Cool Zone 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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hello everyone, this is Dan el Kurt for it could happen here.

Today's episode will be focused on Arab Israelian normalization, Arab Israeli peace deals, and Arab Israeli relations more generally.

The reason that this is an important topic to discuss is because a few weeks ago, the Washington Post published this PowerPoint presentation originating in the Trump administration titled The Great Trust From a demolished Iranian proxy to a prosperous Abrahamic ally.

And this presentation is about God, the US and Israeli vision for what Gaza's quote unquote reconstruction will look like.

And the word great itself is an acronym that stands for Gaza reconstitution, economic acceleration, and transformation.

Now, this presentation has so much in it that horrifies any normal human being, but essentially it outlines this vision for how Gaza is going to be reconstructed, and throughout the entire document, it's very clear that whatever remains of Gaza's population will not have any political rights.

There is some gesturing at some point about handing over some governance to quote vetted Palestinians, but there's also a repeated discussion within this presentation, within this document of how they want to incentivize a significant segment of Gaza's population to leave Gaza altogether and not return, and they want to financially incentivize them to do that.

I think the entire presentation is worth looking at.

I'll put it in the show notes because it really outlines what they think Gaza is going to look like and what they plan for the Pileestinians.

More generally, the reason why Arab is really a normalization is important to discuss given this presentation.

Given what's happening in Gaza after ceasefire is present very much in this document.

It's very clear from the presentation that the US and Israel envision a particular role for Arab governments in this reconstruction and in this new Middle East that they hope to achieve a Middle East where Gaza is this economic zone, connecting it to Saudi Arabia, connecting it to other parts of the Middle East, opening up investment opportunities for different Middle Eastern governments and companies in the Global North as well.

And it really is just an astounding vision to behold.

Referring to Gaza as a demolished Iranian proxy that they want to turn into an Abrahamic ally is also interesting here because we've seen this kind of language in the last couple years, especially during the first Trump administration with the Abraham Accords.

Now the Abraham Accords, as this episode will outline in detail, were agreements signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and eventually Morocco and a part of Sudan.

And these agreements were billed as this new era of peace between Arabs and Israel under this kind of religious language and religious framing of Abraham as the father of both Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims.

So to discuss this entire framework, what it means, what it office gates today, I'm joined by Ben Schumann Stohler and Matan Kammoner, who have created a new podcast series called Bad Cousins.

This is published by Colomdia in partnership with the Diasporust and they recently had an event in Berlin debuting their first episode, which full disclosure I'm on.

But essentially they tackle this question of why are the ab Tim Accords named after Abraham?

What was that intended to denote?

And why is Arab Israelian normalization such a big piece of the puzzle in understanding both Israeli Pasdidian conflict right now as well as the vision for the Israeli Pastidian conflict from the American and Israeli perspective.

So please enjoy this interview with Ben and Mattan.

I wanted to give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves to the audience, So the time would you.

Like to start?

Sure?

I'm an anthropologist.

I work at Queen Mary University in London.

My main research is on migration from Thailand to Israel for agricultural work.

But this project is something of a side project that's blossomed together with Ben, who have been good friends with for I think.

Over a decade.

Now, all right, Yeah, I remember that first book on the time migrants, but you have also published extensively on the Arab is really Normalization questions, So yeah, we'll get into it.

Ben Yeah, I'm Benjamin Sohler.

I'm a founder and owner of Colo Media here in Berlin, Germany.

We're an audio publisher.

We have audiobooks and shows and documentaries in English and German.

And yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Awesome.

All right, So the listeners I'm sure are going to be a little bit aware, but let's kind of just define terms at the top of this.

When we say Arab is really normalization?

Well, what do we mean by that?

So it's a long, long process, it's not new.

One of the interesting things that I found out when researching this, the article that this podcast came out of, is that more than one hundred years ago, Heine White Span who was head of the Zionist organization, and King Faisal were in very very close communication about an agreement that it seems a lot like a progenitor of the Arab courts.

Today, we had a very sort of.

Strong pro Western orientation on both sides, pro imperialists.

If you like use that language.

We had a disdain for the Palestinians as people who were not supposedly an important factor in the politics of the area, and we had framing of Arabs and Jews use as relatives as kin, which is one that we trace back in the show to the sort of Abrahamic concept that has really come to the foe with the naming of the Abraham courts.

Of course, there's a long long history since then, with the big landmarks being the Egyptian is rarely normalization in the late nineteen seventies seventy nine, I think, and of course Jordanian is really normalization in nineteen ninety four, which came very very tightly knit with the Osloochords and the initiation of so called peace talks between the Palestines and the Israelis.

So the Palestinans war, of course, do play a central role here, whether as present or as a present absentees as Israelis like to call them sometimes today.

Of course, we fast forward to the twenty twenties.

The abraham Acords were assigned between Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and one of the warring factions in Sudan.

Back in twenty twenty, and of course there's a kind of live project led by the under Trump as well as Biden to extend normalization between Israel and not only Arab countries, but other.

So called Islamic countries like Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan, yes, which has.

Had diplomatic relations since nineteen ninety two.

But we'll get into that.

Yeah, yeah, But those other ones, of course that are on the table.

I think Indonesia has been spoken about.

Pakistan is always some harring in the background, the big fishes in Saudi Arabia.

And we can talk about that.

As well, right, Yeah, And when we say normalization, usually people are referring to the formal normalization of diplomatic ties, because a lot of these countries, a lot of the Arab countries had a position reiterated in the Arab Peace Initiative of two thousand.

And two that they would not have normal.

Ties with the State of Israel until a resolution of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and the Abraham Accords was a step away from that kind of breaking of that precedent.

But if we think about kind of under the table normalization, of course, there are so many ways in which these Arab country trees have had under the table normalization to varying degrees with the state of Israel.

Ben, maybe you could tell us about what the Abraham Accords were, how are they build and what did they include.

You have to make sure my the precision of my language is on point.

But there's two agreements, right, There's two things that were actually signed.

So one is the framework, right, which which which discusses like Abraham Accords as this unit, the decoration of principles, the Declaration of Principles, And the other one is a peace treaty, right, the peace treaty between Israel and the UE and in other countries.

Right.

So essentially that's what it is.

It's these two signings.

But I think when you when you talk about how it was presented, it's supposed to mean it's supposed to be like a vehicle conduit for travel, for security, for economics, for deals, for cultural interchange, for a new way to be seen.

It's like a massive pr exercise jumping and with the specifics.

Yeah, absolutely, I mean what we're kind of honing in on here is the sort of sort of cultural or ideological aspects.

If you want to be more stern about it, and I think, you know, that's that's the real interest of the show is in how this sort of mythical framework that I refer to already, and specifically the figure of Abraham is really really central to this kind of ideological framing of their course.

Like Foer is written extensively about how toleration and tolerance have become sort of ideological tools, and Abraham is kind of a figurehead for that.

He does listen in to two different ways that I think are interesting for listeners to sort of follow on.

The first is as the progenitor or the kind of a figure.

Out of Monotheism.

So Jews, Christians, and Muslims all all have a stake in Abraham, and of course this concept of the Abrahamic religions that's very central here.

But another one, and we already mentioned this as well, is this the sort of language of kinship of Jews and Arabs as being related to one another, as.

Being specifically cousins or so is called bad cousins.

Because we're kind of exploring the various modalities or the various kind of shades of meaning and mood that this this idea of cousins can have it can be very positive.

Of course, you know a lot of people.

Say, oh Abraham, that's so, he's a wonderful figure of peace, of hospitality, et cetera.

But they are also really dark sides to it.

The dark size that we really get into are the sort of misogyny that's very, very central in the Abraham myth, the underpinnings of slavery versus freedom that are that are really really present there, and maybe most prominent and most important to me, maybe as somebody who also studies migration to the area, is xenophobia.

So something that you don't have written about, you know, the similarities between the UE, for example, and Israel that aren't really considered, that aren't thought about much.

One that's always stood out to me is the way that migrant workers are treated.

In both these countries.

The Golf States, including including to Ae, are huge obviously users of non citizen migrant labor.

Israel is not as big, So it's not as big as phenomenal in Israel there, but it's growing a lot, especially since since since October seventh, when pastina workers have been shut out of the Israeli market.

And so I think Israel is like the Golf states in a lot of these ways, and it's also getting more getting to be more like them, and Abraham is kind of a prism or figuring through which we start to explore all these issues.

So in my mind, when the Abraham Accords were you know, whispered about and then we saw them happen, and you know, I've been writing about Arab's really normalization since before the Abraham Accords in smaller ways.

But in my mind, when I kind of heard that terminology being used and that framing being used, to me, it felt deceptive that they were using this term of like the Abraham Accords denoting and hearkening back to like the idea of the Abrahamic tradition and that we're kin and all of these things for listeners who are bad at religion as I am.

Abraham had two sons, presumed, you know.

Apparently, and one of those sons is the ancestor of Jews and the other one is the ancestor of Arabs, if you believe that.

So anyway, I'm not gonna blespheme on this podcast, but.

I think the story is important.

I mean, it is a deception.

I totally agree with you on that, but it's important to unpack how the deception works, right right, right, it's so effective because the story is so well known to people in the region.

No, absolutely, absolutely, But to me, like the deception lay in the framing of Arab and Israeli animosity through a religious perspective, as if the conflict was a religious one.

So to me it felt kind of very shallow.

But then as you start to unpack not only the impacts of the Abraham Accords immediately so immediately repression increases in these countries that sign the agreement, But then you start to unpack, like what are these accords actually serving for the Arab countries that are signing Why are they signing with Israel.

Well, they're re engineering.

They're attempting to re engineer society.

A lot of that tolerance language has to do with that.

It's they don't want societies that are politically active.

They want them to be interested in consumerism, they want them to be maybe slightly socially liberal, tolerate the Israelis, tolerate more crimes and you know, kumbaya, and never ever have the ability to question the political leadership or the political.

Status quo in any of these countries.

Or in the region as a whole.

Yeah, I think it's all that, but I think it's also a global power move.

Right.

The golf countries, including Qatar, which has a different politics, are all really trying to make a name for themselves to become really really huge global players.

They're basically all trying to transform this gigantic oil wealth that they have into soft power, into diplomatic power, into cultural power.

You know this, This this brings us into the comedy festival in Saudi Arabia as well, right, And I think I think part of the framework here is we're part of this larger global story which is about freedom, piece and friendship through religion.

Now, what's the deception here?

The deception is this sort of and I think been A this is one of one of his favorite points, so he can he can expand on this.

There's a sort of like a switcheroo game in which something else is brought into view and the Palestinians are hidden.

Right.

The crux of the conflict, the crux of what is basically brought is real to go wild on the entire region attacking seven different countries simultaneously, is the Palestinians, and it's always has been the Palestinians is always going to be the Palestinians there is, and you've written about this as well.

There is a segment of verb society, especially ever believes, especially in the Gulf, who want nothing to do with the Palestinians and our andopy would be happy to get rid of them.

But this isn't the case with the vast majority of Arabs.

It's also not the case with the vast majority of global South, I think, and even the vast majority of the global North right.

We've seen very very clear majorities against Israel's genocide in Gaza, even in the United States, you know, in.

Israel's biggest, biggest stally ebroad.

So there's in order to not have to talk about this, it's always good to be able to talk about something else.

One of the many ways, and I'm not saying this is the only one, one of the many ways in which the subject has changed is by talking about Abraham.

So we're doing well.

I mean, our show has a little bit of a it's it's it's kind of a difficult to move to make because we were trying to talk about an excuse but also impact why that excuse is so powerful.

You know, there's like a lot of violence in this peace framing.

And if you look at I think it's point eighteen of the peace framework that Trump talks about the Trump presented on Gaza.

I think it's eighteen.

I have the quote here, but number it's you know, an interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence to try and change mindsets.

I mean, this is like to try and change mindsets and narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits that can be derived from peace.

I mean, it's like mafia talk, right, It's like you better do it exactly, you better you're going to love this piece so much or else kind of thing.

I cut up some audio from the episodes and from the interview with you, Donna at the live event that we had here in Berlin a couple weeks ago.

This topic is so feels so urgent and relevant to so many people that like more than fifty people came out in the rain in November in Berlin, and one of the things I played was was exactly when you called it an obfliscation, Like there's this paradox where all these things are under the table are coming up and are now explicit, these secret deals with gold states, this normalization that you know, you two had known about, you know, in your research, but people like me wouldn't know about if they're not following, if they're not academics, if they're not following this closely.

And yet the Abramccords brought this all up.

Okay, now we're now everyone knows right now, we know that like this is about Iran, this is about security, this is about you know, these material issues, right, But at the same time that that that it's playing on this kind of clarity and this openness, right, and this moderation, it's also creating a whole new obfiscation, a whole new myth.

And you know, people love love this quote.

Like there was a lot of like nodding heads in the audience when I played what you said, Donald, which was like as if, right, like as if this is about religion, it's about land and it's about sovereignty, and and that's clear, but these aren't called the land and Sovereignty accords.

I mean, like you said, like you said, it's very violent.

I mean, I've been describing normalization under these terms as well as the Abraham Accords in particular as authoritarian conflict management, because it maintains structural violence.

It's not attempting to solve the underlying, you know, motivations for that violence, which, as you said, is Israeli Palestinian conflict, which is the land, which is the the war crimes.

And I think also I want to just emphasize for listeners that the tolerance framing in particular, there's like the flip side to it, which is you better like this piece or else.

And we're calling it peace and it's Abrahamic, So like, if you don't like it, what does that say about you?

Are you intolerant?

Are you an anti Semite?

Are you you know, like, it's just how could you be against peace?

The piece is in the name, but it's a very particular type of piece.

It's a liberal I think.

I think authoritarian conflict management is a very good way of putting it.

But also it's also very helpful.

To help to explain why the Abraham myth is so useful in that regard.

Can we can just go over the story real, real, real quick for listeners who aren't that familiar, Yes, please, so Abraham, who was known as in all the so called Abrahamic religions, as the first one to to explicitly reject idolatry.

Right, So there are there are other righteous men in the Bible before him, but he's the first one who becomes what is in Islam is known as the friend of God, right, so Khalid.

And he also.

In addition to having this very very intimate relationship with God, he also has a family.

Right.

And in this family he has he has a wife and a maid servant.

The wife is named Sarah, and and the maid servant is named Hagar.

Now we're gonna do this quick.

Don't worry.

Sarah is barren, she can't have children.

And she says to she says to Abraham, I have an idea.

Why don't you have a child with with a maid servant with Agar, and it'll be my child.

So already, already I think we can see authoritarianism.

We can see uh, we can see authoritarian conflict management already as kind of the seed that's that's planted in the story, Hagar has a child.

That child is named Ishmael, and Ishmael is beloved by his father.

It's the Old Testament says, so, it's very very clear, right.

But then Sarah gets jealous.

She says, well, you know this, this this son is going to and his mother are going to be basically the pushing me out of my of my status within the family.

YadA YadA, yadah.

There's a lot of other stuff.

That goes on, very very interesting and very fascinating, and lots of it very well known, like so called.

Sacrifice of Isaac.

She miraculously has the child, right that child's named Isaac.

Everyone agrees within these scriptural traditions that Isaac is the father of the Jews and Ishmael is the father of the Arabs.

This is central to both Jewish theology and Islamic theology, and the Christians in so far as they're involved in the story, they're also in on.

Now, then the question becomes which one of them is the blessed son, which one of the which is one of the ones is the one who's supposed to inherit the land that is the Holy land, wherever that's defined, and that's a little bit vague as well.

The Jews say it's Isaac and the muslim to say it's Ishmael.

So we have a we have a story what my dissertation advisor, Andrew Triia are called a community of disagreement.

There are people who disagree on something, but they don't disagree on the frame.

Right, the frame in which all that that the entire story is inserted is one in which there's no disagreement.

Everybody agrees that Abraham had two kids.

Everybody agrees that the women are basically you know that the women this part in the story is predicated on their sons, on whether their sons succeed.

Is is what makes the women succeed or not?

And then the question becomes which one is the favorite son?

Which one is the one that the father loves and the big father up above also loves.

Right Now, this is in itself, I think, at least in the way that it's framed in Abrahamical courts, a form of what do you call it, authoritarian crisis management?

Right, that's what it is.

Now, that doesn't mean and I think that this is also important.

This is also one of the reasons that we made the podcast that there's no other ways of reading the story.

How else could we read the story?

For example, we could point out we could note that the person who has the most intimate contact with the God in this entire story is Hagar.

She's the first and only person in the Bible to give God a name.

She calls him Ellroy, the God who has seen me.

She has at least two miracles done to her.

In Islam, of course, her story, in Ishmael's story becomes the story of Mecca.

All the traditions of the Hajj are based around the story of Hagar and Ishmael.

So she's a central central figure.

And she is a slave woman.

She's an Egyptian, She's the one who's cast out into the desert.

She's a migrant.

Her name Hagar or Hajar in Arabic means migrant or migration.

Right, there's all these powerful undercurrents in the story, as there are in every powerful myth, that mean that they can be read differently, and some people are reading it differently.

So I don't think the story itself is the problem.

The problem is that the story is used in a very particular way, in a way which facilitates again what you call it, conflictual.

Sorry, authority and conflict conflict management.

Yeah, I mean it's a it's a mouthful.

Maybe that helps us to get to what the podcast does, Like who do you speak to?

I know I'm on one of the episodes, but who else do you speak to?

And like what trends were surprising to you?

How did your kind of thinking shift over time?

I mean, let me start at least because one thing we talked a lot about at the live event, there was a panel and there was a discussion with the audience, and one thing that's become excessively clear, like we heard my time explain the story I'm not from the Middle East, right, and also in this Berlin audience, like the relevance of the story as a Bible story.

I know I've heard of the story, but it doesn't have that much impact for me, like on my life or on how I understand the world.

It's a story, It's a Bible story.

And we felt this from the European audience, right.

We heard people say something like like, okay, this is a myth, but are these the myths that are worth exploring right now?

You know, maybe with like looking at the at other myths of more like material issues, and I think what we're trying to do with the show is also explained well.

But these do affect people's lives in the Middle East, like this is something.

In fact, episode two, which comes in a couple of weeks, we have all these vox pop interviews from the Old City of Jerusalem where we talk to people on the street and just ask like, why do you think Jews and Arabs are cousins?

And what does that mean?

And what does that mean with the Abraham Accords?

And immediately everybody had different Israelis and the Arabs that you talked to Himtan had different understandings of the Abraham Acords good and bad.

But if you said, why is it called the Abraham Accords, every single one of them are like, oh, yeah, because we're cousins.

So start there, right.

So so episode one was about the kind of geopolitics, but that's why you were on Donna episode two explaining this kind of what does that mean?

Then that if everybody can agree that the Jews in the Arabs are cousins, but the Abraham Accords are seen with all of these we already started talking about, you know, all these obfuscating kind of nasty, hidden, violent undertones, but also kind of like sick, you know, we can fly there or whatever, like all this tourism and and high fiving and entrepreneurship and you know, the biggest satyr of whatever UAE history or whatever that was, you know, So like so we start there and then and and the idea is to really like then turn this whole thing around and look at the myths and look at the stories and try and understand from all these different sides we go into, you know, medieval Islamic stories and texts, and the idea of hospitality and the idea of of cousinage and what does cousins mean?

And I mean my time, you can you can go further here, but the idea of the show really starts from there, right, And that's how we're going to like start at the geopolitics and end up hopefully and turning the whole Abraham idea thing in such a such a somersault that it lands right on its head or right on its butt or something, and and not only we kind of dismantle it or understand it and take it apart, but then maybe like reclaim it in a different way and maybe even use it for some kind of positive progressive purposes, even radical ones.

That I mean Matan and his activism and his research, you've you know, you've matan you say, you've already seen and kind of he has to make the case to me.

You know, that's kind of the framing of the podcast, like.

I'm eternally making the case.

But that's okay.

I think I think it's it's it's it's kind of a it's kind of a difficult case to make.

And and and.

The fact that people keep challenging me on it, I think is very is very productive.

Well, one other thing that came up in Berlin, and I think it was really interesting, is that Ben sort of touched on this at the beginning of what he was saying just now, the way that framing this as the Abrahamic course, framing it as the abraham story tends to make it easier for people from Europe or from the United States to North America to see themselves as outside of this story.

Right, So this is Donna, you also.

Alluded to this.

There's this idea that this is like an age old conflict, you know, between these these.

These relatives who are always quarreling between themselves and oh, it's so difficult.

To primitive people over there.

Yeah yeah, Q like oriental music right in the background, and and hence that we rational outsiders, we Westerners, we Christians, et cetera, all these sort of vaguely linked identities that so called outsiders have.

We are sort of neutral and rational outsiders who can play a mediating role and bring this this, this, this whole ancient mess to an end.

Right.

But the funny thing about this is that it's also a religious kind of there's also a religious undertone here.

There is this idea, you know, a lot a lot of scholars have written about how so called secularism, so called enlightenment, you know, in the West, actually is a secularized.

Form of Christianity in a lot of ways.

And this is really actually very very clear in this Abrahamic framing, because there is this idea that Christianity is superior to these other two religions.

Right, this is this is this is the actual universal religion.

This is the one that is able to encompass and sort of transcend the other ones.

And hence, I think maybe this was controversial few years ago, but nowadays, I think it's quite clear that the US sees itself as a as a as a Christian state, right, even sees itself as a crusader state.

I mean, they stayed pretty clearly with.

The Secretary of Defense having deis volt tattoos on his chest, right, so this is this is no longer they're saying the quiet part out loud.

This this in this context as well, and they think that they can come in, you know, and as these sort of outsiders solve things, But they're actually deeply implicated in the story themselves for much much earlier than the nineteenth century.

We could but go back to the Crusades if we want.

Europe has always been involved in the Middle East, right, and the Middle East has been involved in Europe.

For us, these are near foreigners, right, So there's no innocence here, right, there's no there's nobody who's outside the story and Abrahamic framework.

One of the I think sort of pernicious ways in which it's acting in this in this current conjuncture, in this current day and age, is as this sort of framing that neutralizes the Western influence.

It makes it seem objective and.

Rational, and also I think allows the Golf States to claim that.

Right, there's like some interesting stuff in the Facult book that I didn't quite put together about the you know, sort of elite Amarathi perspectives as liberal and anti democratic.

But if you're pro business in a certain way, then you can claim this kind of you know, like Donnatan you Tube have written about moderation a lot, but this idea for me of like, if you can claim you know, the business forward thinking, then you're also modern.

Then you're also considered you know, more above, Like you have a different elevation and a different sort of legitimacy according to this worldview than somebody that would care about such things as the Jews in the Arabs.

What an ancient, old fashioned kind of passe, you know, the Palestinian issue, you knowugh kind of thing.

But you know what's cool, like artificial intelligence and like shipping deals in the Indian Ocean that's new.

You know, golf, Yeah, that's sick, Like yeah, golf and like virtual reality watching people play golf like that would be awesome.

Yeah, And it's sort of data that's sort of invited.

The bichocolate, I could go on.

It's I still think the sator, like the biggest ator in Memoradi history or whatever is my favorite anecdote.

But the way that it invite this space so like it's almost like a genius, like maybe it was like Jared Kushner's great genius was to see this, like, you know, ability to let other people claim the same Christian elevation right the same like I'm on the shaky ground here now, so I'll stop.

Yeah, I don't know.

If I don't know genius, I don't I might dispute, you know what I mean.

In a way, it's in a way, it's kind of obvious, right, like they were they were always going to call these Abraham McCords.

When they did them.

In a way, right, Jared Kushner, I don't know he was.

He's the right guy.

He's the right guy in the right place at the right time, more than anything else.

But do you understand what I mean that, like this invitation into this perpector that you were saying, which is kind of like Christian you know, in the in our event to Berlin, someone said something like, even without the Jewish Muslim context, we have this problem, we have this problem in this region, and the abramccords allows the conversation to happen on this level of let's talk about chips, let's talk about fighter jets, you know, let's talk about drones.

Yeah, dronesveillance Yeah.

One of the things that I think is really important is it's sort of normalis is this idea that there is a place for everybody and the people shouldn't be mixed, and there's rarely extreme right, the religious extreme right in Israel.

There is this notion of the distancing of Ishmael for his correction, right, what's the idea here is that the Ishmaelites, that is the Arabs, that is the muslim that is, the Palestinians, they have their place in the world.

It's not that that place isn't here, It's somewhere else, in a place called Arabia, right, And therefore that's why we can be friends with them aratis because their Martis or Arabs in the right place in Arabia.

The Palestinians, however, they are a problems because they are Arabs who don't realize what the.

Right place is.

They can stay here if they accept total subjugation basically, you know Themutrich's plan is sort of a secular.

Raization decisive plan.

Yeah, his decisiveness plan or whatever that's called is is is a sort of secularization of things that Kahana was saying.

The so called rabbi may Or Kahana was saying in the nineteen eighties.

The sort of spiritual father that Israeli extreme, right, they can stay here if they if they're willing to be our slaves, basically, if not, they can go to Arabia.

And once they're in Arabia they can be they can be our best friends.

And this is really, I think, very very closely connected to the animosity towards migrants.

Right.

That brings me back to the figure of or Haja.

Right, she is a migrant, and because she is a migrant, because she's not in the right place, that's why she's denigrated, That's why she's exploited, that's why she's cast out into the desert.

So it's not just about the Palestinians in that regard.

We can see how this sort of myth also plays into the hyper.

Exploitation of migrants in the Gulf.

We can see how it plays into the racist treatment that the refugees from Sub Saharan Africa are receiving in North Africa.

Right.

We literally saw.

People a couple of years ago in Tunia being cast out into the desert the way the Hagar and Ishmael was.

And of course this is all.

This is all closely related again to Europe, to global imperial kind of processes, to capitalism.

You know what Ben was talking about, hecial hierarchy, special hierarchy.

Right.

So one of the reasons that I think we need to keep our eye on this ideology is that in some ways it's different from what we're used to, right.

It's not, for example, white supremacy.

Right, We're used to think about white supremacy as this sort of globally dominant racial ideology.

But this is something different.

This is not about people being better because they're white.

It's about people being better because they're in their right place.

And that's actually, I think something that's really coming up very very strong on the global far right, on the far right globally, this idea that you know, oh you'll see like in New York, for example.

It's not that we have anything against black people or Arabs or Asians or anything else.

They just need to stay in their own countries as so long as everybody stays in their own countries, that's fine.

And you know, with climate change, with.

All these catastrophica ecological changes that are happening in the world, people are going to be moving and we already we already see people in masses moving from place to place, but that's going to be larger and larger movements as in the coming decades.

And you know, the basic test of humanity is going to be the test of hospitality, whether people are allowed to into new places that they have to go to in order to survive.

And this sort of ideology I think is already sort of primed.

It's primed to deny that and to say no, you've got to just stay in your own space, right, So against that, Abraham I would like to place Huggar.

I think she's She's the answer.

So, I mean, that's fascinating.

I've never really kind of thought about I've never really thought too hard about this story because as a Muslim and Arab child, it upset me.

But I do want to say, like there is as as you mentioned, like there is a general trending towards ethno nationalism all over the world, but the Gulf States cannot manage ethno nationalism.

Saudi Arabia is kind of a little bit of a different story.

But the ones that signed, they are minorities in their countries.

On top of that, to their own citizens to IMMORTI citizens to buy any citizens.

They are illegitimate.

They are only legitimate.

By virtue of providing economic opportunities.

You know, those cracks have already been showing up.

So the way in.

Which these countries can build legitimacy for themselves offset possible public pressure, offset any kind of accountability for their regional role.

People forget that the United Arab Emirates is deeply implicated in the genocide in Sudan.

That connect with what is I think inherently white supremacist and things like this, But of course they're not white, is what ya seen of hash Salda Hassyrian theorist calls the ideology of modernism.

He was writing about the promise and the discourse of the Asaid regime when Bashada Usaid came to power.

But when I read it, I was like, this sounds a lot like the ideology of these Gulf states.

And so he says it has three traits.

It entirely neglects issues of values such as freedom, equality, human dignity, mutual respect among people, in favor of morally amorphous categories such as secularism, enlightenment, and modernism itself.

It neglects fundamental social issues related to poverty, unemployment, marginalization, life conditions, gender relations, et cetera.

And the advocates of this modernism are politically conservative, I mean, just to.

A t Yeah, that's the Abraham Accords and a unchill.

Right there, exactly.

Yeah, And I you know, I wrote about this in the context of the Abraham Accords in a paper I published in twenty twenty three, but Yasin Hashsala had like kind of nailed it back in twenty eleven that this was the trend.

Yeah.

I think Syrians saw a lot of things earlier than the rest of us.

Yeah, definitely, And so this is their vision for the world.

And I think this is the vision of a lot.

Of essentially the right in the world, even in America.

Likely they don't care about democracy.

They want this.

They want you to be prosperous and in your place, and yeah, everybody stays separate.

Yeah, there's a sort of like callousness around all of it, which I think is it's actually a draw for some people, because you know, cynicism is a big thing in the world, and people are I think one of the reasons that people attracted to Trump, for example, is because it's clear that he's a completely cynical actor, you know, who's only out for his own sake, and people are sort of, you know, for better or worse, sick of the.

Of liberal hypocrisy, so they gravitate towards that.

And it's funny.

I mean, you would think that wouldn't go hand in hand with religion or these mythical stories, but.

It actually does.

You know, speaking of prosperity, for example, there's in Evangelicalism there's a very strong str of what's called like the prosperity gospel, this idea and this has you know, very very old roots in Calvinism as well.

If you make it in the world, if you're rich, if you make if you make a lot of money, that means that God loves you.

That's like a proof, right, And so there again we shouldn't think about religion too narrowly.

Religion is really infused in all these sorts of social ideologies, among which are this, and I think this is very very prominent in the abraham A story.

In the Abrahamics story.

Is that well, you know, if they have oil, if they have riches, if they've managed to sort of manipulate the global economy to their own advantage.

Then more power to them.

Right, And that's attractive.

That's that's something that you want to that's a train that you want to get on.

Maybe they'll give you a plane too, Right.

That was the Kataris.

That wasn't ue, So we shouldn't get them mixed up.

But I think it's kind of the same story.

Yeah, no, I completely agree.

So, I mean I started this discussion by talking about the plants for reconstruction in Gaza mm hm.

And you've already mentioned that, like the big whale for the Trump administration is Saudi Arabia.

They want Saudi Arabia to normalize with Israel.

What are some things we should watch for in the near future?

What do you where do you think this arab is really a normalization is going to go.

I'm always hesitant to to make predictions.

I think it's a it's it's an extremely volatile moment.

This ceasefiring guys that we God knows if it's going to hold or if there are just going to go back in and.

Start genociding again.

I think we're also seeing these really really rapid movements throughout the region with I mean, we keep.

We've kept we've kept alluding to Cutter, but Cutter and Turkey.

Are really playing a really much bigger role now than the than they were until recently.

And that's with American blessing.

So that's also going to change.

I think the sort of calculus that that that Saudi makes.

But broadly speaking, I think one thing that we really need to keep an eye on is this iMac Corridor, this idea of that.

Basically Biden administration was starting up, but but Trump is really sort of put into into hyperdrive, which is this idea of connecting India, the Gulf, Israel, and Europe through a sort of alternative to China's Belton Road initiative.

It revolves around oil and gas, but it also revolves around data centers and AI so sort of geopolitically and and and geoeconomically.

I think that's that's that's the big plan that the Americans have hatched for for the region, and that basically means turning Gaza into some sort of concentration camp slash as Easy especially economic zone.

Right there are really really really frightening plans to ethnically clans about half of the Guns in population, and to uh and to sort of turn the rest of them into into well basically slaves, you know, basically uh, unfree workers in these in in this so called the especially economic zone that the that they're that they're trying to to set up.

Now, whether any of this is going to actually happen, I think it's anybody's it's anybody's guess at this point.

But it's it's it's very clear.

And I just saw a physiata speaking about this at the Historical Materialism conference in London.

It's very clear that it's their plan, right, that's the planet's out there.

It's it's I don't know if it's even been leaked or just publicly released, that this is what the the Americans, Israeli's Saudis and immioralties are are planning for the region.

It's a it's a really kind of nightmarish vision that they're not even they're they're broadcasting out loud.

They're not they're not even pretending to disown it or anything.

So so you know, we should take them at their word, and we should be very very clear that this is something totally unacceptable.

And I mean, as you started out saying, and I think we've always agreed on this.

The question for the region is the Palestinian question.

If the Palestinians don't have sovereignty, if they don't have freedom, if they don't have equality, if they don't have the right of return, then things are not going to are not going to calm down in the region.

It's just going to be more and more, more and more violence, more and more of this help for everybody.

And you know, these have been hellish years for all of us.

I'm not, of course making any sort of comparison.

I think it's clear that the things that have been.

Happening in Gaza are beyond any sort of any sort of description in terms of how hard the genocide has been.

But you know, as in ISRAELI who's currently not living in Israel and I would like to return at some point.

I really hope that everybody in the region can come to this very very clear conclusion.

You know, whether you phrase it in religious terms or not.

And I don't think there's a problem with framing it in religious terms.

There are ways of framing it in religious terms when we can talk a little bit about that more.

If you want, just the fact that that that the indigenous people of Palestine.

The Palestinians need to need to have the rights to respected and fulfilled.

And that's the only the only way that we can that we can bring peace.

That we can bring you know, these these really beautiful biblical prophecies about the wolf and the and the sheep lying down and the cutting down of swords into the plowshires to make those reality.

So some people might call that messianic, but I think there's also good, good forms of missionism.

Then, do you have any thing to add pop that?

My hope the past year two years has been that if the Abraham Accords elevated you know, countries like the AE two a certain like volume, like gave them a certain audience that maybe they didn't have before internationally, that then uh, what Israel has done could be criticized more obviously and that they would actually have some leverage.

So my hope still is that as like normal partners, they can normal threaten and normal criticize and normal check the power of their you know, quote whatever partners Israel.

And so I'm keeping an eye on hopefully that that that will start happening.

More of what we do see is that like trade continues to go up, and that doesn't seem to have an impact.

And I find that very disappointing.

And also at the same time, I see the polling, and Donna, you know more about this than I do, but the polling shows increasing criticism of normalization with Israel.

So, you know, the idealist to me thinks that like civil society will win out eventually, that this is just untenable, and that what October seventh showed was that and the and the wars since then, that without dealing with the central cause in the region, which is the Palacinian cause, like there will be no possible safe you know, entrepreneurial dream land of a rich future, that that their claiming is going to happen.

So that's my old but and I keep an eye out for that.

I hope that they use China and Russia as good countermeasures and counter threats to the American agenda, and I keep my eye out for that.

Yeah, I think, uh, I think really that's the That's the open question moving forward is like will the political elites went out, will they be able to sidestep the Palestinian question, sidestep their own publics, who, as you mentioned, are extremely critical of normalization, extremely supportive of the Palestinian cause.

I think the Americans think that they can.

I keep mentioning this on this podcast, but I was on a panel with Stanley McCrystal, General and commander of the Joint what is it, the Joint Armed Forces or whatever in I Rock in Afghanistan, and he was like, Oh, you know, the Arabs really want to move past the Palestinians, like it's a thing of the past.

If October seventh hadn't happened, like you know, we would have just moved past the Palestinians.

And I was like, what the hell you're talking about.

That's you only say that because you think that you can continue to crush air publics.

Yeah, like you are predicating your entire strategy on authoritarianism.

And it's it's not a Middle East problem.

It's a civil society all over the world has to fight back against authoritarianism or this is our reality.

Yeah, this is I think this is the moment now, and this is one of the ways in which the rest of the world is becoming more likely our world in some ways.

As we mentioned, we have large majorities almost everywhere in the world.

I think maybe every country in the world except for Israel.

We have a majority of people who are now supporting past ten more than support Israel, who are against the genocide, who say, you know, who answer the polls in a way that that makes it clear that they're that they're against what's going on, right, and they're against their government supporting it.

But most governments in the world, most governments in the world, including ones that aren't considered very pro pro us are are are basically letting this happen.

Right.

That means that there's no effective democracy anywhere in the world really, except maybe in a few places where you can say, okay, I don't know, Spain, some countries.

Are Island, Yeah, yeah, where even even.

Those countries, I don't think they're they're doing it as much as as as their populations we would like them to do.

Right.

So, again, this idea that the that the that the West is somehow essentially different from these other countries, it's also kind of a lot and it's also something it's it's also it's also bogus, and we need to we need we need to call bullshit on that as well.

Yea, many people have already have already made various arguments, and there's various ways of making this argument that the Palestinian question, the question of gods, or the question of the genocide is kind of the global question of our time.

I don't think just because there's a ceasefire that that's going to go away in any way.

Every everything that caused the explosion in the first place is still there, right, And I think we're going to keep seeing mobilizations around this issue.

I'm sure we are.

The crucial question for me is how we connect this to other issues, How we connect this to the question of democracy.

Can we connect this to the question of rights for migrants, How we connect this to the questions of of of climate change, right.

And and and various people are already doing that.

So I'm I'm not saying this is something that people aren't working on, but this is this is this is kind of the challenge for our for our time, and this podcast, this project is is you know, just just you know, one small part of that mosaic, which is looking into the ideology that framed them the Chords after Abraham and again thinking about how we can not just debunk that ideology and say, oh, this is it's not about this, it's about that but also about how we can read those stories in a different way and sort of yeah, exactly, to subvert it intimate and to read those stories in a way that that that makes progressive sense.

Now, that's I'm really looking forward to listening to the other episodes, not just my own.

So, yeah, you sound a little more convinced now than you did after we interviewed in.

You I'm being really nice.

No, I'm just you're being hospitable like Abraham exactly.

It's in my blood.

When we played it live, someone came up to me afterwards and was like, you know, I agree with Dona, right, And I was like, no, I think we all agree.

Like that's kind of the point.

I think we all agree on the basics here.

The other part is just sitting in the cringe, as Madan says, oh.

Nice, yeah, basting basting in the cringe, yeah, basing in the cringe here, and trying to find our way out of like a bad mushroom trip hallucination where you can do things pretend that the Palestinians don't exist.

Yeah, you know, that's that's We're trying to be the orange juice that's supposed to get you out of the you know of a bad munchers.

How do they hangover whatever?

Yeah, the trip?

Yeah, sorry, don't I don't do drugs.

I don't understand anyway.

Thank you all so much.

This has been a very interesting episode.

And yeah, I'll link in the show notes for for listeners all of the things we mentioned.

But yeah, more soon.

Yeah, episode episode one is already out by the time your listeners hear this, I think episode two might already be out as well.

Okay, in episode two, we kind of go into the into the into the backstory.

Episode one was was with you and we talked about about the chords themselves.

Episode two we start digging into those into those warm holes of the Abraham story.

Interesting and we when we talked to people in Jerusalem again Ben mentioned this, both Palestinians and Israelis.

We went and we went out and asked them what they thought about Abraham Accords and why they thought it was named after Abraham.

Yeah, I'm really excited to listen to that.

Thank you all right, thanks guys, thanks for having us on.

Thank you.

Take care.

The last week, two major news networks, CNN and CNBC, partnered with the so called prediction market Calshi, an online political betting platform to use Calshi's real time betting data in TV news segments, online news content, and, as Calshi announced on X the Everything app quote, to integrate prediction markets into CNN's global newsroom, with Calshi threatening, quote, a new era of media is here.

This is it could happen here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Regular CNN viewers may have noticed this integration has already been happening for some time.

This past election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in place of an addition to polling data to weigh the likelihood of candidates winning elections.

CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enton Nate Silver Protege, who used to work for five point thirty eight trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories earlier this year.

How she praised Entin by name in their announcement of the CNN partnership.

Quote.

Enton is an expert at translating what data and polling are saying on any given issue, and through this integration, he can tap into real time prediction markets data to better inform and fact check his reporting.

Unquote.

Here's an example of this reporting in a CNN segment from October twenty twenty five.

If you go back six months ago, you go back to April K Baldwin.

What were we looking at, Well, we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear shot of taking control of the US House of Representatives.

According to the Calshi Prediction Market odds, we saw him in an eighty three percent chance.

But those odds have gone par vomiting down.

Now we're talking about just a sixty three percent chance, while the gopiece chances up like a rocket up like gold, up from seventeen percent to now a thirty seven percent chance.

So we'll look like a pretty clear Demo likely Democratic win in the House come next year has become much closer to toss up at this point, although still slightly leading Democratic.

Harry Enton never clarifies how these quote unquote odds are formed or what they really are.

To a viewer who just tuned in or maybe isn't paying that much attention, it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually from a gambling website.

They're just big percentages displayed on screen the way you would see polling data or legitimate information used in a newsroom.

This short section using the Calshi prediction market odds was then followed by three minutes of analysis using selective mid term voting data from twenty seventeen to twenty to support the movement in these gambling odds.

The gambling ods themselves were a load bearing piece of information in this piece.

Calshi's main competitor, another so called prediction market called poly Market, partnered with x the Everything app and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their prediction data into online news content.

Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated have also both launched deals with the prediction market platform Galactic.

So what exactly are these prediction markets and how do they function?

On poly Market and Calshi, users can bet yes or no on the outcome of a question relating to world events, which is called a market.

As more money is wagered on either side, the odds of the outcome change.

Currently, top questions include various predictions for Time Person of the Year, will the US strike Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of the Epstein files, and who will be the next president.

Kalshi has Trump's chances at six percent.

Here's Polymarket CEO Shane Copelan explaining on sixty minutes, you.

Make money if you're right, you lose money if you're wrong, and as a result, it creates this information that's really isful for people.

These companies would like you to believe that the ratio of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome of world events is somehow useful or reliable information for the general public to forecast the future, whether that's through betting on the likelihood of an upcoming recession, the winner of a sports game, which days of the week Israel will bonb Gaza, or what movie will win Best Picture.

Almost fifty million dollars is currently being wagered over a potential Russia Ukraine ceasefire in twenty twenty five.

Production markets currently have three billion dollars in weekly trading volume.

I do need to note these companies argue that hedging outcomes of world events legally is not gambling, because that would be illegal.

Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of two thousand and six, which suppressed the early prediction markets of the two thousands.

But CALSHI is regulated as a platform for trading financial derivatives rather than securities trading or straight up legalized gambling, and this determines what entity they have to register with and what regulations they're subject to.

CALSHI launched in twenty twenty one with a federal license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and after a year's long battle, in October twenty twenty four, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of CALSHI, allowing online prediction market betting on US elections, rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the practice was illegal gambling and their concerns that prediction market betting could undermine election integrity.

Former CFDC chairman Rostam Benham misstatement in May of twenty twenty four, reading quote contracts involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience of participating in the democratic electoral process.

Allowing these contracts would push the CFTC, a financial market regulator, into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise.

A week before his dad took office in January twenty twenty five, Donald Trump Junior became a strategic advisor at Calshie Hoolymarket launched in twenty twenty without registering with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and was fined one point four million dollars by the CFTC in twenty twenty two for operating as an unregulated exchange and was held forth prohibited from allowing bets from US based users, though the poly Market CEO sees it a little different.

It was at one point four million dollars fine and also was a settlement and you could not have customers in the United States.

Yeah, we had to go in geoblock trading in the US and move certain operations offshore.

And it wasn't hey you're banned from trading the US.

It's like until you're licensed.

I mean it was breaking the law.

I mean people say breaking the law.

It's like which law you know?

So if anything it's incompatible.

It's incompatible with the law.

Yeah.

With the regulatory matrix that existed.

The past two years, Polymarket has found to be facilitating illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France, the UK, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, Romania and Australia.

Most of these bands just required geoblocking users, which can be easily circumvented through the use of a VPN, and since the financial transactions on poly market are all done through crypt currency, it's not clear that polymarket is taking any steps to enforce these bans beyond geo blocking.

In the midst of facing regulatory hurdles and bands from across the globe, Polymarket still exploded in popularity last year, attracting investment from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users, primarily driven by betting on the US presidential election, speculation on whether Biden would drop out of the race and who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the platform technically being banned in the United States after the first presidential debate in July twenty twenty four, around the attempted assassination of Trump and the RNC, Polymarket gained sixty thousand new accounts.

The year prior, polymarket averaged two thousand, three hundred new accounts per month.

August twenty twenty four saw seventy thousand new accounts, September ninety thousand, October three hundred thousand.

The month after Trump's second inauguration four hundred thousand.

Currently, polymarket has over sixty thousand daily active traders and hundreds of thousands of monthly traders since October twenty twenty four.

To give another example of their recent growth, in April twenty twenty three, Polymarket's monthly volume was about three million dollars.

A year later, it was thirty nine million.

In November twenty twenty four, it was two point five billion.

Last month, it was three point seven billion.

In summer twenty twenty five, cash Ptel's, FBI and the CFTC under Trump dropped investigations into whether polymarket was illegally allowing US users to place betts using VPNs.

Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Junior's venture capital firm invested in the platform, and Trump Junior himself joined Polymarket's advisory board.

Curiously, a few days after Trump Junior joined Polymarket, the Commodity Futures Training Commission announced it was going to allow poly market to operate in the United States after acquiring another company that held a US license.

This past October, Trump's own truth Social announced it was partnering with Crypto dot Com to launch truth predict Quote, a revolutionary prediction market backed by President Trump for enhanced decision making unquote.

When Barry Weiss's Sixty Minutes did a puff piece on Polymarket with its CEO last week, Anderson Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading markets, CEO Shane Kaplan seem to think that a little bit of insider trading might be good.

Actually, good predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.

Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing.

Obviously, you need to curate them, and you need to be really clear and strengen on where the line is drawn and like sort of ethics, and we spend a lot of time on that.

But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen and there's a lot of benefits from it and people will adapt.

The CEO did not elaborate on what poly markets practice of curating insider trading looks like and where their quote unquote stringent line is drawn, because in reality it doesn't seem this line exists.

They essentially encourage insider trading through these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement.

From the point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their prediction markets more accurate, so it's a net positive, and if it fucks over some users on the other side of a bet, that's just the cost of business.

Last week, an alleged insider trader won over a million dollars for bets on Google's twenty twenty five year in search rankings listing twenty two out of twenty three in the correct order.

This user has made a series of early bets related to Google the past year, like the exact release date of Google's Gemini three point zero, which they won one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on.

But because this polymarket user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to stop this behavior, and polymarket can't reverse these trades because they run through the blockchain, not that they would even necessarily want to.

Professional gambler, political data analyst and poly market advisor Nate Silver was also asked about insider trading on the China Talk podcast two months ago.

Are you worried about insider trading with this uh, with all this political betting, I mean there's an aspect of like, look, these are all crypto Uh, you know you get on these markets with crypto and like, like there were markets like which way is Suzanne Collins going to vote?

And you know the sort of the like you know, like the tail outcomes for like a legislative assistant in her office?

Are you know you can make ten times your salary?

And like a minute, right, what's your what's your think think on this?

For sure?

I mean, look, I think there are a couple of qualifications though, Like, first of all, I think people on the inside often aren't as well as a formed as they think, and or there are some downsides having an inside view and not an outside of you.

You might drink the kool aid, so to speak, right, you might be in a bubble.

Yeah, look, I mean I mean there are ones where it's like you can literally I mean there's been a lots of group chats people talking about like very very sketchy trades and one way bets that are being made in the stock market of like what's.

Going to happen with a trade deal?

I mean you can literally be the person who decides right and be vetting on the side if weird.

If there are incentives to make money in a world of eight million people, many of them are very competitive, and all of whom and on all of them, most of them acts to the Internet.

Right, people are going to find a way a way to do it.

Right, Let's pause here for a sec.

What do you think Nick goes on to list as a comparison to political insider trading as like an unfortunate but somewhat inevitable consequence of our evolving system of finance.

Like in the crypto space, we've seen an increasing number of like crypto kidnappings.

Right, Well, I mean, that's one of the consequences if people are worth vast amounts of wealth that isn't very secure it it's just gonna gonna happen until you up security or a better or whatever else.

And so like, you know, I don't think there's necessarily anymore or less insider creating on like polymarket than there might be for in sports betting sites.

We've seen a lot of sports betting scandals or for regular equities.

You know, I believe the literature says that like members of Congress achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios.

I have to do I'm sure there's some debate about that.

I have to like to double check that, right.

It's fine, Bros.

It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping.

It's fine.

Actually.

So Nay goes on to say that prediction market insider trading isn't that different from congressmen doing insider trading on the stock market, or like rigged sports betting, but he really neglects to emphasize that those things are also bad and should be aggressively clamped down on.

That shouldn't be allowed, and prediction markets intentionally skirch regulation.

They currently have far less legal protections for users against unfair practices, and with crypto they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors.

And now news companies are legitimizing turning everyone's phone into a corrupt casino for world events, whether that's Israel starving Palestine or how many tweets Elon Musk is going to publish this week.

The day before CALSH announced their partnership agreement with CNN and NCNBC, CBS aired a sixty minutes puff piece on polymarket, anchored by Anderson Cooper.

When we met with Copeland last month, more than three point six million dollars had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's president Nicholas Muduro would be out of power by the end of the year.

Polymarket users didn't think, so they gave it only a twenty three percent chance.

And if you buy no on that and you're buying it at seventy eight cents and at the end of the year he's still.

In power, yeah, you get a dollar.

So you've made a profit of.

Twenty two cents for share.

I wudn't see why this would be I mean, I don't want to use a term addictive, but it would be compelling.

I mean, maybe it is a tick fier, well, certainly compelling.

This is how I see it.

If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and try and get an edge.

Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly Calshi partnered CNN as well as CBS's Sixty Minutes, is so hesitant to call this clearly addictive practice addictive, quote unquote compelling.

Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copelan explained the platform earlier in this piece.

It's a site where you can basically bet on current events, some sort of question about the future like an election, and as a result, when a ton of people are betting, you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is and how.

Accurate it is.

It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball.

Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO quote may be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely onto something unquote.

In explaining how poly market users attempt to seek truth and gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how in twenty twenty four, an anonymous French user made over eighty million dollars on poly market by betting on Trump winning the presidential election, and to bolster his bets, he contracted you goov to conduct private polls in swing states.

People thought he'd just liked Trump, and he had actually commissioned a ton of private polls.

He did something called neighbor polling, which is you ask people who they think their neighbors.

Are likely to vote for.

Four scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to saying you're going to vote for somebody, and people feel some sort of social awkwardness and What he noticed was there was huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the normal pole, and the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously.

He thought Trump was undervalued.

If this guy was not able to make eighty million, but rather able to make eighty thousand dollars, he would have never gone through the hassle.

But when you get markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for people to go above and beyond to try and find truth.

What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer scale of money being wagered creates incentive to quote unquote find truth.

In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this specter of objectivity around the gambled odds, which obviously the CEO of Polymarket has a personal incentive to encourage.

But Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of capital t truth even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction market odds back during the twenty twenty election, which had his chances of winning that election far higher than what pure polling models showed.

Well, she claims that prediction markets can help journalists quote unquote fact check, but doesn't explain how fact can be determined from speculative gambling markets.

Where is the fact in gambling, Well, we will find out after these ads.

To quote from poly market advisor Nate Silver's blog The Silver Bulletin quote, It's basically good when people are more exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized.

But of course I also analyze poles and build probabilistic models myself in that capacity, I strongly disagree with the notion that prediction markets can serve as a good substitute for poles.

These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by the prediction market companies themselves, including Polymarket.

To be fair, one minor pet peeve is that both reporters and readers often confuse probabilities for poll results unquote, As Nate goes on to explain, if Trump is up fifty five to forty five over Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's not saying that Trump is expected to win by ten points.

It means that ten percent more users on the website favor Trump winning, which is pretty close to a toss up.

This confusion is a huge problem which is bolstered in both how prediction market companies market their platform but also how journalists use gambling data in news stories.

If you see a social media post, an advertisement, or a random news segment showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians in a race without context, those betting numbers could be interpreted in a number of ways and influence someone's percent exception of an election, and maybe even their choice on who to vote for or even whether to vote at all.

In an October speech, Zora Mumdani reference to Calshi billboards predicting a Cuomo victory in the Democratic primary.

When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me.

And when we strolled.

Into Times Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed Cuomo's chances of winning at nearly eighty percent, we knew that the so called experts were set to get it wrong yet again.

Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable.

When you see the Calshi odds that have our chances of victory in the nineties, know this.

You are reading the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he went to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory was promised.

We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.

Cal She excitedly shared the latter half of that clip, proclaiming breaking zoron Mamdani references his Calci odds on stage, Calshi is mainstream unquote despite this clip demonstrating how prediction markets often suffer from inaccurate bias.

Last week, Discount Steve Kornaki, former five point thirty eight analyst and now CNN's data expert, Harry Enton shared this segment about the Tennessee District seven special election on x the Everything app with the caption odds are Dems will come within ten points of a win, if not outright win.

I would say, if you had to look at the congressional map any district that Donald Trump won by twenty two points, you would say, you know, you've got like nearly a one one hundred percent chance of winning if you're running for Congress there.

But what are the prediction markets saying right now?

You know, what are we talking about in terms of the prediction market?

Us, Look, the Democrat has a fifteen percent chance of winning in that race, Okay, a fifteen percent chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald Trump won by twenty two points.

But here I think is the key nugget on this side of the of the ledger, and that is a GOP win by under ten points.

There's a sixty eight percent chance of that.

So there is a more than two thirds chance that the Republican candidate, Yes, they win, but they win by a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump.

We're talking about double digits, smaller.

We're talking about a huge, huge shift.

To the left.

We're talking about when you add these two together, we're talking about a more than eighty percent chance that there is a clear double digit shift to the left, and a fifteen percent chance the Democrat actually wins in a district that Donald Trump won by twenty two points.

That just shows you how bad the environment is for Republicans right now, that the Democrat has any sort of a chance, and this.

They talk to you about this, he's just authoritatively rattling off complete speculation on a Democrat victory.

As big screens display percentages in huge text with source Calci in tiny text the bottom of the screen.

Ordinary polling showed that this was a close race that leaned red by two to eight points, and the Republican did end up winning by nine points.

To quote the broken clock Nate silver quote.

Without having polls to look at, the prediction markets would probably kind of suck at making election forecasts.

Translating poles into probabilities is considerably more complicated when there are many correlated races at once, such as in the battle for the electoral College or control of Congress.

Prediction markets had a strong twenty twenty four in this regard.

They leaned toward Trump when our model had it at fifty to fifty.

I don't think this was because of any special modeling insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls.

Again, so give the markets credit for that.

These sorts of soft quote unquote intangible intuitions can be valuable, though you'd need a lot of data to determine whether they add or subtract value in the long run unquote, As Nate himself acknowledges, someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical model would show.

A contention.

I have with Nate.

One of many is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds.

They are not actual probabilities.

These odds aren't based on objective, mathematical principles like flipping a coin, the three door problem, or even something like blackjack.

These odds are created whole cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data informed guessing, but still primarily through people's intuition, which is susceptible to group impulses.

Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous controlled data that's needed to form a probability, like that which is applied to legalized sports betting.

This is quite evident in the betting odds around the Last People Conclave, which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions.

There was no existing probability to support the election of an American pope, a first time occurrence.

With prediction markets, people can still do research to make an informed bet, but it's not really the case that X candidate is mathematically expected to win an election.

Eighty out of one hundred instances a hive mind of users have formed that statistical division through the power of money, eighty percent of users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur.

So the problem isn't just that, like Nate says, people are confusing probabilities for polls.

It's that they're confusing prediction market betting odds for mathematical probabilities.

It's this difference that allows betting on sports outcomes via Calshian poly market, even in states that ban typical sports betting, because you're not actually betting on fixed odds, you're betting against other investors.

And now news companies are not just manufacturing consent and normalizing political gambling, but are actively encouraging the use of these platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets.

Anderson Cooper calls it the quote unquote wisdom of crowds.

But we already have methods for learning group consensus, which may have problems, but frankly far fewer problems than gambling on world events.

Beyond the moral qualms of betting money on human suffering, prediction markets are susceptible to not just personal bias, but group bias based on the current ratio of odds.

This in group consensus can be influenced by short lived trending topics, and these platforms cater to a hyper online point of view.

Prediction market users provide a very non representational sample variety pulling from a very specific type of guy who regularly uses these platforms.

To quote from Calsh's CNN Partnership announcement quote, cal she has become the definitive source for staying informed about the future and is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall Street and Main Street get recently called the New York City mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media.

It's because of this accuracy that calci's data will serve as a powerful compliment to CNN's reporting.

Journalists can more easily surface credible information to their audiences about the real time probabilities of future cultural and political events unquote.

In practice, this reporting mixes gambling data and actually reputable or credible pulls in a confusing way, like this recent CNN segment which cites CALCI odds on whether Trump will send tariff stimulus checks as well as CBS you gov polling data on if tarif's lower prices back to back in the same segment, do they.

Think that the tariffs that these rebate checks are actually coming?

And at this point.

No, No, I mean chance Trump tariff, the tariff stimulus checks are sent to Americans by August of twenty twenty six.

It's a twenty five percent chance.

That's one in four.

So that's not nothing.

But the American people right now are craving, craving some relief, and at this point it doesn't look like it is coming.

Although I will note John Berman, this twenty five percent, it is greater than this six percent who say that tars decrease prices, or that five percent back in March, which are just you never see one, two, three, four, five percent.

So look, twenty five percent ain't nothing, but at this point it's low.

Yeah, it's interesting the prediction markets think they only one in four chance that will actually happen.

There is this really what the future of political forecasting is going to be?

Maybe, maybe not, but there are four horsemen of this political gambling apocalypse.

Nate Silver via his gamification of election predictions based on his time as a professional gambler.

Sports betting, especially since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada in twenty eighteen, resulting in almost forty states subsequently legalizing some form of sports betting, which has facilitated because of gambling to grow dramatically across the country in the past ten years through the spread of online sports betting apps.

The third horseman is Trump for the Trump administration through their removal of regulatory hurdles facing prediction markets.

And finally that CNN guy Harry Enton, a Nate Silver protege who trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories the past year.

These four horsemen, Nate Silver, sports betting, Trump, and Harry Enton have created the cultural and political conditions for political gambling to spread.

Like wildfire, which, hey, is also something you can bet on.

During the LA Fires prediction market, users could bet on how many acres would burn.

So what is the endgame of this, this gambling apocalypse that seems to be inching its way closer and closer To answer that, Here's a clip from Calshi co founder and CEO Derek Manser.

Long term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.

We are living in a word where like we have an abundance of information, but there's a lot of noise, and like we don't really understand what's real from what's not.

Our prediction markets are an antidote to that.

They do a very very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people.

And you're seeing the sort of massive shift where like people are using them whenever they think about questions about the future, you know, whenever they're debating about anything.

And I think that trajectory is going to keep going.

That's a new consumer habit that I don't think is going to be undone.

This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting, this financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion, creating new addictive consumer habits.

These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports betting to everything, where everyone gets to be their own little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino in their pocket, getting addicted to gambling on speculation of world suffering.

And CNN is complicit in this.

CNN and others have decided to partner with platforms that enable the people who decide when to drop bombs around the world to win millions of dollars by betting money on the choices they themselves are making at the expense of the rest of the world, and these companies think this is a good thing because the betting odds can serve as a potential heads up that something is likely to happen.

Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non existent, are just not enough.

Congress needs to be far more involved in regulating online betting, and in the case of political events, it should just be completely banned.

It is detrimental to a healthy society.

It incentivizes corruption, cruelty, and erodes public trust.

Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely, but it should return to being time and location locked.

Go to Las Vegas like a fucking adult.

Currently, there is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets.

Only the federal government can, and Trump's federal government certainly seems like it's not going to considering the President's Sun works for both of the main platforms, Klshi and poly market, and while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are now working as their own news aggregators, specifically Polymarket's social media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account.

Because that drives traffic back to their website, where people can bet on the news stories that poly market is sharing, even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up.

On December fifth, Polymarket posted quote just in suspected J.

Six pipe Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon of those involved in January sixth unquote.

This claim subsequently spread all around the Internet, parroted by people of a variety of political orientations.

But if you read closely, the original post says suspected J six Pipe Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon, polymarket is just spreading gambling information as if it is news content.

Quote unquote.

Projected just means that polymarket users are betting on this, But these projected posts are mixed in with other posts just aggregating the day's news.

So unless you are paying super close attention, which rarely people on the Internet are, this becomes a trojan horse of disinformation.

When news companies use the term projected on election night, usually that indicates with pretty clear mathematical certainty that an event is going to happen.

When Polymarket uses projected in news tweets, It only indicates that Internet gamblers are swinging around money in an effort to create truth with once legitimate news companies not just complicit but active participants in this process.

That doesn't for us today at it could happen here.

See you on the other side.

Hello, and welcome to Achnapan Here.

I'm Andrew's age also known as Andreism, and I'm joined once again by That's.

A q mea Wong girl who was really really the first time was like I Am not going to miss my cue this time, and then this time I was like, oh, I'm waiting for the queue, and then it was like shit, that's the cue.

And it took my brain like several seconds to be like, oh no, it would be very funny if the editors just edited out the pause so everyone has no idea what I'm talking about.

That's that would be hilarious actually, But there was unaware that was like a ten second pause before me I came in.

No really truly, this is mia on like three hours of sleep brain.

I was like, oh, yeah, right, the cue is going to come.

But then it things going great for BeO Loong, the other person who's on the show.

You know who I am statistically if you're listening to the show who, of course?

I mean speaking of seconds.

By the way, in those ten seconds that you were waiting for your queue that had already passed, hundreds of people were born, you know, every second where someone is being born.

Like other animals, humans have this tendency to multiply.

But should they That is the question of the day.

This is the last episode I was on.

We spoke about the worries surrounding populasia.

You know, whether we have too many people or too few people.

But the question of making people or not making them has been the subject of a few ideological classes.

There's a whole movement of thinkers who argue that bringing new life into the world is a big mistake.

These are the anti natilists.

And on the other side you have those who say that having children is good and essential.

That's the pro natalist camp.

So in this episode will be getting into that tug of war philosophically and weighing the issues with both.

Because I'm not going to make it a secret, I'm not a fan of either of them.

I don't know how do you feel.

About Yeah, this is the one good Stalin quote.

They're both worse, So we have to pick among those twos.

Let's start with the anti natilists.

I don't what's the kind of gut reaction or impression you get from those those folks.

I don't know.

I think there's a combination of stuff that's largely harmless and sometimes is funny.

Like you get protested people pulling up signs that are like I didn't ask to be born or didn't consent to be born.

It's like, sure, but then then there's also people just doing masshootings about it.

So it's great, it's it's a good time.

It's a very normal time for politics.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean when I think of them, I tend to think cringe and Reddit.

But they actually have a philosophy outside of Reddit forums.

So, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, anti natilism is the view that it is either always or usually morally impermissible to Brookery.

Now, most of us grew up with the idea that life is inherently valuable, right, but anti natilists disagree.

They see life as a bruden rather than a gift.

Very edgy, very read it but you know, it's something that has been around since before the Internet.

While not himself an anti natalist, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who lived in the nineteenth century, is taught by some anti natalists as a contributor to their philosophical foundations.

In his descriptions of life as constant, striving, frustration and pain.

In the twentieth century, the Romanian writer Emil Choran argued that non existence is the ultimate form of peace.

His philosophical pessimism regarded individual life and human history as a whole as a record of error, illusion and futility, and most famously, South African philosopher David Bennetta laid out one of the main anti natilists are in his book Better Never to Have been the harm of coming into existence.

It's a bang a siteo.

Though now you can find theoretical contributions to anti natilists thought in Buddhism's idea that life is suffering or incidant interpretations of it rather or incident gnostic traditions that sow the material world itself as a kind of cosmic mistake.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that anti natilists put forward for their stance.

There are philanthropic and misanthropic arguments of antinautilism.

You know, the philanthropic ones focus on harm to the individual who is brought into existence, while the misanthropic arguments tend to focus on the harm that new people cause to the will.

So there's the consent argument that Mia would have mentioned.

You know, basically a child that cannot consent to be inborn, so by creating them, you're forcing them into life.

They didn't ask for a life that will inevitably include suffering.

Another argument is in that sort of negative utilityanism camp.

It's the idea that our moral priority should be reducing suffering, not increase in happiness.

In fact, they don't see the potential or actuality of pleasure as an offset to suffering at all.

You know, under their view, even a single unit of suffering is unacceptable, and since every new life will include suffering, not creating life is the surest way to reduce it.

If Benetta had the famous asymmetry argument, which is that the presence of pain is bad, the presence of pleasure is good, but the absence of pain is always good.

Even if no one appreciates that good and the absence of pleasure isn't bad unless there's someone missing out.

So put simply, according to the argument, by not having a child, you avoid guaranteed suffering without depriving any person of joy because that person doesn't exist.

So that equation is probably one of the main pillars i'd say of the ant i need lists as a movement.

You know, you might be thinking to yourself, Oh, but I'm glad to be alive.

No, you're not.

According according to Bennetta and the anti natalists, you're deluded to think.

So.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it the deluded gladness argument.

Basically, your positive view of your own life is unreliable.

Better argues that we have cognitive biases like optimism and selective memory and so on, which distort how viciously we assess our own suffering.

So many good life reports, even if you think you have a good life or a decent life, you're deceiving yourself, according to him, Do you think people are deceiving themselves when they say that they enjoy their lives?

You know, this entire line of argument is just making me be like, you need to do less philosophy and like go outside and live.

Like it's just.

Like, yeah, I mean I get the whole thing about you know, all mental bias towards optimism and that kind of thing, but that doesn't invalidate the joy of people appreciating their life.

Yeah, it's like this.

This sounds like the exact script you get in your head when you're really depressed.

It's like, okay, like have you considered getting your depression managed and getting help for it instead of like doing philosophy about it.

I feel like you would be an antenatilist.

Oh you're yeah.

Another thing murders well.

And it's also frustrating because it's like the most compelling version of this argument is about like this world right now is absolutely dog shit and I can't justify bringing someone into it.

But that's like too grounded.

It's all these people are like, no, no, no, no, Actually, here's like this philosophy that proves that that life bad.

And it's like, uh, I mean there are antonielists arguments that do get into that more grounded Oh yeah, definitely, yeah, thing you know that they have one argument about multiplying suffering, right, because every child you bring into the bull is in just one pouson.

You know, they have the potential to have truer themselves and grandchildren and so on, multiplying the chances of pain, disease, loss suffering down the generations.

It's like, this is like long termism.

Shit, it's just like instead of like actually analyzing the world, we're going to build unbelievably complicated and completely meaningless, like abstract models of it and try to base our things off of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it's it's destally ridiculous.

Now I understand.

You know, our truck record isn't the best.

You know, they have their plagues and slavery and genocide, environmental the strut, and some of them say, well that's the best thing.

The best thing we could do is to voluntarily go extinct, you know, to step off the stage of the earth.

And that connects with the general misanthropy, and I think the misanthropic argument that humans are some kind of blight on the world.

Yeah, and they're antilists who take it a step further as well, And they're not just antilists for humans, they're universal antiists.

So they believe that not just human births are problematic, but existence itself.

Sentient beings across the board, human or animal are better off never being brought into life at all.

Really, truly, at this point, brother, this is a you problem.

You just don't like existing, Like we can work on that.

But this is not a philosophical thake, like you're just depressed, Like, come on, what are we doing here?

Yeah?

I mean, antonism is making some very heavy claims and they're obviously going to be coming to arguments because people are going to roll over with the kind of as solutions that it makes.

The most intuitive anser I would give is that yes, life involves suffering, but it also includes pleasure and joy and creativity and achievements, and for most people, those positives outweigh the negatives.

And if you're a radical, you recognize that some of the negatives of life are not inevitable.

The famines, the wars, the suffering, the poverty, it's not inevitable.

It's a product of economic and political systems that we have the power to change.

And yes, there will always be suffering.

They may always be some diseases, there will always be death, right, but that doesn't mean that existence is worse than non existence.

I'm glad to exist me, I feel like you're probably glad to exist.

I'm glad you.

Exist, yeah, most of the time.

Like this is a distinct improvement for positions I have been in.

But like, yeah, it's nice.

Yes, you know, like even even in the middle of like the hell world, it's nice.

Yeah, And yeah, the biases may skew our perspective, but the fact that we overwhelmingly choose life itself is a reason too not throw it out, you know, whis people are given the choice do you want to live right now?

And I mostly people want to say they're going to live, you know.

Yeah, and yes, we don't consent to be inborn, but there are other things that we don't consent to that we still benefit from.

You know, in funds, don't consent to be vaccinated, but it's it's something that benefits them, you know.

We educate in funds, we restrain them from danger.

We don't ask their permission necessarily to do these things, but it's just for their well being, for their benefit.

And I don't think while consent is an important factor in the way that we engage as others, I don't think consent is the only factor for a framework of determining what is moral and immoral.

You know, you can't use consent to determine whether it's moral or not to exist.

I don't feel like those two pieces mashed together very well.

Yeah.

Well, and also I think like there are so many other things that we didn't consent to, you know, like this is another thing that's talking.

It is like we never consented to die.

On a less metaphysical level, I don't know, like I didn't consent to like to live under this state, yeah, where you know they're like doing helicopter raids on apartment buildings and like dragging naked children screaming away from their parents in the middle of the night, Like you know that, And that's a thing that you can actually actively do something about that you didn't consent to.

That is actively harming you and everyone else around you versus like being born and making that the thing that you're doing is like okay, like we didn't get to live in or capitalism.

We didn't we didn't get sent to colonialism, Like we didn't geet to any of the shit, and that's something you could, you know, make not happen versus you being born, which there is nothing you can do to change the fact that you were born.

And it's like, oh, well, focus the next generation.

Yeah, you want you want to focus on like reducing the amount of suffering the next generation will create in the world.

Have you considered like climate change?

Yeah?

Yeah, I also think that on a broader level, right, I think it's good to be questioned some of the intuitions that we may have, you know, even if they're our deepest moral intuitions.

I think it's good to maybe consider them or to be thoughtful about them.

But also, as the incent Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues, if a theory implies that the creation of all human life is a moral mistake, that conclusion itself might be reason to doubt the theory.

This is something called the repugnant conclusion objection.

I mean, because it's it's repugnant.

It's intuitively repugnant to most people to hear that existence is a mistake.

Nobody should be alive.

Yeah.

I was like, well, no, absolutely not.

Get your shit worked out exactly.

Betray to logic here, not great.

Like you were saying, Yeah, there'll be a lot of things in the world that suck right now that cause suffering, and there's a lot of present joy is alongside that present suffering.

But there's also the value to be had in that potential joy.

You know, the potential possibilities have value.

If potential suffering has value, potential joys should also have value.

The potential of creating a batter world, each new child bringing the potential for greater love, for incredible arts and crafts, for scientific breakthrough, is for reshaping the world in a positive direction.

You know, the potential for the unique goods that each individual life can bring, I believe justifies the risk of suffering because the world without those future goods would be worse than a world with them.

And yes, humanity can cause harm.

Where we are also capable of extraordinary good we can change, we can reduce suffering over time, new generations are going to be part of that solution, I will say, though two anti nationalists credit.

One of the points of the Internet and Psychlopedia of Philosophy points out is that the debate of what anti natialism is theoretical.

You know, this is stuffy philosophers sitting around exchanging notes and writing books.

Right, Most of its advocates are not actually putting forward policies that are restricting people's ability to create life.

But the same cannot be said for the other side of the coin, the pro natalists.

Yep.

So, in broad terms, pronatalism or just natalism is the belief that reproduction is a societal good or even the society needs more children.

This movement is getting louder and louder these days.

It's shaping policy debates in the US, in Europe, in Asia and beyond, because, as I mentioned in the previous episode, fertility rates are falling almost everywhere.

Countries like South Korea, Italy, Japan, and the US are seeing fewer booths than needed to sustain their current populations.

So you're going to be seeing pronatalism in various forms, shown up in politics and even in tech circles, especially in those ways texicles.

Now, pronatalism is a broad umbrella.

You know, you can have the mild position of supporting families with policies, and most people are not opposed to that, but you also have the strong pronatalist stands which is actually urging or incentivizing or mandating both for cultural, economic, or ideological reasons.

Pronatalism was motivated by a few different reasons.

You know, there's the economic anxiety of a shrink in population meaning fewer workers, more retirees, and strained pension systems.

There's a nationalistic argument of worries about cultural continuity which tend to tita into the reactionary directions, and the pronatalism today is very much political as a result.

In the US, Republicans have been leaning into it, framing the low booth rates as a national crisis.

And in Europe you have countries like Hungary under Victor Auburn which have made pronatalism a signature policy.

It's very in effectiveness.

The religious motivations of pronatalism are also pretty interesting.

You know, you have the being fruitful and multiply directive in the Bible, which some take as far as the quiver full movement, which is the whole thing about having children by like the dozen no more.

Yeah.

Then you have the tech elite circles pronatalism because it connected with the ideas of human progress.

One of the prontalists who most famously practices what he preaches mostly for worse is he on Musk.

Yep, right, he's He's a big Nazi about it.

For one, because of us, we'll worry about white facility rates but he also thinks that globoth rates as a whole or a bigger threat than climate change.

So I mean it seems like he's single handedly trying to fix that with his seed is spreading.

Yeah, is his assembly line of children with the accompanying product barcodes for names, And I just feel bad for them, honestly, to have that as a father.

No, it sucks.

Yeah, it's not great.

It's not good.

And so he and his billionairem bodies of the belief that civilization will collapse if we don't make more babies.

Silicon Valley circles a fund in pronatalist think tanks and embryo optimization projects.

A lot of policies are also coming out of the pronates list camp.

Unlike the anti natalists historically, countries like the Soviet Union hand their off medals like Mother Heroine for women with large families, and the Russia of today has revived similar awards recently, alongside like I mentioned in the previous episode, banning anti natalist propaganda.

Now some countries are offering tax incentives for booths and even proposing baby bonuses of thousands of dollars paid for each booth.

Thousands of dollars per birth is kind of a spit in the face because that's not even going to last the first couple months of a child being born.

Let's be real, children are extremely expensive.

Yeah yeah.

Proniceists also tend to push things like expanded family benefits, child allowances or holes and subsidies for pearents.

These, I would say, are the more liberal minded or progressive minded pronac lists as much as you can be a progressive and a pronac list, because they actually considering the ways that they can make actually bearing children and raising children a bit easier for the people who have to do it.

That sort of support also includes things like expanding IVF access, subsidized and fertility treatments, you know, improving embryo screening, that sort of thing.

Places like Scandinavia also have generous leave policies, which are often cited as a model of soft pronatalism because it makes it easier for people to balance work and child.

Are it.

But you don't tend to hear these policies coming out of the much louder pronatalist conservative camp.

Right, What do you get from them and from their pronatalism tends to be restrictions and women restrictions and abortion and body autonomy policies that conflict with the goals of reproductive justice and gender equality, sometimes putting women's health at risk.

And also conservatives push lots of narrative with their pronatalism, large families, sense of valories.

They frame childbearing as a civic duty.

You know, they appeal to legacy and culture and identity when you get into that white supremacist camp, and you also get the whole eugenics of it, you know, the tech elite, praiselest wing.

They're pushing for things like gene editing, embryo selection, and the sort of stuff that Musk is talking about with his racial replacement anxieties.

In any case, the effectiveness of even the few positive policies has been pretty mixed.

Countries have tried pumping billions into subsidies, and often fertility rates have barely budged deep structural issues like the cost of living, cultural norms around gender, career paths, health concerns.

All these often ugwe the incentives of a couple of thousand dollars or extended opportunity leaves.

You know, if people don't want to have babies, they're not gonna have babies.

If they're not confident in their ability to have children raising environment that they feel is best for them, they're not going to have children.

You know, people, more than ever have that choice.

And unfortunately, a lot of the pronatalist policies don't care about making child bearing easier, you know, easing the path to make that choice.

They just want to pressure people to have children.

Yep, you know, the loose straight back to massogyny, a reaction against women's freedom, pushing them back into the kitchen, pushing them back into that subservient position in society.

So, after looking at both sides, right, you have the anti natalists and the pronatalists.

Don't create life to avoid suffering, or you must create life to preserve society.

I guess you could call me a centrist.

The anti natalists repulse me, and the pronatalists equally repulse me.

You know, I'm wary of anyone claiming that you must have children or you must not have children.

I'm weary of a world where these kinds of choices are coerced by others.

You know, as an anarchist, I'm a firm believer in autronomy, in personal freedom and the ability to decide one's own life.

That's what matters to me.

You know, I don't intend to have children myself.

I do like children a lot.

I was once a child myself, and I look forward to being an uncle, a godfather and all that.

But that's my choice.

You know, Let your choice be your choice and my choice be my choice.

Make choices freely, resist the pressure from either camp, and keep the agency intact.

That's all I have to say on it.

Honestly, Yeah, I mean honestly, that covers my stuff.

I was gonna say so.

Yeah, I mean with that if speaking rapid Yeah, all power to all the people.

This has been It could happen here, Peace.

Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.

I am your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today I have exactly the kind of story you probably expect when you hear my voice on this feed.

A white nationalist has gone and done something we all wish that he was not doing.

If you listen to my show Weird Little Guys, you already know a little bit about this particular guy.

On that show, I talk about white nationalists, neo Nazis, right wing extremists, aspiring terrorists, things of that nature.

My domain is mostly guys you've never heard of because they failed to live up to their goal of becoming the next Hitler or whatever.

It's funnier than it sounds, I swear, But unfortunately for all of us, sometimes one of those guys breaches containment.

The guy we're talking about today wants to be more than just one of the weird little guys trying to make a name for himself on the fringes of the white nationalist movement.

He wants to be a congressman.

He's trying to make himself everybody's problem, and that makes him part of what is happening here.

Back in August, Representative Nancy Mace announced that she wouldn't seek re election in South Carolina's first congressional district and she would instead focus on making a run for governor.

And that announcement opened the floodgates.

All but one of the ten Republicans vying for the nomination to replace her filed their paperwork after the announcement.

I don't pay a ton of attention to this sort of thing.

It's not really my wheelhouse.

But last month a man named Tyler Dikes joined the race, filing paperwork as a congressional candidate in Mace's district.

Now, like I said, it's a crowded field.

There are ten people in this primary, and it's Nancy Mace's district, So being a little bit of a conspiracy theorist with an extremely right wing policy platform doesn't really set you apart.

They all kind of blend together most years.

I probably couldn't tell you a whole lot about every primary candidate in my own district, let alone won two states away.

So on the surface, he's just another carbon copy America first zelot trying to fit this particular mold.

He's created an image for his campaign that's not unlike Nancy Mace's, and I guess that makes sense, right.

These people voted for her, so maybe that's what works here.

Tyler Diykes's campaign website is pretty similar to Nancy Mace's.

They both emphasize their personal connection to military service.

Nancy Mace graduated from the Citadel Military College and Tyler Diykes features photos of himself and his Marine Corps dress blues.

They both describe themselves as entrepreneurs and business owners, and they both hate immigrants so much that their lust for mass deportation isn't even confined only to the pages devoted to their position on the issue.

It's in their candidate biographies, and they frame themselves as fighters.

There's a lot of fight based language, fighting for America, fighting for Christ, and they both really position their devotion to God as something they have to fight for and fight against the christ hating whardes on the left to keep like this is something someone's trying to take from them.

Their platforms are pretty similar to America First, South Carolina first, law and order, tough on crime, deport millions of people.

Nancy Mace is running for governor on eliminating the state income tax and if he gets to Congress, Tyler Diyke says he wants to slash taxes two but of the five main policy ideas on his congressional campaign website, the one that's about taxes the tax that he will cut as a congressman.

He wrote that he will end property taxes.

Now, regardless of how you feel about property taxes, those are imposed by your state and local government.

The federal government doesn't tax your property.

So I guess he's got that Republican tax cut spirit.

But he's a little confused, but overall just another far right America First candidate trying to elbow his way into this attention economy.

It's distasteful, it's bigoted, it's chrysto fascist, enophobic, poorly articulated, economically unsound, but it's not unique or interesting.

These guys are a dime a dozen, and they'll mostly be gone by the time the primaries end.

But there is one really weird thing about Tyler's campaign messaging.

He keeps bringing up that he's not a Nazi.

He wants you to know that no one's asking him this.

He's bringing it up preemptively.

I am not a Nazi.

Letters that he mailed to the homes of hundreds of voters in his district are starting to raise questions he thinks are already answered in those letters.

And here's the thing.

They still call me a Nazi to this lick.

They still random me is all these evil, horrific things.

But let me tell you this what makes me a Nazi.

I love Christ, I love God.

I love my country.

I love my state, my family, and my community and the entirety of the Low Country area.

And that's why I live here.

Because I love you so much.

So does that make me a Nazi?

Does love in your family?

Does loving God?

Does love in your country?

Does that make you a Nazi?

That makes you a nazi?

Sophet?

Oh, wow, he's just another tragic victim of cancel culture.

He's being attacked by the woke mobs who hate good Christian men and that's why they're calling him nazi.

Right?

Is there another reason that this keeps coming up?

Or is it just because he loves his family so much?

So it's quite interesting.

You know, my experience is anily six.

For example, my brand is the neo Nazi domestic terrorists because hwave.

Oh, it's not just because he loves his family.

It's because he's a peaceful, patriotic supporter of Donald Trump who visited the Capitol Building and the communists who run the mainstream media are unfairly showing a photograph of him where he was simply waving hello to a friend.

And that's why they're calling him nazi because he loves America too much and he waved Helloa to a friend while on a sightseeing trip to the Capitol Building.

It probably won't surprise you to know that that is not the whole story.

He's getting closer.

It's definitely a little bit more about what specifically he was doing with his right arm at the top of the east stairs of the Capitol Building a little after two pm on January sixth, twenty twenty one.

It's more about that than it is about his love of his family.

He's getting warmer.

See.

The reason he keeps bringing up that he doesn't want to be called a Nazi is because there are Nazi allegations.

But these allegations aren't just lies from the evil left wing media.

It's something he's been asked about by the FBI and by the DOJ, and the Marine Corps and police in multiple jurisdictions across several states.

A lot of people are asking him about the Nazi thing, So it makes sense that he'd want to get out ahead of it and assure the voters that there's a good explanation when he brings up that innocent wave that's being taken out of context to smear him as a Nazi.

He's talking about a photograph, a particular photograph and one of many that federal prosecutors included in their sentencing memorandum.

After Tyler Dykes accepted a plea agreement in federal court.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting an officer during the breach of the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.

In exchange for his cooperation, the government dropped the other eight counts on the indictment.

So in that sentencing memorandum, there's a picture.

It's a still frame that was taken from a video, but obviously you can't put a video on paper, so it's just a still frame, and it shows a mass of people making their way up the east steps of the Capitol Building on the afternoon of January sixth.

Whoever's taking the video was standing at the bottom of the stairs, so you're just seeing the backs of the people in this crowd who are walking up the stairs, except for the figure in the center.

In the center of the picture, at the top of the stairs, a very tall man in a black jacket and a gray mask has turned around so he's facing the plaza below, and he's sort of squared up facing down the stairs, and his right arm is completely extended at about a forty five degree angle elbow straight wrists, straight, fingers together.

The government's caption reads still from video showing Dikes performing what appears to be the see Kyle's salute after he arrives on the landing in front of the East Rotunda doors.

He maintains that he was waving to a friend.

For what it's worth, I've seen a lot of these waves, and I know what it looks like to me, and regardless of what it looks like to you in this photograph, I have a video of him doing the exact same wave at a Nazi rally, so it's not just a picture.

He only served three of the fifty seven months he was sentenced to spend in prison before he was released in January of twenty twenty five as a result of Trump's blanket pardons for the nearly sixteen hundred January sixth defendants.

But that's not the issue here.

He's not ashamed of being a January sixth defendant.

That's a badge of honor.

That's not a problem.

If he can spin this Nazi thing into a story that reinforces this narrative of brave January sixth patriots who are being persecuted by communists and liberals and the woke mob, it stops being a problem for the people whose attention and votes and donations he wants.

His story is pretty simple.

All the people calling him a Nazi are lying.

They're taking a single photograph out of context.

It's not a Nazi salute, it's a wave.

And all of this, all of this Nazi talk, it's all just about this one single incident, this one picture, this one wave, and the government, the government is preventing him from proving that.

To you, and then the honorable judge that I had denied me being able to get that evidence and being able to show that people, and so a lot of these people, unfortunately, because of a lot of the news media and because of the outforts of the Biden administration, they see me as an enemy and as a terrorist.

That's Tyler Dyke's in mid October of this year telling a local TV news crew in Hiltonhead that the media is complicit in spreading these lies the government told about him in court.

When he was interviewed last month by a conspiracy theorist and right wing podcaster named Anne Vandersteele, she was on his side, She was earnest, and she won to get to the bottom of this.

He told her that the government's entire case was lie after lie, and there's proof that he never did any of those things on January sixth.

And she's excited to hear this, and she wants to see these videos because she would love to see proof that the government is persecuting our brave January sixth patriots.

But there's one little problem.

Well, you know, that's a very funny thing.

The honorable judge in my case actually put out a gaggle order banning me from being able to have any of the discovery evidence for me to be able to defend myself from the force that is in the dockets.

Oh, it's in the dockets.

It's in the dockets.

Phenomenal.

I can look at the dockets.

We can look at that together.

That's easy.

And I do see here that there is a protective order filed in this case.

Shortly after he was first arrested, the judge entered an order prohibiting the public dissemination of certain discovery materials.

If you look at enough J six cases, this kind of protective order was almost universal.

The government didn't want to publicly release stuff like the names of confidential informants, security footage from inside certain secure government areas, personal information about witnesses, just a laundry list of kinds of evidence that was likely to be produced in these cases that would be sensitive.

So they're not saying they can't turn it over to the defense in discovery.

They're just saying this stays between us, right, This doesn't get released to the public.

This was normal and it was routine, and it was agreed to by everyone involved.

The defense council agreed to this.

So okay, off to a good start.

I do see a protective order on the docket.

But if you skip down a year down to the bottom of the docket, to the end of the case.

After the guilty plea, the government filed their exhibit list for the sentencing hearing, and in that document, the federal prosecutor wrote, the government does not object to any photo or video evidence being released.

To the public.

So of the exhibits they planned to show in court at sentencing, they said, it's okay if everyone sees these, the media can have these.

And so the judge in turn asked defense counsel how they felt about that, and the defense replied, defendant Tyler Bradley Dyke's by and through his attorneys, does not object to the video and photo evidence identified and the government's noticed ECF number forty four being made publicly available.

Defendant does subject to any public disclosure of his military records identified in Exhibit nineteen, and so the judge signed an order the exhibits that the government identified for the sentencing hearing, which the file names are in that document.

It includes the video of the wave, the video of him grabbing the policeman's shield, the things he's saying he can't get yet.

Based on the file names, those videos can absolutely be requested from the court.

These aren't under seal.

There's not a gag order.

He can request these, and I think he should do that.

There are a lot of videos on that exhibit list, and I'm sure people would like to decide for themselves if he's describing them faithfully.

The only exhibit on that list for the defense objected to making publicly available, the only one that remains sealed and isn't available for public access, are his military records.

Those military records are specifically the ones related to the other than honorable discharge he received from the Marines.

See those campaign flyers, the ones he was mailing to people's houses.

They're all signed at the bottom Tyler Dykes, US Marine Corps veteran business owner, pardoned J six's patriot On November tenth, the Marine Corps birthday.

He posted a photo of himself in his dress blues on the campaign's Instagram account.

Being a Marine Corps veteran is as big a part of his campaign identity as talking about how he's not a Nazi.

These are kind of the top two things.

He's a Marine, and he really wants you to know that Nazi stuff isn't true.

And he was a Marine.

That's true.

He definitely was in the Marine Corps.

But those military records that he doesn't want released would really undermine his narrative about being a proud, honorable veteran who definitely isn't a Nazi, because they would show that he received an other than honorable discharge for participating in prohibited extremist activity on November eighth, twenty twenty.

And that's in the file.

I know that specifically is in that sealed file because in other documents that refer to it, that's all it says.

I don't know what else is in that record.

All I know for sure is that the stated reason for his other than honorable discharge is something that happened on November eighth, twenty twenty.

Now, luckily for us, I know that on November eighth, twenty twenty, a security camera in Sumter County, South Carolina recorded footage of two men.

One of the men looked exactly like Tyler Diykes.

Even his father had to agree it kind of did.

And the men were putting up flyers with swastikas on them outside local businesses.

I don't know if his military discharge records include anything else.

Was it really just the flyers, just the one time with the swastika flyers and that was it.

I don't know if the military was a where that he'd been attending things like a paramilitary training weekend at a compound in Michigan hosted by members of the neo Nazi group the Base.

I don't know if there's a memo in there about the time in January of twenty nineteen that an FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned him about his possible connections to domestic extremist groups.

I don't know if the Marine Corps knew that he was one of just a handful of white nationalists who attended the Unite the Right to the flop of a Nazi rally held in Washington, d C.

In twenty eighteen to commemorate the deadly rally that had happened a year earlier, and along that same line of thought.

I don't know if the Marine Corps knew back then the Tyler Dykes had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville in twenty seventeen.

I don't know if they saw the videos of him marching with a tiki torch or the videos of him punching wildly at counter protesters that he'd helped trap in that sea of flames.

And with the exception of the United the Right rally in twenty seventeen, which was before he enlisted, all of the rest of that conduct occurred while Tyler Dykes was a Marine.

He went to Nazi rallies, he joined Nazi groups, he put up Nazi flyers, he went to Nazi training camps to prepare for the race war, and he fought his way into the Capitol Building on January sixth.

So, okay, yeah, he was a United States Marine.

He can post that picture in his uniform on his campaign website.

I don't care I'm not personally offended about him being a stain on the honor of the US military or whatever, but I think a lot of voters would feel like this isn't quite honest.

By the time Tyler Dykes was arrested in twenty twenty three and extradited back to Virginia to face charges for menacing those counter protesters with a lit torch, he'd already been kicked out of the Marines.

He had apparently hidden that from his parents, and there was a lot they didn't know about their son.

The day he was arrested in twenty twenty three, he'd been out with other members of a group called the Southern Son's Active Club, a sort of white supremacist fight club for friendless young men.

They were trying to hang Nazi banners from a highway overpass, but Tyler Dykes was bitten by a dog and had to go to the hospital instead.

He eventually pleaded guilty to that felony charge in Almarle County, Virginia, related to the torch march, and he spent a few months in the local jail.

On the day he was supposed to go home, he was picked up by a federal Marshal.

The DOJ had waited until the last day of his sentence here to unseal the charges against him for January sixth, and after that he spent a year out on pre trial bond in that case.

And then he eventually pleaded guilty to those charges in the summer of twenty twenty four, and he finally reported to federal prison in October of twenty twenty four to be there for almost five years, but he was released a few months later in January of this year after receiving a federal pardon, and now he wants to go back to the Capitol Building, not as a rioter this time, but as a congressman.

The campaign is barely a month old.

He's using a right wing crowdfunding site for campaign donations, so you can see that he hasn't cracked two hundred dollars yet.

The only photo of his launch party is so tightly cropped that you can only see the candidate himself standing in an empty field in a public park.

I don't think there's a lot of grassroots excitement for Tyler Diykes in South Carolina's first district.

But if he does keep making the rounds, and if he ever ends up in front of a real reporter, I hope they'll ask him why doesn't he just produce those exhibits.

The videos he's claiming are being kept from him under seal aren't.

And if he so against any exhibits being held back from the court of public opinion, he could go ahead and release the one he actually has in his own possession, the only one that is sealed.

He has his own discharge records show him to us.

I'm dying to know how many of those Nazi rallies the Marine Corps knew about before they finally kicked him out.

If you're interested in hearing more about this particular weird little Guy, there are two episodes available right now over on the Weird Little Guy's feed.

Let's say Cool Zone Media show you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts.

If you're in the Charleston area, or more importantly, if your conservative boomer parents are, it can't hurt to let folks know that one of your local candidates isn't being entirely forthcoming about why people are calling him a Nazi and wherever your conservative parents live.

Maybe this is a useful example of the kind of thing you might find when you start at least scratching the surface of these America First candidates.

All right, everybody, this is an emergency episode of it could happen here.

We're dropping everything else for the most important breaking news in the country.

Andy Dick has overdosed in public in the city of Los Angeles.

Thankfully, in preparation for this, we've had our entire team deployed to the areas around Andy Dick's home.

James, do you have any updates on the situation.

No, I'm not sure who Andy Dick is.

It's just like a public figure in a bout.

I couldn't planned this out better.

Andy Dick is America's sweetheart and he's going through some troubled times.

But it's okay.

They narcandem in public.

No, it's Andy Dick's fault.

This is entirely on Andy Dick.

Ye on the person who had not Kerry Narkan.

Yeah.

No, one should never feel sorry for Andy Dick.

I feel bad for the narcan.

This is it could happen here.

Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and Andy Dick.

I'm Garrison Davis.

This episode, I'm joined by do.

We've refer to someone the first time we only used the last name Garrison.

Yeah, I'm joined by being James Shout, Robert Evans, and Sophy Lechter.

We are covering the week of December fourth, December tenth.

So one of the big stories of the last week or so is something that would seem would be unequivocally a bad thing in any other political climate, which is Netflix buying Warner Brothers and contributing to the shrinking ever further of like America's like the number of people who actually own all of the media that Americans consume.

Yeah, monopolization is obviously bad.

But in this case, I mean it's it's it's bad that on that end, it's probably better that Netflix buy it than Paramount.

Yes, so I guess I'm like, well, okay, it's gonna be work creditor.

Versus alien situation.

It's a really a weird situation, right, because a lot of people are really dooming about you know, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers and what that'll mean for like, you know, art and the you know, theatrical model of film distribution, and then not realizing that Paramount's counterbid based on Saudi money.

Yeah, would place Warner Brothers in the control of one of the most Trump aligned like media enterprises in the United States, right now, Yeah.

Yeah, So let's let's let's roll back a second and look at what is actually going on here.

And it's actually very important to note this is being recorded on Wednesdays, Zeber tenth.

This whole situation is changing extremely quickly.

There could be some another unhinged thing could have happened by the time you're listening to this.

But the basics here is that Paramount which was recently acquired by sky Dance, Which is.

Which direction did that acquisition go?

I mean, technically speaking was a merger, but it was really but it was Skydance taking control of Paramount.

Skydance had been run by Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison.

David.

Yeah.

So and this is this is this is this is the regime that sort of imposed Barry Weiss on CBS, which has become increasingly right wing under her quote unquote leadership.

We're going to do a full episode about this, I think on Monday.

We're gonna be tuning into the Charlie Kirka Erica kirktown Hall on CBS this Saturday.

Oh God, they can't make me.

I will have recorded this episode before they did this.

I'm going to be tuning in because it looks phenomenal, so it's worth putting out.

So Larry Ellison, who is the father of David Ellison, is one of the most terrifying of all of the right wing billionaires.

Yeah, he's kind of more quiet than someone like Andresen or Elon Musk about being a unhinged right wing fanatic.

But he's one of Trust's biggest supporters.

He has a whole thing about how everyone's inevitably going to be under total cont surveillalists that will make everyone behave Well, we'll cover this more later, but the Ellison's the father son Ellison duo and paramounts backed by the Saudis, Abu Dhabi and Catter.

They want Bugs Bunny desperately because he keeps My sources are saying he keeps pranking Mohammed Ben Salmon.

By cross dressing.

Yeah, and it's really.

Yeah, the entire Saudi military is incapable of stopping bugs Bunny, I mean, bet for taking him down.

Well, I think what's what's an interesting fact in these various bids for control of Warner Brothers.

The Netflix deal does not include CNN.

The Paramount deal does.

Yeah, before we get intoff, should we should say what Paramount is doing now, which is Paramounts on Monday began to try to just do a hostile takeover by just straight up buying out the shares at what they're claiming is the higher share price.

There's a whole lot of complicated stuff yeah about share pricing here that you don't really care about.

And there have been so many dishonest headlines, like one being like Paramount lost the bid by just eventy five cents and seventy five cents to share.

That's like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gags, And that's not even it's it's all, it's all ridiculous.

Yeah, the Wall Street Journal has been getting a lot of the information about this.

We've gotten to a point on Wednesday where investors are going to the Wall Street Journal and being like, there's gonna be a bidding war.

There's gonna be a bidding war.

But the Wall Street Journal points out, and I think this is an interesting thing here that's important to say, these hostile takeover attempts almost never work.

It's like thirty percent of the time.

Yeah, and it's like sub thirty percent that these that these things kind of work.

But the other card that the father's son Ellison duo have is claiming that Trump is more likely to back Paramount's buyout than the Netflix one because Trump can sort of stop this through anti trust yeah, or quote unquote anti trust stuff.

Per Axios, Jared Kushner's consultancy firm is part of Paramount's buyout plan, and per Wall Street Journal, David Ellison met with TRUP with Trump administration officials in quote recent days, yeah, and has offered to you know this this comes back to what Garrison was saying about CNN being part about the part of this package they have been offering to effectively do to CNA what they did to CBS, which is put it under the control of the right wing fanatic and turn it into a propaganda pure propaganda outlet.

This is you know, obviously corruption of a sort of mind blowing yeah, yeah, and a broad to the fact that like our quote unquote free press is literally just for sale.

Amazingly, this is not this doesn't seem to be working.

No, I mean, and Trump has spoken positively about Netflix and the Netflix CEO the past two days.

But he's also speaking negatively about both of them.

Yeah, both the Netflix's negatively about Ellison recently.

And there's a there's a quote from an article I found uh in the Wall Street Journal.

Trump is so far avoided publicly backing a bitterer.

None of them are particularly great friends of mine, he said at a White House round table on Monday.

A person close to Trump said the President will want Paramount and Netflix to compete for his approval of a deal, which does sound very Trump.

Yeah, and apparently the specific think he's mad at Paramount about is for having mergery Taylor Creen on CBSS.

Yeah funny.

Oh, he's so really funny.

There is no amount of sort of ass kissing that you can do to actually make Trump consistently be on your side.

It's really hideous.

This is all disgusting.

Unless unless you give him the FIFO World Peace Prize trophy.

Yeah, he'll die for FIFA now.

Yeah, can I just say fuck me?

He's actually renaming American football to soccer.

God.

I love the FIFA trophy because it looks disgusting trophy.

Yes, I have fifteen minutes on that.

It's just all all those hands grasping that ball.

Ohh my god.

Yeah.

Really genuinely one of the one of the most impressive actors sports sick fantasy since nineteen thirty three.

But but yeah, it doesn't seem like Trump is as keen to back Paramount's bit as what some of the Paramount people thought he might be.

The Netflix deal might just end up actually going through.

Yeah, yeah, and we'll see about this.

This is all gonna change probably by the time you're reading this or listening to this.

That's that's the one that you do.

But it's so cool that we live in an economy where your two options are Netflix destroys Film Forever and the Nazis gained control of CNN.

It's great, great system.

Yeah, no, no, no, no.

Notes, And what what would really be damaging if if Paramount's able to buy Warner Brothers is that then they would be in charge of Nathan Fielder's rehearsal, which which does which does target the fascistic Paramount regime.

Yeah, James, what's some what's some small news stories we can uh, we can go with here before our first break.

Yeah, okay, I'm operating on a couple of computers here, so this is gonna I'm gonna have to work around some constraints.

Fam good thing you're wearing your five eleven uniform to help maintain the discipline necessary.

Girls.

And this is not five eleven, my friend, this is five dot one dot one.

Yeah, you can all get this ship outside of Syria and Iraq, and I fucking love it.

Yeah yeah.

I still have my knockoff Timberland shirt which just says fixing gand and looks honestly, the label looks like an AI slop tried to put the Timberland logo.

It's amazing.

My favorite is the one that just says sixteen five plus eleven.

I love fake five eleven.

Shit.

If you have fake five eleven ship, I have a collection of it.

Send it to me.

I will retire and make a museum one day.

I cannot get enough of it.

I love that it started as a rock climbing brand in New Smite and now it is a lifestyle brand in Syria.

It's perfect.

I tell you, I missed my Adodus tracksuit that I got.

A I got some I got some merle boots as well.

Yeah I love that ship.

I got a fake Gerban knife graber that that yeah.

Yeah, bullshit knives.

Yeah, one of my.

Face putting out women's hats very soon.

Yeah yeah.

Okay, let's talk about the news.

So this is a fun one.

Schroding does permit, We're going to call it.

In Pensacola, somebody participating in Food not Bombs was arrested Following that, at a press conference, the city announced that a person was arrested for being in a park too late, right, I guess in Florida, of course, yeah, this is this is the most serious crime, yes, and also giving food to poor people, which is probably like a felony in Florida.

So the city then announced issue have been resolved because there had been there was a permit issued to Food not Bombs for them to.

Be in the park late and give people food.

Food not Bombs did not apply for the permit, nor do they want the permit, right, there's no kind of That's not how Food on Bombs works.

Food not Bombs is an is an action, not an entity, right like it is a protest action.

The city is now reviewing if the permit is releasable under public records law, so someone can find out who attempted to white Knight food not bombs.

Yeah.

Some of the suggestions is as a guy who runs some kind of we will cooperate with the cops to get people off fentanyl charity, which uses some incredible AI imagery on its Instagram page.

Yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah, so I will keep you updated on this, this Florida story.

Yeah, thanks for that.

James.

In the Oregon versus Trump case regarding National Guard deployment, Judge J.

Biby, not normally a guy associated with WOKE, a George W.

Bush appointee, has penned an extensive opinion I think of sixty four pages on the domestic violence Clause at the Constitution and how it ought to restrain the use of the Guard.

So it's like a different argument than we've seen previously, right in discussions about the National Guards, because.

Yeah, I've read the other judge opinion pieces, but not this one.

Yeah.

So Biby's been been in it for a while, and ye, like he's been someone who has previously not really been in a post of what I might see as of overreach in terms of state power and violence.

But yeah, using this.

This is a different close at a constitution, right, So it's now moving along in that discussion.

Yesterday as we're recording this, so that would be on Tuesday.

At the ninth the Democrats held they buy cameral shadow quote unquote shadow hearing on the detention of US citizens by DHS that doesn't really have the power to do much.

And I have not had time to listen to the entire recording because it was only streamed on Facebook.

I love that we have an opposition in this country.

God, I love the Democrats.

Yeah, they're really I like how together they've got it, like after a rough patch, they're really firing out.

Yeah, like a phoenix from the ashes of an absolute ass for being in the election.

Yeah, yeah, like an ass phoenix exactly.

Yeah, ass phoenix.

That's that's my band.

Actually, I can't believe that you plugged us on there.

Thank you.

Okay.

Trump's ongoing barrage of hate about Somali people has been met with some incredible posting.

People who are not on x dot com will have miss this, but like genuinely some of the funniest response to some of the most hateful shit.

Like Trump and Miller have both been on a and I guess Fox News.

Fox News went to Minneapolis and heard a call to prayer and had a meltdown about it.

But this is this campaign, I guess by Trump and Miller is very much ongoing.

We spoke about that last week with a TPS and people an't familiar.

They can check that out last week.

Yeah, Aileen Higgins won the Miami mayoral election.

Do I want to make a pit bull joke?

The dog you're talking about, mister worldwide?

Well, we could do.

Margat is a major issue.

I'm just trying to work on that acronym.

Oh God, because I'm always thinking about mister worldwide James's He's never a far from my thoughts.

No, I often think about Pitbull and how he and Hillary Clinton often were exactly the same thing.

That's right, they have a lot in common.

Actually, the primary thing is.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know, yes, but this is the first time a Democrat has won the mayoral office in Miami in almost thirty years, which is and it is wild significant.

This is astonishing.

Yeah.

Yeah, this was like a pretty decent win.

This was a runoff election, but it's still a pretty pretty substantial win.

Yeah, And I think there's there's There's a few important notes here.

One is that even the Miami Cuba demographics swung massively towards the Democrats, which is sort of apocalyptic news for the Republicans, really really bad.

If you're losing the Miami Cuban population.

If you have got Miami Cubans to think critically about politics, things are dire.

Yeah.

And and the other thing here too is that the Florida Democratic Party, like I would compare them to clowns, but like these these motherfuckers make Bobo the Clown look like fucking Napoleon.

These are the most some of the most incompetent people the entire history of politics, and the Republicans are losing to them.

That's astonished.

There were a couple of other results like this, Yeah, this week, Democrats flipped a Georgia State House seat.

The seat moved blue by twenty two points.

Geez yep.

They flipped Albuquerque City council.

There's all of these little results, and this has been happening basically since we got the first special elections of the Trump administration, where the Republicans are losing like ar plus twenty two districts.

They're getting destroyed in places that it shouldn't be possible for them to lose.

And this is another major confirmation of the media everyone hates them theory.

Every day it gets more and more validated.

Everyone can hate them.

Yeah, last a small news story that I think is worth mentioning because it's a I think pretty important.

Actually, conservative podcaster Benny Johnson is threatening to sue Milo Iianopolis for alleging that he is gay.

So we're gonna be keeping up with this story pretty close.

I know this has a lot of ramifications for listeners.

Yeah, great, cool, we should do ads.

We're back and we're talking about the January sixth pipe bomb guy suspect.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, we know there's a person.

We don't know that it was a guy.

We know someone planted those pipe bombs.

I'm going to talk about the suspect.

Ye.

I want to start just for a little bit by again talking about the degree to which I really hope this is apocalyptic for the Blaze.

Yeah, what they did is a case study and what you should never do as a publication.

It was unethical, it was idiotic, and it was deeply dangerous.

And if the Capitol police officer does not sue them.

I don't know what kind of advice she's getting other than maybe just sheer terror at the number of death threats she's already received.

But like ma'am, getting all of Glennbeck's money is the only thing that will keep you safe right now.

Please do it now.

Yeah, So you were out last week when we got some the very first reporting on the pipe bomb arrest.

Yeah, I know, is the only thing I regret about my vacation.

Yeah, but very little information was out last week, and we have more information now regarding the alleged January sixth pipe bomber, or technically January fifth pipe bomber, who is now charged with transporting an explosive device with attempt to kill, injure or damaged property, and attempted malicious destruction by means of fire and explosive materials.

According to court records, the FBI identified the suspect through cell tower records, license plate readers, and purchases of potential bomb making materials, including the pipes, the cap ends, the wires, steel, and nine volt batteries.

It doesn't appear that they gained possession of new information, but by changing the agents looking at the information they were able to piece piece this together to actually make inaction on it, leading to the arrest.

So it's a classic FBI story of they had all the information they needed to have caught this guy very long ago and did not yeah.

Right, or lack the ability to like put the piece together in a way that makes them able to do arrest.

But as is always the case, this was not an issue if they didn't have enough access to information.

There was too much encryptied there, you know, they need more power.

No, they had everything they needed.

They just didn't think right, That's what it was.

They weren't thinking right, you know.

Still, very little has come out officially about the alleged bomber's potential motivation.

Who may be innocent, let's be clear, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's nothing alluding to his motivation in the charging documents besides just an interest, a year's long interest in bombmaking, starting in twenty nineteen and continuing into like twenty twenty one.

Now, NBC has reported based on sources inside the law enforcement investigation team, but Embassy's reported that before for the suspect acquired an attorney, he confessed to investigators and told the FBI that he believed in twenty twenty election conspiracy theories.

But some new information from the New York Post, which I have verified, may have actually cracked this story wide open.

They have learned that the suspect is a Brony.

My Little Pony fan draws a lot of actually relatively good quality My Little Pony fan art and writes fins my Little Pony fan fiction.

I could read some here.

Garrison, what is the quality of their fan fiction?

Yeah's just just give us like fifteen minutes.

I'll read a paragraph.

Quote Apple Bloom's eyes.

It snapped open and she sat up in her bed, hinting heavily and sweat dripping from her red mane.

It was another bad dream about that village she had discovered back in the ever Free Forest sunny Town.

At first, it seemed like a normal, peaceful little village, kind of like Ponyville.

What was strange was that none of the inhabitants had qut marks.

In fact, they hadn't the slightest clue as to what a qutie mark was.

So could you send me that link?

Yeah?

Thank you.

H I'll actually I'll send this to the entire team chat.

I'm demanding Hazard pay at the next union negotiations hazard pay.

Actually like this is very standard but relatively good quality.

My Little Pony broni activity non sexual entirely Like.

I've looked at a lot of this guy's art.

It's fairly clear, pros, fairly high quality.

My Little Pony fan are in a variety of styles from different eras oft the show not like a sexually fetishistic depiction.

Can't wait to see the headlines from this.

Yeah, cool Zone host defends Capital bipe bombers pros.

But no like.

A high school classmate told Washington Post that he was bullied for having My Little Pony backpack in school.

Yeah, that makes sense.

He's had this interest for quite a while, kind of kind of tapered off a few years before before the bombing, But for a while this was like kind of one of his main hobbies.

On a Tumblr profile, he lists his interest as quote hardcore music, video games, mainly horror drawing, improving myself philosophically, and anime.

Unquote.

Well, his grandmother has described him as quote almost autistic, like because he doesn't understand a lot of stuff.

Unquote.

He's only ever worked for the family bail bond business.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, I'll say this, he wasn't bad, Like he could have had a future in a private security or something like that, like not bad ops as it turned out.

Yeah, but I don't know.

A funny slash a dark thing is that in the right wace just desperate effort to make everything about trans people.

They have turned this Brony thing into like a you know the trans people also like my little pony and like Bronie and like like quotes from like psychologists in some of these articles about how how how Bronie is like play with like gender boundaries by by being fans of like a girl's, like a propery that's usually enjoyed by girls.

So this was like a slight attempt to try to kind of paint this and like in like a pseudo translate, but that's not getting much traction because like people know what Bronie's are, and like, come on, I think this, this whole strategy is is on the out in some ways.

Yeah, am I am I incorrect here because I had just caught this, but I didn't.

Actually this is like while I was on vacation, I had heard that he expressed a belief that the twenty twenty election was stolen from Trump.

Yeah, that's see.

Do we know if that's accurate?

Okay, Okay, so he does seem that's been.

Reported by the NBC that that he told investigators that he believed in like twenty twenty election conspiracy theories.

Okay, the ones that were spread by Trump.

So, I mean it seems like, from what we have, one of the more predictable ones.

And like it's not if this is like a weird right wing you know, Bronie.

This is not the first time right wing Bronie has done something violent.

He doesn't seem super politic in my opinion, like none of his owne activity points towards a deep interest in politics.

No, but if he said he thought the election was stolen, then that makes sense as being a contributing fact.

Yeah, a factor perhaps, but not a huge like online presence that revolves around politics.

Like a lot of people who aren't super into politics maybe thought the election was like stolen or like rigged.

I mean, as we try to point out periodically, the vast majority of people who will carry out a shooting or other act of mass public violence in the US are going to have more in common with other people who do that than anyone specifically, just in political terms for the most part, because most of them are you know, there's their shooter stands there, they're they're that sort of thing, like this is their special interest bombings or whatever.

He does seem to have, Like it's a lot of special interests, right.

It used to be my little ponies, then it became bomb making that just seemed to be a special interest of his for like three or four years.

Was just like the practice of bomb making.

This is just just something he got like into, And I think that's more of a motivating force and like a specific partisan political motivation.

And I think it's really funny, like reflecting on a statement that that that law enforcement leaked last week saying that he had like anarchist like leanings, which is very very amusing now in light of in light of all of that, for a long.

Time, they have used anarchism to mean like a predilection for violence or chaos.

Doesn't less like the government, right, Like yeah, yeah, part of this is just the way people tend to use the term anarchism.

When I was doing my research for like the nuclear Doomstate device episodes, there's a bunch of otherwise great pieces that are like and then in the in the wake of a global nuclear war, society will collapse and all that will be left is anarchy.

It's like, guys, like, it's not anarchy.

That's that's going to be the problem that like, like you realize that the cause of a nuclear war is like, yeah, all of this, Yeah, it's it is not an anarchy as opposed to nuclear war.

I'm worried about, for example, Yeah, yeah, then yeah, I'm worried about like democracy, fucking authoritarianism.

I'm worried about all of those things.

Anarchists would never have built the nuclear doom sdat of fights.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's why I used left libertarian sometimes in my academic writing, because it was just the term.

It's just not comprehensible, especially someone coming having been raised on US media.

And in the wake of a global nuclear war, you'll be lucky to get some anarchy because it probably means someone's found some food and it's cooking it for you.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.

Food no bombs on like food off.

They've rebranded, but that's still going food common.

Yeah, bomb is actually done with bombs.

We did it.

Yeah.

Food One other update.

I'll squeeze in here quick.

It's short.

Yeah.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas can use its newly on congressional map in the upcoming twenty twenty six midterms, likely adding five Republican seats.

The lower court order, which.

Found the new map was racially jerry mannered intentionally, has been stayed indefinitely as the Supreme Court prepares to consider whether to overturn the lower court's ruling entirely, a process which could take months go well into the midterm cycle.

So the Supreme Court is authorized the use of that new map for this next election.

Talking of fan fiction and covers of things, here is a song that was originally the worst song by the Clash and now it's about tariffs.

Jazz right jazz Bo Sorry, Locking jazz Bomb, Locking jazz Bob.

I think the cover is of a similar quality as the alleged Bombers fan art in my opinion, Dear God, there's a lot of good twilight sparkle stuff that he was draw in.

Come sorry, So all right.

China is technically once again buying American soybeans.

Is part of the sort of giant trade deal that Chi Jinping and Trump negotiated, but come it is not buying soybeans at the rate that the White House said it would in the fact sheet that was released by the White House about the negotiations.

This is a huge problem because farmers are still not being able to sell enough soybeans to not get completely fucked, and the White House is now putting out a bunch of statements saying, oh no, we actually screwed up the fact sheet.

They said that they would buy the soybeans not before the end of the year, before they at the end of like the growing season.

That's good, that's good.

Yeah.

So and his other solution to this has been a twelve billion dollar farmer bail which is funny because he did a twelve billion dollar farm bailout in his first term when exactly the same thing happened and it didn't really do anything.

Well, at least we're not bailing out let's say Argentina.

Funny example, Garston, what makes you choose that one?

Oh god?

Yeah.

So.

The issue with this farmer's bailout is, and this is something that farmers have been saying through all of the trade press, any regular press.

They can get access to, every local media outlet.

Every single farmer who anyone has interviewed has gone, we don't want to bail out.

We want to be able to sell our blasted soybeans, and they still can't.

And this is, you know, a becoming a real problem for this administration that even after their giant negotiations to get tried out of by soybeans, they still can't do it.

And farmers are continuing to be very very pissed off about this.

Where are my beans?

Yeah, they're sitting in the silos, They're still there.

They can't sell them.

How am I going to keep up my soy consumption and going to be for us to become a known the vegan Ocean era some other kind of boy, I guess.

Yeah, Well, we'll just have to get it from Brazil.

Ands that Brazil mentioned.

Everyone cheer, Hey, they're doing good these days.

Oh yeah, hasn't there been some Bolsonnaro news recently?

I feel like.

There has been.

Let's roll to ads and then we'll talk about it.

Okay, this has been ur talk.

We're back, and you know who's not free to listen to podcasts?

Hear Bolsonnaro.

We can hope after trying to cut off his ankle monitor.

He has been taken into custody for attempting or probably trying to escape.

Trump had made comments about it, expecting to see him soon.

Yeah, I don't think.

I think he's going to die in prison.

He's not doing well.

I will say one thing we got to do.

You know, back when he got stabbed, I think everyone's opinion on it was like, oh, fuck, you've just you know, you've made him a martyr.

You got to look cool and seem like a bad ass.

This has done nothing but empower him.

Yeah, no, it cares.

No.

Actually that stab did a lot of damage, Like that ruined his life, low key.

Ye.

So thoughts and prayers to that guy wherever he is.

You know, we just didn't realize the level of game that you had, my man.

No, I mean it's it's it's tough.

I mean we used to have the two like of the world sickest men, Bolsonaro and Stephen Crowder just fighting it out to see who would stay sicker for a long But.

Jordan Peterson that seems like erasia.

Yeah, he's taking the spot because he's still vanished from the Daily Wire because of his like.

Bizarre His daughter says he's basically dead.

Yeah, he's like patient zero for CWD and humans or something.

Right, Like the Daily Wire still is acting like Peterson's is like still a person.

Yeah, it turns out Cold Turkey quitting Benzos via a fucking coma in Russia is a bad call.

Speaking of Crowder, I did watch the two hours Stephen Crowder Nick Fuente's interview this week.

Oh god, and it was really uncomfortable.

Yeah, I'll bet I can imagine.

They were just like jerking each other off for two hours.

Nick was trying to be nice and like not act like Steven's this like like totally irrelevant like boomer, and Stephen was trying to make Nick think he was cool, and it was so painful to watch.

The entire time.

Sat Yeah, it was.

It was bad.

There was nothing else notable from that.

I guess let's actually move to some notable notable stories to close this episode.

Yeah, so I want to talk about the case of Faustino Pablo Pablo.

A US District court in El Paso, Texas has grown too Mister Pablo Pablo a tentative restraining order directing the government to return him to the United States by the twelfth of this month, which will be the day that you were.

Hearing this episode.

Mister Pablo Pablo enter the USA in twenty.

Twelve and was found removal by However, that judge granted his application for withholding of removal under the Convention against Torture because he would likely be tortured if he was returned to Guatemala, which is where he's from.

In theory, he was removable therefore to a place where he would not likely be tortured.

Right, this is what we've seen the US government doing more and more in the last year.

Really, he spent more than a decade.

He moved to California, attended his ICE check ins until he was detained at an ICE check in on the fifth of November.

Mister Pablo Pablo's lawyer filed a habeas petition and asked the court to enjoin ICE from removing him from the Western District of Texas, which is where they took him on the seventeenth of November.

Right, so he was detained on the fifth.

People who listened to my immigration series a couple of weeks ago will be familiar with this.

Right, people were detained in La ferried all around California and then sent to Texas.

This is what happened in his case.

He wouldn't have been sent to the same place for people of my serious work, because that's for family detention.

By the time the court ordered the government not to remove him, they had already sent him back to Guatemala, just to cover There is one country in the world that he has with holding of removal to because he will be tortured there most likely, and that is where they sent him.

The government conceded that they had made a mistake and said they quote tentatively scheduled a flight for the fourth of December.

He did not take that flight.

As far as we know, he is dolling Gatemalae.

He's in hiding and the court has ordered that the government facilitate his return by the twelfth of this month, so we'll probably update you on that in next week's ed.

I'm going to talk about an expansion of social media monitoring, which we've already seen for visa applicants, but now expanding out to tourists as well.

Customs of Border Protection and DHS have posted a sixty day notice for a proposal to revise the electronics system for travel Authorization Application, which is a waiver that some foreign tourists can use to avoid getting a tourist visa.

The proposal is to add mandatory social media collection for all foreign tourists using the ESTA visa waiver.

This proposal would require that applicants provide the social media information from the past five years, citing a January Executive order quote protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats unquote.

This would match the sort of social media monitoring we've seen applied to some visa applicants and immigrants, just now extending out to tourists using the ESTA application, and to comply with this January Executive order.

CBP is also planning to add quote several high value data fields to the ESTA application when feasible unquote.

This would include quote telephone numbers used in the last five years, email address is used in the last ten year, IP addresses, and metadata from electronically submitted photos.

Family member names, parents, spouse, siblings, children, family telephone numbers used in the last five years, family member dates of birth, family member places of birth, family member residences, biometric face, fingerprint, DNA and IRIS, business telephone numbers used in the last five years and business email addresses used in the last ten years unquote.

Yeah, this is a wild amount of data.

I mean they can flash some of this like really quickly again against like quote unquote watch lists, right, Yeah, but some of this A like to gather this data to gather biometric data, that's not possible with like you say, you're applying on your cell phone or your your home computer, right, so this might require an appointment.

Yeah, for some of the fingerprint stuff.

Part of the proposal is also requiring selfie be submitted with this application, separate from what iver is on the ID that is being used, and so they can extract some like facial biometrics from that.

Yeah, but they can also they can also collect that stuff like at the airport reports of entry.

They have fingerprint scanners now at a lot of these like entry kiosks.

Yeah.

Yeah, the selfie isn't just a selfie, it's what's called a facial liveness scan, which is what we've spoken about before with CBP one right that like notoriously was very poor at capturing black faces.

Generally, you sort of have to like move the phone around your face to check that It's like, it's not me holding up a life sized copy of Garrison, it's actually Garrison.

A three D Garrison.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, the Garrison mannequin that we all got for Christmas last year.

Can you can excuse that one to me?

Sorry, it's not legal in New York.

Yeah, this will make it a lot harder for people to apply forest divisas.

It's going to create a massive, like dragnet of data for people applying forest visas.

Yes, seeing that kind of is the goal already, right, So, like if you live in these countries, you don't always qualify for an esther.

There are certain things you could have done, certain countries you could have been to, certain like if you have a criminal record, et cetera, where there you wouldn't be able to get an esther.

So this is kind of already a something of a like a pre vetted group and countries who from which systems can apply for esters?

Is that in itself?

It's like a tea, right, Not everyone in the world can apply for an esther.

Yeah, it's already a semi exclusive waiver with like a cost burden as well.

Yes, yeah, yeah, it creates a massive data data mind which I'm guessing might be what they what they're going for.

Yeah, I mean, just the normalization of this sort of like social media scetting to identify, you know, undesirable political beliefs that Mark Rubio in the Department in the Department of State or DHS seems is like a national security threat.

Yeah.

Yeah, I also have kind of my fringe fears that this will be used to train but yeah, we'll say, yeah, how is this not going to be catastrophic for any business that relies on tourism, any state that relies on tourism, Like.

Like yeah, Florida.

Yeah, I know that's not the top risk, but like it just seems again they're they're they're going out of their way to fuck over every single demographic in the country, which I don't think is going to work out.

For them in the long term.

Yeah, it's a uh, this is yeah, this is a weird one for me because it's the Yeah, the economic cost is so obvious.

It's a it's a catastrophe, And there's a part of me that's like, maybe this is a good thing, just because it's part of like, right, we've always known and have been trying to say for years every single aspect, like they these people are bad for everybody.

There's like one hundred and fifty people in the country who benefit from the policies that like the most extreme parts of the right wants to push, and everyone else is going to be completely fucked over by it, and we might as well just take the mask off.

And maybe that's some of what we're seeing in the collapse of Trump's approval is people realizing, like, oh my god, these guys really just want to destroy everything good about life like that.

That is conservatism in a nutshell.

We hate life and ourselves.

Yeah yeah, well yeah, that's that was the Democratic Party in that symptoms garrison.

But we want what's worse for everybody there that's yes, yeah, you got it.

Yeah yeah, talking of worse for everybody.

Do we want to talk about the National Security Strategy document that the Trump administration releases.

Go for it.

Yeah, we should do a dedicated episode about that, but we could talk briefly about it.

We have fifteen minutes.

That's not you saw fifteen Yeah.

I've pulled a lot of quotations from it, and we're not gonna be able to discus sort of the mare.

I think we will have to discuss this probably next year when we do the whole episode on it.

It is one of the more like especially in terms of like foreign relations, one of the more like sort.

This is our ideology, this is our outlook, and these are our goals documents that I've seen from this administration.

Right, they talk about how I'll just quote from it here.

American strategy since the end of the Cold War have fallen short.

They have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states, and have not clearly defined what we want, instead stated vague platitudes and have often misjudged what we should want.

They talk about how they are going to retain soft power.

Soft power people now familiar is a theory that Joseph Nye had an international relations It's a power to compel or persuade rather than to force.

Right, the United States has been hemorrhaging soft power like someone with their artery cut, like in the last twelve months, like seft power is a fraction of what it was a year ago.

I find it very odd to see them even mentioning that, to be honest, when like I mean, they have soft power of your victor orban talking of orban there's this incredible stuff about Europe.

Here quote we want to support our allies in preserving the freelom and security of Europe while restoring Europe's civilizational self confidence and Western identity ha riste.

Another quote that's good, this is wild.

The larger issues facing Europe include the activities of the European Union, other transnational bodies undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, creatoring birth rates, and the loss of national identities and self confidence.

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in twenty years or less, and then a missing skipping of it here.

We want Europe to remain European.

This just sounds like your average like white nationalists like Twitter posts.

Yeah no, yes, it comes from Twitter, right, this is just the Twitter.

Replies, like very twitter brained like types of politics.

Yeah yeah, this guy has like a Greek statue avatar exactly.

I think it's really fun to think of Europe being like, I'm Europe.

I have a lot of self confidence issues.

I can't really speak up for myself in in in big groups like the European Union, Like come on, what do you mean self confidence to grow up?

Yeah, it's wild.

They're like, you know, they're they're saying that, like what European people don't have enough, like like what European pride?

People don't respect my Western identity Like okay, yeah.

Notably, like for instance, the country of France, a country which lacks self confidence and pride in this identity.

This is this has been an issue for a long time.

It's it's very funny to have this in like a this is like a US foreign policy or national security documentary.

Yeah, this is like these are the guiding principles of our foreign policy going forward.

And they're like jerking off about like Europe remaining European.

Yeah yeah, it's just like shit talking an entire continent.

No, America should think Europe is gay and we should stay away from it.

That's what our national security party should be is Europe is gay.

We don't want to deal with whatever Europe is doing.

We're America.

Yeah, leave us alone.

Yeah that ended really well for us in the theory.

Yeah.

Well, there's almost like a like a like an early twentieth century vibe to this document.

They talk about the Monroe doctrine, Yeah, they do, and they talk about the Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine, which they define as quote, we will deny non hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets in our hemisphere.

Which the people aren't familiar with the Monroe doctrine.

It's the US sort of has a right and obligation to exercise some control over the outcome to the entire Western hemisphere, like say Venezuela.

Yes, that would be one example, Keraton.

Yeah, see, it's totally different from Iraq because this is on our ham So it's good intervention actually mm hmm.

Yeah.

Manifest destiny has given us the right to all of the Americas, and so we can we can intervene in outcomes there.

There's a lot about the nation state in here, and like the idea that they quote unquote nation state should prioritize its own interests.

I wonder what they're talking about there, because like we have many nations that are exclude different states all around the world, right, like the Kurds being one example, Right, like they are they saying that nations and states should always align, whilst like their special envoyage Syria is saying that he said this week the decentralization has never succeeded in the Middle East, which is a wild statement to be saying in a place where like you can drive in a single day to the sites of three different genocides from northeastern Syria, right, you can see how the place where the Armenian genocide happened, the u CD genocide, and the Anphal Like you can do that driving a day if you don't get hung up at the border.

Yeah, I mean, honestly before now if we're counting some of what was done against the White Yeah, yeah, that's a little unclear at the moment, but yeah, sure yeah.

Like to say that centralization is the only way from the Middle East is a wild statement.

So I don't know how some of this pans out.

There's also a lot here on border security as national security, right, sure, I'm just going to read one.

They use the word nation a lot.

Nationalism was a sub field of by PhD.

So obviously, like I'm interested in the exact understanding of nation they have here because there are several, but throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration a grated citizenship only rarely to foreigners who also had to meet demanding criteria.

The West experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom in country throughout the world, mass migration as strained domestic resources, increased violence out of the crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security.

The era of mass migration must end.

Border security is the primary element of national security.

Great, this is the only terrain they have left because they've abandoned class interests and like exploitation.

So the only thing they can actually focus this on, and they focus focus the economy on, is through nationalist immigration policies.

This is like the last refuge for the right once they're still trying to appeal to some sort of populism but don't actually want to address real class conditions.

Yeah, and for a lot of the right, when they talk about nationalism, they are talking about ethno nationalism, right.

The people, you know, the people are the nation, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, the vulk like which is not always the bloods nationalism.

It's one type of nationalism.

It's not all types of nationalism, right, Like.

That's the cool thing about the United States, And this is the one country, one of the only countries where this that principle has been like opposed in variy degrees since the country is founding.

Yeah, like it's supposed to be the example maybe along with France, right of like subscriptive now where nationalism was not an ethnic quality, it was subscribing to a set of values and belief philosophical idea.

Yeah, that does not seem to be the vibe I'm picking up.

There's a lot more in this document.

They spend a decent part of its ship talking other document, other previous national security strategies.

Yea, these are always good for both.

But we're going to keep it brief and then off they go.

But yeah, I think it's it's worth us maybe doing the whole episode on because I think it's one of the more like coherent statements of believery.

Not not a lot of this stuff is new.

We knew that's how they thought about immigration.

Yeah, you hear them talk about it on Fox on News Max.

Like any Stephen Miller like public statement is you know, it's going to talk about talk about how immigration is changing, you know, the economic makeup of the country, and like the core identity of the country is changing wei to defend Western identity, that sort of stuff.

Yes, seeing it all written in document together, I think is where this has value totally.

And I think, yeah, seeing that all laid out, seeing that, you know, the way these things play into their view of the world.

And then as I following what's actually happening in the world, and like you know clearly that when they're talking, they're talking about.

The United States.

When they're talking about nations, right, they're not talking about the Kurds, They're not talking about your Zds, the Catalans, southern nations that don't have states.

Right.

It's just so funny because they lay out all these economic things, right, straining domestic resources, violence and crime, weakened social cohesion, and destroyed labor markets.

Right, they lay out all of these things which have direct like like economic cause hole drivers.

Yeah, and they're like, no, no, no, no, it's actually not about these economic factors.

It's just about immigration, like they're so it's so blatant.

Yeah, no, other ideology and history escape go to a certain group for the economic disaster in the country.

That's never happened before.

Yeah, it's just one for one.

If you go back to moish Postone's theory of like structural anti Semitism as the driver of the Holocaust, it's literally just this, right, except this is an even more blatant version of it.

Seem like the Nazis, even though did try to do some like populist economic policies as well.

Yeah yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, the Strength through Joy program.

Yeah, the modern American right doesn't even try to do that.

It's just the immigration.

They're not even doing like a weird like like right wing like socialized there.

There's all this I'll push back.

There's a little bit of like the talk with oh, we're gonna have a give every American thousand dollars that will be invested in that.

Like there's there they are like.

They talk about it, they don't do it.

They don't do it.

They talk about it.

Yes, sometimes, Yeah, he talked about a tariff check.

Right, Trump was going to give every every American check.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

The first time they date during COVID, Right, they threw some money around, but.

There was that like, yeah, one or two stimulus checks we got at the end of COVID.

Yeah, the end of a first you know, back of the pandemic cycle to be more accurate.

Yeah, yeah, Robert.

Was there one other thing you wanted to talk about?

We have time.

Yeah, this is basically related to the Warner Brothers acquisition.

For whatever reason, Reddit's algorithm will periodically give me little hints and bits of the war between Zack Snyder fans and the rest of the world.

Oh yeah, I know a lot about this.

I know a lot about this.

Yeah.

I'm not a big Zack Snyder fan, you know, but I don't care.

Like I didn't feel strongly anti or pro his his DC movies.

There are some crazy people out there who believe and they are like reading the tea leaves.

They think the Saudis are going to like kill his enemies.

They're going to restore the Snyder for Strobert.

Yeah, this is I've been following this just as like a personal interest for you nuts.

It's crazy.

They're fascinating people like they're fascinating you.

Unique people to study, like the.

Number of people who literally believe that it like it.

There should be people executed publicly for for not letting Zack Snyder finish his movies.

That didn't make money is.

Out because well because Netflix has parted with Snyder for years, when when if Netflix takes over, they're obviously going to restore the Snyder Verse.

James Gunn is going to be You're.

Going to restore the Snyder paramount, take over the saudis.

We can do it too.

So it's it's really for Snyder bros.

Things are looking up.

So put your money in Snyder coin right now.

Well, my favorite thing about that is that like as soon as they announced the deal, they were like and James Gunn is staying.

They talked a lot about him on the call because like his movies are a big part of what makes what are valuable right now?

Right, Like he's good at making money for the people that he works for.

And the level of conspiracy theories like no they have, it's like it's great have to hide Zack Snyder's back because they can't let people know yet, but he's already been told.

He's been doing this for like eight years.

It's so funny.

I had not realized how crazy they were.

Yeah, I love it.

It's really fun.

Anyway.

That that's I always enjoy encountering a new cult.

I think Zach is kind of taking advantage to them to get his insight follower account.

Yes, it's very funny because he's like posting stuff that's like they're reading.

Is like he's messaging that it's coming back, even when guys like Ben Affleckx like it was the worst.

I hated being Batman.

I would never do that again.

I don't want to be it's I I love it.

I just love seeing deranged people be it arranged about something that's actually harmless for once.

Yeah, we could get we could get a Snyder verse related shooting.

That's not impossible.

Snyder does encourage it a little bit.

But yeah, Snyder is not I think the villain of this story.

And no, he's clearly friends with Gun like they're they're no, no.

Yeah, yeah, and I uh.

Specifically, he has dropped his plans, which which he had for years, to do some mind randed adaptions, which I'm bummed about because I think Snyder's heron raand would be great and instead instead he's writing this like this like lesbian movie with someone with yeah, and so unfortunately we're trading iron rand for like this like lesbian cinema slop, which I'm I.

Am just lesbian I am really about because.

I think I think Zack Snyder's Iron Rand would be a much more fascinating piece of art.

No, No, I want to see Ben Shapiro get one hundred and fifty million.

That's what I've got.

Yeah.

No, they bought exclusive TV rights to one of the one of the books I for I forget if I forget if it was Funtain Head or Atlas Shrugged.

But since the Daily Wires like finances have collapsed, I do not think they're going forward with that right now.

Oh but but gare the pendragonsight it's coming out though.

I'm excited, right, we got.

To watch that together, but you gotta find it.

We gotta.

We gotta have the company pay for us to meet in the Airbnb in a state and and just just watch that, son of a bit.

If we want to this year to plan some kind of a cool zone convergence to to to watch uh, to watch the pen Dragon cycle together, I would I would hapily travel for that.

I think we're ethically obligated to do that.

Okay, final final closing note.

Trans housing insecurity continuing to increase.

But if you have an extra room, put a transperson in if you have a couch, put a transgirl on your couch.

This is going to be bea the message going forward.

Jesus Christ.

People put a trans girl on your couch.

You can figure out how to live together.

It will be fine.

People are going homeless and dying.

Please do this.

Wait, is there like data on like what's what's that?

Is this just as a result of like the continuing like people being forced out.

Of their jobs?

Yeah, this is this is this is this is all this is.

This is me finally talking about something I've been tracking for a very very long time, which is I mean I say a very long time.

But you know, even over about the past four or five years, has been massive transmigration into places like Portland, into places like Chicago, into places like New York.

They're getting how in New York there's a lot of a lot of transh housing in New York.

I think this.

Yeah, there's there's some regional aspects of this.

Don't come to San Diego.

We yeah, it make it makes sense that the cities that are safer having like a big influence and there's a lot of people, those are also cities that do not have great housings supply that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nearly balloon.

And there's been a lot of issues with it, and that's something that can be mitigated by just putting people on your couch.

I mean, yeah, that's as a short terms maybe I don't honestly the couch thing freaks me out.

As a long term solution.

Well, but I mean that's the thing though, it doesn't have to be a long term.

If people have connections to help other people get jobs.

Yeah, so they can like just like pay.

Pay a low amount of rent for like a room that's way more solid than like this like forever couch surfing thing that sometimes people like refer to as like quote unquote transhusing.

Yeah.

Okay, but again, but the the the idea here is that there and this is something that I have running too extensively, is there are a bunch of people who basically just need to get out and need like a couple of months or a month to get back on their feet and don't have the ability to do it and are going homeless because of that, and it's killing people and it fucking sucks.

Yeah, and that is something that can be mitigated with sort of cultural shifts towards sharing space more, and we're all gonna have to do it more because the economy's about to collapse even more so.

Great fun.

Yay, put a transcoll on your couch.

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