Recent Mass Shootings in North America

This is an IHART podcast guaranteed human qual media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here I'm Garrison Davis . This show originally focused on the potentiality of a second American civil war and the conditions or events that might set one into motion. And we will return to that topic later this episode. But first, let me introduce my guest , friend of the pod artist and noted live streamer, Bailey Newposter . I don't like that that's what we're attributing to me nowadays, but that's, you know, that's fine. That's fair . Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming back on the show. Let's start main topic . Last summer, President Trump announced a UFC championship fight at the White House in twenty twenty six as a part of the festivities for America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday . The event was initially planned to take place on july fourth , but last October, Trump announced it was rescheduled to take place on Flag Day , june fourteenth , which coincides with his eightieth birthday . Income Memorial Day, a giant claw like canopy was being wrecked on the South Lawn right in front of the White House . The event officially titled UFC Freedom two hundred fifty , had a lower capacity than originally envisioned, just four thousand attendees , far from the twenty five thousand spectators on the White House grounds that Trump pitched last summer . The four thousand seats in the miniature stadium arena were invite only . Most tickets went to members of the military while Trump had a thousand tickets to give out at his discretion , though there were eighty five thousand free tickets to watch the fights on big screens from the Ellipse Park near the Washington monument. USC Free Emptifty was streamed on Paramount Plus and began with Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walking together from the Oval Office to the Octagon . Zack Brown song the National Anthem featuring a military flyover . This was a sixty million dollars production with fireworks, dirt bike tricks, and music by the US Marine Band , which played Trump's favorite song YMCA Billionaires like David Ellison and Marcus Zuckerberg were in attendance, along with members of Trump's cabinet and politicians . Before the first fight, USA announcer Bruce Buffer kicked things off in a way that really encapsulated the entire event and I'll show you this clip here and I'll have the audience listen to the audio from the south barn of the White House in Washington , D C for USC Freedom two fifty Presented by RAM trucks, nothing stops Ram and by crypto dot com the world's leading cryptocurrency platform . It's sponsorships on the White House lawn. Let's go dude. Crypto shutouts literally within thirty seconds of like the actual event like starting after the anthem, like when the fight starts , within thirty seconds, we get cryptocurrency ads. And I mean, the stage was covered in logos for red white, and blue monster energy, meta rumble , the far right video streaming platform , crypto. com , as mentioned , stake gambling , and of course polymarket . UFC fighters were actually paid in the form of a crypto coin called USD one issued by the Trump family's own crypto company, World Liberty Financial . Awesome. Crypto all the way in this event . But UFCre Fedom fifty went off largely without a hitch, save for a stunt pulled by UFC heel Josh Hokit after winning his heavyweight match where he called Michelle Obama a man while being interviewed by Joe Rogan that's that's probably one of my favorite conspiracy theories. The Michelle Obama is a man. It's pretty old. People have been writing that for like over a decade. That's a classic. I like the ones that mix it with Michelle Obama is a man and Obama used to be a woman. Those are the ones that I really respect. It's a solid straight tea for tea relationship there. Yeah. Joe Rogan never addressed this comment for the rest of the night and the UFC cut out this comment from Hokkit from the YouTube upload and has been issuing takedown requests across social media. UCEO Denin White told Time Magazine that he's quote completely against saying nasty and false things about people's families. Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense, unquote . But according to the FBI, this event could have gone very differently . On the morning of Tuesday, june sixteenth, the DOJ announced that the FBI and law enforcement had prevented a mass casualty attack attempting to kill government officials with five arrests in multiple states over that weekend . Early reports framed the alleged plot as a sophisticated multi step plan involving explosives, drones, and snipers. Vice President JD Vance addressed the alleged terror plot on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, saying, quote, so much of the far left rhetoric is driving itself towards violence . Let's take a listen . This is a very, very dark stuff. This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up so loud that disagreeing with somebody is a cause for violence. That's the place that we've come to, unfortunately, I think a lot of my Democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum? Maybe they can do something different. His eyes are getting like deeper set . Like he looks waxier and waxier as the days go on. Maybe just he doesn't get thicker eyelider . Or maybe he's moved to eyes shadow . That's possible. That is which is the sensible move. Yeah, you start off with eyeliner, it doesn't look good. And then you realize what I should really be doing is eyeshadow. Imagine tears streaking down his face and his eye . Midwest Evo. Oh Midwest Evo. Shiver up ran my spine . So according to the vice president, this alleged terror plot was coming from the Democrat side of politics and simply the result of them turning up political rhetoric. Fox News reported that upwards of twenty three people were involved in this plot , five of whom are currently in custody , with the details of the plan being uncovered on the encrypted messaging app signal. Fox News claimed the thwarted attack was targeting capitalism, billionaires, and APAC. JD Vance also mentioned how the administration is going after the terrorist funding networks facilitating this kind of viol ence. We're trying to look at the underground networks that drive towards this violence. twenty three people do not get to the point where they're going to commit a mass terror incident in Washington, DC without some serious funding, without some serious coordination. And we've actually been trying to go with those networks of coordination because this is a this a terrorist plot. That's not a few guys doing crazy stuff. That is a coordinated planned terrorist plot. Thank God we for warded it, but we got to do more of that stuff. According to the charges announced by the DOJ , Tyson Proper, nineteen years old of Ohio, Brian Rau, twenty four of California, Michael Thomas , thirty two of California, Daniel Eskridge, thirty two of Missouri , and Abraham Alvarez, thirty one of Nebraska all conspired to plan and execute a mass casualty tar ofget eventsing politici ans and other quote unquote high value targets at the UFC Freedom two hundred fifty event. The co conspirators allegedly planned to use drones to drop unspecified explosives on the north side of the UFC arena , forcing event attendees to evacuate south where other co conspirators would be set up with sniper rifles to fire on the fleeing crowd. It's sort of a real shame that the Iowa Interactive guys aren't making another hitman game for a minute. A lot of this is like very hitman , very yeah, very agent forty seven's type stuff . And as we get more into the plan, it's going to get increasingly video gamey. Yeah, yeah. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, quote, the FBI, our law enforcement partners andS att IUorneys did what they do every day to make America safe through quick response and vigilance in investigating, disrupting, and dismantling this alleged plan before it could be carried out. FBI Director Kat Patel said, quote, thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners and the DOJ, in a multi state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody, and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold. While the results represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing out of the ordinary for this law enforcement team. We are built to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens, unquote. And he said all that without blinking those big wet eyes of his . I think this was mostly in the form of a tweet. So it sounds like the FBI did a darn fine job preventing this terrorist attack except what happened here was not the result of the FB I's excellent investigative prowess . They did not just stumble across this attack because of their diligent , diligent efforts to disrupt terrorist planning. Law enforcement only learned about this potential attack because on june tenth , the mother of one of the co conspirators called local law enforcement in Ohio concerned about her son's recent firearm purchases and contact with individuals online. Officers went to their family home and spoke with nineteen year old Tyson Proper and his family. According to the criminal complaint, a family member told officers that Proper had quote recent ly met random people online and quit his job in preparation to conduct unquote missions and quote unquote recons with these individuals as soon as that upcoming weekend , Proper allegedly spent about three thousand dollars of his graduation money to buy quote, camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition, extra magazines , and plate carriers, unquote. The family turned all this equipment over to the police voluntarily. After local law enforcement interviewed Proper and his family , Tyson Proper was transported to Dublin Springs Mental Health Center . And I think this is quite notable is that they did not take him into custody , but was transferred to a mental hospital . In the DOJ announcement, they refer to this as a medical facility , but in court documents they specify it's a mental health facility. And the criminal complaint says quote, Law enforcement submitted an application for an emergency admission based on his homicidal ideations , detailing that Proper had been thinking about joining the military or police force with the goal of being able to kill people unquote . I like that it's always like these guys , no matter what political ideology they have, at one point, they're like, maybe I should just fucking join the military, maybe I should just join the police. I just really want to fucking shoot people. It's like I want a cause. I want like a duty. Yeah, I believe that 's sort of kind of more like floaty mindset. I think there's more of a factor here than like any specific political ideology in a sense. And we'll get into that once we once we talk about the way that this group envisioned itself, like the role that it had on starting a second American Revolution . But there's very little like defined ideology happening with these individuals. And for someone like Proper, there's a large degree of delusional thinking at play here. Yeah, it's guys who want to do missions. Yeah, exactly. Like they want to do missions and recon. It's very aesthetically based on the military and this idea of like tactics . And we'll get into this sort of like military fetishism later on as well. But yeah, it's it's very much like very, very video gamey, very much like I want to plan like a mission to do in real life like what we play in video games. That is that's the sort of feeling across reading about their plan because their plan is relatively complicated and there's no way that they could have pulled a plan like this off. Like this type of plan would be hard for a nation state to be able to do successfully. There's no way that like five guys from like across the United States with like a, you know, nerdy focused like and tactical kit would be able to like do this . About like halfway through planning, they would have given up and all gone gay, probably . What do what do you mean gone gay? Well, they would have would have turned into I was just thinking like, you know , really quitting your job. This guy quits his job to meet his online friends, you know, go hang out with them in the woods. That's like more positive out of yeah fifty fifty like they either try to plan a mass terror attack or they like all end up like kissing and stuff, you know? I mean, yeah, camp having a gay camp out in the woods is the more positive path for people like this. Yes, because that's really all they need is just a group of friends to go camping with. Well, I do I do, like how Vance and them are talking about it. They're like, we fuck got these guys who are definitely going to try and shoot up UF our UFC event because they were going to successfully do it if we didn't stop them. And it's like, if you look at the kid, it's like a mentally ill teenager. Yes . And as we will also get into, you know, far from this like left wing anti capitalist motivation, which JD Vans and Fox News are promoting , that is not at all what was going on here. So the day after Tyson Proper was admitted to the mental health facility , the sheriff's off contacticered the FBI. After searching Proppers' phone, investigators found signal chats detailing a planned attack with maps highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. According to the criminal complaint, Tyson Propper's family saw him researching and mapping locations around Washington, DC , and when asked what he was doing , he said that he intended to conduct quote unquote recon and quote unquote hit and run missions. Hit Run missions . Awesome, dude . That's fantastic . I would do GTA five online like heist , like prerequisite missions before we go blow up this UFC event . So on june eleventh , the FBI searched Propers home and found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a list of approximately forty six names, including celebr ities and politicians , as well as pages quote, in which Proper wrote that the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children and others to a demonic figure, unquote. Awesome for going . It's getting better. It's getting better . So yes, this is obviously evidence of like delusional thinking. Like this is not this is not someone who's doing well and this is also not your typical rhetoric from a Democratic politician considering the claims made by Jadie Vance . This is not this is not regular democratic politician rhetoric . The proper's family told the FB I that he recently began interacting with a group of people online who, quote, represented themselves as ex military and that may share some Christian based ideology, unquote. The family believed that these people online were using religion to manipulate proper and that they quote expressed ultra religious and anti government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the watering communities and other government actions . So rather than sort of general like left wing anti capitalist or rhetoric from Democratic politicians motivating this attack . This is very general kind of libertarian esque anti government sentiments . And this as we will discuss, this group did not consider itself on the right or the left, but saw themselves as American patriots more than anything else . And they were upset about government corruption and had this anti establishment kind of leaning that was pushing them to plan complicated and far fetched attacks against the establishment and corrupt politicians. This is very average guy who sells cars ideology. Yes. Oftentimes when people like read through these sorts of court documents , they'll be like they had an incoherent ideology. And you're like, it's not really incoherent, right? They're responding to real things in the world. Like everyone knows we're all being fucked over. Government did mishandle the Epstein files. There is a lot of corruption, right? And it does exist on both sides of the political spectrum. So like they are responding to real things, but there's not an avenue that's being channelled in a helpful or useful direction. So it gets dispersed through these very lurpy, like idealistic, violent avenues where you get a group of people who don't really know what to do, but are seeing these problems in the world . And then what they end up doing is lurping themselves into federal custody by typing on signal about their dreams to shoot politicians. Spending their college money on guns. Yeah . Now the criminal complaint in Ohio for Tyson Proper also specifies that family members highlighted concerning statements he'd made in recent months on social media , quote, such as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti Semitic comments on Facebook, unquote. Wow , left wing . Well, they are national socialists after all. True, true . We will return to discuss Tyson proper and the alleged attack on U FC two hundred after this outbreak Okay, we are back . On june eleventh, the FBI interviewed Proper at the Mental Hospital, where he admitted to planning an attack on the Freedom two fifty event at the White House. The FBI ran their search own of Proper's phone and on the encrypted messaging app simplex found messages identifying possible targets. The criminal complaint alleges that in mid May, Proper identified a senator from Tennessee and wrote quote, She's taken money from the pro Israel lobby and supports them, unquote . A few weeks later, Propper sent pictures of four members of Congress apparently taken from the Track APAC website, writing, quote , These are the people we're going to focus on. Proper allegedly told police that members of this group that were planning the attack were primarily recruited through TikTok , where members shared photos and videos of tactical kits and physical training via TikTok direct messages . Once a recruit had proven himself on TikTok, they were then let into a quoteote unqu vetted signal chat . So glad this isn't happening on my video, app of choice, Instagram reels. I really I really don't want to start restricting that. The TikTok aspect is super interesting because there's elements of this that's similar to the accelerationist like Nazi terrorism of twenty sixteen to twenty twenty. These people are not explicitly Nazis even if there's an aspect of anti Semitism kind of directing this violence. But this is anti Semitism that's largely focused on the role that Israel has in influencing the U. S. government and the Israel lobby and politicians taking money from Israel. That's where most of the antisemitic aspect comes from. And then in Proper's case, he is posting about Hitler on Facebook . But this is not driven by like neo Nazi style anti Semitic ideology. Like these guys aren't posting about San and Rads or Germany or race science. At least that's not what's outlined in the court documents . So some of this does feel downstream from the acceleration Nazis like the base and Adam Waffen and their target selection that we'll get into in a sec kind of also is similar to this. But they're not primarily organizing this one like telegram, right? This is guys posting shooting videos in tactical kit on TikTok and that's how they meet each other is through TikTok, sharing videos of their plate carrier and doing shooting drills . And then they start talking and they start planning these sorts of operations as they call them , and then they move to signal to plan these things more in depth. Proper's phone contained a large signal chat with approximately nineteen individuals , along with smaller chats consisting of four to five people that were divided based on role assignments and locations . In these chats, the group discussed exit, escape, and evasion resources for the Freedom two fifty attack , including the location of potential safe houses. One of the signal chats was titled Hunters , which the complaint says quote contained detailed instructions for carrying out the attack and plans to safely escape . Proper showed the FBI the TikTok profiles of other co conspirators . And based on this, investigators were able to identify someone in California and someone in Missouri . The guy in Missouri , Daniel Eskridge had the username Fulcrum Resist on TikTok and they were able to identify him because he followed himself from another account with his legal name . And the account with his legal name largely just reposted the tactical videos from at Fulcrum Resist . Like reposting your own videos and being like, I don't know, this guy looks pretty sick. This guy looks like I had it in dope. Have you guys seen this guy shooting? Oh my God, I bet he's gonna do something crazy one day. This guy has a wife and five kids. Oh my gosh. She's like, I think it's like thirty two years old. He lives on a rural property about an hour north of Kansas City . And he's he's kind of the most interesting guy in this whole deal for me. The FBI was also able to identify coconspirators based on information in the Simple X messages given to them by proper . Now one of these simple X group chats was called Vanguard of the Old Republic . Don't yes This was the main name that this group used to refer to themselves. Was Vanguard of the Old Republic. And there was another simple X chat that was called Vanguard of the Old Republic Parentheses ops stage one , which was their which was like a which was like a you know an op planning chat. Awesome . That's so dope . I'm gonna read some messages from Fulcrum , that is Daniel Eskridge of Missouri . He wrote that the vanguard of the old Republic should intend to quote recruit operators into this group and start making teams to complete tasks and objectives to push our lions forward. So good . Quote , the definition of a vanguard is the leading group in an advancing army or the foremost pioneers in any field, movement, or industry , that is what we strive to be . This chat here will be insulated for the most part from each team's detailed plan. So we won't post exact details in this chat . This will be the main chat for everyone as we grow and we will have specific ops chats. Our goal is in a general sense to quote restore the old Republic. Our constitutional republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians, and foreign actors . They have usurped power from the people and concentrated it at the top to the point that we now live in late stage quote unquote democracy. When I say restore the old Republic, I'm not talking about all the flaws that we had in the past times, but merely talking about the fact that in a constitutional republic, the people truly hold the power, and that's what we intend to restore. To get there, this country needs more fuel on the fire to show our fellow Americans that the time has come to stand up and reclaim that power . May twenty second, twenty twenty six. Oh my god, people who are on like the Star Wars Wiki forum like way too much. Like I'm on the what is it? Wikipedia? Wikipedia? Yeah, Wikipedia mod Another co conspirator named Michael Thomas of California wrote quote, to be clear, I intend to escalate this group and I don't want to take six business years to do it, unquote. Six business years. He's making it sound more professional. That's a lot so much of this is like Larpie, right? They're using all these like, you know, the sort of like tier one operator terms, which we'll get into in a second, like, you know, missions. They want it to sound professional six business years. A business year is the same as a regular year. It's not good . But Thomas also wrote that everyone in the group should quote consider yourselves an enemy of the state and discussed imagining executions . Another co conspirator named Brian Rau of California wrote about the need for quote unquote guerrilla style warfare and quote unquote raid attacks with quote skilled operators to work like ghost s to conduct infiltration missions unquote . Yes . Very hit man, very agent forty seven. Right, right. These are frankly just like totally totally delusional. The criminal complaint says that Thomas and Rao met at least once in the last month in Southern California to quote practice marksmanship and tactics. Michael Thomas of California described different tiers of operators within the v anguard of the old Republic. And this is largely taken from like military terms. Quote, Tier I operators may be asked to put themselves in harm's way, break the law, and potentially go into hiding. Tier II would cons ist of getaway drivers, drone operators, and direct support , may still be asked to seriously break the law. Tier three may be a runner or part of the underground railroad , indirect support, recruitment, supply, logistics , tech, still active contributing, but most likely safe from legal issues. Tier four Social Media influencers, protesters, funders, press , followers. Nobody is being asked too much or taking any risks . Tier one status is not something to take lightly. You will be sacrificing for your country and carrying a brunt of the weight . We will try to break them out of jail if we need to, unquote . Oh my God, dude This is this is kind of them at their Larpiest. When they're talking about like four different tiers of operators and it's like you and like at, you know, at the most like nineteen of your internet buddies and kind of at the least kind of you and your five closest friends talking about how you want to like wage insurgent warfare against the government. They're structuring their discord ser ver. Yeah, here you go . Yes, that is that's what's happening just not on discord, but on simple X and Signal . But like a lot of people like know guys like this, right? These are guys in their twenties or thirties who played a lot of like tact military video games who have this sort of military tactical fetishism and they're looking for like an outlet for this combined with this anti establishment sentiment that is based on very real things happening out in the world , but it has nowhere to be directed, so they just do this LARP and eventually wind up in federal custody and get charged with conspiracy to commit murder on the White House grounds. Fulcrum, Daniel Eskridge of Missouri wrote, quote , So right now in the historical timeline, I believe we are at the trigger event point . Meaning to set this off, we need an event or events that ca peopleused to realize the revolution has officially begun . So this is what the group intended to do. They intended to execute attacks that served as trigger events to cause this sort of mass like upswell of support for a second American revolution. They didn't call it a civil war, they called it a second American Revolution . And that is how they envision themselves as being the operators that will do trigger events to put this all into motion. It's kind of similar to like the Boogaloo Boys type stuff from , you know, five, six years ago . This group allegedly talked about attacking power grids with a fleet of dr ones to hit specific transformers and discussed assassinating several US senators, House Representatives, and prominent business executives. So this sort of target selection, very similar to the base and Adam Waffen and like, you know, neo Nazi accelerationist terrorism from around like the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty two type era . The group did debate how they should choose assassination targets with Fulcrum writing, quote , We need to make sure someone that can't be easily turned into a right versus left thing. We want someone both sides would celebrate, would cheer and support us for taking out . Both sides would celebrate us shooting up this one guy like this one guy's weird America birthday event like what he what did I mean, I think what they're pulling on from here is stuff like the Luigi Mangioni incident . Right. They're trying to identify like and I find this purpose to be very interesting because a lot of these guys do have this sort of like Christian nationalist or like Christian like libertarian it's kind of unclear but definitely have this like Christian element to their motivation. They see themselves as patriots , but they do not explicitly associate themselves with like the right or the left, right? They see themselves as kind of like outside politics . But I find this aspect to be rather interesting when they're trying to specifically find targets that will allow for both people on the right and left to like cheer them on or like join in on like a second American revolution . This does push them towards a talking a lot about like APAC backed politicians and unnamed prominent business executives . Their names are redacted in their criminal complaint . But I'm sure that's, you know, it's Black rock. It's well , it could be people like Jeff Bezos or like Elon Musk and it doesn't we it's not totally clear, but I'm assuming that's the sort of range in which they're discussing. Fulcrum texted quote, so the goal here is to get at least three trigger event ops fully planned and manned and to the best of our ability to have them executed on the same day or in rapid succession so that our message is undeniably clear to our illegitimate government and our fellow Americans that we are waging war . We don't need to wait for resistance infrastructure, supply lines, and all these other things. That's what every other group in this movement is working on, and I'm sure one of them will be able to get it right . But they can't do that without mass support and they won't get mass support as long as people think all anyone is doing is holding signs and chanting. All we need is three small groups of fully committed operators with a fully fl eshed out and perfectly formulated plan and all real world on the ground intel they will need for each op to be successful . Once we've decided on what three events would provide the most impact and bring in the most support, we will create special chats for those ops specifically so that only the people on those ops know the details unquote. All of this planning just for one nineteen year old mitig got to I got to invite my my mentally ill nineteen year old buddy into this group chat so he can his his mom can get really worried that's how a lot of this stuff goes . And like I don't want to , I don't want to diminish the possible harm that a group like this could cause. I think something that Robert pointed out last week when discussing this on executive disorder is like this group could have easily spawned like one or two like mass shooters, right? They could have acted on a plan that was way too difficult to pull off that caused a lot of collateral damage, right? This group could have done something very bad . This group could have set a plan into motion that ended up killing or wounding a bunch of people or driving people towards other sorts of violent acts, right? Because they're encouraging each other to like buy weapons, buy kit, you know, do all these things, right? So there was a potential for real harm here ? Was the UFC Freem two hundred and fifty event ever in serious harm from these people? Absolutely not. There was no way they were able to pull off their plan , as we will soon discuss. But first , let's go on another ad break . Okay, we are back . I have one more encrypted message from Fulcrum or Daniel Eskrit of Missouri. Exciting. Quote, I can't speak for everyone in saying we're tired of not making shit happen and tired of being ruled over by treasonous pedophilic criminal politicians and foreign agents, unquote . The Fulcrum wrote that what they're doing is not only our birthright but also our duty as Americ . It's about time the elites in the government are reminded of why they should fear the people, especially the American people . Unquote Eskridge wrote that the American people is the largest standing army in the world with one hundred and seven million gun owners . He also believed that half of the military would join their cause and not follow quote unquote unlawful orders after the second American Revolution kicks off , and that following a successful trigger event operation, potentially three percent of the U. S. population would stand with their group, writing that just like America's forefathers, quote, what we do here will reverberate around the world and echo throughout history long live the Republic, unquote. God . So that's the most we know about the group formation and the sort of drivers that they themselves are disgusting. Let's close by getting back into the UFC Freedom two hundred fifty attack plan . the Because more that I learned about this plan, the more it became clear that this would just simply never happen. This is not a feasible operation. It would be hard for a special Ops military team to pull this off at this location, let alone five of your TikTok friends to pull this off . And like the plan to target Freedom two hundred and fifty really only kicked off a week before the event was scheduled to take place . Well, there's your issue guys . If you had a little maybe a month's heads up , you know, maybe you could have gotten something going . On june seventh , Fulcrum messaged the vanguard of the old Republic about using the White House UFC event to take out quote unquote high value targets . In his message, he mentioned communication with quote unquote other groups and said that the UFC attack would require cooperation from everyone and that they would need to quote put a hold on the other ops that were currently being planned . Quote, we need five teams of three. Each team ist consing of one sniper, one tier one operator as support slash lookout, and one drone operator unquote . As a part of the planning, they needed to pick five locations ideal for quote precise sn iper shots and for the drone pilot to operate from. Fulcrum wrote Once each team is mission ready, the green light will be given and the drone rigged with explosives will fly and they will initiate the attack, unquote . So after the explosives detonate , the attention will be quote on the skies and not the rooftop snipers . Who will then eliminate quote unquote high value targets? Oh also , I feel like the skies and rooftop targets are remarkably close. Kind of in the same sort of same sort of range. Racket I'm feeling if you're looking up, you might see on the roof. I don't know . No, even the idea that you can get a sniper on a rooftop anywhere close to the White House without getting your head blown off is like insane, right? Lee, there's just no way that's going to happen. You're not going to be able to get a sniper on a roof within a sightline of the White House. I mean, following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, I can see why people might think it's easier to set up a sniper location than one might expect. The White House is like the most defended place in the country. Like especially at an event like this where there's even more security , I just don't see how this is in any way feas ible The group believed that there would be a protest outside of the event and that this would help allow quote unquote extraction teams to evacuate the quote unquote operators to a location out of state after successful completion of mission objectives. Fulcrum wrote, If we are successful, this could be the first battle of the Second American Revolution. Who is willing to be able to drop everything and be one of these ten operators? And who is confident and capable of flying drones? June seventh, ten twenty eight PM nineteen year old, raise your hand. Please come to bed. No, no honey. I've been chilled I've been activated. I got to go . My friend you know those friends have been hanging out in the woods with? I got to go. They need me . Even if this group got enough quote unqu ootperateors to pull up this mission, which is highly questionable, if not impossible . They simply did not have the funds, the materials, or the resources to carry out an attack like this , let alone the skill or logistical capacity. Fulkrum texted the group quote, we also need to come up with one thousand three hundred dollars ASAP . We need to come up with one thousand three hundred dollars . You can't just pull that. What? This guy has three kids in a wife and can't pull five kids and he can't pull like expensive week we have Oh true, true. Yeah, but you're gonna die you're gonna die like he's gonna he knows he's going to die. He's lurping like he's gonna get out, but he knows he's gonna die and he can't be like, I will go and I'll sell some bullshit and I'll get like one thousand three hundred dollars. We got a fund. Do it. Do you find a credit card? Yeah, this is Anyone have a credit card ? No, quote, thirteen hundred dollars gets us the drones and the charges . We should all pitch in and we need it to ASAP. What kind of drones are they getting? Like is this Amazon you look up drone on there? What? I'm just picturing like the drones that you see getting flown around like at the park by a family that just wanted it just carrying a grenade . Exactly. Yeah . Thomas of California replied quote, I'm flat broke. I can pay in manpower, though. I bet you could come up with a hundred dollars in a week somehow. Maybe just hold a sign by the freeway saying, quote, fund the freedom fighters . Oh God . That's awesome, dude . So I'm able to pay for bombs , the group talked about trying to build drones and discussed breaking into military facilities to steal the explosives needed for their attack plan. Does any of us know how to build this? Oh shit we might have to redo the whole or we can break into some of the most protected facilities in America . I think that might be the that might be the better choice. To be fair, some of those military facilities are not as protected than what you might think. That's fair. The criminal complaints reads quote, a member of the group stated he knew how to build drones connected via fiber optic cable and capable of carrying explosive charges , but did not have access to the materials needed for explosive charges. That number suggested that they quote may need to hit a military industrial complex facility for the things we need, unquote . Fulcrum or Eskridge responded, ten four. I'm lucky the sound of this. Awesome . What you're texting for what are you doing? What are we doing? The complaint alleges that the group continued to discuss the quote benefits and the detriments of obtaining a quote unquote cook for explosive charges versus stealing military ordnance from a manufacturing plant, unquote . They were looking at a few locations in Kansas and zeroed in on the Kansas Army ammunition plant , though never actually stole explosives from this plant , but they sure did talk about it. And their conversations are in the charging documents . Awesome. So again, this is this is all happening days before this attack is supposed to kick off. And part of the plan is for a day or two UFC Freedom two hundred fifty, the group was to meet up in Fredericksburg, Virginia to like go over plans again in person and like practice and prepare. So they needed to get guys in Fredericksburg around the twelfth or the thirteenth . One of the members who was interviewed by the FBI confirmed that their group was communicating online about attacking the event, but claimed that the attack plan was canceled on june twelfth and of course Tyson Proper was placed in the mental health facility on june tenth. So somewhere between june tenth and june twelfth, the group called off their plans . It is notable, however , that at least one of the co conspirators did attempt to drive to Washington DC . When Brian Rau was interviewed by the FBI , he admitted that he'd tried to drive to Washington DC to protest UFC Freedom two hundred and fifty , but denied any involvement in this conspiracy . And he told the FBI that his vehicle malfunctioned and had to return home . One of the most interesting parts in the criminal complaint is this FBI agent writing about how when he was interviewing Rao, Rao discussed how someone could hypothetically use drones armed with explosives to bomb buildings near the White House , which would cause a mass panic with limited debts at USC Freedom two hundred and fifty mentioned this as an example of how to use drones to enact political change in a more targeted way rather than indiscriminate killing, the FBI agent wrote, quote, based on this exchange, I believe Rau was privy to the operational details of the plan, unquote. So Brian Raw just like talked about the plan just like as a hypothetical to an FBI agent while the FBI was searching his vehicle after admitting he tried to drive to DC to protest the event but was not involved in any criminal conspiracy. That's like being, you know, you just got caught. Your spouse has found all of your secret messages or whatever to your grinder lover. And while they're going through your phone, you're like, I mean, what if somebody was hypothetically gonna do that? Like, you know, it wouldn't be that bad because with a it's with a man and not a woman. So it's like we love each other complete ly different ways. I'm not but that's just like me , you know, that's not real. That's not like it's not it wouldn't be anything real . Just like hypothetically, you'd be cool with that, right? You'd be cool with that? The FBI was not cool with that Especially considering that when executing a federal search warrant of Rao's vehicle and home , they seized an Airfifty style rifle, a glock nineteen handgun, a tactical belt, an ammo can full of bullets, a two way radio, an infrared laser target pointer, and a rifle magazine. Brian Rau's family members told law enforcement that Rau had alluded to traveling to DC and according to the California Criminal complaint, Rau told his family that, quote, one day they would wake up and he would be gone, and that he intended to travel to Washington DC where quote unquote, something big would happen . Hey , similar to Propers family, Brian Rows family suspected that he may be intending to commit an act of violence based on a quote increased time spent shooting weapons and a noticeable change in behavior , including increased anxiety, irritation, and seclusion, unquote . Dad spending a lot of time in the shed with a gun in his mouth . Family Family also told law enforcement that Rao had been spending a lot of time online with a new group of friends with his family telling law enforcement that they considered reporting him to the police after he left on his way to DC , but did not because he returned home so quickly. Rao told the FBI he had vehicle trouble. On june thirteenth, law enforcement officials executed a federal search warrant of Daniel Eskridge or Fulcrum's residence , and agents seized rifles, a shotgun, a pistol, and other tactical gear that matched photos Eskridge posted online. That same day, FBI searched the home of Michael Thomas in California, where they seized a hunting rifle, an Air fifteen style rifle, thirty round extended magazines , with approximately one hundred eighty rounds of ammunition , as well as a pistol. While Michael Thomas was being interviewed to quote the criminal complaint, quote, he stated that he saw himself as the planner and advisor for the group, and while he was not willing to take action himself, wanted to guide and instruct others on how to carry out attacks. Thomas expressed frustration that some members of the group seemed non committal and his excuses as to why they could not take action. Thomas said that the aim of this and subsequent attacks was to create enough chaos to bring about the overthrow of the U. S. government, which he believed was being, quote, run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants who are also deeply involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump. Thomas places some of the responsibility of the corruption of the U. S. government with Jewish people and blames them and Israel for the current war with Iran , unquote . So yeah, that is what did not happen at U FC Freedom two hundred and fifty ? Nothing will ever happen JD Vance did go back on Fox News Tuesday night on Fox News The Five and said , quote, it turns out the plot was like not that advanced. They weren't in town. They had not really done that much planning, unquote. So slightly backtracking his previous assertion. We've got to find who's funding these guys . These guys who can't pull out one thousand three hundred bucks from like between the people Yeah, between like what is going on? Like no they didn't wasn't like it nineteen or something in the signal? nineteen in the biggest signal chat related to the group there was nineteen people. So far only five have been arrested. More had been interviewed, right? Because the FBI mentioned interviewing someone in West Virginia who said said that the you attack plan was canceled . As of recording this guy's not been arrested and charged, we don't know his name. So they definitely they definitely are talking with other people related to this like network. Well, they know he was a Tier four operator. He wasn't to walk in touch him. You know, yeah, that's famously how conspiracy charges work. Yeah, yeah The last thing I want to mention is the fifth guy that was arrested, right? Because there was five people arrested initially and that is Abraham Alvarez. He was known as quote unquote shepherd online. Call of Duty, of course, classic. And the DOJ claims that he was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the planned attack. Alvarez allegedly picked out the drone launch points and sniper locations and claimed to have one drone and was trying to get others. He also selected a safe zone meet up location in Nebraska for after the attack. Elviras also claimed to be quote unquote cooking explosives, but court documents never specify that drones or explosives were seized during any of the searches. So we don't know if he actually had a drone or actually had explosives. It seems unlikely because of the whole plan of needing to steal explosives from this military facility in Kansas , but he may have been trying to make explosives, but at this point it's kind of unclear . Now before any of the details of any of the alleged attackers was released, a Fox News contributor said that considering President Biden led in quote unquote millions of unvetted people into the country, quote, it would be a very dangerous delusion to believe that these terrorist organizations and countries did not use that open border to bring people inside, unquote. And as we've already discussed , this was not the operation of a foreign terrorist organization or people that were brought into the country . These are Americans, these are American patriots, self ascribed. But on Thursday, june eighteenth , the DHS announced, quote, alleged ringleader of UFC terrorist plot is a Mexican illegal alien, unquote , with acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Biss writing, this illegal alien from Mexico should have never been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom two hundred and fifty at the White House. The current legal status of Abraham Alveres is kind of un clear , but he was not brought into the country under Biden's open borders . He entered the country as a child on a B two visitor visa that expired in December of twenty twenty one . He has been in this country nearly his whole life, and under Obama, he was granted deferred action for childhood arrivals or DACA in twenty fourteen , suspending possible deportation. So while it looks like he currently may not have legal status , this was not an illegal alien who snuck across the border from Mexico. This guy was brought to the United States as a child and has lived here for over twenty five years , over twenty seven years . So I do think that is worth noting, but I'm sure going forward, the Trump administration will be running with this idea that this illegal alien from Mexico planned the UFC Freedom two hundred fifty terrorist attack. And the actual context of how Alvarez entered the country is important , not that it will matter to Fox News or the Trump administration, but I do think it is worth specifying . And of course, there's upwards of nineteen other people involved in this and the four others that I've spent most of the episode talking about are all U. S. born citizens. Anyway, yeah, that's what that's what did not happen at US FreedCom to fifty. And things, I suppose, continue to continue . It could it could not happen here it will continue not happening. So Bailey Newposter , where can people find you online? Oh God, I'm on Blue Sky as new poster two. Very smart pick. Yes. I'm also on the other app , X as new poster two, but I've not you know not very welcome you I'm also on Instagram as post political bling because that account has not been suspended three different times and then on Twitch I think on Twitch as new poster too as well . Excellent. There's four little options for you. Yes, good luck in your streaming endeavors. Oh God . All right, that doesn't for us here and it could happen here. See you on the other side. Bye bye Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen Here I wanted to talk today a little bit about Belfast and about what happened there earlier this month the racist riots in which mobs of Bigots ran through the city, forcing people out of their homes for not being white, destroying businesses, terrorizing people. It was horrific. And if you spent any time watching live streams or videos or just the coverage. I'm sure you felt as frightened both for those people directly and just for the future as many of us. And in the wake of something like that, it can often be hard to know like what to do and what would I do if this were happening in my community, right? Like what is the proper response, especially if there isn't, you know, an immediate response in the moment that meets , you know, the rage of one of these knights and actually is able to stop it, you know, if these big ots are able to go through and attack and harm people . How do you both respond to that and help the people who have been hurt? And how do you deal with the fact that that could be a very dangerous situation , especially if you've still got these mobs of people out there who are willing to hurt the folks that you're trying to protect and anyone potentially trying to protect them. Well, obviously the people who live in Belfast are dealing with that problem immediately. And so the best place to go if I wanted to know what that was like was to someone who's been living through it. And fortunately, I found the posts on Blue Sky of Lee Hurley. He's a Belfast based writer. He's the owner of dailycannon. com. Lee also runs the trans agenda which records and documents anti trans media coverage in UK papers. You can subscribe at trans genda. Info . I reached out to Lee after seeing some posts that Lee had made about what he had witnessed in terms of the local response to people trying to organize to help folks who had been attacked and brutalized. And Lee wrote an essay for us and read it and thankfully it was good enough to do both of those things. So this is some direct firsthand reporting both on what it was like to live in Belfast while that was going on and what it's been like to watch the community spring into action to try and make right some of the wrongs that were done . So without further ado, here's Lee . Last week, Belfast hit the headlines worldwide. In usual Belfast fashion, it wasn't for anything good . On Monday eighth of june twenty twenty six a man was attacked and stabbed in North Belfast by a refugee. It was a vicious attack caught on camera that resulted in the victim losing an eye and being placed in a medically induced coma. At the time of recording the victim remains in hospital. The next day the city exploded, riots took place across Belfast, vires raged and people were forced to flee from their homes. Today I want to talk to you about what happened , what really happened, not the attack and not the rats themselves, but what went on in the hours and the days after that . Beyond the brick throwing and the burning and the fear because something good did happen and I think it's important that the world knows about that. You need to know that Belfast isn't all bad, it isn't what you saw on the TV , that while the horror happened on the streets the rest of the city said enough . We mobilized This is the story of the real community of Belfast . Belfast is a beautiful city rich in culture, history, world renowned for its food and if you would believe it, it's welcome in future. Ask anyone who's visited for recommendations about what to do in the city and you'll likely hear them rave about the Titanic Museum, a game of Thrones tour or the stunning architecture . They'll tell you how nice everybody they met was. You'll be told about some wonderful restaurant they visited and the amazing trad music session they stumbled upon its own quaint backstreet pub . They'll tell you they want to go back . One of our most popular tourist activities is a tour of the key sites that play keyed roles in our civil war. Taxi drivers will take you to the places where blood was shed, bombs exploded, and those left behind still visit the morn. The tours aren't even that expensive . Here in Belfast we've made a small industry out of the darkest parts of our country's history the troubles . Although the days of bombs and murders and army controlled streets are spoken off and past tense by those tour guides , the beliefs, culture and division that fueled the fighting are still just as strong ly held in many communities throughout the city as they were on the day that peace agreement was signed nearly thirty years ago . Belfast is a beautiful city , but it's a city that requires context to be fully understood and some,what arg ue, fully appreciated . Like almost all wars, the trouble centered around identity and access to resources . On one side, the nationalists or Catholics who identify with and wish the country to be united Ireland . On the other, loyalists are Protestants who want North Norland to remain part of the UK . The division goes deeper than Nan is much more complicated, but it's a bit like the left right divide of Democrats and Republicans in the US , knowing what side someone falls on can usually tell you a lot about their other beliefs and want morals . Even international politics gets levied up here to one side or the other. Loyalists support Israel, NASA support Palestine . Of course it's not that simple. Not all Protestants and Catholics hold the same viewpoints, but for the sake of brevity, I'm generalizing and this is of course a very short and brief explanation of what is actually a very complex history that spans hundreds of years. We simply don't have the time to win the at all with any more depth than that, and it's not the focus of this podcast anyway . But even that oversimplified summary should help you see the contextual ends through its Belfast and what happened must be viewed . And it is within this context where tribalism and nationality and identity are so important that whole house and estates advertise theirs by painting their curbstones in the colours of the British or Irish flag . Jam murals celebrating both murderers and the murdered alike are painted on the sides of houses, where hate for the other continues and where resources are fiercely protected and fought over that this story takes place. Tension has been bubbling up about migration for the last several years in Northern Ireland and elsewhere . Just last summer we saw riot in nearby Balamina in Belfast after an alleged sexual assault took place, with the accused perpetrators being two teenage boys from Irania. Houses and businesses were smashed up and burnt if the riders believed it was any connection whatsoever to an immigrant. No matter where in the world they hailed from. I remember driving through Botanic a vibr,ant mult icultural area of Belfast we live a few minutes away from and seeing business after business destroyed, the Hookabar, the international supermarket cafes . Several months later, the charges against those two teenage boys were quietly dropped due to significant evidential developments . Like everything else here attitudes to immigration and race in general has a pretty clear split between our two main communities . Throughout loyalist areas you will find graffiti and signs stab led under lamposts. Foreigners not welcome here, no Muslims allowed. Stop the boats . A lot of the time these vitraolic messages aren't even spelled correctly. Education is just one of the many areas neglected here that nobody ever riots over . That's not to say there's no such thing as a racist nationalist. There are assholes everywhere. Belfast is of course no different on that front . When this most recent horrific attack took place in a city where immigrants le,galgal, ille refugee asylum seekers. It doesn't actually matter in fact because you don't have to be a migrant to be targeted. You just have to be non white . Whether already treated escape boats for every problem, we're racist riots had become something of a summer tradition. Everyone knew what was coming . Within hours, social media was full of AI generated posters telling people to take to the streets to protest immigrants . When they said protests, we all knew they meant riot . And so the city shut down . For three days, shops, schools, community centres, swimming pools, public transport and businesses were held hostage to racism . Some places opened for a few hours in the mornings before having to cl ose again. The buses were running, the buses were off. Half the city worked from home, fake protest posters popped up on social media, everyday life and routine was thrown into disarray and chaos . But it was when the sun went down the that actual horror happened. From the comfort of our homes with the blinds down, many of us sat scared, scrolling social media trying to find out what was happening . Via helicopter footage streamed live on YouTube, we watched our city get destroyed. We texted each other and made phone calls and even sit posted online trying to find some levity or light in this situation . For others those days changed their lives forever . They watched the cars get burnt out and along with the metal and the tires, tomorrow's scooter on and transport went up in smoke. Sand from the last family trip to the beach still in the footwells, a favourite cardigan left in the passenger seat gone . All of it gone , whole homes gone . Whether physically set on fire or threatened through the letter boxes or driven out by a fear many of us will never have to know. The true number of people who fled their homes since the eighth of June is hard to gauge. Some have gone to stay with relatives or friends across the city, some have moved to completely new places, waiting to feel safe enough to try again . Many have left the country altogether and who can blame them. That is our loss. They say in times of trouble look for the helpers , but here in Belfast you wouldn't have seen too many at first glance. That's for the same reason you didn't see people rise up and take on the riders face to face. Fear . Fear of personal reprisal from the loyalist paramilitary organisations, fear of alerting the rioters and making the situation even worse for those who are trying to help. Fear is endemic here . But there were helpers , hundreds in fact , but our help ers moved quietly and in the shadows. Without fuss or fanfire, people across Spellfats began taking action almost immediately . As everyday life began to return to normal and schools and shops cautiously reopened, strangers became small hero es, families were moved from their homes under darkness and children taken to and from school . The elderly and sick and pregnant accompanied to hospital and doctor appointments , in church halls and community centres, supermarket sized food banks sprung up from nothing , money was raised from all over the world . Where there was need, somebody met it . Then they returned and asked who they could help next. In those moments the real Belfast was seen. On Thursday afternoon, forty eight hours after it all started my, fiance arrived home from work. Let's call her Ell. I couldn't sit and do nothing anymore, so here's what his hammant, she said. She'd already contacted a church and arranged use of their hall. She contacted people she knew through her community work to get word out. I posted about it on Blue Sky not mentioning anything about where it would be located, out of fears we'd be targeted. And someone asked if there was a fundraiser. There wasn't. There hadn't been anything just a few hours ago. Not thinking it would get much attention, I threw up a link to my paypal and said I'd pass the money on if anyone wanted to donate . Thousands came flooding in from all over the world, particularly from Minnesota . Saturday came and we were at six AM to at the wholesalers having roped in another friend to help with her car. By nine AM we were at the church with two car loads of food and essentials, not knowing if it would just be the three of us standing there all day with a load of food. None of us had ever done this before, although Ell has experienced working with immigrants and asylum seekers in other areas . We couldn't have been more wrong through the networks EL had formed over the previous forty eight hours, an organization started sending us addresses of people who needed food, volunte ers kept arriving . People flowed in with donations of food and money and essentials. By the afternoon people were dropping stuff in, taking photos of our board that showed items we were low in and then going shopping to get those items specifically . Hundreds of food parcels were packed up. Lead one for a family of five went to call across the hall as Elle coordinated everything that needed to go out. What ages are the children? Do they need nappies? came a reply without fail. Everybody just pitched in with whatever was needed to be done . Others dealt with people who came in themselves in needed help. Drivers sent from other small charities arrived to collect parcels for people they were helping. I found myself managing the stock, running into the shop in the wholesal ers time and time again to fill up items we couldn't keep up with basics like oil and sugar, flour, rice, pasta, soap, sanitary products, nappies . The list was endless as with the number of people we were trying to help . For three days, people who had never met before stood side by side sorting food parcels. Strangers took strangers into their car and into their homes. As this definitely Halal was desperately googled by a lot of white people. I've lost count of the amount of people I've met over the last week, but I know it's more than I would usually meet in a year. To be fair, I'm not actually that social, but it was still a lot of people. I don't think I got the names of half of the ones I worked al ongside in that pop up food bank that my partner seemed to magic out of thin error using the relationship she'd built up through her job. But it didn't matter. There wasn't time for small talk. It was more hello, thank you for helping pass me some cookinoi please. Are we out at the Odorant game? That's not to say there was no bonding. When you share an intense experience like that under the weight of emotions we were working with, there's a connection built. There was a sense of community that I've never experienced before and given the circumstances I sincerely hope to never experience again , but that seems unlikely . In that church hall where we ran the food mank, nobody needed to be told what to do. There was no induction or even delegation of rules. For three days people turned up and they found themselves something to do, and I don't know if it will surprise you because it shouldn't . But there were many migrants and refugees who turned up to help themselves. One woman came because she was in need of food for herself , but she asked if she could take some extra to make meals for others. Within two hours we had thirty contains of home cooked kawal curry to deliver to homes thanks to her work. I'm not sure I've ever been able to truly define what love or selflessness or solidarity mean, but I'm pretty sure that's what it looks like . This was not work being done by professional charities organisations. That's not to say they weren't doing anything far from it . But I want to take a moment to press upon you that this was everyday people figuring it out together, many of whom had never done anything like this before. WhatsApp groups were created, phone numbers shared and Google Doc databases thrown together, across the city volunteers together and apart. Does anyone held close for a baby? Can someone drive a lady to an appointment tomorrow at ten AM? Resources were shared across makeshift donation centers . If one center had run out of diapers, another was sharing their supply Volunteers drove from centres to shops to homes, trying to find what was required. It was beautiful chaos , and it worked . Nobody had to be there. Almost all the volunt eers had arrived through word of mouth. I don't think I saw one single social media poster advert calling out for help apart from the one I posted on her last day. Help just came . Like me, many of the volunteers felt compelled to do something . Sitting at home beyond the locked door and watching he had filmed the city via live street, just wasn't cutting it anymore . One volunteer told me that when the violence erupted they simply couldn't get the affected people out of their head . They took Friday afternoon off work to deliver food and essential supplies to families who were too afraid to leave their homes. More than anything , she said she wanted to show that people of Belfast Cur and the newcomers to our city are welcome . At a time when fear and uncertain ty was affecting so many families, it felt important to her to offer practical support and remind people that they were not alone . The work people have been doing and are still doing is not without risk. I spoke earlier of fear . There's a dark rumour that Northern Ireland has the best knee surgeons in the world due to the paramilitary's favourite replacement style of knee cabin where they place a gun to the back of your knee and pull the trigger blowing out the front. If you live in a community run by the paras and you piss them off, you're going to know about it. It might be a brick through your window, graffiti on your door or a visit from the local police to tell you they would strongly advise you leave the premises and find somewhere else to live . For many community volunteers this was a case of heart over mind. They were driving into loyalist strongholds that had been rioting just hours before to deliver food to the very people that had been targeted , but their compassion for those sitting hungry, tired, and scared outweigh ed the fear they felt for their own safety. Many of the volunteers who helped will never tell their neighbours what they did. They may never tell anyone about it . The drivers arrive back to the hall with stories of families sitting in the dark with no electric in the meter, of mothers hiding in the back room by the door with their babies in their arms ready to runge a flaming bottle come through the window. If you've wondered for a moment what kept us motivated , now you know . Some volunteers spun into action from the first moment and some are still going. There are still people from ethnic minority communities in great need. I cannot imagine the fear they're still living in . But why was it left of the people to take action? I've heard that question asked several times during the last week. It's hard to know. Many people are rightly wondering where the government was in all this were politicians . Yes, some got on their podiums from time to time to condemn the violence, but it wasn if't the commun for ity on the ground and the wonderful generous people who donated money, all of those people that we helped would still be sitting there hungry, tired, and scurred even more than they are now . I know that here on the ground we're putting together a contingency plan so that we're ready to spring in the action should just happen once more . And we've done that without any of the resources at the disposal of the government , albeit in our own small way. So why after so many summers of this happening do we know nothing of any government plan ? If there was any sort of plan, surely we would be seeing it in action by now . The sad reality is this is likely going to happen again probably this very summer. We have a lot of problems and very little solution. How do we guarantee housing that's safe in a city that's littered with hate? How do we say to people we're giving you a food parcel with a week's worth of food, but next week you're going to have to sort it out yourself and go to the shop . Next week you're gonna have to walk past your neighbour's smashed windows and the graffiti send Muslims out. Next week you're gonna have to walk past the house of that loyalist who insists on calling you slurs every time he sees you . Even as I'm recording this, there are new calls for so called protests over the next few days. There's a rumour a non white man was arrested for trying to break into someone's house. I'm not being caught by saying non white that's the base level of racism we're currently operating with here. And an incident like that is enough to set this all off again . For the rest of the summer, eyes on both sides of the immigration argument will skim over news articles searching for a race or nationality to be mentioned . I cannot imagine how it feels to be a member of an ethnic minority and beyond Tenderhooks hoping and praying someone of color does not commit a crime . You may be forgiven for thinking that we have absolutely no other crimes occurring on a daily basis, especially none committed by white people. Of course we do. They're the majority . We have one of the highest rates of violence against women and girls in the whole of Europe . Since twenty twenty, thirty women have been violent ly killed by a man, a local man . Did they riot then? I'll give you two guesses . Our community action was not enough, that's the sad reality . What does some toilet roll and a few vegetables matter when someone's car has been burnt out? How does a bag of rice compensate for having to leave your home? It just doesn't, but maybe it will bring a small bit of hope . When we decided we were going to do something to help, that's all we started with. Hope. And now a week later, after thousands of pounds worth of food, electric vegers, phones, SIM cards, blankets, and pajamas have passed in and out of our doors into the homes and emergency accommodation across Belfast, it's all we're left with. Hope that we helped, hope that we won't ever have to do it again . As one recipient of Financial Help put it, the real value is not in the amount, it's the kindness, humanity, and compassion behind it. At the very start of this podcast I told you Belfast is a beautiful city rich in culture and history , but to borrow the wonderful words of that recipient, I think it's also a city rich in kindness, humanity and compassion. It is a city that has shown it can and will come together when it really matters, even if you can't always see it. That's the real face of Belfast . I want to say thank you . Thank you to everyone who I met but never got the names off. The people I'd never have met and I hope I don't have to meet again . Thank you to everyone who donated from across the world . That support meant everything to us and allowed us to help those who needed it the most. And I also want to say thank you to the people here in Belfast and Northern Ireland who have been the most affected by these riots, to the immigrants, the refugees and the asylum seekers . Thank you for coming here , for adding to the hotel community and for becoming our community . We are the real community of Belfast and we are nothing without you Notice a change in your hearing? We'll get a hearing check from spec savers. Oh, not sure where to start. Well, we're very flexible. Book one online on the phone on your lunch break on Satur days on the same day if you're lucky. Oh, you only miss the odd word. But what if the odd words you're missing are nice ones like love you or important ones like Duck ? Oh, too expensive, is it? Hm Alright, we like you. We'll do it for nothing. For free hearing checks, should have gone to spec savers. Welcome to ICADAP and hear a podcast that is often about being trans in America and living under a regime that is actively hostile to our mere existence . I'm your host Mia Wong and today we're going to take a somewhat broad view and look at what it means to be trans in America from a class standpoint . Now, I think if you are trans , you are at least broadly speaking , not a capitalist in the sense of you do not own the means of production. You are not the Bourgeoisie . There are so few of us at all who can be said to own the means of production. We are all almost entirely as a class like some kind of worker or . But there is a lot of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and where we fit into the broader American class structure that I want to talk about. today And I want to simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is, but then also talk about how good it is isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people a sense of what this class position means our place and ability to fight back . Because that is also a critically important part of not just being trans , but a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movements in the U. S. for the past, you know, decade has been and long over the decade, you know, like two decades, has been . And obviously , there have been a lot of trans people who are involved in a bunch of shit before then, but the extent to which trans people have been involved and have been central to every social movement you've ever heard of in the modern era is exceptional. And I want to talk about why that is . I want to start talking about why that is by looking at some of the data that we have on what it's like to be trans in the US and this is one of the things that's very difficult when you're writing about trans people because we all have our experience of transness. And anybody who's tried to get trans healthcare, I think, is aware that there is so much research that has just not been done about us. This is medical research on the effects of specific like hormone regimens and like what kinds of medicines do and go to help and what the effects are . A lot of the information that you do get from doctors is based on really, really old studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this is also true when you're trying to look at economic data where there just aren't that many studies of what it's like for trans people in the US . And the ones that do exist and there are people who have , they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically designed to be of trans people . And that's a problem because a lot of what you end up with and the reason why there are some things that I've read that are just not going to be in this episode is that they are very reliant on things like, okay, we know this person has gender markers have changed or their names have changed . And that's fine kind of if you want to sort of get a sense of what's going on, but like the percentage of trans people, the sort of demographics of trans people who have officially changed gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general . So we're going to be using a lot of data in this from what's called the US Trans Survey . It's USTS it's run by advocates for trans equality and God fucking bless them. These people are doing the transgenders work. It's an invaluable resource . I don't know of a better sort of repository of information about trans people that has been collected . So these surveys are run fairly infrequently. There was one in twenty fifteen and one in twenty twenty two . But in the twenty twenty two one they got, ninety two thousand trans and non binary respondents , which is unbelievable. That is a staggering sample size . But the information they got from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak. I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff, which is that yeah, people who transitioned to say that, yeah, their lives are happier now that they transitioned. Like they like they like transitioning. It's good. It's I don't know, do the thing. It will make you happier. However , comma, the economic numbers , Jesus Christ . Oh boy . Oh boy. Now , as I've said, right, the people who work on the US Trans survey, they do astonishing work , but as with all trans people, they're doing astonishing work with not that many resources and it takes them a long time to put their studies together. So again, the information that we're using is from twenty twenty two. So this means a couple of things. One, this is Dream the Biden administration, right? A regime that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this current one, even though there was a bunch of bad shit going on then, some of it done by the Biden administration. Dear God is Trump administration significantly, significantly more hostile trans people. So the conditions that we're seeing now are going to be worse the ones that we have data for. So all the of numbers I'm about to tell you about, you know, poverty rates, unemployment and homelessness, it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the U. S. Transurvy Rights reports, I mean, they released recently , yeah, they released in June, health and well being a report of the twenty twenty two US transgender survey, it is one hundred and ten pages long . So they do very, very good and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still, for example, don't have a granular economic report and we don't have just the full report that they write on this stuff. And we also don't have really the sort of granular reports that they had from the twenty fifteen numbers on the experience of trans people of different races . So those are sort of what I would say are the limits going into this that we have. However, what we do have from the early Insights report is just horrifying . So one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans is dispossession . And you can look at dispossession in a whole bunch of different ways . You can look at, for example, the poverty rate. The poverty rate from the U. S. Trans survey among trans people is thirty four percent. The American poverty rate is twelve percent . So that's almost three times higher than the general population's poverty rate and thirty four percent is really bad, right? Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that's really really bad . The trans unemployment rate is, I think , in some ways even worse . The US trans unemployment rate is eighteen percent. The U. S. unemployment rate in general in twenty twenty two was three point six percent . So let's try to get an understanding of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number. There are so much people it doesn't count in terms of people who have stopped looking for work , right ? But to put this into perspective , during the peak of the lockdowns in twenty twenty , the unemployment rate in the U. S. was fourteen percent and that was the highest it's been in ages . For trans people, it's eighteen percent . So if you are trans in America, right, trying to find a job , it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns. eighteen percent unemployment is like nineteen thirty seven, early nineteen thirty eight Great Depression levels of unemployment ? It's almost one in five people . And again, these are the numbers from twenty twenty two during the Biden administration when the situation was better for trans people. We don't have more recent numbers for the US at sort of any kind of scale . And even back then four years ago, when things were better for us and the economy in general was running a little bit better , it was , again, nineteen thirty eight great depression levels for just a regular trans person , right ? This has a really, really broad array of effects, right? In terms of , you know , just the experience of the world that you have if you are trans because you are fundamentally living in a different world an economic world than cis people do. Like again, the cis people's unemployment rate in twenty twenty two was like three point six percent and yours is eighteen . You are living through the Great Depression and they are living through a normal economy . And that means that just fundamentally from a class pos itions, you have a different experience of reality than they do. You are living in something that is not the same as theirs . I also want to talk about homelessness numbers because queer homelessness has always been really, really bad for reasons that kind of obvious reasons that we'll get into here, but it's also related to, for example, the unemployment rate and the poverty rate because having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive. We got a report recently that was a joint effort between advocates for trans equality in the National Alliance to End Homelessness who did a report using the USTS data they talked about how thirty percent of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime . For Americans, it's about four percent for Americans at large, right? You know, just like Susan Americans in general, it's about four percent. So that is a homelessness rate of eight times the rate of the general population . And again, that is the twenty twenty two numbers, which are now worse . And this is something that I think is borne out by if you are around any like I mean not even working class trans people. If you're just around trans people in general you have met who have been homeless , right? Like you're just constantly around people who have been homeless. And this is one of I think the defining elements of what being a trans worker is the level of precarity is so great and the odds that through some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening with your employer or just like , I don't know, the employer's doing layoffs , it is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street in a way that to some extent the general American population has , but again, the rate for the general population if they've been homeless in their lifetime is four percent and for trans people is thirty percent . And this rate , this thirty percent rate of people who of trans people who've experienced homelessness. And also by the way, a lot of the people who have experienced this have experienced it more than once. And you know, there's a lot of just people who are trans who are homeless right, the fuck now. This is why I say like put a trans girl on your couch at the end of every executive disorder because there aren't widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we have to figure out for ourselves and we just don't have the resources to do it. Now this discrimination is intensified both in the housing market , right, by just general anti trans discrimination, by poverty , and this is also sort of a cyclical process, right? Like part of what's difficult about me writing this is that I haven't been homeless. I haven't been a sex worker, which means that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have. What I can say about it is like obviously homeless makes it harder to get even just an apartment afterwards because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on a whole bunch of shit, including, for example, like obviously like fucks with your credit score. It fucks with just like, oh, do you have like previous landlord references that you can use? There's a whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects of this. Obviously, there's health effects, there's safety effects . So what you're facing is on the one hand , you are squeezed out through discrimination in the workplace, through the fact that also and this is another fairly common thing. Trans people make significantly less money than cis people do just on the dollar. It's way way worse . So you have lower income when you get a job, you have less access to jobs , and you also just have housing market discrimination . And also, trans people have weaker access to family support networks that function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for cis people . A lot of trans people's families and parents don't accept them and they just get kicked out or if they are able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of extreme violence . And that has a massive effect on homelessness, right? Like a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by queer youth getting kicked out of their houses . And because you also don't have places you can go back to , right? You don't have the kind of like family like familial safety net that a lot of cis people have access to and you're less likely to have access to it. This intensifies the rate of homelessness and it intensifies the consequences of it and how difficult it is to get out . All right, we are going to go to s A andd then we're going to come back and talk about some more bleak shit, but also this is not just the things fall apart podcast. This is also the put it back together, but in a better way podcast We are back Now there's another factor, something that's becoming increasingly a factor of trans life that has existed obviously for a long time but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime . And that the trans refugee population. There is in the U. S. a massive trans refugee population. These are, you know, what you would call, I guess, internally displaced people. The movement adv ancement project or MAP did a study in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five looking at trans people who moved from one state to another because of anti trans legislation, right? And they found this and is just between November and June of twenty twenty five , they found that nine percent of all trans people had moved in that eight month span , right ? That's nine percent of trans people had just in the span between november twenty twenty four and june twenty twenty five, right just in that span , nine percent of the trans population moved. That's over one percent of the total transpopulation moving per month to a different state, specifically because of anti trans legislation . Right. That's really bad. If you look at sort of the general population of trans people in the US, that's four hundred thousand people in just that eight month span . That's the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio. And then thirty five thousand more people . Right. I mean that's like obviously it's not like the complete metropolitan it's like the actual just like city of Cleveland right? But like again, that's in the span of eight months, we moved the entire city of Cleveland and it's definitely gotten like almost certainly has like there have been more people who have moved, you know, since june twenty twenty five because anti transcrimination and anti trans crack downs from the state have only gotten worse. This is a refugee crisis , right? And the things that they're fleeing from are also things that are just, you know, conditions of what of what being trans is in the US, right? Which they're fleeing restrictions on healthcare access from the national level, from the state level , also as we talked about, like from religious hospitals , who can also just like even if even if you're in a so called blue state and just be like fuck you eat shit. We're not gonna give you healthcare. They're fleeing bathroom bills, they're fleeing don't say gay bands, they're fleeing just an increase in social violence, right? Because the thing that that this this alles legitimiz , right? That anti trans rhetoric legitimizes, that anti trans state action legitimizes is just getting assaulted for being trans, a thing that has always happened, but it's now happening more than it did before . And yeah, that not being, you know, assaulted and this happens at work. This happens like coming back from work, this happens in other places too , is also a part of the condition of your labor . When you combine the fact that trans people were already and I want to point this out, right? The homelessness rates, you know, the eighteen percent rate of unemployment, the thirty percent rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right ? That was before the refugee crisis like really, really intensified into what we're seeing now , right ? It was not as bad in twenty twenty two as it is right now when again like we were seeing for a period of eight months, we were seeing over a percent of the population per month, the trans population per month moving. All of the unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homelessness numbers, those were all pre the sort of real intensification after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort of status of trans people . And this has had an effect on trans people's class position , right? What this has created in the places that trans people are fleeing to, and this is places like Portland, this is places like New York , like LA . There's a lot of sort of like regional centers too. Right. We obviously see Chicago's at the other sort of big one, but you know, they're like places like Mizoula , right for people who don't know what Missouri Mizouri was a city with a pretty large university population in Montana that has a fairly large trans population because it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the region around it. And there's also a bunch of people who go there for college and realize that they're trans . But what this has done, right, is it's forced a bunch of people to move leave their homes, which is expensive , right ? And then you have to find jobs in these new places . And it's already really difficult to find jobs in the places that you were . And so what you're facing just in general, right? Is you're facing this trade off between can you survive in the place that you are with the life that you have do you need to pick up and go to another place where it's less illegal for you to be yourself . And what this has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations . These workers are of any subgroup that like trans people are in. The trans people in that group are the most marginalized and the most just absolutely fucked of everyone in that group, right? You know, you can look at like the violence rates for black trans wom en particularly is appalling , right? There's a lot of disabled trans people and among disabled people who already have it really, really bad in the US , right? Like you look at the disabled trans people and it's even fucking harder. That's especially an issue with, you know, something that's been affecting a whole bunch of people, which is the Medicaid work requirements, which have been unbelievably harmful to a whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being like forced to work who just can't right . And what this has created is this incredibly incredibly precarious class of workers all over the spectrum of the working class, right? There are a lot of trans people, an unbelievable number of trans people working service jobs and like the lower end and shittier the service job, the more likely you are to find trans people there . There's always been a lot of trans sex work because a lot of times that's the thing you can do, right? And this is sex work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is, of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk. This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization of trans people because there's a bunch of criminalization of sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by the police and subject to even more police violence than they are already, which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts of police violence. I don't know, every trans person has seen some shit But I'm not just saying this to be like the trans class position is bad, but what this has done is create this class of trans workers that moves parts of the class that don't have contact with each other very much . There's a whole bunch of movement between being housed and being unhoused in a way that is at a significantly broader scale than it is for the rest of like the rest of the population. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans workers who are able to unify around being trans and have contact with each other and who organize with each other and who fight alongside each other , right from different parts of the working class that don't often particularly get along. And in particular in terms of like service workers and on housed people, there is a really systemic effort by the state and by the rights and even by the Democratic Party too to pit these groups against each other . But with trans people, it's like, well, I don't know, like there's also an extent to which, yeah, like if you're a trans person you are , you know, x number of days away from being that person on the street. And so this has created a fairly unique class position , right of unbelievable precarity . You know, state enforced precarity. It's obviously not the only right class position in the US of like legally mandated precarity. You can look at undocumented workers who have even more genocidal sh it happening against them right now in terms of just like yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice rounding people up . But what has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class of like download remobile workers. And it's also worth noting that like to some extent this is a deliberate strategy of the right . Like this is this is what the right wants . You know, if you look at like the rise of neoliber alism, if you look at Reagan, you look at Thatcher , right? One of the big things that they are about in this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction . This is one of the things, you know, if you look at how these people come to power, they come to power on the back of very, very right wing social movements, right? That are, you know, in the U. S. it's like, you know, the sort of like the rise of the evangelicals , who one of their big things, right? One of the things that they're interested in is suppressing queer people specifically , right ? But you can look at this in other contexts too, where, you know, you can look at China in the nineteen eighties as the beginning of sort of the reform period is starting when you start to see the return of capitalism to China . In nineteen eighty, you get the one child policy. We're going on a little bit of a tangent here, but something I don't think really acknowledged in the way that people think and talk about China, which is that the One Child policy was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was the reformers, right? Deng Xiaoping is in power. When this goes into effect, right? And when it's like written into the Constitution, like this is Deng Xiao Pink, this is, this is, you know, the sort of pro capitalist reform movement that is imposing the one child policy on people in the US. S. also have you like restrictions on abortion that are sort of part and parcel of the rights attempt to expand capitalism because control over the family , control over social reproduction, the production of new workers and the ability for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system , that's something that is important to them, right? And the maintenance of right wing gender roles is something that is important for them to be able to reproduce their ideology and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came after us . But on the other hand, right, you know, as much as we have been targeted by the right , trans people have also, as I sort of talked about a bit at the beginning of this episode , been overrepresented in just every leftist social movement for the past like two decades, right ? Everything from like union organizing to mutual aid, to like who shows up in the street to protest to like blocks from like occupying to the uprising , right ? There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. And the only real way for this not to happen is when trans people are specifically driven out of these movements. And that happens a lot, right? Like that 's also like one of the things that you experience being a trans worker is that you know people who are transphobic in the left will run you out of the shit that you're doing . Usually, I say usually because sometimes they are you are explicitly pushed off for being trans. Usually there's like some other excuse that's found to do this , but you know, even with how much, you know, like persecution of trans people there've been in these social movements, like trans people still show up for it, right? You know, the take just sort of a random example, right? Friend of the show, Vicki Osterwil was the facilitator of the first occupy meeting in New York, right? We're just we're just always there . We have always been there. We've been there everywhere and we will continue to be there all in all of these movements in the anti Ice movements in I say movements because like this is true in like the twenty eighteen anti Ice movement. It's true in the current anti Ice movement and it was it is true in the student encampments in twenty twenty four . And there's a reason for this. And the reason for this to a large extent is that very precarity, right? If you are going to be trans , especially now , you have no choice but to fight if you want to exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare . If you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians , if you want your life to just merely merely be the life of a cis worker, which is significantly less fucked than your life is, you have to fight . And this is something that is also spread to some extent by sort of trans culture, I would say, broadly, but also just like the kind of social groups that form. And also it's spread. And this is particularly something you see in unions a lot, right? We've talked a lot in the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. It's like, well, we're over represented in unions because we're workers , right ? And this is in some sense the potential of what the right has wrought , right? Which is that they have created this extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees who have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win slightly elsewhere in the manifesto, like Marx writes, what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own grave diggers . And if you look out at the world in twenty twenty six , right? You can see the graves being dug . The question is who is going to be buried there? The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I , for one thing , don't want to fucking be buried in a mass grave . And if we're going to put something in that grave , better it be the class system itself . And that's a world worth fighting for a world where there are no grave diggers, where there are no mass graves , where the state and the landlord don't throw you on the street in the night where you can live in your community and not be run out . Where you have your health care and you are able to be the person that you want to be . And that world is winnable . All that is left is to fight for it. Oh wow , I can't believe you can see. At Division Scotland, we transform the lives of hundreds of patients with cataracts, like Xandra every year and there's no better recommendation that we can give than the words of our patients themselves. My advice to anybody that's in the same position as me go and have a consultation with Vision Scotland. You won't regret it. Imagine better vision with fast and transformative cataract surgery . Call Vision Scotland today . Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and putting them back together. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode is on probably the most controversial midterm election happening this year ., the U. S Senate race in Maine , where the new Democratic nominee, Graham Platner , is running to end the thirty year reign of Republican Senator Susan Collins , who brands herself as a moderate , independent leaning Republican, but has consistently backed Trump's unpopular policies while holding on to power. Beating Susan Collins would be a key part of taking the Senate away from the Republicans . Much of the media coverage and discussion of this election focused on the scandals relating to Graham Platin's personal life , with very little on the real relations of his campaign , the political platform he's running on, the relations between him and organized labor, unions and working class mainers. Plato's campaign has attracted overwhelming support from voters in Maine , despite the series of well reported personal controversies, the Nazi linked tattoo he got as a Marine, old offensive Reddit posts, marital issues, relationship issues, and an ex girlfriend who worked at the Heritage Foundation accusing him of disturbing behavior he got out of the military. Mainstream outlets have covered those at length. This episode I'm going to narrowly focus on the relations of Graham Platner's campaign . I'll start by going over his campaign platform, then his ties to labor unions and community organizing , and finally how those ties set up his campaign for massive success in the Democratic primary . Plattner calls himself a New Deal Democrat, and, like Bernie Sanders, believes we need a quote unquote political revolution in this country. He wants to shake the Supreme Court, increase the federal minimum wage, and ban billionaires from buying elections. His platform is also designed to address the concerns of working class manors, like declining manufacturing, decaying infrastructure, closing hospitals, and spiking energy costs. Platiner supports Universal Healthcare and ultimately wants to pass a Medicare for all type system , while pointing to how the country could build on the VA model, saying, quote, The level of healthcare I've received with Maine's excellent VA system should be available to all . We all know that going up against for profit healthcare will be a hard battle to win. His platform contains a list of policies that will start to break up healthcare monopolies and crackdown on pharmacruption , like banning insurance companies and private equity from buying medical practices and h ospitals and banning prescription drug advertising. Platina says he wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid's power to negotiate drug prices, allow the import of low cost prescription drugs from other markets, and ban stock buybacks and impose a cap on executive compensation for pharmaceutical companies that receive public funds. This platform calls to direct federal funds to reopen recently closed hospitals, birthing units and clinics , establish a national public drug manufacturing sector, make Medicare telehealth coverage permanent, reverse doge cuts to the VA , national legislation mandating a safe level of nurse to patient ratios to counter chron,ic hospital under staffing , and to open a new medical school at University of Maine. A large part of Graham Platner's policy platform is focused on protecting democracy by keeping money out of elections. Quote, Democracy cannot function when wealth buys power. Since Citizens United, unlimited dark money has flooded American politics, giving billionaires and special interests enormous influence, unquote. Platinum wants to overturn Citizens United , either through a constitutional amendment or a different Supreme Court, more on that later. He also campaigns on banning congressional stock trading and advocates that former members of Congress should be banned from congressional lobbying. Quote, public service should never become a pathway to private affluence, unquote. Platiner supports mandating congressional term limits, two for the Senate and six for the House , and at a minimum returning to the talking filibuster. His platform also includes congressional representation for everyone in the country, quote unquote, including in places like Washington, DC . As for the Supreme Court, Plattner wants to pack the court and end lifetime appointments with staggered time limited terms. He's also in favor of impeaching justices on the Supreme Court by quote holding the court to the same eth ic standards we hold all other federal judges . Klanner supports passing a Constitutional Amendment to quote, prohibit partisan gerrymandering and require independent redistricting commissions to draw their maps, which he says would keep elected officials more accountable and make voters' voices stronger. To combat anti labor legislation like the Taft Hartley Act, Plattner wants to strengthen our unquote right to organize by passing the protecting the right to organize Act , which would crack down on union busting by issuing significant penalties and override right to work laws. Planner also supports creating a union job requirement for all jobs funded by federal dollars. In interviews, Planner has advocated for something akin to FDR's proposed economic bill of rights. Quote, in order to democrat ize our economy, we need to provide, as rights, things like housing, healthcare, education, and collective bargaining, unquote. He also wants to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to protect against sex discrimination while addressing how communities of color, LGBTQ Americans and immigrants have had the legal protections that were meant to guarantee them equal rights, quote, turned against them, instead of working in their defense. We need a twenty first century constitution that restores the original purpose of these guarantees, equal rights under the law, protected for every person in this country, unquote. His policy platform includes passing federal LGBTQ anti discrimination legislation and calls out Democrats for quote unquote peddling soft bigotry to pander to Trump voters. One of Platiner's most in depth policy pages is for his billionaire tax plan , which he says represents quote the bare minimum of what I believe we should expect a Democratic Congress under our next president to pass. Planner believes that income taxes alone , quote, cannot address the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few . Only a tax on wealth can do so. He promotes a five to six percent annual tax on wealth over one billion dollars , as well as taxing capital gains the same as wages, quadrupling taxes on stock buybacks and taxing excessive CEO pay to pressure corporations to reinvest profits back into their workers through higher wages, better benefits and long term security. On the campaign trail, he's talked with voters about removing the one hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars a year income tax cap on social security payments so that the ultra rich contribute to the same payroll tax rate as the rest of us. He also wants to restore the enhanced child tax credit. Platner's tax plan doesn't just include raising taxes on the rich , but closing loopholes make a corporations use to avoid paying taxes altogether. Quote, by closing corporate loopholes, we ensure that the giants who profit off our shared infrastructure, courts, and educ ated workforce finally pay their way and that we can sustain investments in schools, safety, and services community depends on . One way to stop corporate tax dodging is by ending worker misclass ification, that is hiring workers as quote unquote contractors to deprive workers of labor protections and healthcare while using this misclassification to dodge payroll taxes. Instead of foreign policy dominated by trade agre ements that exploits workers and promotes endless war, Platner's platform calls for a new era of American economic diplomacy that takes on billionaires who quote defund the societies that made their fortunes possible, simply by shuffling money into an offshore account, unquote . He advocates a global billionaire minimum tax to quote ensure that extreme wealth is finally re invested in the public good regardless of where it is parked, unquote. This is based on a proposal by the EU's internal tax observatory. To accomplish this, Platiner says we would need to overhaul global economic institutions, use our leverage as a trading partner, and use international economic diplomacy to target concentrated wealth and coordinate taxes and sanctions on ultra wealthy individuals, quote , rather than relying on broad trade sanctions that harm ordinary people . He also wants to close an inheritance tax loophole by stopping billionaires from passing down their wealth to their heirs tax free through buying appreciating assets, borrowing against those assets and then passing down the assets after they die while avoiding any taxes on the increased asset value. Platin serays time for those gains to be taxed too . The tax plan also includes ways to lower taxes for working and middle class Americans. Quote, if we tax millionaires and billionaires at fair levels, we can provide a quote unquote cost of living exemption from federal income tax up to a reasonable threshold for working and middle class Americans. If we stop multinational monopolies from dodging their taxes, we can cut taxes on the small businesses and self employed individuals who are struggling to survive. The federal government could adopt a property tax fairness credit similar to Maine's that ensures low and middle income families do not pay more than four percent of their income in property taxes by providing a refundable credit, including a fair calculation of rent attributable to property taxes, so that renters are treated equitably unquote. Something we've previously report ed on is Platner's opposition to what he calls regressive gas and diesel taxes. Quote, relying on fossil fuels to fund basic infrastructure does not make sense if we want to reduce fossil fuels used in transportation. Instead, public goods should be financed by progressive general revenues, as outlined in my end billionaire welfare tax plan, unquote . Platiner notes that an extra two hundred and seventy five billion dollars has supplemented the tax based highway trust fund since two thousand eight. Platner also supports Rokana's Big Oil Windfall profits bill that would implement a per barrel tax equal to fifty percent of the difference between the current oil price and the price per barrel last year . And he promotes a national electricity rate freeze by quote, providing direct low cost energy infrastructure financing to any state that freezes or lowers electricity rates for four years , funded by the windfall profits tax and repurposed federal fossil fuel subsidies unquote . His platform states that the most effective national security project would be a huge buildout of domestic clean energy product ion , rather than relying on private equity to invest in new clean energy, Platner supports a national energy infrastructure fund that would issue debt backed by the federal government and quote partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric cooperatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low risk clean energy projects . Planner believes this fund could cut Wall Street speculators out of the equation help build at scale with union jobs, lower costs and pass savings onto rate payers. He also wants the Department of Energy to use the Defense Production Act to revive domestic manufacturing to procure and stockpile critical clean energy technologies. This platform also includes creating a strategic fuel reserve for farmers and fisheries , a national whole home repair program to assist in weatherization, electrification, and heat pumps to lower household bills by partnering with public housing authorities, county programs and local trade unions , as well as reinvesting the money funneled to big defense contractors back into shingipbuild. On the campaign trail, Platiner talks a lot about being a veteran and the various ways that's informed his politics. He's promised to, quote, never send Americans into a pointless war. And to solve the issue of a president effectively being able to declare wars, but it's not call them wars, Platiners called on Congress to reclaim its war powers and other authorities over the executive, quote, we must pass a new War Powers act . The same must go for ending the executive's intrusion on congressional powers of the Purse, taxation , and other legislative prerogatives, unquote. We'll talk more about Graham Platin er's campaign platform and ties to organized labor after this ad break Welcome back to It Could Happen Here . Democratic nominee for US Senate Graham Platner was interviewed by the New York Times and said that since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy, our wars, and interventions haven't been good for workers or American families. Quote, they often are very good for corporate interests, defense contractors, and people in places of political power who want to use war as a mechanism of protecting their political power , unquote. Planner told The Times that he has a complicated relationship with the military, where he's still proud of being a marine , but is ashamed of what's happened in the Middle East and says that the policies and systems orchestrating those wars are quote unquote flawed from the top down and that he considers himself anti war. But it doesn't matter if you try your best inside of a flawed policy in a flawed system. It's flawed from the top down. It's bound to fail. It's bound to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who in no way, shape or form are deserving of it, because I mean we destroyed Iraq , and we destroyed Afghanistan , and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement , all of it was we brought that . We, the United States did that. And that I'm ashamed of The anger that I feel is for the people that send me , who are, frankly , still the same people, who are sending people off right now to go be in harm's way so we can start and have a stupid war with Ir an. Platinar has been clear that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that the U. S. has aided in the genocide of Palestinians. Quote, it is the moral question of our time and we failed as a nation. Platner believes that Israel should not receive any U. S. tax dollars and has proudly opposed APAC , though he has voiced support for sending aid to Ukraine. Platner calls abolishing Ice the moderate position , and that he supports a path to citizenship, strong border security , and a quote unquote end to the mass deportation machine. His policy platform says that quote unquote, many multinational corporations have no interest in immigration reform because quote, they want illegal workers with no rights, who they can pay slave wages and abuse at will unquote . In response to the overturning of Roe V Wade, which Susan Collins assisted in by voting for Brett Kavanaugh, Platner wants to codify abortion rights and protect privacy rights . His platform states, quote, The Constitution should make clear that Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, including personal medical decisions, control over one's own body, and freedom from unjust surveillance. In an age of mass data collection and artificial intelligence, this protection is more important than ever . Platinum certainly leans pro gun, he's taught leftist armed self defense classes and owns Air fifteen . He doesn't support an assault weapon span, but did back a referendum to create a red flag law in the state of Maine. Other miscellaneous campaign planks include more funding for the post office, passing the Postal Banking Act, developing a federal childcare policy for kids under six , defending Medicare access for people with disabilities, strengthening the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, opposing any federal support for private school vouchers , reviving federal support for housing, something like the VA Home Loan Program for more Americans , banning hedge funds from buying homes through legislation like the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act and legalizing cannabis and clemency for people caught up in the war on drugs. That is a long list of policies, and school perspects,ive legislation, that would be no easy task to enact . Some would mean a fundamental transformation in American politics and the world economy. Platin knows that not everything in his platform can be passed overnight , but says that Democrats need a strategic vision to fight for , telling the Maine monitor, quote, I'll be the first one to say that me being in the Senate as the junior senator from Maine is not going to get us Medicare for all. There is this sort of establishment pushback where people are often like, well, you're not going to be able to do that immediately . Like, well, no shit. That's what power building is , that's what a long term plan is, unquote. In interviews, Platner often talks about his quote unquote theory of power and how the Democratic Party has quote never been able to articulate what it's trying to do. Like what's the end goal? It never really articulates a clear set of policies to get us there and then never seems to want to wield power to make those policies a reality un equal. Platiner told The New York Times that Democratic Party leadership has failed the moment, that the party needs new leadership, and that Chuck Schumer should be replaced. Of course, candidates can say anything to get elected. We've all seen politicians run on populist platforms, only to then serve lobbyists, corporate interests, and themselves once in office. Trump himself first ran as a populist outsider despite being a billionaire. Senator John Fetterman also comes to mind. Though the only thing that really made Harvard graduate John F ederal and quotequ uneot outsider was that he wore a hoodie and had stupid facial hair. Prior to his Senate campaign, he served as mayor of Braddock for thirteen years and lieutenant governor for four. Fetteranm also claims that suffering a stroke quote unquote liberated him from quote unquote progressivism . All this to say , John Fetterman and Graham Platten's respective backgrounds are quite different but obviously words and promises aren't enough. To measure a candidate's worth, one must look deeper at the ties to local communities and organizations that might inform a candidate's political platform facilitate their ability to run for office. To quote Graham Plattner, we need to build political power through getting people like me into the U. S. Senate, into Congress . And we also need to do it while building organizational power outside of the system. There's never been a moment in American history where we've gotten good things just because the institutions or people in power decided to do it . They need to be press ed . I mean, this is honestly why the country has killed the Labor Movement. We did it on purpose . We did it because the Labor Movement is the foundation of power that can actually like push back against the system unquote . Graham Platiner is only running for Senate because last summer, the AFLCIO, along with other local labor unions, were looking to put up a candidate to run against Susan Collins on a working class platform. In july twenty twenty five, candidate scouts showed up outside Plattner's door asking him to run for Senate. Platin says he and his wife told them to quote unquote fuck off. The scouts, including progressive strategist Daniel Moroff, had learned about Platiner from a video he was in a few years ago about community organizing against a corporate Norwegian salmon farm that was trying to move into their bay. My daily grind is coming out in the morning and cleaning equipment and tying knots and fixing rope and fixing line and fixing boats, and cleaning oysters and listening to podcasts. My name is Graham Plattner and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. Born and raised here in Sullivan. I grew up three houses down from the house I currently live in. Bangorc Daily News reported that in July, Plattner spoke with Jason Shedlock, the president of the main state building and construction trades council via Zoom to quote talk about the potential run while working on his oyster boat. About a week after first knocking on his door , the campaign scouts showed up again , but this time with a detailed plan and the connections to get a campaign up and running. Union support ed provide resources to shoot a launch video, facilitate small dollar fundraising, and get Plattner's name in local papers. He had never run for office before, but did serve as the harbor master and chair of the planning board for the town of Sullivan . In terms of Platner's own working class or middle class background , Plattner's father was a lawyer in rural Maine, and his mom was a small business owner who currently owns a local restaurant. As a kid, his family got a financial aid package for a fancy private school in Connecticut, but Plattner got himself kicked out after three months and then went back to Maine. After exiting the military, he worked as a bartender while going to university in DC, dropped out , then worked as a private military contractor for six months at the Embassy in Afghanistan. While there, Plattner says he got deeply disillusioned with government corruption and the military industrial complex , quit, moved back to Maine, started working at a friend's oyster farm and got into local organizing. In a less reported on a Reddit post made by Graham Plattner , he credited late political commentator Michael Brooks with moving him towards left wing working class politics around twenty nineteen to twenty twenty . Platner also made Reddit posts about being an anti fascist . The Senate campaign launched in mid August, and in just nine days it raised one million dollars , with an average donation of thirty three dollars. ninety eight percent of the donations were under one hundred dollars . During its first week, the campaign was attracting three hundred volunteers per day . Pretty soon, the campaign attracted the attention of Bernie Sanders, who comes September, invited Platinum to speak on his upcoming fight oligarchy tour , and has continued to campaign with and back Platner. Meanwhile, Governor Jennet Mills was recruited by Chuck Schumer to beat Platner in the Democratic primary . From early on in the race, Plattner had received backing from local labor unions. Beyond the Maine ALCIO , Platiner has received endorsements from Ironworkers Local seven, National Nurses United, Maine State Nurses Association, American Postal Workers, Local four hundred fifty eight , the National Postal Mail Handlers local three hundred and one, the Electrical Workers Union local two three twenty seven , the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the Maine State Council of Building and Construction Trades, North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters , Carpenters Local three hundred and forty nine and three hundred and fifty two , Painters and Allied Trades DC thirty five , Massachusetts and Northern New England Labor's District Council Millwrights local one twenty one. Labor's International Union of North America local three twenty seven six six eight and nine hundred and seventy six , teamsters local three hundred and forty and the United Auto Workers who represents nearly two thousand workers in Maine, including Marine Draftsmen at the Bath Ironworks, nonprofit employees, workers at the Portland Museum of Art, and graduate employees across the University of Maine system . In their endorsement, UAW Region nine A director Brandon Mancilla said quote, Graham Platner has emerged as a vo ice for the people of Maine fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and money in our politics. More importantly, he's building a mass movement that will not only power his campaign but will be ready to take on the challenges facing working families in Maine and across the country once in office. Our members are ready to hit the ground running with Graham's campaign and take back the power for Maine's working class, unquote . Platiner has said he wanted this campaign to be an extension of the local community organizing that he and his wife were already engaged in, telling the main monitor the campaign is a quote organizing strategy first and an electoral strategy second . For the past few years, Platin's organized with a mutual aid and community activist group called Arcadia Action and was named in local news coverage for organizing a protest after Trump was reelected. The protest focused on quote, the preservation of constitutional rights, support for Ukraine, and protecting transgender manors, unquote. Planner is also an active member of the Kenopskit County Chapter of the Mains People's Alliance, the largest progressive community action organization in the state, which claims to have more than thirty two thousand members. As a member of the Maine People's Alliance, Plattner traveled to Washington DC a couple years ago for a march to protest access to healthcare and since then has been doing grassroots community organizing in Hanok County according to the organization . The member led board of directors of Maine People's Alliance voted unanimously to endorse Graham Platner. To quote the announcement, Maine People's Alliance Board co chair Gina Moran, they them, said quote, listening to Plattner during interviews in town halls, it is clear that he addresses the critical issues affecting our country and specifically Maine. He speaks d irectly to the reality that the top one percent are hoarding wealth while the middle class and the poor are left to go without . He's also addressed the need to fix these same issues that we have been working on for years such as health care affordability, the housing crisis, and immigrant rights. His activism drove him to seek this office out of frustration . His values and dedication are what align him with the main e People's Alliance . The organization said back in February that Platiner has been, quote, active and vocal in resisting ISIS presence here in Maine and has been calling on our members of Congress to do more to protect everyone in Maine and across the country from ISIS violent racist tactics, unquote. Maine People's Alliance Board member Sean Donnelly said quote, Graham names the oligarchy and corporate greed as the true enemies of progress in Washington and he understands that the only way to defeat them is through grassroots organizing. His personal story of finding purpose through his community and activism has the power to inspire many who may feel angry, disconnected, or hopeless about politics. Graham is a talented leader whose values, vision, and strategy are aligned with the mission of the Main People's Alliance . Following the primary, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed Platner over Susan Collins, who was one of the deciding votes in sending Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and last week, the Maine Service Employees Association, which represents more than thirteen thousand active and retired public service workers in the state, formerly endorsed Graham Plattner . So why are these endorsements and community ties ? These relations are what a working class campaign's political platform emerges from . And this community voting block is a mechanism to hold working class candidates accountable to their constituents. Platner has told New Y theork Times that he's a quote firm believer that organized people is the only actual place of power to conflict with organized money . And in our society, money is very organized, unquote. He echoed this sentiment at a campaign rally covered by More Perfect Union . Politics is about power . And in this society, power is either organized money or it's organized people And the money is organized, it always has been, and it always will be until we organize enough people to pull it back . In May, Platner told John Stewart getting someone like him elected quote needs to be in tandem with a fully organized broad based coalition here in the state of Maine that can put pressure on members of our delegation if need be because it's not going to be enough to just rely on the systems unquote . Two days before the primary election, Platner spoke at a town hall about building a senate office that prioritizes a relationship with labor unions rather than the owners of the industries that labor works in. A senate office where a worker, labor organizer, or civil rights representative should get more face to face time with a senator than any lobbyist. I very much believe that we need to connect that kind of local organizing work directly to a Senate office in DC . So it's something like I used to have been an organizer with Maine People's Alliance before . And I firmly believe that we need closer coordination between community organizations, environmental organizations , frankly all of the organ izing groups around Maine with institutional power Because I do think that's history tends to show that you're most successful when outside organizing is working in tandem with institutional power . That tends to be when we get the most significant wins. I'll come back to discuss how the Platiner campaign was actually run after this ad break . Welcome back to a Capit here . This past April , one of Plattner's former high school classmates, turned journalist, named Josh Keefe, wrote an article for the main monitor about why Plattner's campaign has been so successful in Maine . Platner told his former classmate Dad, the campaign is being run like a community organizing project . Quote , this kind of campaign and kind of politics with an or ganizing focus . This doesn't work if you just run TV ads . My background is in organizing and I want to take that on the road as a candidate . And the only way it ever works is by going out and engaging with people directly. You got to like not sleep unquote . Direct person to person engagement has been the hallmark of Platner's campaign strategy. Here ag aesge, is certainly playing a factor in the race. Platin is forty one . Janet Mills is seventy eight , and Susan Collins is seventy three. Platner's younger age is not just compelling to voters who want a younger generation of candidates, but it also impacts how he can campaign. Platter is effectively campaigning full time , making three to six campaign appearances a day while his business partner handles the oyster farm . From late September to the early June primary , his campaign held eighty three town hall events across the state , pulling in hundreds of people per event and filling out community venues . In comparison, Susan Collins has not held a single public town hall meeting in over twenty five years. Janet Mills didn't even release a policy platform until April. Platner told More Perfect Union, quote, people want to hear about the future, people want to hear about your policies , and people also want access to you so they can figure out if you're full of shit or not, unquote. Considering the smaller size of Maine , come the November election, there's a good chance Platinum will have spoken face to face with nearly every voter in this state. At these town halls, he often talks about power , how working class power won the New Deal , and how since the seventies, corporate interests have been undermining that power , using money to influence policy . At an event in Freberg, Maine, Platner said, quote, We are the richest society in the history of humanity . We can have universal healthcare. We can have universal childcare, we can have universal education going from kindergarten all the way through higher education. We can have a tax code that pulls back the wealth that was stolen from the working class of this country for the past fifty years . What we need to do from the ground up build power the old fashioned way . This comes from organizing unquote . Planner's campaign has helped with other local electoral and legislative efforts , and the main monitor reported that Plattner's events often serve as locations for quote food donation drop offs. He is frequently introduced by a local activist who gets to talk about their work , unquote. Plattner told the main monitor quote, We really have to fundamentally understand that no one is coming to save us . And the only way to build that power on your own is here in the real world , face to face with your neighbors , building trust in relationships again, unquote . Platiners also said that building that kind of outside power is also how to find more people to run for office and gather the resources needed to get them elected to take power . In an interview with John Stewart, Putner said that because the U. S. Senate is in many ways a uniquely undemocratic institution, quote , set up to be a specific bulwark against working class people to protect the elites , that actually makes it a quote unquote unique place of power if candidates with strong ties to working class communities can occu py those seats . Following their historic loss in twenty twenty four , the Democratic Party establishment has been in a uniquely weak position , opening up the opportunity to address the issues that have led the party into national relevancy . Graham Platinum lays blame on the Democrats abandoning the working class. And that doesn't just mean white construction workers, but the actual multicultural multiracial working class , wage workers and those who cannot live off their investments. For the past forty years, the party has abandoned organized labor and begun catering to upper middle class professionals and has become a party of the elites and Ivy Leagues. In the United States, there are a lot of people who don't vote based on an ideology they hold , but in response to what's happen ing in their communities , hospitals closing, jobs disappearing, groceries and utilities getting more expensive. Why would they vote for a party that says everything is fine? The economy is technically doing great. The Democratic establishment has wagered that voters would rather protect the system rather than change it . And in twenty twenty four , that wager was proven wrong. People want change , even if that change is being promised by a billionaire charlatan whose real interest is in serving the upper class and tech companies. But for as many people who decided to vote for Trump, there were many others saw through the charade but were so disillusioned by party politics that they chose not to vote at all. Platner's campaign has made itself not just about taking on Trump or even Susan Collins , but a part of a larger seismic shift the working class reasserting its power and taking back the Democratic Party. To quote the main monitor, quote, Unlike Janet Mills, he's not trying to convince voters he will stand up to Trump. He's trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he believes allows Trump's brand of politics to flourish, unquote . Later at that event in the town of Freiburg , Plattner told the crowd, quote, people when their lives begin to deteriorate are going to look for folks to blame . And if we don't have an actual answer, then hatred and xenophobia and racism and homophobia and transphobia, all of them will fill the vacuum . This means we have to go out in our community and we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves unquote . Maine has semi open primaries, meaning that unenrolled voters can vote in a party primary . In the lead to the up prim ary, Platner's campaign did a series of videos where he gets coffee with Republican leaning voters and they talk about how their interests are more aligned compared to the interests of Trump, the billion aire class and Susan Collins . Platner himself has said that his rise in Maine says more about the appetite for a new kind of politics rather than him specifically as a candidate . But from the perspective of some voters , the slow drip of scandals and controversies might actually bolster Platner's image as an anti establishment candidate . For example, these people interviewed by CNN and MS Now . Are you considering holding your breath and voting for him? I got until Tuesday to decide, but I'm pretty sure I'll vote for him. I don't think a lot of this crap is anybody else's business. For some Democrats, they're willing to look past the interpersonal stories. I'm not really interest ed in the guys Floyd bulls. You know, I'm interested in his vision and what he has to say . And I love what he has to say. So yeah, it's been definitely difficult because everybody is piling on this guy. Does he have a problematic past? Yes , but I would rather have a redemption story than somebody telling you how wonderful they are, how much research they do , and yet they still make the wrong decision for the people of Maine . On election day, june ninth, Platinum won seventy one point nine percent of the vote, with one hundred fifty four thousand and fifty eight votes . Governor Janet Mills, who stopped campaigning a month or a half prior, but remained on the ballot, won forty one thousand votes or nineteen point three percent . Graham Platiner won more primary votes than any other Democrat ic Senate candidate in the history of Maine. As he walked onto the stage for his victory speech, drop kick Murphy's cover of Which side are you on blared in the background . Platin promised quote, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator . Now the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for one story , that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they fail to understand that this is not about me at all . This is a movement us , about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much at the hands of the ruling class . At a town hall just a few days before the primary , Platiner spoke about the need to rebuild our old alliances with labor unions, community organizations, and civil rights groups. Quote , the only thing that's ever beat fascism is a broad based working class coalition . Fascism is what we are up against. I think a lot of the folks at the national level misunderstand the reason they keep getting everything wrong. They think this is a race about me, but it isn't. This is a race about us . This is a race about the future of politics in Maine. This is a race about building power the old fashioned way from the ground up, going out into our communities and having hard conversations , putting in time and energy that many of us do not have. We've got to do it anyway . So what I'm asking to do, if you don't want to volunteer on this campaign, that's fine, join a labor union, go help out at the local food pantry , go help out at a food bank. It doesn't matter what you do, but you got to do something . Because the moment we're in right now , it's going to require all of us, unquote . There were two hundred and fifteen thousand votes in the Democratic primary. Platiner's campaign had fifteen thousand volunteers These volunteers went up against and beat the Democratic establishment, and now they face the GOP establishment. This shift in the politics of the Democratic Party is not isolated to maintaine, Democratcialicist So s just won in Washington, DC, and following the election of Zoram Dani, nine more DSA candidates just won the Democratic primary in New York, including three seats in the US House of Representatives. But Maine occupies a unique place in American politics, the stereotypical purple state. Unseating Susan Collins would prove that real working class politics don't just win liberal cities, but can take down what Bernie Sanders would call the oligarchy. There's an old saying As Maine goes , so goes the nation . If you want to st op , if you want to stop war with Iran and end the forever wars , if you want to give workers the raise they deserve seniors the security they worked for, you want to bring back Roe V Wade , as Maine goes , so goes the nation . If you want to stop a Trump family slush fund, their ballroom, their deals with Saudi princes and tech oligarchs . If you want to stop the corruption as Maine goes , so goes the nation . If we want to dismantle Ice , win back the Senate , check Donald Trump's power and take back ours as Maine goes , so goes the nation . Together we will defeat Susan Collins . Graham Platin is slightly ahead in the polls above Susan Collins, but the race is still quite close. In twenty twenty, when Collins was facing a challenger , she too was behind in the polls, but still pulled off of victory. That does it for me and it could happen here . See you on the other side So we need a social media wrap up for the word bake off. Any takers? I can design posts on Canva. I can also design posts on Canva. Aha. Well, I can design posts with a jam tile thing on Canva. That's great. I can design posts with a jam tart theme and generate a moving image of a jam rolly poly rolling on canvas. Well, I can design posts and create a three D headline that says bake your tasks out on Canva. I can design posts and create a three D headline and turn your face into a bake well tart on Canberra. All right, calm down. With a huge range of easy to use design AI tools, anyone can come with Canva. I can slice a video with a crocumbouch . This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our Weekly Newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by James Dout Me Wong and Robert Evans. Hey, hey. This episode we are covering the week of june seventeenth to june twenty fourth. Yeah, should we start off with some little things? Yeah , let's start out with some small things. Mm hmm. So I guess to begin with a federal judge ark Sple Suknan , who we've heard about before in the show, has sparked the Trump administration from quote haphazardly assembling a list of citizens that would be used to purge voter rolls. Great . Yeah . I'm glad they can't do that haphazardly. Yeah . Given the timing right before the midterms, hopefully that means that this isn't going to happen in a way that will impact the midterms. The State Department has announced it's going to begin revoking passports for people with outstanding child support of more than two thousand five hundred States dollars . They can contact an embassy to get a temporary passport to come back to the US, but they'll only have their full passport restored, I guess if they pay their outstanding child support debt . Okay , yeah, I'm wondering what got this to their ears. How big a problem is this? I'm not again I'm not against this. I'm just wondering why they why they moved to do this . I saw it on the Twitter feed of the U. S. Embassy in Nigeria and I would be interested and I don't know how possible this would be to go after with public records to know which particular embassies are revoking passports of which particular people. If you see what I mean? Yeah, I think in general, revoking passports is a bad thing to do. Yeah, I think this isn't the way to go after child support. You are a piece of shit if you're not playing paying your child support , but I think generally the possibility of someone being left like stateless , you know, that's not how we get to a better world here. I'm just wondering why they're doing this. Like that's that's by like this has to be they have to be targeting somebody with this. Like I don't believe this is about the problem of like there being a lot of people who are getting all of child support by fleeing the country . Like I don't believe that's the motivation here and I'm kind of curious what it is. I couldn't tell you for sure, but the fact that I saw this on the Nigeria embassy website, I mean, I can look right now and see what if other embassies have posted it, I guess here we go U. S. embassy in Spain . I don't see it on their page . For example, interesting. Okay. It'd be interesting to follow Legislaug that's suggestive, but yeah, sure. It's something I came across like you know about half an hour before we recorded this. No, it's not worthy. A judge has quashed a subpoena aimed at Governor Waltz and May Frey, along with other state politicians in Minneapolis, writing, quote , This course of events in and of itself establishes beyond a reasonable dispute that the subpoenas were part of a broader campaign to coerce state and local officials in Minnesota to assist the Trump administration in its enforcement of immigration laws , and of course his campaign played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration's well established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the president's political and personal adversaries . Very thing that the Trump administration has done with the DOJ, right? But it's good to see it called out, I guess. Sure. USCIS is looking to increase fees for existing permanent residents to naturalize, bec Iome U. S. citizens as well as removing fee waivers for lower income migrants . This will be a barrier to people, right? And that is why it's happening. Yeah. Yep. A rep Erna Paulina Luna used Claude AI to end legislation . She's deleted her tweet, but I actually posted a link to her tweet on Blue Sky and it still contains like the cached text of the tweet if you want to go read it. She immediately responded by throwing her staff under a bus. Sure. Noble. Claiming that it was not uncommon for staff to use clawed to fucking amend national legislation. People just don't like to do their job. Do you? My God. Yeah, it's a yeah, I don't know how for hundreds of years people wrote legislation without asking fucking Claude. She left the had Claude responded in the text of the bill that's had stuff. Yeah. Claude is very popular in Washington, DC, like specifically yeah I mean it's it's widely agreed to be the best of the of the chat thinking person's chat bot yeah yeah the thinking man's chat bot there is like a weird pizaro universe where you get like the Mark Fisher clawed outputs that writes all tons of legislation that gets suddenly passed where the US enters a very odd odd time because they kept using this chat bot that really liked like certain certain writing from certain shit that people were reading online in two thousand one . Yeah, certain biases baked in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm having this nightmare image, I'm having this nightmare image of people doing like prompt injection attacks specifically to like get clawed to auto spit out certain lines of regulation. Yeah , yeah. Just inserting trans rights into the defense appropriations bill. Claude amending prescription drug laws to allow me specifically to purchase a lot over the counter . I can see a lot of good places to go here. Yeah. The Evans Amendment. The Evans amendment. I just get to call can actually be delivered. You don't even have to purchase it. Yeah, they put it in a trash bag for me, yeah. I drop it with a drone. Talking of inserting shit into bills, let's talk about Mike Lee, the only person worth of the planet than the sport of go ld. Mikey mentioned two weeks in a row. Are we ? I'm mentioning Mikey until he stops with this shit. Let me tell you a bipartisan group of legislators has introduced legislation to block the back door sale of public l ands through the reconciliation process. Hazar . They might as well have called this the fuck you Mike Lee stopped doing this will it. Like it is exclusively one person who is doing this and it is Mikey the bill equivalent of spritzing a single guy on the nose with a bottle of water stab it. , he's been slapped down it's interesting to see like you know see less bipartisanship than you used to, but no one likes Smikely in this ship , apart from people in Utah who inexplicably elected him. There's nothing people in Utah hate more than the beautiful land in which they inhabit. , not being able to mine and graze it as much as they like. The Atlantic is reporting that PHS has pressured General Donahue into stepping down. It seems Donahue will leave his job next week. Yeah. I guess I'd be Robert, you'll be sure you're familiar as well. Donohue is a massive figure. He's very famously like the last U. S. military official to leave Afghanistan during the withdrawal. Yeah. He's a pretty major guy and was widely considered to be kind of one of the folks you'd think would be sort of bulletproof outside of the fact that he was involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan famously, like and I think most people assume that because it was in a very like stereot ypically heroic way and because this guy had such a reputation within like special operations that he would be protected. But this is kind of further example of the brain drain that's been hitting all of the guys who know how to do stuff in the Department of Defense? Yeah, like it is quite remarkable when you look at a list of the people who have been purged like you know quote unquote retired, right? Like in terms of U mil.it Sary. leadership capacity, it has been significantly diminished by Pete Hags I just want to put a note in here for later on hopefully, hopefully this never becomes relevant, but I really, really do not like that in a two year span there has been a significant purge of both the senior leadership of the American and Chinese militaries really do not like that. Just put ting this note in the record that like yeah very similar . You mean all the guys who like know each other? Yeah , and you can say no, I don't think that means that. I know this guy. He would do wouldn't do that for this reason. Like everyone like that on both sides is gone and that maybe is how traditionally disasters happen. Yeah. Yeah . So don't like this. Just putting it in note. It's actually like say what you want about. I mean, say many different things about like the fucking militaries of both China and the United States. But it's really good actually when you have like a professional officerad raQ that's insulated from politics and also like kind of socially know the guys in the other countries at the higher levels because they've like spoken. Like that's actually really useful in de escalation of conflict. Exactly. Yeah, it gives it informalal de escation mechanism. And when that disappears, it can lead to problems . Yeah. And when you're promoting people of the Hag theft fucking tendency, especially Ray , a surprising number of disasters have been averted and not just because military officials, but because like people in two countries who were like high up in the government like just kind of had hung out with each other at events and one was able to like call the other and be like, hey Joe, like you, guys aren't doing this, are you? Because my people are fucking flipping out . Those relationships are really load bearing in the us all not dying an atomic fire thing. So yeah, you know there seems to be some kind of counterfactual I don't know, there's just a lie going around ex dot com that Donohu Donohue was the last soldier to leave at Afghanistan as Roberts said and like they were being shot at and there were like junior enlisted folks being shot at that wasn't happening. The last thirteen US troops who died in Afghanistan were not shot by the Taliban. They were killed in an Islamic state suicide bombing. Again, because the Taliban was cooperating with our withdrawal. They were like, the Taliban was not fighting, shooting at the US as we were leaving because they wanted us to do what we were doing. Yeah, yeah, they got the desired outcome without having to do that. If you're the Taliban and the war is almost over and you know if you know what you know one thing about the US as the Taliban, which is like if we just suddenly kill a bunch of their guys , maybe they don't leave . Yeah, I know, they will return into a fucking murdering people sp ree. Like I don't know, people once again, right? Like things that have happened in the last five years seem to not exist in the mind of people who use Xot com to get their news never existed for them. I guess finally some good news from Margway PDF who destroyed a Top Mador MI seventeen helicopter using FPV drones yesterday. Oh wow . Yeah, not the first I was happening in Myanmar. I constantly see when a drone is used in Ukraine in a sort of relatively novel way. People saying this is the first time it has happened. And almost always it has already happened in Myanmar. Not always like there were some autonomous drones that killed people in Ukraine a couple of years ago that I'm not aware of existing in Myanmar. But like orientalism definitely plays a role in people's ignorance when it comes to like military first s happening in the Spring Revolution. But yeah, in this instance they seemed to hit it with multiple FPV drones taking out its landing gear and its engines . I do have one short story here that I've tried to avoid covering because I really don't think it's that important . Yeah . But much like the algae it just keeps creeping back into the headlines. So last month, President Trump got super obsessed with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, spent fourteen million dollars in a no contract bid to get rid of the algae. Trump used his own pool guys and they've drained the reflection pool. They painted the bottom quote unquote American flag blue and then filled that thing up again . Brilliant marketing decision by whoever named that paint, by the way . Yeah . Yet somehow the algae returned. And in an even worse state turning the entirety of the blue reflecting water green . So in response, they started dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae . Now hydrogen peroxide also a paint thinner and strips of the American leg blue paint started peeling off the bottom of the pool , making the situation worse. Now here's where things get really interesting. This is the only reason why we're covering this because last weekend Trump began making the completely unsubstantiated claims that the algae filled blue paint fiasco was the result of quote unquote radical left lunatics who vandalized the pool . The National Guard and the Park Police have since then been arresting people for standing near the reflecting pool . On Tuesday night, President Trump truthed, quote, six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for the damage they did to our country's now beautiful reflecting pool . The three hundred and fifty foot gash made by a very sharp knife or razors is actually numerous slashes over a very long, three hundred and fifty foot length . It was purposefully and criminally done and someone had to work very hard, probably in the dark of the night, to create such a situation , unquote . No evidence this has happened obviously. People have been watching the pool nonstop. No one's been seen the National Guard waiting in there with a knife cutting the floor. Now garrison garrison, you don' underre notstanding what the president is saying. One man didn't wait in there with a knife. A team of hundreds each made a single slap. That's the kind of discipline Antifa is capable of. You don't need the dark. Of course in the dark of the night, they wear black. Now there's outlets like the Washington Post just re ported on Trump's claims without noting that this is just a lie. Just a complete nonsense. Yeah. But as the president has said , six people had been arrested, one of whom for sticking his hand in the pool and touching one of the floating pieces of blue paint. Yeah . Trump has said they will need to drain the pool again to make further repairs ahead of the fourth of july two hundred and fiftieth celebration . If you read the actual report that was made by I think it was the Parks Department or whatever, like analyzing what had happened in the reflecting pool, they did notice some like things that were described as cuts but concluded they had nothing to do with the paint itself . Like if you actually read the report, like what he's talking about is not like what his own people said. He just saw cuts in the report and ignored it was like but these were somewhere else and not relevant to the paint peeling and just went with it. Like that's the root of all this . The thing with the story is like, yeah, on the one hand it is very funny that the pool the pool green but, also the fact that Trump can just lie about this stuff and then also a bunch of people get arrested is really bad. It is, in fact, really bad that you can be arrested for putting your hands in a pool . Yeah. That's very bad. Fundamental level, not a sign of a society that is functioning or healthy or at all not doing well . Yeah . Yeah, not great, no, not a good no. Yeah, not a good look for us. On the USA's two hundred fiftieth birthday. Yeah. Deeply authoritarian society speaking of , let's discuss probably the worst piece of news this week. Yeah , which is the sentencing in the prairie land case where the Trump administration brought terrorism charges against what they allege is an anif Ant a cell who attended a protest outside of an iced detention facility last fourth of July . Benjamin Song was sentenced to one hundred years in prison. Song was convicted of attempted murder for shooting toward a police officer who was pointing a handgun at fleeing protesters . Marciala Reda was sentenced to seventy years in prison. Zachary Eve ts, Autumn Hill, Savannah Batten, Elizabeth Sodo, and Megan Morris were sentenced to fifty years in prison after being convicted of providing quote unquote material support to terrorists Some of these people weren't even involved in planning the protest but just knew others who were . One of the people in this case wasn't even at the protest, Daniel Sanchez Desrada, who was sentenced to thirty years in prison, did not attend the protest but was convicted of concealing documents for moving a box of personal items in anarch ines from one house to another . That got him sentenced to thirty years in prison. One of the judges, Judge O'Connor, who's not the judge for the trial , said that the maximum sentences are to quote send a message to anyone who shares similar ideologies. Yeah , these are brutal sentences . Right. Like these are the sort of things that you see in the potential liability, but it's in my experience I haven't seen many people get like maximum sentences. Like I'm familiar with guys who are convicted of providing material support to the Islamic State, for instance, who did not get sentences anywhere in this situation . No, this is absolutely insane. This is unprecedented . V cleeraryly politically motivated as the judge openly said during sentencing. Yeah deliberately admitted it was, yeah. Yeah . Like the Adam Laughen guy who planned to attack power grids a few years ago was just sentenced to twenty . This is absurd. Like a song sentence of a hundred years is pretty insane itself for even for being convicted of attempted murder, but all of these material support charges and concealing documents at thirty to seventy years is like yeah. It's outrageous. Yeah. It's a very clear attempt to have a chilling episode that's the goal here. That's the goal with the with the prosecutions in Minneapolis as well, like yeah , you know, it's all the same part of the same strategy. Yeah. No, using conspiracy charges to rope in people to this larger case arguing that this conspiracy is evidenced through reading zines, through wearing certain clothes at a protest, being put of antifa . And then they don't need to actually argue that every single person did a specific violent crime, but just association with each other can lead to a conviction. And we are seeing this copied in Minnesota where just like one or two people are charged with doing violence like kicking a vehicle. But what links the fifteen defendants together in Minnesota are these conspiracy charges. Yeah. Yeah, the thing that it reminds me the most of is just is haymarket , where, you know, in a very similar way, you have an attempt to even necessarily go after the people who did the thing. You have an attempt to put the ideology on trial. I mean, the judge explicitly says this, right ? This is not a trial that is happening because something happened. This is specifically an attempt to send a message, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, to send a message and to stop resistance to everything that Trump administration has been doing, and particularly try to try to like bring down a level of resistance to Ice and Border patrols like raids and actions . Going forward, the defendants will absolutely need support for what is going to be a lengthy appeals process . The worst case scenario is going to require building a mass movement to push for pardoning anti Ice protesters, including the Prairie Line defendants in a post Trump government. A complicating factor in this case is that some of these defendants are also facing state charges , which a federal pardon would not cover in Texas. Yeah , but rallying behind people is of the like utmost urgency . Same as all the anti protesters around the country who are facing repression I do want to note that our previous coverage of prayer and my previous coverage focused on how the government used these specific charges , how they used specific testimony and flimsy evidence to successfully argue a conviction. Well, also mentioning that some of the mistakes that the public defenders made during that case, missing deadlines to file motions, not calling witnesses, right? There is unique aspects of this case. And I think knowing what those are is important. When I was putting together that episode, a lot of the coverage I saw talked about how fucked up this situation is. And it really is, right? But I think it's also important to actually know how the state is able to do this, like how they're able to argue this in very specific ways, to understand some of the unique aspects of this case, and to know what the state and jurors consider relevant evidence saying certain things in group chats , but also just being at a protest with someone else wearing possibly matching clothing, right? Understanding those specifics I think is also important . But going forward, supporting these defendants regardless of the conviction is of the utmost urgency. We will link to the support committee for the Prairie Land Defendants and the donation link to help with legal costs and other expenses resulting from the state repress ion. Yeah, I'm sure these people will have a lengthy and challenging appeal process ahead of them. Like they will need significant legal support if they're going to get out of prison and you know, like if we look at like previous movements in the US, like Biden Pardon and Leonard Peltier after decades, right? Yep, of him being a prison, like most of the rest of his life was spent in jail and we can come to contrast that to how Trump pardoned the J six is very rapidly. No, one hundred percent. Yeah , specifically in a post J six pardoned world and considering the popular resistance to ICE . I think it's imperative that we go forward with the specific intention of even if the appeals fail, an anti Ice movement needs to include these people in their advocacy and getting them pardons in the future . Yeah, yeah. And I think it is also just worth saying that, you know, I think there's there's an extent to which this repression would have happened regardless, but part of the reason why this is happening and part of the reason why the judge is saying the stuff and part of the reason why they find the need to try to do a chilling effect and to use fear and terror to stop anything else you know to stop any of the persistence is that the resistance is working , right? That doesn't mean that people aren't hurt in unbelievably sort of hideous ways. It doesn't mean that deportations aren't continuing, but they have not been able to do the things that they wanted to do. No, they're this is defensive lashing out. Yeah . Yeah , you know, there is an extent to which they're doing this because they're losing and they know it. And they have to something has to happen in order to change the balance of how this whole sort of conflict between IC and people's communities has been unfolding. And this is one of the things they're trying to do to do that. Yeah, and more broadly, they're just trying to chill anything that could become part of successful resistance. Like they understand that anything that's public to the administration that looks bad can make them look bad. Like that's why they're lashing out at the fucking reflecting pool tool. Like the goal is to just instill like to instill a sort of instinctive fear of doing anything that could make the administration look bad.ed They're trying to like force their own sort of like less majeste situation out through just like arresting people whenever they embarrass the regime. Yeah . And specifically trying to criminalize common protest tactics and picking specific cases like prairie land and like the fifteen defendants in Minneapolis and rather than actually focusing the majority of the case on alleged crimes , instead focusing on Antifa as this scary specter, right? It's anarchism, violent militancy , where just discussions or aesthetics of militancy is really what is really what the case is like resting on and convincing a jury that these people are a scary group of outside agitators . But by solidifying a conviction, that actually criminalizes what are legal protest tactics. Like this is the scariest part about the case in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities is that most of that document is covering legal, like Icewatch, rapid response networks, right? Legal actions , but they're trying to criminalize people's coordination to do that legal action focusing on a group that the government thinks is specifically militant or has certain political beliefs. Yeah. I would say that the Minneapolis indictment is not the Prairie Land indictment. Like that it's a very different thing.. T Tototallyally. Yeah, we made an episode that people go back and listen to it. But like, I think people I understand the fear that people are feeling , but like I want you to know that like this isn't every case going forward, right for this is a case that they have had success and they extracted like a really horrific burden . Most of the cases they bought in Minnesota have been thrown out. The details and evidence of these cas es are very, very different. Yeah, I'm only invoking the comparison because the strategy from the DOJ is similar . Even if the specific details and evidence in these cases do widely differ . And regardless of those differences, I think both the defendants in both cases should receive the same amount of support. Yeah . Like I mentioned, links for the support committee and the donation link will be at the very top of the description below . Let's go on a break and return for more news We are back and we're talking about Iran . We saw like a lot of back and forth over the weekend about the MOU about Trump threatening the Iranian deleg ation, about them not signing it. The MOU of Versailles didn't didn't work out. The MOU of Versailles. Well, we have an MOU in place , right? At the time writing , this rests on a very fragile piece in Lebanon. And I want to read something from Bengavir about Lebanon. He's a national security minister in Israel . Yeah last, time we spoke about him, he was physically assaulting people from the flatilla, I think. I'm just going to read this out. Through every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn. With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF and this comm,itment takes preced ence over every other consideration . I told the Prime Minister, even in a private meeting, for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping pong. In the Middle East, you don't win with measured responses and restraint . You need to go berserk to obliterate, to crush the terror. That's just a genocide post. Like there's insane genocidal. Yeah. Super genocidal . Like he might as well just say what I want is a genocide. The genocide is what I want. Like in other historically documented genocides , it is relatively rare to have the person just being like, We're doing the genocide over here. This is a genocide. It seems like a good time for it. Like yeah , it is historically somewhat remarkable to just be like, yes, we want to wipe them all out actually. If anyone wonders if this is genocide or not, absolutely, like you will not find a clearer statement of genocidal intent than this . And so the Iran peace deal being contingent on Israel at least finding peace Lebanon, right now they're occupying southern Lebanon. It doesn't look like they're leaving is contingent on this government , which includes someone who is openly genocidal that finding a peace deal with Lebanon , which I mean what kind of compromise can you come to with that person? Like Israel continues to be the force that continues to destabilize the region and cause more death and suffering. Let's move back to America. The Senate did pass a war powers resolution this week. It came through from the House . A resolution here, it expresses the will of Congress. It's slightly different from a piece of legislation . It is a setback for Trump, right? Like it's nothing, especially because some Republicans supported it,. Rand Paul, Lisa McLski Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy , of course John Fetterman crossed the other way because he is a Margaret Republican. He just has a blue badge next to him . So in twenty nineteen, probably the most analogous kind of recent example, Trump vetoed resolution concerning US support for the Saudi led coalition in Yemen, right? He will likely ignore this. History understanders will know that we didn't stop supporting the Saudis, right? And is very unlikely to change his policy about this, but he is clearly very upset about it. And this is important because Trump has a record as we go into the mid terms of attempting to destroy the careers of any Republican who he considers to have spoken out against him, right? So in a general sense with with a war, Congress would have to approve it within sixty days, sometimes for national security reasons, it can be extended by the executive branch to ninety days. What the White House is arguing here is that the April ceasefire means that that clock has stopped and that the war powers resolution therefore pertains to a war that no longer exists . And if they start again, it will be a completely different, separate and unrelated thing, and that clock would start again from zero. Yeah, she 's crazy. That's kind of magical thinking, but that's what they're going with, right? Just before we recorded , it was reported that Trump had a lunch, like a closed door lunch with GOP senators , which resulted in him getting into a screaming match with some of those senators, including Cassidy. Clearly the, peace deal, the fourteen points that we that we spoke about last time have been extremely unpopular with the Republicans , right? Because Trump eventually caved on like Iran's coming out of this perhaps strategically in a better position than it went into this. And now obviously, the US has done massive damage to Iranian infrastructure it's killed people, right? And but in terms of actually their military capacity, it seems to be a much less degraded than we initially thought . It looks like this continues to be one of the areas where Trump is bleeding GOP support, and so it is interesting to keep track of this. Let's move on to talk about immigration now. So the DC district court had a ruling this week. It ordered the government to facilitate the return of a man, Mr. Martinez Andino that they had deported to Honduras . The quote from the opinion I'm going to quote kind of extensively here, I have removed like when you get these opinions right they will have intex citations for other court cases and I've removed those for reading clarity quote after being arrested and detained in Montana by immigration authorities and moved between at least six detention centers in different states across the country, he seemingly disappeared. He was not permitted to contact his attorneys for more than ten days , and neither immigration and customs enforcement , nor customs and border protection would tell his attorneys where he was or in which agencies custody despite repeated requests . Not until his attorneys filed this lawsuit , initially seeking only a temporary restraining order directing defendants to tell them where and in whose custody plaintiff was located, did the government disclose that he had been removed to Honduras the same day, purportedly because he had voluntarily agreed to that departure. This guy was kept without contact with his lawyer, who was trying to contact him and who he was asking to talk to for ten days , he disputes in this case that he voluntarily agreed to depart because he was deprived of access to his legal team, because he wasn't able to understand the documents he was asked to sign . I can say from numerous interviews I've conducted with people who have been in detention that there is a great deal of pressure to sign those documents. They're there all the time, right? Like in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and it's freezing fucking cold, that document is right there in the wall for you to sign. The court ordered the government to quote ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to Honduras. And they cited Abrago Garcia versus Nome, right? So they're using that as a preced ent here. That doesn't mean that he gets to come home and he's not going to be pursued by immigration , right? That means that they have to process him and not hide him away from his lawyer for ten days . Because effectively what they did was hid this man from his lawyers for more than a week and then forced him to sign a document he couldn't meaningfully consent to. Some background here he enters as a fourteen year old without family members. I don't like the term unaccompanied minor because I've spent time with migrants travelling to the US and there are often children who are travelling without their family, but they're still accompanied by somebody or somebody who's just decided to take care of them. But that would be the legal term here, right? He was granted SIJ special immigrant juvenile status and then when he got back to Honduras, he contacted his lawyer, filed an affidavit stating that the paperwork he signed when he was detained was not explained to him , and he was quote told the only option he had detention was to sign for the paperwork. He quote asked to speak with his attorneys for days nine days between march thirty first and april ninth and his quote requests were ignored or denied and he quote told immigration officials that he was afraid to return to Honduras and wanted an interview or a hearing with the judge. These requests were also quote ignored or denied. He also says he felt terribly mistreated due to poor food and no access to showers . He also gave a different timeline of deportation than that which the government presented in his case, suggesting that he may not have entered the country at the time the government said he was out of their custody , which is important , right? Because the government's saying we don't have him anymore . His timeline of when they landed, how long they sat in the tarmac, when they transited the border there is different from the one that the government provided. It's good to see this case right, but he will still face an uphill battle. I also want to talk very briefly about Blanche vs. Lao. This is a ruling that returning green c ard holders are now considered or can be considered applicants for admission, which means they can be placed on immigration parole when entering the country. The case here pertains to Mr Lao, who returned in twenty twelve and was placed on parole while facing charges related to trademark counterfeiting. I do want to go back and reference that date again. twenty twelve. This is something that happened when Barack Obama was president. Barack Obama loved to deport people . Anybody who's telling you that that isn't the case is lying to you. Mr Lau later pled guilty and therefore was swiftly praised in removal proceedings because the government argued he was inadmissible. So when you are paroled, you're not technically admitted. You are paroled pending admission . Therefore, if you are found to be inadmissible , it is quicker to begin that removal. So this is where the Supreme Court had to decide, right? Generally green card holders are considered to have already been admitted when they are returning, right ? This ruling though will have serious consequences for LPRs, legal permanent residents, green card holders, right? This pertains to crimes involving moral turpitude. I spoke about these a great deal and I don't think we really have the space or time to go into them here, but we're just going to say that it is a broad and nebulous category because quote from the Supreme Court opinion here, nothing in the INA required the Border Officer to have a clear and convincing evidence that Lao had committed a crime involving moral turbitude before deeming him an applicant for admission. So Mr. Lao had not been convicted of that crime, right? He had been charged with that crime. Mr. Lao is still contesting whether this particular crime does involve moral turbitude, it seems. But nonetheless, this is a significant thing that green card holders, legal permanent residents need to be aware of. That's it for James Reads a bunch of court documents this week . I'll link to all the court docs in the thing if you guys want to get deep in there . So in other extremely bleak news, we're moving to the climate front where we are seeing a whole bunch of heat waves across the world. I want to start in India and Pakistan . So India has been dealing with very, very serious heat wave for a lot of parts of May and June . Temperatures just in parts of Dew Delhi have hit one hundred twenty three degrees Fahrenheit, which is a nightmare. Yeah, that's that's really bad. Yeah. Yeah. In New Delhi, it's consistently been over a hundred degrees. We also talk about over one hundred degrees in one of the most humid and worst AQY places on Earth. Like that's just hell. Yeah, that's hell. Yeah. Yeah, and as we're going to get you in a second in places where people don't have access to air conditioning and especially the, you know, the more rural and the more like the further out you get you're dealing with people where you don't have good access to electricity and electricity grids tend to fail in the heat, especially when it is this hot and also this humid . Just that we know of the direct reporting from the Indian Health Ministry is reporting one hundred dead from the heat . It's probably much larger than that. One of the very consistent things when you when you're reporting on this and you know, the PBC, for example, will talk toed researchers is that yeah, the dust are probably way higher, but there's real problems with how heat related dust are categorized because the thing that kills you is the heat, but you're dying from like another sort of like health factor you had going on. So we're probably not going to know what the magnitude of this was for a pretty long time . Things have been bad enough that almost half of the states in India have either and it depends a lot on the region, but a lot of these places have just straight up shut down their schools or have revised the schedules for their schools and effectively just started the summer break early because it is too hot to send kids to classroom . Sometimes there's been sort of like Zoom school all sort of stuff people probably are familiar from like the lockdowns. But yeah, the BBC did a report from Bando which is a, district in Utah Pradesh, where there was a full week in May where it was between one hundred and sixteen and one hundred and eighteen degrees , which is just a nightmare . And the other extremely dangerous part, and this is also true in the other places we want to be talking about but is particularly has been true in a lot of places in India is that it's not really cooling at night . And that, as we've discussed on this show before in a whole bunch of different segments, but it's worth repeating every single time it is hot . That's one of the ways that things get very, very dangerous because when there aren't periods you can cool off at night that is like that is part of the way that he stroken deaths from heat injury are ex acerbated intensified . Now there's also a heat wave going on across Europe. Yeah . A lot of heat waves to go around here. Yeah, fortunately yeah, yeah. Oh yeah . Yeah . So both the UK and France are seeing their hottest weathered on record. France saw their hottest day on record and their hottest night on record which is extremely bad. Forty people have died in France . I think it's the beginning of June , just from drownings from people trying to escape the heat. My God , which is weak. Yeah That's brutal. Yeah . And there's also been worker temperatures are placed in Spain. You're seeing temperatures that not be happening not just at sea level but up in the mountains. You're seeing temperatures that are astounding and temperat ures that you know the architecture of these places and they're electrical grids and just like, do you have air conditioning, right? Like a lot of the places with these ways are striking are not places that they've necessarily hit before . And they're not designed to handle this kind of heat. Yeah, I mean people aren't familiar. Most of our houses in Europe are built differently from houses in the US and they're not particularly designed like especially as you get into Spain, like some of them were designed with shade in mind, but not with like a temperature conservation insulation and so specifically air conditioning. Right? Air conditioning is much, much less common than it is in the United States. Yep. Yeah . It's also worth noting that like one of the things that's intensifying this in a lot of places in India, but this is true . The more into the developing world you are, like, the more fucked you are in a lot of ways about this, but like you're also dealing with a lot of places where just the trees have been cut down for industrial and sort of mining purposes and that also was increasing temperatures. And I want to close by just saying that right,? We're seeing the hottest temperatures on record. And this is what's happening under one point four degrees of global warming . Right like the versions of this where we're supposed to be stabilizing are, you know, the sort of what's supposed to be the sort of habitable zone, right? The cenarios where we like, quote, unquote, deal with climate change are like two degrees of warming, two point five degrees of warming . It's already this bad. It is just going to get worse and this is one of the just persistent kind of quiet crises that is happening in the back up of everything else, which is that yeah, the way that we're powering all of our industries is causing the world to burn . Yeah Complicated further by austerity measures and make it harder for people to fund cooling their hom es in Europe, right? And the things that you might need to buy or do to keep your house cool. Margaret and I made an episode a while ago about heat waves so if you're looking for some resources, you might be able to find somewhere. Yeah . Let's go and break and then we will return for few more new stories. Hopefully not all of them depressing. Don't worry, I've got a happy one. Yay We're back and as promised, I have some less depressing stuff to talk to you all about. Oh, sorry, no I messed up. We're going to talk about the deaths of millions. So if you can recall back to the first months of the Trump administration in like february third, twenty twenty five, this is a little bit after Musk started his , you know, the early stages of his work with Doge, he tweeted, quote, We spent the weekend feeding U. S. Aid to the wood shipper. I think we all remember that that great moment. And this has been widely criticized and there are numerous articles, studies and reports that have come out , and made the case that the cuts to U. S. aid that Doge made have resulted in a tremendous amount of human death and suffering. Musk has consistently denied this. Earlier this week, he quote tweeted a fan who had writt en, If cutting USA killed a child, a single child, it would be covered by the media like the biggest story in history. Musk added exactly in his quote tweet . Now, there actually have been several stories that specify individual children that have died because of cuts to USAID and we'll be talking about some of them. Oh yeah to you. And I want to quote from a recent article by Matt Novak and Gizmodo . The trillionaire oligarch even insisted that USAID is the one that's killed people, retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci was to blame for the COVID nineteen pandemic because federal funds were being used to conduct gain of function research. USAID money killed millions, Musk wrote Tuesday. Admittedly, U. S. intelligence agencies now end orsed the idea that COVID nineteen escaped from a lab, but that only happened after President Trump took office for a second time. Before Trump took control, intelligencies were largely skeptical of the idea. So you're already seeing like the dimensions of sort of the spin here to the all of the many deaths as a result of and this will come down to not just, you know, the U. S. Aid cuts, but anytime this is pointed out is the counterfactual will be. Well, but you know, actually these groups were killing way more people because of and then insert this insane conspiracy theory, right? We've reached the point where they're now load bearing . Both for like the personal like mental health of the richest man in the world and for the federal government itself. Like the conspiracy theories aren't just a thing that are being signposted to get votes. They're a load bearing part of the ideology because otherwise everything's a failure, right? Good stuff. Glad we're here. So Novak's article noted, and as I opened the episode by mentioning, a ton of people have done the important work of documenting just how many human beings have been killed as a result of the cuts that Elon Musk was integral in pushing. We'll talk more about that later, but I want to give one example from a Washington Post article published in September of twenty twenty five that does specify a single child that was killed as a result of these cuts. Quote,ver Fe ravaged the body of five year old Suzay Kinyabi as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pig tailed girl who had liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life. That medication, already purchased by a U. S. taxpayer funded program, was tantalizingly close, a little more than seven miles away, but it hadn't reached the clinic where Susa was being treated because President Donald Trump's suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos. The injection Susan needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USA and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air. Less than a week after her symptoms began, Sau wasz dead . Congolese government data shows that in Susa's province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year. So keep that in mind during this next bit that's just one of many stories. We may think, I I will cover this at some point on BTB in more detail, but a couple of days ago, you know, the same week that we're recording this episode , Rokana, a Democrat from California, went on the IHIP news podcast, which I am not familiar with, but is apparently a sister podcast to what the hill calls the notable I've had it podcast. I don't know who any of these people are, but whatever. Kana was asked like what will your party do if the Democrat s win the midterms? Here's what the hill says happen next. I do believe that once we take power, there has to be accountability. There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk, Connor told Welch. You know, they're celebrating that he created forty four hundred millionaires, but they don't talk about the four and a half million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling the U. S. Agency for International Development, Khana added. He needs to answer for that. He needs to be supenaided. He needs to face investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with the Department of Government Efficiency . Kannak's comments were quickly exerted from the podcast itself and shared all around the internet until they reached Musk and he made a comment of his own on the website that he owns. The standard applied by Doge was very simple and easy. Provide contact information for the recipients of Aids that we can confirm it's not fraudulent, the tech trillionaire said in one of the posts. The reality is that money was being sent to corrupt politicians under the guise of aid. Liars in stock inside traders like Roe the Robbers should be in prison. Musk went on to claim that it's time to sue this liar. It would be great if he sued them, like that would be a fantastic eleg ant. Great. I'd be fine with that. It looks like the direction Roe wants to go is much dumber because everything in US politics is annoying. Connor responded to this by challenging Elon Musk to a televised debate and I'm to fuck all. I'm not gonna say what I think. I'm frustrated . Anyway, instead of going into that, I want to talk about where the number rows cited came from because that is worth discussing as claimed four and a half million children who might die as a result of USAID cuts. On january first of twenty twenty five, the U CA Fielding School of Public Health carried out research that found that over the prior twenty years, USAID funding had helped save ninety one million lives . Obviously, that same study also concluded that the massive cuts to USA to under Trump would imperil that work, and they calculated that the cuts would cause fourteen million additional deaths around the world by twenty thirty , including the deaths of more than four and a half million children under five. So if you look back to Rose's phrasing, I think he actually did a reasonably good job of like citing this information what Rose said was they don't talk about the four and a half million children around the world who he possibly sends to death by dismantling USA, right? That's a reasonably accurate way to sum that up. So I'll give Rose some points there. Although I'll take a couple of points away because this phrasing does somewhat admit that these are predicted future deaths. He's not like not saying that, but he could have been a little clearer here. Yeah . And I might also say and because I think you could argue that he under counted the severity of what that study says because the study just notes that four and a half million children under five could die as a result of these cuts, which suggests way more than four and a half million total children deaths . Right? There are a lot of children who are over five . And most of the children are over five. Yeah. Most children are probably over five years old. Yeah. I do want a quote from UCLA studies again here just to clarify where their data came from . Quote, The London based journal The Lance had analyzed data from one hundred and thirty three countries, the work combined two approaches, a retrospective evaluation covering the year's two thousand one to twenty twenty one and forecast modelsing projecting impacts through twenty thirty based on reductions to the budget of USAID. U. S. citizens contribute about seventeen cents per day to USAID, about sixty four dollars per year. I think most people would support continued USAI funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives, said Dr. James Machinko. And I agree with that. I think that's those are the kind of numbers that we should be putting out, which is like yeah , this is how little money it costs per U. S. tax payer to save this huge number of lives around the world. It's worth digging into some of the more specific reporting we've seen on the consequences of these U. S. aid cuts, because the reporting that Roe was citing is just predicting future possible deaths . Yeah. But there's documentation, as I cited earlier, about the people that Elon Musk and Doge have already helped to kill or who have the cuts that they have championed have led to these people's deaths would be the most accurate way of saying that . And celebrated like yeah, and celebrated it. Right. They have. Yeah. So again, I'll probably do a whole BTB on all this stuff later, but I want to discuss one more story, which was published earlier this year in the New York T imes. The title of that article was in Afghanistan A Trail of Hunger and Death Behind U. S. Aid Cuts . Trump last year very suddenly cut USA to Afghanistan. Even after our twenty twenty one pull out from the country, we had continued to send a significant amount, about a billion dollars worth of aid a year, which was more than a third of all of the aid flowing into Afghanistan. So given the status of that country, you can see how load bearing that is to their infrastructure of health . Yeah . Cutting that has caused the worst child starvation crisis in twenty five years in Afghanistan, and this catastrophe has been exacerbated by the closing of four hundred fifty health centers as a result of these cuts. Here's a selection from that Times article. The isolated province of Daikundi has lost many of its health clinics to the USA cuts. The clinic in Nalege, surrounded by parched fields of almond and mulberry trees, was a lifeline for eight hundred fifty families. The villagers say its closure has hurt children the most. Zakiya, three months old, has been vomiting since birth and her condition is deteriorating, said her mother, Sharifa Kawari. For weeks, she hoped her husband would bring back enough money from the coal mine where he worked to finance a taxi ride to the nearest clinic. But he said his pay was barely enough to put food on the table. The loss of the clinic erased years of monitoring that had saved children's lives. When I was giving birth, we were losing babies, said Nick Bacht, Miss Kuare's mother in law. One would hope that younger mothers these days wouldn't face that. And another tragedy contained in that article, quote, In twenty twenty four, the United States funded over half of Afghanistan's nutrition and agricultural programs. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since last year's cuts. Afgh ans, forty percent of the population, now face acute levels of hunger, two million more than last year. Seven provinces face critical food insecurity, the final stage before famine, according to the integrated food security phase classification. A group of international organizations that the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor global hunger. None were at this level a year ago. Malnutrition is also hitting cities, affecting the most vulnerable, the very young, sick and elderly, first as it does elsewhere. Muhammad Al i, nine months old, was one of a dozen toddlers way late her dosing in a Kabul nutrition ward on a recent morning. He was too weak to ingest milks at his mother. Her husband's meager income as a housekeeper means they often eat only once a day. And there's millions of stories like this already. And just a hidden, I mean, the number of deaths already as a result of these cuts is hideous and undeniable . And one of the counters you'll see when this get brought up to Musk and his fawning fans is that like, oh, the money was just going to corrupt dictators and local rulers and like no, the damage that we're already seeing shows that it wasn't. There was aid in place that was catching some people and it's not catching them now. And the human consequences of this have been atrocious and that's that's just inarguable. Yeah anyway, that's all I got for today . I remember that time receiving calls and messages from people looking in the Burmese diaspora on the Thai Burmese border about one of the only clinics where people could deliver their babies closing down and people literally going to the clinic finally get locked, like inaccessible to them and delivering their babies on the street outside . Like and this is within maybe days, hours after the USA after Elon Musk tweeted about how we didn't go to a party because he was too busy acting the shit. Like yeah, I've seen USAD all over the world . And yeah u,ndoubtedly , not every penny that goes into that goes directly to like buying food because that's not how that shit works, right? People have to administer this, people have to get things done. Sometimes the way you get things done is through things that we would consider corruption. I don't particularly care as long as it results in the person who needs food getting food or who needs medicine, getting medicine. And like there are of course other ways to achieve that end, and I think we should pursue them. But this is one of the worst things that the Trump administration has done, one of the cruelest and most evil things that the United States has done in a very long time. And then like USAID often crowded out other agencies, right? Like so that like local networks, local NGOs, other NGOs couldn't exist in that space . And then Baita switching like this is particularly evil for our last Man Story , something that is arguably , arguably less depressing on Tuesday night, we saw the first real test of Zorn Mamdani and New York City DSA's political power . All three of the Mandani endorsed candidates won the Congressional Democratic primary , and nine out of ten insurgent candidates on the DSA slate won their races for Congress, State Assembly, and state Senate . These insurgent candidates are non incumbent people challenging seats. Now as for the Mandani slate, former city comproller Brad Lerand beat inc umbent Congressman Dan Goldman with sixty five point eight percent of the vote in district ten, which is Park Slope to lower Manhattan. Dan Goldman is an establishment Democrat who's supported by APAC. He got famous for Trump's first impeachment hearings . Oh how well that went. Breadlander opposes APAC, has long called Israel's actions in Gaza Genocide , but also describes himself as a quote unquote liberal Zionist, the one that would vote against offensive weapons sales to Israel . When campaigning with Mamdani and Palestinian activists Mosin Maduri, who's been targeted by the Trump administration. Bradlander said, quote, As a proud Jewish New Yorker, I will join you in that fight to end occupation and apartheid and genocide unquote. Lander's victory here is a pretty significant upset. He was projected to it. He was doing good in the polls, but unseated Goldman is not a small feat. The second congressional race I want to talk about is in Bushwick, Green Point, and Williamsburg . And this was technically an empty seat , but the outgoing Congresswoman threw her backing behind progressive Antonio Renoso, the Brooklyn Bureau president . Mom Danny and the DSA backed Claire Valdez, a state assembly member and a union organizer. There was a huge organizing push for Claire in the weeks leading up to the election. It was a massive ground game from DSA, three hundred thousand doors knocked. Meanwhile, a dark money superpac ed up to a million dollars in the last week of the election to blast pro Renoso ads , and Renosso had backing up a bunch of unions and the working families party more, kind of like typical progressive democratic establishment organizations in New York. This is the quote unquote comic corridor. This is like kind of one of the further left districts in the country . And Renoso is a progressive figure , but Claire was absolutely running to his left and had support from the UA as well as a DSA . And come election day, Claire won with fifty six point one percent of the vote while Renoso earned thirty five point eight percent . But the biggest upset of the night was in the thirteenth district, upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bron , community organizer Darieliza Villa Chevier beat the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espayat. Espayat has been a powerhouse in New York City politics for thirty years . He's deeply tied to the New York City Democratic political establishment . And this was the closest race . Avila Chavier won with forty nine point four percent of the vote to Espiot's forty five point nine percent. Avila Chevier has been very active in pro Palestinian organizing in New York City, including the Columbia Encampments. Pro Espayat attack ads against her highlighted a tweet she wrote a few years ago, reading, quote, unquote, fuck Kamala Harris . APAC pumped six hundred fifty thousand dollars into a pro Espayat superpac, which spent almost three million dollars to help reelect him . And in total, Espad received over seven million from the real estate, Wall Street, pro Israel lobby and from GOP donors , as well as a collection of super packs. In the lead up to this primary , things were getting pretty ugly . In response to a campaign speech where Mamdani quoted GZ translation of Gramsha, quote, The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters before discussing how APAC and SuperPac are using dark money to hide the identity of donors while blanketing the airways in bad faith attacks . In response to this speech , New Jersey Democratic House rep osh Gottheimer responded, monsters , dark money , a hidden hand turning us against each other . Swap APAC for Jews and it's the oldest anti Semitic conspiracy theory in the books, unquote. It shall make up a bunch of shit and it means a different thing. Yeah, if you swap this word for this word you'd change the word for this. Yeah, if you said something completely different, it would have a different meaning. But Madani has faced multiple questions about in the past few days and I think he has answered them fairly well. But yeah, people are trying to insinuate that dark money is like an ant isemitic term when it just refers to like an actual process of hiding the identity of donors to a super pack. Yeah. And a term people have been using for twenty years. It's a real term. It's a real it's a real term. There's a book called Dark Me. It's a term people using for forever. It's completely absurd, but things got way worse than this. While campaigning, Dariolezo was harassed by people yelling, quote unquote Jew hater and someone following her around screaming she's Haitian . Jesus . Jesus Christ here . Racial animus continued to be weaponized in the district thirteen election. A senior advisor to representative Espayat, who was then on leave, went on a Spanish language podcast to say that Mamdani wanted to change the racial demographics of Washington Heights, northern Manhattan, by making it, quote, no longer a bastion of the Dominican community, unquote, but instead a quote unquote bastion of the Haitian Muslim community allied to him . Oh boy . Anti Haitian bigotry specifically among Americans, it's a real and vicious thing where we've made a whole podcast about this a couple of weeks ago, but I did wonder when they swear someone was shouting, she's Haiti if that was what was happening there. Yes. And that was definitely weaponized by campaign advisers and volunteers going into this race . Daria Liza herself is a child of Dominican immigrants. She's afra Latina, but this advisor's invocation of this great replacement theory style attack is an extremely disgusting play. Yeah, it's this exists in the discourse in the Dominican Republic to be clear, like it's not they didn't they whip that one out thin air, but politicians from the Dominican Republic echoed this rhetoric on E x the Everything app, in specific reference to this district thirteen election. Come election day, Espiots canvassers screamed at dairlies of voters and volunteers , quote, Dominicans only go to Cub a if you want communism, shut up, get educated. We don't want Islam here either. We're Christians here, unquote. Jesus Christ . Yeah. Very ugly weaponization of racial n ationalism. Yeah, yeah. Now this did not work. Terry Haliza won in what is a massive upset and her Palestinian activism was a big part of her campaign and proof that anti Israel politics do have a strong place in the Democratic Party moving forward . And to do that, you have to unseat these APAC backed candidates . This was a really big night for New York City DSA. And this election has cemented that New York City is possibly the strongest political machine in the city, at least in terms of elections, right? And if you want to look at political power more broadly, it's like the New York City DSA and like the NYPD right now. They're like strong dueling factions and part of Zorn Mamdani's mayorship is a manifestation of those contradictions . But also, based on this sweep of DSA candidates going against establishment, Democrat incumbents, people are also reconsidering Zoron and the DSA's decision to curb Councilman Chayose 's primary challenge against Hakim Jeffrey's. Yeah . Who knows how that would have gone. Possibly , she could have tapped into this incredible momentum and beaten House minority leader Hajim Jeffrey. That could have certainly been possible. DSI was also pretty thinly stretched this election. They had a lot of stuff going on and it's possible that a primary of this scale would have prohibited their ability to win some of these other elections. We don't know. I don't think it's super useful to retroactively speculate so much, but this sweep is useful information going forward that supports the idea that there is a real hunger to unseat these establishment democratic figures . And that has been proven Tuesday night in New York City. Yeah , it's the polar opposite of what we've seen in California , right? Which is like the Democratic Party doubling down without as many successful left primary challenges. Yeah. And I mean, New York City DSA is like a uniquely highly organized like faction in this city. Like the fact that it was able to out organize the working families party is significant. Yeah . And to a pretty extensive degree in Bushwick, the Commun Corridor Green Point, Williamsburg. There's still space for Protestems to run on the working families party and run a spoiler, but we'll see how it goes. Yeah. And I mean, if specifically if Daria Liza gets into Congress, it is almost certain that she will based on how this night went, she could very likely be the farthest left congress member in the history of the country or at least in the past like fifty years, like significantly to the left of AOC and like the campaign itself was significantly to the left of AOC's campaign. Yeah. Anyway, that is that is what happened in New York Tuesday night. Cool . I guess last we should talk about a couple of mass shootings. Yeah that have unfortunately occurred in the last week. Two mass shootings that I wanted to talk about. One happened just the day before we are record ing this so on june twenty third of twenty twenty six in Montreal . twenty five year old Seth Hatfield of Lethbridge, Virginia allegedly started shooting from a hotel window in the Codenay Borough of Montreal . Footage posted to social media shows the shooter firing at police on street level being shot and killed himself . Two other people were killed during this incident, a police officer and a civilian . There's a manifesto that's about one hundred and four pages that is out. I have not gotten to read the whole thing yet, but early reporting on it suggests it's a lot of incel type rhetoric, a lot of discussion about like how it's it's unfair that women are, you know, hypergamous and going for all of this like tiny number of attractive guys and so this huge number it's very normal like in cell stuff. He like lists out the different like classes of targets that he thinks are okay . One thing that does kind of make this interesting is he's grafting this like weird kind of like reactionary anti capital ism to the inseldum, which has been done before. This is not like the first time I've seen this. We also mixing in the West is preventing me from getting my girlfriends. Right. Yeah. Mixing in some anti Semitis m and anti Zionism and also mixing in like at least some like kind of left wing and right wing signifying really, like there's some calls to, you know, ending capitalism that can seem kind of socialist, but then a lot of really reactionary anti immigrant stuff in there too. He's also really angry at pickup artists. The shooting took place outside of the head office of ALO, which is the parent company of pornhub . And he was also really angry about pornhub. A big chunk of the manifest was apparently him justifying like attacking executives of specific companies, including the people who put out pornography. This is not like super weird stuff unfortunately , but yeah, it is very sad. It's not the first time this has happened in Canada. There've been in twenty eighteen, there was a van attack in Toronto that killed ten that was kind of an incel linked attack. There was a twenty twenty machete attack . And then of course there was the Cole Polytechnic attack, which was a couple of decades ago at this point, which is considered to be in some cases, some people would argue like the first of the incel kind of like public mass attacks. And then also this week there was a mass shooting in Chico, California. We don't know a whole lot about this one yet, but I did want to know that it's happened. Law enforcement officials have said that the shooter was wearing clothing