigate that is depending on like how afraid they are of being prosecuted after this, which I am seeing a lot of talk about, quite frankly.

• 2:50:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:50:01Speaker 02

  And that might do some, that might actually mitigate how, what they're willing to do, right? Like, I, I don't know. One of the things that's been interesting to me is that despite all of the talk ahead of this is like, oh, is Trump gonna, are they gonna recognize the results of the election? You know, are they gonna be sending troops out to stop this if it goes against them? That talk dropped on the right when it became clear how big a, a loss this was.

• 2:50:23Speaker 06

  Within hours. Yeah. I, I feel like a bit of a dumbass with my episode yesterday, cause it was like, cause it was like, oh, there's gonna be, and I'm sure they'll still come after various things, but it's like, oh, wow, it really was just like an absolute bluenami. Yeah.

• 2:50:39Speaker 04

  Too big to read.

• 2:50:39Speaker 06

  They don't even know what, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:50:41Speaker 04

  I mean, just to end on that note, we were thinking here in Texas that one of the better outcomes might actually be Greg Abbott winning and, you know, Talarico winning, because if it's a split vote, they can't cry wolf with the same effect. But, I mean, we ended up getting the same effect, but just through a different mechanism, which is amazing. And, and

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  They all lost.

• 2:51:04Speaker 04

  If, if all politics has to be Star Wars, I, I wanna see a lot more glup shittos. I don't wanna see fascist Anakin. I wanna know who is the glup shitter, the new glup shitter on this.

• 2:51:16Speaker 06

  It's a lot, you know, a lot of glup shittos came out of the, the woodwork to win it for, for the Democrats last night. Oops, all glup shittos.

• 2:51:25Speaker 04

  Before we go, I do wanna mention that like, just we glup shitter, sorry.

• 2:51:32Speaker 04

  New song to glup shitter. Yeah. And really good night for indigenous candidates, right?

• 2:51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:37Speaker 04

  Deb Harland, governor of New Mexico, Nez is looking pretty good, like former chairman of the Navajo Nation. It remains to be seen in Arizona, right? Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, like I was talking to some friends, uh, some, some Yaki friends yesterday about like incredible turnout in indigenous communities, like at least where they were. Uh, and from what I've heard, it was, it was pretty high everywhere. And, uh, yeah, that, that's good to see. Like, Trump has been fucking extensively with indigenous people, their rights and their land. Uh, and it's, it's good to see them showing up and it's good to see indigenous candidates being returned like at a state level.

• 2:52:18Speaker 06

  We'll talk more about some of this sort of stuff where the Democrats will do next, that kind of thing in tomorrow's edition of Executive Disorder, as, as well as some, you know, non-election related stories to help get a, a general sense of what's going on in the world. But before we close, uh, Stephen, where can people find your work, especially to keep up on, you know, the politics of Texas? And who sent those fucking mailers?

• 2:52:41Speaker 04

  God, we are gonna get to the bottom of those mailers, even if it may not be as consequential to Robert's point. The accountability must continue. We must get to the bottom of who is behind that so their feet can be held to the fire. You can find my reporting often at the Texas Observer, but if you just Google my Italian ass name, you can find my website. And, uh, all of my articles get consolidated there, cause I, I do write for a few different outlets. And, uh, you know, I'm always excited to be on the show with you all. So thanks for having me.

• 2:53:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  Thank you for holding Texas down.

• 2:53:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. How about you, Kevin? Where can people find your, uh, coverage of places with pine trees and rain?

• 2:53:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm on like all the social media channels at Kevin H Foster, and then my Substack is Last Week in Hell. And this week, it's not the most fitting name, because it seems like things have generally gone okay, but This week in purgatory. Yeah, this week in purgatory. One level up, baby. One level up at a time. We're clawing our way out.

• 2:53:49Speaker 06

  That does it for us here at It Could Happen Here. We'll see you tomorrow for another episode of Executive Disorder. We reported the news.

• 2:53:58Robert Evans?

  We reported the news.

• 2:54:06Robert Evans?

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• 2:54:38Robert Evans?

  This is the moment, baby. This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question. Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game

• 2:54:53Speaker 06

  and those who just wanna watch from the sidelines, eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that dog in you, underdog. At least you're dog. Terms may apply.

• 2:55:11Speaker 06

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I am joined by Robert Evans and number one electoralist Mia Wong, who was so excited about the results that she couldn't even make it to our episode yesterday. She was too pumped. We couldn't, we couldn't contain her. Up all night. Not even a joke. I actually was.

• 2:55:40Speaker 02

  Well, she was also, she, she votes in 11 or 12 states every election. You just can't stop her from voting.

• 2:55:45Speaker 06

  I, I'm from Illinois. I was raised on vote early, vote often.

• 2:55:54Speaker 02

  Good stuff.

• 2:55:55Speaker 06

  We do need to acknowledge that I think out of everyone's midterm predictions, Mia's was the most correct. Oh, I, I, I wanna grandstand for five seconds, which is very funny that I am the, like, the least electoral person. And in, you could, you could pull the tape in 20, early 2025, like March 2025. I, I, I am pulling the election results from like rural Iowa and going, the Democrats are gonna win by 20? Yes. You could pull the tape on it. I, I was there. I was pleased you'd ask me.

• 2:56:27Speaker 02

  See, I respect that. I didn't even have the courage to really make any predictions. After the last like three elections, I was like, I don't know, man. Maybe the polls are right. Who the fuck knows?

• 2:56:37Speaker 06

  My, my thing on that genuinely was that, like, I was doing the, the polls were cucked angle, which is that the poll, cause like, oh, the thing, the thing with the polls, the polls were all using the 2024 demographic stuff for like ages. And then they tried to modify it afterwards. But it's like, if you like go outside, you can tell that, like, talk to any person in any state, you can be like, this is not 2024? Even, even by the time you're hitting like early 2025, right? Everything is just different.

• 2:57:06Speaker 02

  Oh, no. I mean, even out in the country, I spent a lot of time in rural Oregon and the, the Trump signs have largely disappeared.

• 2:57:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. See, you've been seeing that a lot. A lot, a lot of reports from people who live out in the country noting that the Trump banners are no longer on the haybales.

• 2:57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:21Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I, I think we're, we're gonna be doing a full episode in like a couple of weeks on how Trump sort of systemically went through and pissed off all of those people individually. Because it's a, a truly like a, a masterwork in electioneering. I, the only person I've ever seen do it like this was former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, who just went like row by row down every single one of her constituencies and pissed them all off individually. Ah, it's incredible stuff. This episode, we are covering the week of October 28th to November 5th. Yesterday, we covered the election results in a special edition of Executive Disorder.

• 2:58:04Speaker 06

  Today, we will be covering reactions to those results from the Democrats and the Republicans, as well as some other news stories. We'll start with a few small things at the top. Yeah. And I, I, I promise this is not entirely an election episode. If you stick around long enough, you will get a 1 million person wildcat general strike. So hang, hang in there, people who are sick of elections.

• 2:58:29Speaker 06

  Health is coming. Last week, Mayor Mamdani quietly canceled New York City's own Cop City, a $225 million, quote, public safety academy that was slated to be built in Queens. It's something that Zoran talked about a few times during the mayoral primary, but has since then kind of receded into the background in an interview before the launch of his camp. Zorron told the outlet City and State, quote, "We do not need to spend more than $200 million on a cop city training facility in Queens." Good for him. And last week, the mayor's office confirmed this plan is no longer going through. Woo. Look, I've watched the NYPD at work a few times. And how much training do you need to teach guys to sit in a van

• 2:59:13Speaker 06

  playing Candy Crush on their phone until it's time to maybe go out and hit people? Like, how much training does that really take? It requires a lot of training to kettle people on the same bridge every single year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Of course, of course. You need $200 million for that. If Mumdani's promises a few weeks ago will come to fruition, we should also be getting an update on the timeline of the SRG dismantling in the next few days to weeks as well. It has been a good week for Mumdani overall. On Wednesday, an appeals court ruled that Mumdani can go ahead with the Peta tear tax on second homes worth millions of dollars after a Staten Island judge tried to halt the rollout a few months ago. So that will be going ahead.

• 2:59:58Speaker 06

  And in fact, when Mumdani was on like CNN talking about the election results, Jake Tapper made a snide remark about the New York Knicks. And Mumdani's rebuttal was bragging about him paying the Peta tear tax. So fuck you, Jake Tapper. Good bit, good bit.

• 3:00:17Speaker 06

  Last Friday, dock workers held a one-day strike action across 22 countries and more than 100 ports in protest against war and arms shipments. A coalition of unions released a statement beforehand, quote, "Portes must not be used for the transport of weapons, ammunition, military equipment, and troops. Dock workers do not work for war." This action was originally called by the European Dock Workers Council with unions in France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Morocco. This has been something that's been a very big issue for European dock workers for a long time. I mean, you can like, you can go back and look at like, like 2010. You can find dock workers doing strikes about this. This is something that, yeah, so this is like a long-running

• 3:01:02Speaker 06

  concern of European dock workers, particularly in like Italy, Greece as well, and obviously France. And it's good, it's good to see more of it. This is a nice little kind of warm-up action. This is just a one-day action. Yeah. If this gets extended to a few days, it could really, it could really, you know, clog, clog the gears. Yeah. And so it's nice to see this happen. And hopefully more things like it will happen in the future with some more organizing. We will now turn to a special segment by James Stout. Take a listen.

• 3:01:36Robert Evans?

  Hey, everyone, it's James. Tragically, I lost a tooth to some Skittles about a year ago. And the thing that was on top of my tooth has fallen out again. So while my friends are recording, I am having someone drill into my face. I'm paying half a month's wages for the privilege. So I can't join them. But I did want to update you on a couple of non-election things as well as one election thing. So let's start with the election thing. Last week, I said there were 53 counties in California. I just read the number that I had typed wrong. There were 58. Also, I wanted to talk a little bit more about California and specifically those 20,000 votes, right? The DOJ attempted to take their request to sequester ballots to the Supreme Court of the United States, which, just like other courts, did not cooperate, right?

• 3:02:21Robert Evans?

  John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote, quote, "Once California co-mingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back. The only way to preserve the district court's ability to grant relief to the United States after a full merits proceeding, therefore, is to segregate the challenged ballots. That remedy would not cause undue hardship to California." Supreme Court disagreed. They turned down the government's request with a very brief, unsigned 9-0 order. I think this is just illustration, right? That the government threw everything it had at suppressing the vote in this election and did not succeed. Even on election day, I posted that HSI had arrested a Canadian man who they claimed had registered to vote. Again, right, this is an attempt at making people afraid

• 3:03:06Robert Evans?

  or intimidated to vote that very obviously did not succeed anywhere in the United States in numbers large enough to influence the outcome of the election. Moving on from the United States, I wanted to talk briefly about Iran. The United States, right before the election, made what it called a defensive strike, which Trump then went on to say was against Iranian air defenses. Evidently, it's very hard to make a defensive strike against someone else's air defenses, right? Unclear if that was a different strike or not, but Trump, Trump said they watched Iran rebuild their air defenses and then destroyed them, which is, that is not a defensive action, right? Talking of Iranian air defenses, Iran took down

• 3:03:49Robert Evans?

  another MQ-9 Reaper drone with what's called a 358. 358, I think we've talked about them on Executive Disorder before. They released video in this case. But a 358 is a loitering munition. It's like an anti-drone drone. It's not capable of taking down jets. I mean, it's capable of doing it. It's just very unlikely it will be able to, right? But it works very well for these drones. Iran's taken down a number of drones with these. They work in a similar way to the drones that the Kurdish Freedom Movement was using to shoot down Turkish, Bayraktar and Akinci drones.

• 3:04:32Robert Evans?

  In fact, the SDF took out a US drone, presumably by accident, in Syria after the Assad regime collapsed. So not the first time these US drones have run into these kinds of loitering munitions. But it's indicative of the 358s are pretty cheap compared to like more advanced air defense systems. And as I said, and they're not the best solution for like fast attack jets, but it is one of these things that the Iranians have developed, right? That have been very effective for the money. The other one being their Shahed drones, right? And they have been able to take out a number of United States attack drones with these. In this case, the MQ-9 Reaper drone that they say they shot down over the Strait of Hormuz.

• 3:05:17Robert Evans?

  It's a little unclear. You can't see in the footage where they shot it down. But nonetheless, I think this is reportable. Staying on the topic of drones, the publication Intelligence Online is reporting that they have seen intelligence from a Myanmar armed resistance group that has identified four Russian drone operators deployed on a long-term basis with garrisons to the Myanmar forces in southern Shan State. This has been a thing for a while, right? There have been Russian drone ops, Russian trainers deployed with the Tatmadore, along with the Tatmadore using Russian technology for quite some time, right? But it's interesting that these guys are deployed long-term

• 3:05:59Robert Evans?

  and they seem to be, rather than training, actually operating drones. If you remember the fall of the Assad regime, there were Russian drone ops there as well. Some of those guys had paid a bribe or had got this kind of posting that took them out of the meat grinder in Ukraine. And they were doing these colonial wars for Russia, right? That's what this is. This is imperialism by another name. The Tatmadore has benefited heavily from Chinese and Russian drone technology and drone tactics, right? They've been using drones much more effectively in the last, I guess, year or so than they previously had. And so it's not surprising to see. We also saw like, sometimes you'll see guys with Wagner patches, like the, what is now Africa Corps, right?

• 3:06:44Robert Evans?

  The Russian private military contractor thing. In that case, I'm pretty sure that at least in my experience, that's just them thinking that they're cool in the same way that you will see PDF guys sometimes with like a United States flags on their plate carriers, because that is an aesthetic and a thing they look up to, right? The US Special Forces guys, or you'll see like Special Forces tabs used. You'll see guys with things that look like Ranger tabs, but 99% of the time that's from the Free Burma Rangers. That's a different thing. So it's nonetheless interesting to document the growing links between Russia and the Tatmadore. I would really love if some of the solidarity that we've seen with the people of Ukraine could be also directed to the people of Myanmar.

• 3:07:29Robert Evans?

  I can't help but think if they were white and European and they were fighting for their freedom, they might get a little more support from the rest of the world. That's all I got for you this week.

• 3:07:38Speaker 06

  We are back. Now, I said this wouldn't be an election results episode, and that is mostly true. But I will update a few races because there are still two races yet to be called, Alaska and Mississippi. An Alaska Democrat, Mary Peltola. Yes, yes, let's engage in some racism here. Going up against. I forgot to do that joke last, yesterday, so. Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, not going to acknowledge that at all. Adam, leave it in. Right, right now, Peltola is up 600.

• 3:08:10Speaker 06

  100 votes with 25% of the vote left. So this, this still might go to ranked choice instant runoff if, if she doesn't reach 50% of the vote or more than 50% of the vote. Still a lot of votes to be counted. We'll probably know more in a few days. It's possible she does just pull ahead and this doesn't go to instant runoff. We will see. The biggest, biggest surprise, as I said yesterday, Mississippi with Scott Cullum against Sidney Hyde Smith, the Republican incumbent. Cullum is a little less than 2,000 votes ahead. So he has, he has gained in the past 24 hours with over 40,000 estimated votes yet to be counted.

• 3:08:50Speaker 06

  These are largely provisional or mail-in ballots, which according to Mississippi law can be counted till Saturday. These are expected to go mostly in Cullum's favor, but this is still a super close, super close race, right? This is like 49% to 48.9%. Very close, but he is, he is expected to pull ahead. I wanted to talk a little bit about this. It's like a, a very funny sort of revenge grudge match, which is that Scott Cullum was nominated to be a federal judge by a Joe Biden in 2023. But there's a weird convoluted system where like the senator from a state can block a

• 3:09:32Speaker 06

  nomination for, for federal judge appointments in their state. And the person who blocked that was Senator Hyde Smith. Aha. And this apparently was because Cullum was like too pro-trans and also an unhinged thing about him getting money from George Soros. So this has been a, a years in the making revenge plot to some extent by Cullum, who is now about to beat in Mississippi, the senator who blocked his appointment from being too pro-trans and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. That is pretty wild. That's great. It's, it's amazing. I, I have seen some sort of, you know, like liberal pundits try to, try to paint

• 3:10:17Speaker 06

  this as like an example of, of why it's better to nominate like centrists or moderates because otherwise there'd be no way for a Democrat to, to win Mississippi. People calling him as like a centrist just are not familiar with, with him or his platform. This is like, this is a, a firm anti-AIPAC Democrat. Yeah. Running a lot, a lot, a lot of the same like economic populism that we've seen across many candidates, including raising the federal minimum wage, anti-big tech stuff, like a lot, a lot of the stuff that I think we're, we're kind of largely familiar with. You'll be on just saying the word affordability, like actual, actual policy proposals, not a centrist by, by any means. And if he's prevented from being a judge in part by being too pro-trans, then I think

• 3:11:00Speaker 06

  that, that kind of bolsters my, my argument. Very funny. Maybe stop from being, from being a judge, apparently not stop from being a senator. So. That's right. Great stuff. I do also want to mention a few of the DSA races a bit more in depth because DSA now has an expanded block of eight representatives in the federal office. Rashida Tlaib was re-elected in Michigan and she'll be joined by a new block of DSA House reps, including Donovan McKinney from Michigan, Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, Malat Quiros of Colorado, Angela Gonzalez Torres from California, which is a really solid win here. That one was kind of more of a battle district.

• 3:11:43Speaker 06

  And of course, Daria Eliza of La Chavilla and Claire Valdez, who join AOC in representing New York. And so far, there's at least 93 DSA candidates who've won at the federal, state and municipal level. And the vote still is being counted in few of those places, like in California, or at least vote was still being counted by the time I wrote this last night. One of the big races that has not been getting actually a lot of attention is the LA mayoral race, which since yesterday has been called for DSA endorsed candidate Nithya Ramen. This is another thing that we should probably do a deep dive in the future. This was a close race with Ramen pulling ahead by three points in the past, like day and a half.

• 3:12:27Speaker 06

  There's some interesting kind of background lore regarding Ramen's DSA endorsement that I do want to mention here. A few days before the election, DSA's National Political Committee, kind of like their Board of Directors, so to speak, voted on whether to force the local DSA LA chapter to rescind their endorsement of Ramen, based on perceptions from some out of state DSA members that Ramen did not support the BDS movement enough, boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. During the election, Ramen stated multiple times that she supports BDS as a protest tactic, but there's disagreement in like DSA national on the correct interpretation

• 3:13:07Speaker 06

  of a 2025 DSA convention resolution against candidates opposing BDS and whether that means holding candidates to implementing BDS once in office. So like on, on like Sunday or Monday, like just days before the election, DSA's National Political Committee voted 14 to 13, very close, to not force the local chapter to pull their endorsement before the election. So this is like a, you know, razor, razor, razor edge vote here. Yeah. And I think this gen, this general situation underlines some internal tensions within the DSA, especially DSA as a national body, not just like big chapters like New York or LA. Absolutely.

• 3:13:51Speaker 06

  But there are these big tensions between the so-called like mass politics wing, what I would kind of call like the Zoronist wing of DSA, the Socialist Majority Caucus, Groundwork Caucus, versus the more kind of agitational activist side of DSA, characterized internally as like the quote unquote left wing of DSA, which focuses more on like abolitionism, anti-imperialism, and also has some more kind of like campist tendencies. I think the, that sort of agitational side has more representation on like the national body chapter than what they have in local chapters like LA and New York, where a bunch of members are concentrated. And because of that split, we're seeing this kind of drama play out between some of these bigger chapters and the national organization.

• 3:14:33Speaker 06

  Which I will say, SOC soaked Dems, our power to the locals looking a lot better now, huh? Ah, okay. Decade, decade, decade old DSA drama aside.

• 3:14:47Speaker 06

  Two other, uh, not technically, I guess, DSA races, but DSA like or like Bernie crap, kind of like races I want to mention. Justin Pearson, a Democrat in Tennessee, unfortunately lost by less than 3,000 votes to Republican Brett Taylor in a newly redrawn House district. This was redistricted into a Trump, you know, 22 district and, and Pearson ended up trailing by just a few thousand votes, like a very small margin. This one was quite, quite sad to see. Pearson's great. Though in Michigan, in Michigan 7th District, William Lawrence went up against Republican incumbent Tom Barrett. Lawrence is of the Sunrise Movement Organization. This is a, this is a big swing district.

• 3:15:32Speaker 06

  Centrist, moderates were concerned that Lawrence was going to be too far left and would keep this district red. Did not happen. Lawrence was able to pull this off despite over like 20 million in GOP spending against Lawrence. So that is one of the more interesting results of, of the night. Let's go on an ad break and then talk about copium. Let's talk about the copium.

• 3:16:10Speaker 06

  Okay, we are back. Do you know who's not back? The Republican Party. They are not feeling so hot. And it was, it was really funny. A few days before the election on Halloween, Mike Johnson made this proclamation. I have been all over the country, my friends, and I'm feeling really good right now. I'm telling you, the polls are wrong, okay? We're going to defy history and we are going to be celebrating big victories on Tuesday night. That's my prediction, okay? Amen. It's a spiritual battle. Yes, ma'am. Great prediction. Hey, I mean, look, the, the first two predictions were true. The polls were wrong and they did make history.

• 3:16:53Speaker 06

  There were great victories too, just not the ones he was anticipating. Unfortunately, the way you did it was by getting a historic ass kicking. Yeah. Beautiful. And losing your job. But hey, that'll mean he has more time to monitor his son's erections, which we know is his passion. Mike Johnson has indicated he will not be staying on as the, did not intend to stay on as minority, minority leader for the Republicans. So yeah, he will have more time to monitor his son's erections. Which I also want to mention here that this sets up a sort of fascinating race for who, who, who the minority leader is going to be to replace him. Yeah. Because I think people have forgotten this.

• 3:17:34Speaker 06

  The, the reason Mike Johnson was elected in the first place was that the previous majority leader like couldn't survive a no confidence vote. It was really hard to find one. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they picked Mike Johnson because nobody had any idea who he was and they didn't realize how weird he was. Which, by the way, is the same reason Dennis Hastert got his, got Speaker of the House. Yeah. Right? Was that like, he, he was considered safe. He wasn't seen as ambitious and no one knew anything about him. So he didn't seem to have any scandals. So Mike Johnson's optimism in that clip there, delusional or not, was also promoted by Fox News' Jesse Waters before the election. Oh. casting serious doubt on the blue wave and predicting that the youth and Hispanic turnout would be low.

• 3:18:19Speaker 06

  Here is the headline, Jessica. There is no blue tsunami. Yes, there is a maybe a three foot wave that's going to knock out a few sandcastles. But the Democrat narrative that this thing is going to sweep the nation does not exist. The red wall is forming. Older voters are showing up to vote against socialism and the youth and Hispanics are not showing up.

• 3:18:46Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, they didn't.

• 3:18:48Speaker 06

  I just want to put on the record that the way that he said the Hispanics is a Yes, that is, that is something he intentionally, that's something he intentionally does consistently also by saying the blacks, also the whites. This is like one of his reoccurring bits almost. Jesus Christ. But basically, everything he said in that sentence was completely wrong. Oh. And after the election, Waters sang a bit of a different tune, dooming how Republicans lost whites, men, Hispanics, and farmers. The coalition's totally collapsed. I mean, we lost whites? Whites! You can't do that if you're a Republican.

• 3:19:31Speaker 06

  Men, Hispanics, big time. And so it's going to take a while to put the coalition back together because it was in the heartland. So what happened was, so China, in order to pressure Trump in the trade war, stopped buying crops from the farmers. And then you do the Hormuz straight squeeze and fertilizer and diesel go up. So whoa, they move blue. There, which he's, he's not wrong there, but like, that was you guys. Like, you didn't have to do any of this.

• 3:20:02Speaker 02

  No, none of this was necessary. I mean, and that's like, they've been having to, like JD Vance is kind of the closest people in high power to coming out and saying like, this was just a horrible fuck up. But Trump has even admitted like, yeah, Iran is what screwed us, but we had to do it. It was the only option. They had to keep.

• 3:20:19Speaker 06

  So since, since the results on Tuesday night, there's been a lot of kind of attempted explanations from the Republicans to figure out what the fuck just happened. One of them, coming from some Republican operatives, is that Trump got too friendly with Mumdani and that kind of sabotaged the Republicans' campaign strategy. To quote from the Wall Street Journal, quote, "Republicans plans to make Zoran Mumdani, the 35-year-old socialist who became New York City's mayor last year, the face of a party that they would paint as out of touch with most Americans. In September, when Trump was in New York ahead of the UN General Assembly, Mumdani had a surprise announcement. He had invited Trump to meet.

• 3:21:04Speaker 06

  Republicans in the House were apoplectic. House Speaker Mike Johnson told White House officials, "An image of Trump being friendly with Mumdani would hurt Republican House candidates in New York who are running on an anti-Mumdani message." Trump aides didn't like the idea either, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump and Mumdani met at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, just as the president wanted. Johnson later told others that it was an unforced error in a difficult election year." Unquote. Very funny, but definitely, definitely true. If you remember when Mumdani was elected, there was a lot of dooming on how this is now going to give Republicans this perfect, you're talking about going into the midterms, but how crazy the Democrats are. And because of how good Mumdani's poll numbers have been, how well he's just governed in

• 3:21:48Speaker 06

  general, which is kind of acknowledged in big parts by, like even Fox, and Trump to some degree, that that kind of threw a wrench in their plans to paint Mumdani as like emblematic of the craziness of the Democrats. Instead, they kind of tried to do that with El Sayed, which also just didn't pan out for them at all either. There was some kind of early explanations from the, you know, Fox brain trust as they saw results coming in. One being that youth just want instant gratification and can't commit to anything. They can't stick with anything like voting GOP.

• 3:22:25Speaker 02

  Forever. Yeah.

• 3:22:27Speaker 06

  Forever.

• 3:22:28Robert Evans?

  This idea that I've been thinking about a lot, which is just this shortened attention span, that everybody wants everything, you know, instantaneously. And, you know, I gave you my vote for two years and now I want to switch to somebody else. And a lot of these voters are, don't seem to be expressing what it is they think they're getting by switching over. And we'll see how it pans out tonight, but I think that's a change dynamic in America. Well, I also believe that when you're scrolling, if it says Medicare for All, you're like, yeah, I'm for that. Okay, now you're moving on, you're watching the football game and you're learning how to put a French hairpin in your, in your hair. Like, it's just like, there's so much going on.

• 3:23:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's it. No, yeah, that's it. I think they got it. I think they cracked the case.

• 3:23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23:08Speaker 06

  Oh, God. They're on their, they're on their damn phones too much and their, the serotonin receptors are screwed. They just want everything super, super fast. They can't stick, stick with the hard two more years, as Vance requested, of war with Iran, the skyrocketing prices.

• 3:23:25Speaker 02

  Skyrocketing prices, yeah. And ICE raids, yes. The youth should have just had the chutzpah to stick it out a little bit longer, see where that was going to lead.

• 3:23:33Speaker 06

  Party discipline is the one thing that's lacking.

• 3:23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23:37Speaker 06

  Among you.

• 3:23:38Speaker 02

  You have to give people a reason to be loyal to a party. And that's like the antithesis of conservatism.

• 3:23:43Speaker 06

  You know what? This really does highlight their sort of biggest frustration and their biggest like miscalculation is that they thought the 2024 electorate is the new electorate. Like, that's, that's where the new lines are. The youth are gonna, are gonna stay with them. They did not realize that the people who ended up voting for Trump in really big numbers in 2024 were not doing it out of loyalty to Trump, but out of this huge anti-incumbent sentiments and major frustrations at the Biden administration. And they thought that that then, you know, created loyal Trump voters. And no, those same frustrations then just got moved over to Trump because he continued all the same bad stuff and then added a whole bunch of new bad stuff. Yeah. Everyone suddenly remembered, well, it's probably a combination of people remembering

• 3:24:27Speaker 06

  that living under Trump sucks and then people learning for the first time, they're like, this is awful. It's even worse than the last time. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance posted what I'll call a screed on X, the everything app. Yeah. It's about right. Going over kind of his analysis of what happened and how much, maybe where Republicans kind of dropped the ball and how they were thinking about kind of what the voter composition would be, right? If, is this electorate going to be the 2024 electorate again? And, and he, he talked about in this screed, as the election date, as the midterms got closer, he started developing suspicions that, no, that's not going to be the electorate.

• 3:25:09Speaker 06

  And he started asking his like polling guys what, what they think is going to happen. I will quote from his screed. "Despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept telling us the same story. In some states, turnout was merely okay. In other states, it was downright amazing. And in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team. Our people, our voters, are showing up. So I asked the smartest data guy I know, 'Does that mean we're going to shock the world?'" "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest." They didn't. "But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys.

• 3:25:50Speaker 06

  Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Vance continues, "Undoubtedly, there were places we could have done better on turnout, but the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump Vance 24 voted for Democrats in 2026." Then Vance listed the top four reasons, you know, causing this switch, quote, "End the war, focus on cost of living and inflation, put America first, and change our relationship to Israel." Which, which is very funny because like, three of those, like, end the war, cost of living, inflation, and change relationship to Israel. It's like, oh, so you're the Mumdani campaign.

• 3:26:33Speaker 06

  Like, the Republicans are like, what if we did the Mumdani campaign, but like, actually anti-Semitic? It's interesting. It's like, they might start kind of converging on a more kind of nationalistic form of socialism. Yeah, yeah. A kind of national socialism has never gone wrong before. No precedent for this. But Vance ended his screed, quote, "Our voters showed up, and the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. I am open to the idea that we should change enforcement, immigration enforcement, by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

• 3:27:18Speaker 06

  The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night." Unquote. I like that he has to add in his little, his little kind of ice, ice soft defense there in his final point about the war costing them the election, which, yeah, it does. Yeah, the war was a huge part of that. "The Trump administration saw some of this coming in the days before the election because on the morning of Election Day, Trump told Fox News that the US will stop sending $4 billion in aid to Israel by the end of this year." Did not matter. You can't just drop that on Election Day and think that's going to change the results. Also, no one believes you. But he did, he did say that in part to kind of defang the potency of candidates like El

• 3:28:00Speaker 06

  Sayed, who campaigned in large part against sending money to Israel. Trump also said Election morning in a bizarre kind of final, final message before the midterms, quote, "If people ever got tired of me in the US, I'll move to Israel and become Prime Minister." Sure, man. I don't know. We're moving from, we're moving from the settler colony to like a shittier, smaller settler colony? I do want to mention one other Republican's reaction to the results. That's Ron DeSantis. Both we and others have talked about DeSantis calling Tuesday's election an extinction-level event for Republicans. But I also want to highlight a later part of, of his speech, where DeSantis identifies

• 3:28:44Speaker 06

  where he thinks Republicans got off track. Quote, "I knew Republicans were in trouble when I was reading an overview of what they were running ads on, and they are spending hundreds of millions on transgender ads. That was not the issue motivating voters, and it was kind of an attempt to just scare Republicans to vote. Now, the issues are different, and Republicans, it seemed like in some of the ads I was seeing, with how much money they were spending, they were really fighting yesterday's battle." Unquote. We're all looking for the guy who did this.

• 3:29:19Speaker 06

  Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. You're telling you, you're telling me, huh? You're maybe, maybe, maybe it's not the issue motivating voters. Yeah. You sure about that?

• 3:29:32Speaker 06

  Which, look, I, I, at least the transgendered community is getting a tiny form of revenge for all of the shit that we've had to go through and will continue to go through. A revenge amuse bouche. Yeah. Well, this is the rething the whirlwind appetizer. Yeah. We will get the main course in time. Yeah, the whirlwind takes another 70 minutes to cook. It's like ordering the souffle.

• 3:29:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, but one, one of the most sort of shocking results of, of this election cycle was a quite progressive trans woman winning a Alabama state house seat in Montgomery. She pulled a 22-point swing to win it, to win a district that was like Trump plus 16. Also, her, her name is Montgomery. It's the same thing with the fucking Hungary guy. Her name, her name is Allison Montgomery.

• 3:30:28Speaker 06

  That's hilarious. Yeah. And, you know, and her, her, her opponents ran a whole bunch of anti-trans attack ads and she, you know, called them pedophiles and did a bunch of anti-data center stuff and stuff like that. And one in a place that is, you know, like there are obviously, there's a lot of trans organizing in the deep south. To the best of my knowledge, like Montgomery, Alabama is like not, like this part of Alabama, like it was part of the city of Alabama is like not like a trans hub. Yeah. Right? Like this isn't like a district in like Atlanta or something like this is, or like New Orleans. Like this is not, this is not that. This is, this was, this was like deep Trump, like again, like Trump, like plus 16. No, she, she ran on an economic populist plat- platform. Yep.

• 3:31:13Speaker 06

  That most people can agree on, that it's like commons, a common sense. Yeah. Uh, anti corporate platform. Yeah. And I think, I think this is, this is the thing that like, you know, I, I something I think Eric was going to talk about a little bit, but a lot of the narrative about sort of like, oh, progressive candidates did worse than non-progressive candidates. It's like, I, trans, trans women running on like the Bomboni platform are winning in Alabama. Like I just eat shit. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's super absurd. Like there's just no. Get out of here. Uh, this is my, my frustration is the word progressive just doesn't mean anything. Yeah. Like, does, does press, does progressive mean that you're a, a corporatist Democrat with good social policies? Does it mean you're an economic populist who doesn't really talk

• 3:31:56Speaker 06

  about culture war issues? Like, like what, what does, what does progressive mean? Yeah. Does it mean you're, you're Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was originally a progressive? Like. Yeah. Who knows? No meaning. It is really frustrating. And this whole narrative, I just don't find compelling at all because the vast majority of these swing state candidates, one, on economic populism, anti-corruption, stopping foreign wars. It's hard to characterize most of these candidates as centrists. Now, there are some moderates and more center-left Democrats mixed in there, like in Alaska. And there's a lot of issues with many of these candidates. They are not perfect by any means. But when you're seeing liberal pundits really push this narrative

• 3:32:40Speaker 06

  that moderates are winning way better than progressives or winning way better than socialists, it's very clear that they're just setting up a narrative to crush any potential progressive, left-wing, or like a real populist from taking the lead in the primary to become president in 2028. They're running the same electability playbook, trying to convince people that candidates on the left don't stand as good of a chance as winning. And this is all very silly to me because El Sayed did win. He won. He is going to be the senator. Troy Jackson did

• 3:33:20Speaker 06

  win. But the only thing a lot of these liberal pundits can talk about is how El Sayed did not do maybe as well as some other candidates, especially compared to like Talarico. And again, I think this is all very silly because Talarico and El Sayed actually had very similar platforms. And these races had a lot of different parts. Ken Paxton is much more hated than Mike Rogers, who was generally one of the more liked Republicans in this midterm election. And prominent Democrats tried to sabotage El Sayed for months, from near a tandon to

• 3:34:01Speaker 06

  comments made by Nancy Pelosi. And of course, Haley Stevens endorsing the Republican days before the election. Also, just tons and tons of money was mobilized in Michigan. It was also mobilized in Texas, but way more was spent in Michigan than almost any other Senate race. And in the end, El Sayed performed pretty similarly to other statewide Democratic candidates. He did perform slightly under the gubernatorial candidate, but performed better than the attorney general candidate. And there's a lot of just little differences in how states elect people sometimes, like Maine historically selected a much more democratic

• 3:34:40Speaker 06

  governor than the representatives they've sent to DC. And speaking of Maine, I do not think centrist moderates can really accurately say that a more moderate candidate would have won by more against Susan Collins. Collins has shown herself to be incredibly resilient. Anyone running against Collins would have had a hard time. And it turned out a union populist candidate eventually was the guy to beat Collins. I think it's also very disingenuous to point to Florida when the Democrats just totally abandoned the race in Florida, leaving Angie Nixon to fend for herself. And all things considered, I think Nixon actually

• 3:35:21Speaker 06

  did quite well having to run that entire campaign herself. And her opponent, Ashley Moody, had the highest independent favorability rating. So if you're going to evaluate, you know, the minute differences between progressives and moderates in these races, I think you actually have to look at the minute details of each individual race and not flatten things out into these generalizations that probably don't hold water when you consider things more closely. And keep in mind, this whole rhetorical game played by liberal pundits is in preparation of trying to crush any left-wing candidate for president in 2028. Anyway, let's get into some of the Democratic Party reactions to their own victory. And

• 3:36:04Speaker 06

  it's, it's interesting because this is all kind of in the shadow of Trump announcing election night on a phone call with Politico, that, that he is interested in working with Democrats to pass bills and doesn't just want to sit in the office for two years and like veto everything. That's, that was the way he put it. Weak, scared. He said it very scared in this, in this clip. I'll, I'll, I may as well actually just play, it's only 15 seconds. He does sound very scared in this. Well, we're going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country. Very important. They've already called and they want to work with me. I have the right to veto everything. But I don't want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything. They want to see things happen too. Does not sound, does not sound happy.

• 3:36:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, that, that is, that is the sound of a man who was like, oh, fuck, if I don't keep Schumer in power, I could go to prison. Yeah. Oh, speaking of Schumer, horrible speech election night, brick wall.

• 3:37:00Speaker 06

  In more than one way. Uh, do you want to play this, this, this clip of Schumer talking about his aspirations of becoming the speaker again?

• 3:37:08Speaker 04

  How do you deal with those candidates who won? Who said they're not going to vote

• 3:37:11Speaker 02

  for you? Adam Hamilton, Troy Jackson? Again, to repeat the answer, the issue is not me. I'll be reelected as majority leader. But the issue is focusing on the American people and what they want.

• 3:37:29Speaker 06

  I like that he slipped into saying minority leader because he's so used to being a loser. Yeah.

• 3:37:36Speaker 06

  No, Schumer should not be. Obviously not. No. No. No, he, he is, he has, he has been one of the key levers of power for the Republican Party in rallying the Democrats to vote for a bunch of the horrific shit that amazingly, like the, some of the stuff that lost Trump the election, that was in the big, beautiful bill, like passed because of Schumer, like whipping people in order to vote for it. Yeah. And Schumer himself also voted for that, too. Since Tuesday, Bernie has started a push to get more Dems to sign on to Medicare for All. And he will likely become the new chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan has loudly proclaimed We will rip ICE apart.

• 3:38:19Speaker 06

  And incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair Robert Garcia posted a two-word statement, lawyer up. And Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted subpoenas.

• 3:38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. And a strong one-word statement.

• 3:38:34Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ron.

• 3:38:36Speaker 06

  So in terms of where, where this is going, I think there was a very interesting report that was released, I guess, two weeks ago, Monday now, right about a week before the election, where the House Judiciary Committee released a genuinely astonishing document in which they accused Donald Trump of, and I am just going to quote from this document here, which again was released by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, like with their, like, House Judiciary Committee official stuff on it. Seal. Yeah. Quote, "Above all, the evidence we have seen, as shared in the accounts of 11 women

• 3:39:19Speaker 06

  each described below, indicates that Trump abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside and in coordination with the most infamous sex trafficker in history." End quote. That that most infamous sex trafficker in history would, of course, be Jeffrey Epstein, who they accused Trump of being, quote, "a close friend and confidant of," alongside the sort of aforementioned allegations. They furthermore accused the administration of, I think, doing a thing we've all known they were very obviously doing, which is stonewalling the investigation into the release of the Epstein files to conceal alleged crimes.

• 3:40:01Speaker 06

  So in this report itself, I think, was sort of planned as the, I guess, like, October surprise that they ended up not really needing and was really, like, not covered by the media at all. But the report itself is interesting because it's a combination of information that had already been publicly available, but also stuff that had not really been made public before. No, yeah, there's, there's brand new, like, revelations in this. Yeah, and this is, and I say this quite genuinely, this is one of the most astonishing documents in the history of the United States. I cannot think of another time anything like this has ever happened.

• 3:40:45Speaker 06

  This is the members of the opposition party on the House Judiciary Committee accusing the President of the United States of participating in a sex trafficking ring and accusing the administration and the broader, the President and the broader administration of actively covering up those crimes. The allegations in here range from, like, bizarre redactions of, of the versions of the Epstein files that were released to the public that would, you know, that sort of withheld information that would implicate close Trump associates, most notably Powell and Poli, who was the global envoy for strategic partnership until October 15th of this year. The, the documents accuse Poli of, you know, facilitating and participating in sex trafficking.

• 3:41:30Speaker 06

  And the Democrats accuse Trump of concealing this and also of, in their questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell, who they also mentioned in this was, like, sent to a, like, really cozy, club-fed prison by the administration, they accuse the administration of deliberately steering interrogations of Ghislaine Maxwell away from discussing some of very specific allegations that, like, Ghislaine brought up by herself, and then the, the interviewers, like, immediately were like, no, no, no, don't talk about that, and moved her on to a different thing. So the document itself, there, this is sort of broad outline of the alleged sort of Trump-Epstein operation and how they allegedly use modeling agencies to work a sex trafficking ring. There were sections about the alleged cover-up by the Trump administration, the DOJ, and the FBI.

• 3:42:12Speaker 06

  There's a lot of going through very harrowing accounts of specific allegations from different women. I'm, I'm going to quote from this towards, like, at the very end of the document, quote, "The stakes of the Epstein-Maxwell conspiracy are monumental. Human trafficking, child abuse, and rape are among the most serious offenses our law recognizes. Government complicity in a cover-up to protect traffickers and rapists is criminal obstruction of justice and an intolerable offense against free society. Moreover, a president implicated in a sex trafficking operation is a president exposed, constantly vulnerable to blackmail by foreign governments and domestic criminals. The full extent of the President of the United States's involvement in criminal sex

• 3:42:56Speaker 06

  trafficking ring is inescapably to the utmost concern to Congress and the American people." And the document ends with calling for an investigation of Trump and other Trump allies and appointing a specific independent counsel to carry out the investigation. It is astonishing how little media coverage there was of this, of a few sites. Yeah. You know, I mean, a few outlets, like, New York Times was, like, on Blue Sky defending their coverage of it, in which they said that, you know, oh, yeah, there's a document released by the Democrats calling for, for an investigation. There are, like, rape allegations in this that, like, have not really been made public before. New. Yeah.

• 3:43:37Speaker 06

  And there, there was more coverage of Obama's joke about the Cheesecake Factory than there was. 100%. Yeah, about the Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee accusing the sitting President of the United States of being in league with Jeffrey Epstein, which I, I think, I think one of the things that it's kind of helpful to do was, like, I don't know, we're in this era where everything is so insane that it's very difficult to step back and think about what that would mean in literally any other period of American history. And I think one of the things that's become clear in, in the aftermath of this election is that this does look like the angle at which they're going to go after Trump, right?

• 3:44:22Speaker 06

  In, insofar as we're doing a sort of bringing Trump to justice thing. It, it looks like this is going to be, this is, like, at least how the House Judiciary Committee is going to go after him. And I think this changes, to some extent, the dynamics of previous Democratic attempts to go after Trump, because it's a lot harder to sort of brush this stuff off in the way that you could do with something like Russiagate, where regular people are pissed off about Epstein. Yes. And, like, even Trump's base is pissed off about Epstein in a way that they didn't, you know, they could just not give a shit about Russiagate. And, and I think this being the angle of attack changes, to some extent, some of the

• 3:45:03Speaker 06

  dynamics around what the political contours of, of a, like, actual prosecution of the Trump administration is. And also, now that these people are in control of the Judiciary Committee, there's going to be a lot more stuff being revealed. They are going to have control, to a much larger extent, of the investigation if they can get their independent counsel. Like, the stuff that has come out from the Epstein files about Trump already has been unbelievably damaging to him. And the stuff that we're getting is the, like, redacted versions of it, that that's the result of their sort of half-assed cover-up. The stuff that's going to be coming out of this, I genuinely can't even imagine.

• 3:45:45Speaker 06

  And so I think this is going to be, insofar as the Democrats are, like, going after him, I think this is going to be the angle that they come at him for. We'll talk a little bit more about that, and then one other non-election story after this ad break.

• 3:46:14Speaker 06

  And we're back. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what I think needs to happen in order for this, like, massive upset midterm victory to, like, matter in the long term, right? Because this is, this is good, and we've all spent our day or two celebrating what's happened, and I'm, I'm very happy that the Republicans got their asses kicked so badly. But we've also seen over and over again that, like, just beating them in an election, even, like, one that makes them very sad, does not bring long-lasting victory, right? We remember 2020, you know, that, that seemed like a good election. It seemed like things were going to at least move away from the Trump-y stuff, and then it absolutely didn't. It got much worse in 2024. And part of why it got much, or a big part of why it got much worse is the Biden administration

• 3:46:59Speaker 06

  did fucking nothing to punish Trump or any of his people for the crimes that they committed in office, for January 6th, for any of that. Merrick Garland completely shat the bed, and he was allowed to shit the bed because that was what Biden and the people in charge of the Democratic Party wanted. They did not want to risk going after Trump in a serious way and, you know, being seen as penalizing their political enemies. And that's become such a bugbear in liberal politics that, like, well, that's just not what we do here in America. We don't punish, you know, we, we beat them in elections, but we don't, we don't go after. I think Hakeem Jeffries had a quote that was along the lines of, like, "The American people don't want..." Us to get even. Yeah, they, they don't want us to get even, they want us to, to govern properly.

• 3:47:42Speaker 06

  And governing properly means, it's not even about getting even, it means punishing people for committing crimes against your society, right? The Trump administration, this is not just a case of, oh, well, these guys were bad at governing, it's the, they broke the law. Trump is repeatedly, like, massively engaged in fraud to the tune of billions of dollars that he has stolen from taxpayers and taken in foreign bribes. We know this, it's well documented. We know that, that under his leadership, the Department of Defense, the Department of War, or whatever you want to fucking call them right now, have committed crimes overseas. The war against Iran is definitely illegal. There's a number of policies. That fucking Hegseth has been responsible for that also should be seen as potentially criminal.

• 3:48:28Speaker 06

  In addition to this, you've just got the fact that there is a broader conspiracy among like the tech elite to get rid of democracy like and they've been pretty open about what they wanted to do about the fact that they are looking to create like a new governing structure that does not give regular people any sort of say, right? Peter Thiel is open about the fact that he wants dictatorships, a bunch of them balkanizing the United States, all of these things shouldn't be allowed to just sort of sit there like one of the things that does really worry me is that there's been some evidence that I've come across in the last couple of days that prior to the midterms, some people in Silicon Valley have been reaching out to Democrats, right? Because they can see which side their bread is buttered on. They know that things are like that. This was a bad bet.

• 3:49:11Speaker 06

  And that's proven to be a bad bet by 2026. And they need some Democrats on their side because they want the government on their side and like we, there's a lot of things we can't allow. We can't allow Trump to get away without accountability. We can't allow his kids to get away without accountability. We can't allow people like Pete Hegseth to get away without accountability. And we can't allow Silicon Valley to get away without accountability, right? There need to be people in fucking cages, right? At the very least, as the end result of this, and that's not something I think is going to happen in the next year or two. But what they can do, what Congress can do right now, the House has the ability to subpoena and investigate. Democrats have certainly enough of a lead in Congress that they can start if they, if they don't want to go for.

• 3:49:52Speaker 06

  And I can actually understand an argument for not trying to impeach Trump right now, given the fact that they tried a couple of times, although I kind of think they should try. But there are people they can't impeach, right? They can go after Hegseth, right? They can go after RFK Junior, right? Like, and these are people that they should go after. And if I see the Democrats making Elon Musk's life a living hell, right? If I see the Democrats like investigating Meta, investigating SpaceX, investigating like fucking Anderson Horowitz. If I, if I see stuff like that happening, if I see them at least trying to force RFK Junior and Hegseth out of office. If I see them trying to prosecute Hegseth once he gets forced out, I will at least feel like, okay, maybe,

• 3:50:36Speaker 06

  maybe they're showing the kind of guts they need for 2028 to actually lead to a conclusive victory, right? Because again, I don't think there's much of a possibility of punishing everyone who has broken the fucking law properly right now, but I do believe there is the potential that if they start right now and that if they begin that process, the Republicans have a lot more of an ability to, you know, obfuscate and interfere with that right now while they still have the presidency, while they still have the Supreme Court. But if the Democrats start fighting now and build that habit of fighting, then I will have a lot more faith that should they gain the executive branch, that they will start taking efforts to like extend that

• 3:51:18Speaker 06

  and to, to make sure that we're actually properly punishing these people because it's again, it's not about even vengeance, not that vengeance doesn't feel good. It's about self-defense and the only real self-defense at this point is making sure that none of these people can ever get close to power again. And that doesn't just mean kicking them out of office. It means locking them up. It means doing worse in some cases because treason exists and there's a prescribed punishment for that. And it means taking away their fucking money, right? Especially when we come to the Silicon Valley people, it means taking away every fucking ill-gotten dime they've gotten. And I think this is something that you can frame this in a way that does not sound like politics of vengeance to the average American conservative, right? Because that's not the message you want. There's too fucking many of them for one thing. That's not the message that's going to win anything.

• 3:52:04Speaker 06

  I think the message that will win anything is if you talk to both, you know, your liberal democratic progressive constituency and the chunk of, you know, conservatives and centrists who have voted off and on for Trump, but are not super committed far right and say, look, you are being hurt by these people. They have injured you. They have stolen from you. They have destroyed your livelihood. And we're going to not just hurt them for the sake of vengeance, we're going to hurt them to take their money and redistribute it to things that can help you and that can fix and repair the systems that have been hurting you. That's not just, again, how you punish your enemy. That's how you build a long lasting coalition by showing that like, no, no, no. Number one, I'm not just going after people who piss me off politically. I'm going after enemies of the republic.

• 3:52:47Speaker 06

  I'm going after people who have hurt you and who have hurt all of us. And I am going to stop them from being able to do that again. I'm going to punish them. I'm going to take what they've taken from you and I'm going to give it back to the people. I think that's, that's a line that you could actually build a durable and loyal electorate over, right? One thing the Trump heirs should have taught Democrats is that vengeance is really good politics. People like being promised that you're going to fuck up someone who's hurting them. The big thing that the Trump administration does, they just lied about who's causing the damage, about who's hurting Americans, about who's responsible for the problems in our society. They blamed it on trans people, on migrants, on fucking Hollywood wokes or whatever.

• 3:53:28Speaker 06

  And that's all fucking nonsense, but there are people who are continuing to cause tremendous damage to the average person in this country and to people all around the world. And if you, if you build a politics of vengeance against the people who are actually destroying life itself, I, I think that's good politics and it's also again, just basic self-defense. I think in terms of what the potential of this kind of politics is going forward. So what if, one of the fascinating things about this election is that the Republicans were dealt this world historic ass kicking. And the economy hasn't even collapsed yet. That's the thing. We, we have not seen the bottom of the support for these guys. Nope.

• 3:54:10Speaker 06

  We still haven't seen that yet because like they haven't, they, they haven't had their 2008 yet. And that is coming. The day in which the AI bubble bursts is a thing that we are going to see. And if you are already set up and positioning yourselves as the people who are going after all of these Silicon Valley fascist freaks who have been immiserating every single person in this country, except for themselves and their like narrow cadre of allies. And you are already doing that when everything blows up? That is an, that is an actual path to like fundamentally changing the material balance of political forces in the US. Because those people are going to be, that, that is going to be the most vulnerable they have ever been.

• 3:54:54Speaker 06

  Like since they came to power is going to be them in the position of, oh my God, we just blew up the entire global economy. Yep. And if you don't do the thing that Obama did, right? Which was Obama went to the bankers after 2008 and told them, I'm the only thing standing between you and a guillotine. Don't stand between the way them and a guillotine. Yeah.

• 3:55:12Speaker 06

  Right? If, if, if you don't do that, and if you go after these people and destroy them, actually destroy them as a class, just like completely annihilate their ability to like materially affect politics, materially affect society, we can, we can make this not happen again. Yep. Yep. Like there, there's a way to stop this. And part of it is you have to fucking stomp these people out like embers on a fucking carpet, right? Yeah. Like, anyway, so that's what I'll be looking for. If I see any signs at all that the Democrats are, and I have seen some signs, at least in terms of like what people who have been elected and reelected have been, have been stating recently.

• 3:55:56Speaker 06

  There are Democrats who want to do this, right? Now, there's probably going to be a conflict within the Democratic Party about that. Oh, yeah. Right? Like, there's definitely going to be a conflict about like, should we do, you can see that in what Hakeem Jeffries have said and how that sort of Yes. counters what, you know, people like Merkley have said. There, there is definitely a debate between some, some like Jeffries or even some things like Tyler Rico has been saying. Yeah. Tyler Rico said that he's quote, not interested in retribution, is more interested on delivering economically for Texans. But has also talked about, quote, rooting out corruption. Yep. And I think the corruption angle is really the, the thing that can thread the affordability, cost of living stuff with the genuine need to punish the Trump administration and Trump himself for all of the stuff they've done the past two years.

• 3:56:42Speaker 06

  And this has been something we've been talking about a lot in our kind of privately, in our own reactions to, to, to the results. Cause like, one of my first reactions after seeing kind of the scale of the Democrats victory. The worst case scenario for me was that if Democrats get this huge mandate and then don't really do anything like material like with it, if they just kind of coast on Yeah. Kind of bullshit, like performative anti-Trumpism, doing like a hear, like endless hearings or kind of impeachments that go nowhere. Because Democrats do really need to go after Trump, right? And they do need to like shatter the mega movement and they need to go after this federal administration, DHS, ICE, Department of War, right?

• 3:57:22Speaker 06

  And they, and they need, and they need to do that while setting things up to take power in 2028 to then send even more of these fucks to prison. But I think this, this does have to be, I think, in tandem with also doing the things they campaigned on, which is mostly on cost of living and affordability. Because I think if, if they don't at least put a, a focus on that, especially in like their messaging, but also that needs to be built on them actually doing real things. If, if that is not their focus, and I think anything they do to hurt Trump could be seen as just like posturing, like it could be seen as. Just trying to please liberal elites rather than like focusing on the concerns of people who cannot pay rent next month or can't afford groceries.

• 3:58:05Speaker 06

  So it is something that needs to, I think, be done carefully. And the anti-corruption aspect is, I think, the perfect way to tie these things together. Because the anti-corruption angle is a really easy way to talk about like these economic and class issues, which is directly connected to all of the ways that Trump has been engaging in corruption to help his billionaire friends, all the ways that the Trump sons have been doing insane, like insane corruption, right? Stuff that puts the Hunter Biden shit to like absolute shame. Jared Kushner, all the ways that companies have been siphoning tons of money sent into DHS to set up these like private prisons. Like, there's, the level of corruption, we haven't even reported on it enough, frankly, on this show, but the level of corruption in the Trump administration is absolutely

• 3:58:50Speaker 06

  wild. And that's a very easy way to tie affordability and cost of living to the need to hold Trump accountable. And I think beyond that, you also tie in the fact that fraud and scams have gotten so much massively worse. Silicon Valley is deeply tied, fucking, every AI company is complicit in massive fraud simply by making these models that are used to commit fraud on a massive scale, right? Beyond that, every social media company is complicit in massive fraud, particularly Meta. And then just beyond that, MLMs are the backbone in a lot of ways of Republican fundraising, or one of the major backbones of Republican fundraising. Well, Democratic fundraising too, unfortunately. And Democratic fundraising, unfortunately, too, which is why it's going to be hard to fucking go after them.

• 3:59:34Speaker 06

  But we need to, that's, that's one of the fucking reservoirs of fascism in our goddamn society, and we need to burn them out. Yeah. No, I think there's a way to do all that that doesn't get caught in this sort of like, these ideas of like revenge or retribution, but just justice and accountability, which I think people will be able to buy into more, especially if it's coupled with, with delivering on economic issues. And this is something I think out of everyone, El Sayed has kind of expressed this the most clearly. In response to a question on Morning Joe, he laid out how to pursue efforts to hold the Trump admin accountable from investigations into what led to the war in Iran and how Doge totally destroyed the FDA.

• 4:00:13Speaker 07

  We need to align everything we're doing with the goal of addressing the immediate pain that people are feeling at the pump, at the grocery store, in their lives. So there are investigations that are worth having. I want to understand exactly what led into the war in Iran. I think we need to understand exactly what that was. Why? Because it's costing us dearly in terms of the lives of our servicemen and women, in terms of the price of gas, in terms of the price of groceries. Similarly, you know, more niche story, but one that I've been paying attention to for a lot of reasons. In Michigan, we were dodging lettuce all summer. Why? Because of a cyclopes varus outbreak. And you think about that, and you're like, okay, so what decisions were made to Doge away the part of the FDA that is supposed to be the FDA?

• 4:00:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:00:57Speaker 07

  Like, make sure you're not eating lettuce that someone has defiled, right? And then we ate, you know, people were eating that, 8,000 illnesses, and the CDC's count was 2,000 cases behind the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services count. I want to understand exactly what happened there so we can set up legislation to solve the problem. So long as people see our politics as being about this red versus blue retribution game, all of us collectively lose. If you are focused on addressing the ways that bad decisions were made so that you can solve them, and then you solve them, that's where I think accountability has to stand.

• 4:01:30Speaker 06

  It's funny, because my kind of worst-case-scenario reaction was that, you know, Dems will just coast on performative anti-Trumpism. And if anything, I think pressure needs to be applied now, maybe a bit more in the other direction, now that I'm seeing more statements come out from senators-elect. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot of focus on, on really trying to deliver on the affordability thing. And frankly, there might actually need to be some more outside pressure on like, really, really, really sticking it to Trump DHS, Department of War. But I think there is, there is a way to do both these things at the same time. I think my, my other really big concern is that, one of the structural problems

• 4:02:12Speaker 06

  of the Democratic Party is that, in a similar way to, you know, the old nationalist party of China, the Kuomintang, the Camtay, which was, you know, the, a party that had both Mao in it and also like, a huge block of China's landlords at the same time? Where, like, you have like, the most, like, you have, you have the guy who is going to kill all the landlords and the landlords in the same party. And this is sort of the problem with, like, with, with, you know, they're saying like, delivering on affordability, and the Republicans are saying this now, but like, okay, how are you actually doing that? Because the thing is, right, the people who, the people who are making everything expensive, and the people who are making it so you can't pay your rent in the grocery stores, like,

• 4:02:57Speaker 06

  all the people who own those businesses, all of the people who, like, you know, the people who are driving rents up, like, they all make money, and they're all friends of a bunch of people in the Democratic Party. And so I think, I think this is the other thing we're going to hit, which is there's going to be a battle over like, okay, so we've all agreed we want price to go down, but how do you actually do that? What are the actual balance of class forces here? Because you're dealing with a situation where you have a movement that is based on working class anger, that has delivered this, that has delivered this victory, but then you have a party that is also, to a really, really significant extent, a represent, a representation of the people who are fucking over all of these workers.

• 4:03:39Speaker 06

  And that is, welcome, welcome, welcome to like, the new terrain of class struggle of the 21st century? No, I mean, it's exciting that we're even having these conversations more openly in a way that maybe we weren't 10 years ago. Something that like, you know, a lot of candidates did, or at least, Tyler Rico did campaign on things like universal pre-K. Yeah. Lots of candidates campaigned on ending, ending, you know, wars, data center moratoriums. There's, there's these sort of like reforms, right, that which, which will kind of chip away at certain things. But there are these like, much larger issues. And tackling corporate power is going to be, you know, bigger than just delivering universal childcare, right? And it's something, both those things are things that the Tyler Rico campaign was, was based on.

• 4:04:21Speaker 06

  That was kind of his, like, his initial kind of core plank was just like anti-corporatism. And once you're in office, you get hit with a lot of pressures that you don't get when you're just, you're just campaigning, and that type of stuff usually slides away. The fact that Bernie is still kicking after 10 billion years is, is kind of shocking in a certain way. Obama ran on, on getting rid of NAFTA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then spent his entire time in office, like, trying to pass war-free trade deals, and then his solution to 2008 was to do robo-signing and just have the banks literally steal people's houses. Like, yeah, this is the next fight. This is the next scripted episode I am like, working on. It's kind of, is on this question, because this doesn't mean that we just have to, you know, pray and hope and, you know, tweet blue-sky posts hard enough to, to keep Democrats

• 4:05:06Speaker 06

  to their promises or get them to fight capital. No, that requires real work and painful, painful work that we might not see the fruits of for a while. But I think there is momentum here, and that momentum needs to continue. And there's even something, you know, this is more of like a non-reformist reform, but something like the Protect the Right to Organize Act, which is in the Senate, is gaining support, even if that passes, right? That will strengthen the ability for workers to unionize in so many ways. Yeah. Undering tons of anti-union legislation from the past 70 years. And I think there, there is, you know, specific targeted things we can push for to, to start kind of rolling this boulder further and further. But, I mean, no, it's, it's, it's not, it's not going to be easy, it's not going to be quick. Yeah.

• 4:05:49Speaker 06

  Do you want to, I guess, close by talking about some ways that people are doing things? Not, not in the electoral sense? So let's, let's talk about alternate ways to remove a president from office. Yes. Now, while, while, while the US was having a, having a very nice election, a bunch of other places in the world were doing other things. So let's, let's begin with Paraguay in our, in our dispatches from a world in revolt. So we have talked a lot on this show about protests and the sort of uprisings that we've been seeing, how they've been, this accumulation of economic grievances, right? There are these things where there are, you know, people's anger over worsening the economic

• 4:06:31Speaker 06

  conditions and, you know, decades-long neoliberal dismantlement of the education system. Eventually, a single event happens and it boils over into a mass protest. Now, while we have been talking about this, I said a few weeks ago, we have not seen the second kind of mass uprising yet, which is the kind of mass uprising sparked by the instant collapse of a national economy that either, you know, increases the price of bread by 300% or makes everyone unable to access their money. And folks, we have our first the economy collapse uprising that has very quickly removed the president of Paraguay. So let's talk about what's actually happening in Paraguay and how right-wing president Santiago Peña is just gone as of, this is, this is actually a very recent update, as of Thursday,

• 4:07:16Speaker 06

  November 5th, he just resigned. So massive, massive protests engulfed Paraguay after a bank called Unile Bank, which is used by 60% of the population of Paraguay, was taken over by the central bank because they didn't have enough money to cover their reserves, which is to say they didn't have enough money to cover the amount. Of, you know, money that everyone had put into the bank. This means that the, the bank is just sort of gone now, right? All of the branches are shuttered, their, their phone trees are down. And this means that an unfathomable percentage of, of Paraguay's population was left simply unable to withdraw their money from a bank. Famously, something that never leads to anything bad happening. Oh.

• 4:08:02Speaker 06

  Or anything that leads to a general revolt. However bad you think this is, is so much worse than that. Like, Unio manages the state pension fund. It manages the healthcare fund that like state workers, and I think other workers too, pay into. And it also like manages the fund that's like paying for like Portugal's like dam system. Hmm. It is a nightmare. And partially, so Unio had been like a bank before that, but it had sort of rebranded around the time that, that, that right wing president Santiago Peña came to power. Peña himself is a longtime banker and financier who came under fire last year for holding a bunch of shares in this bank.

• 4:08:45Speaker 06

  And then also appointing the head of Unio to be the head of the central bank, which is the bank that's supposed to be regulating Unio. And they put the president in charge of the central bank. This, this has gone exactly as, as, as well as you would expect it to. And by as well as you would expect it to, I mean, Unio then turned around and loaned tens of millions of dollars to businesses of friends of the bank owners. And these, these loans just went belly up because obviously they're not getting paid back. And so, you know, the, the bank like, like really, really far below the mandatory reserve limit, which is the amount of money that you're just legally required to have on hand so that you don't get into a situation where people try to take their money out and you can't pay them.

• 4:09:29Speaker 06

  They were also lying about their debts and assets. And there's a bunch of things that they were claiming were assets that are actually just, they owe people money. So the central bank of Paraguay seizes control of the bank because they're like, oh my God, you're under the, you're massively under the reserve limit, you're going underwater. And they look at the books and it's even worse than they thought it was. And they basically liquidate the bank and are like, oh my God, we have to sell off all this bank's assets to try to like give people their money back. But this has caused another crisis where the government was like, ah, the banking system's going to be fine. We're going to move all your people who only have your money in this bank to other banks. But that meant that like 250,000 people were trying to pull their money out of, out of other banks, which caused like some minor crises in those banks.

• 4:10:10Speaker 06

  You know, this obviously resulted in massive protests, a bunch of people lighting stuff on fire. Peña resigned before he could be impeached. There is an impeachment vote coming. He also resigned before he could be hung from a lamppost. It's real bad. This is, I think, an interesting case of the kind of personalized corruption that we've been talking about. That, you know, with the Trump regime, with their connections to big tech and with their connections to, you know, like Saudis and the UAE and all of these kinds of different tech and finance monopolies. Where, you know, you have these regimes that are deeply connected to extremely risky loans in the finance sector. And then it's, you know, the entire situation blows up in their faces. And I think we're going to see a lot more of like this specific kind of uprising going

• 4:10:53Speaker 06

  forward where Peña was out so fast, right? I think he lasted like five days of protests before he just had to resign because it was his guys who he put in power from his specific, the domain of expertise as a banker who just blew up the entire economy. I think we're going to see a lot more of like this kind of uprising going forward. And yeah, you can remove presidents through ways that aren't elections. And to sort of close things out here, let's talk about another thing that's not an election. And let's talk about finally, that one million person Wildcat general strike that I, I teased at the beginning of the episode. And that strike is going on in Bangladesh.

• 4:11:35Speaker 06

  Bangladesh is home to one of the world's largest and most important textile sectors. This is also a very kind of like low wage, high labor textile industry. And it is, you know, it has been one of the engines of the Bangladeshi economy, which is to say that it is an engine of absolutely heinous exploitation. People may be familiar with the horrifying Rana Plaza collapse, which killed over a thousand people in 2013. And a lot of people who were killed were garment workers who were working at one of the five garment factories that was contained in this giant skyscraper high-rise thing that collapsed. You know, this is also a sector where the buildings frequently light on fire and kill a hundred people.

• 4:12:17Speaker 06

  It is brutal and devastating. And that has led to a really quite militant labor movement, but not a labor movement in the way that you see it in a lot of other places. It is a lot of Wildcat strikes. It is a lot of like, kind of old school, like, like, you know, stuff you would say in like the 1800s in the US of just like, fuck it, we're all walking off the job and we're all going to go fight our employers because they're killing us. So as of like Thursday, November 5th, people seem to be going back to work to some extent. But there was almost a million workers like on, either on strike or unable to go to work because the strike had closed 500 of Bangladesh's 2,500 garment factories.

• 4:13:02Speaker 06

  Now, the government has been forced to appoint a minimum wage board. The, the specific demand here is they want to pay increase from, they want the minimum wage, which most, a lot of these workers are minimum wage workers, to go from $100 a month. Jesus. To $250 a month because of cost of living increases. Yeah. And like, this is, this is, this is a sector of four million people. This is a sector that is the size of like a small country. And these are people making a hundred dollars a month. They are working 50 to 60 hour weeks. And if, if you want to work out whether or not that's more than the $2.50 a day that's supposed to be the, the like absolute poverty indicator, you can, you can work that out yourself.

• 4:13:47Speaker 06

  It's, it's horrifically bleak. And they're asking for something that's so far from the American minimum wage that it breaks my fucking heart. Like they're talking about like, you know, maybe like $10 a day, like not an hour a day, right? And obviously purchasing power is stronger there, it's not that much stronger. And it's weird because they're largely described as protests, but if you read the actual accounts of what's happening, it's like, no, this is a general strike and people setting up roadblocks. It's still in a situation where there's been very heavy police repression. We're still in a situation where these could spark up at any time because, so the government like said it was going to do this wage board thing to like look at the minimum wage, but it hasn't, they haven't committed to raising the wage.

• 4:14:31Speaker 06

  And, you know, they're, they're trying to, they're trying to set this for December when they're hoping that these protests will have calmed down and that the workers in this strike will have gone back to work. We're going to see how this goes. And finally, we're going to talk about briefly, I want to mention, this is probably going to get covered more next week, which is that there's one more general strike in France, which is an official, I think it's a one day general strike that was called by a bunch of the sort of nominally left wing unions. I say nominally left wing because you could do an entire doctoral thesis on every single time that the UGC has specifically prevented like the world from being a better place. But yeah, I, the estimate, this is happening like as, kind of as we speak, the estimates I think are like 600,000 people in the streets.

• 4:15:16Speaker 06

  The unions are saying 1.3 million, which is conceivable. This is obviously like, this is another sort of like cost of living strike that's also being done in sort of concert with the student movement. The student movement has, you know, they're still in the, in the streets fighting. We're going to see to what extent this can be mobilized. Somewhat counterintuitively, Macron has been trying to make sure that protests are sponsored by unions because the unions are people he can negotiate with to get people out of the streets. And so he's been attempting to pass measures to make it illegal to like have a protest that's not sponsored by an NGO or a union. So there is an extent to which this strike can function as a way to contain the energy of, of these revolts and a way to channel them into politics doesn't do anything, which

• 4:16:00Speaker 06

  is kind of the UGC specialty, is get everyone out of the street and then lose the election. This is their famous strategy in 1968. Yeah, but we're, we're, we're going to, we're going to see where this goes. And also presumably there's going to be a bunch of more protests over the weekend. We don't know yet, we're recording this on Thursday, but we will, yeah, we will, we will update you on whether Macron is hiding in a bunker again. That does it for us today. It's time to stop thinking about voting for at least the weekend, which will be nice. Put a trans go on your couch and remember, only six years ago, our president was also hiding in a bunker from us. We reported the news.

• 4:16:44Robert Evans?

  We reported the news.

• 4:16:51Robert Evans?

  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 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on.

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