Executive Disorder: French Student Protests, Flavio Bolsonaro, ‘Third Country’ Deportations

0:08 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong. The whole gang, back together. This episode we are covering the week of September 30th to October 7th. James, I think you can take it away with your barrage of news.

0:34 All right.

0:34 So, yeah, we've got a lot of small things this week. Another person has died in ICE custody, making this the deadliest year on record, with 37 reported deaths so far. Of course, it's only October. Yeah, like we're entering the final quarter of the year, like this week. Julian Kuro Churata died in Louisiana after being transported from the Richwood Correctional Center. The Ritual Correctional Center has a long and dark history of neglect and even homicide. I've linked to an article about that in the show notes. This week, the president suggested in a rally that it would be acceptable for him to allow Iran to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.

1:14 A small price to pay.

1:15 Yeah, I remain neutral on the issue of Los Angeles, but we're not having that in San Diego. He's not so much remarkable. He always says crazy shit, right? His rallies, he just goes on a wild one. But like, What's remarkable, I think, is the response of the administration. It is itself a kind of interesting thing for a president to say.

1:31 It is a remarkable choice in the months before an election.

1:36 It's a little bit high.

1:37 It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay. The cheering is what's also very interesting.

1:56 I'm looking at the faces of the people immediately behind him.

1:59 They're turning to each other.

2:01 Yeah, they all look a little confused. I'm going to read a post from Rapid Response 47. It's one of the White House-associated Twitter accounts. The LA Times had said that the Trump had suggested it would be okay to take out Los Angeles or San Diego because that is a phrase that he said. Quote, no, he didn't, you buffoons.

2:18 He was saying the US is fighting to stop Iran from having the ability to take out LA and San Diego with a nuclear weapon, which they would if they had the chance. That's not true.

2:27 That's just not what Trump said. That's just very clearly. And this isn't taken out of context. He was saying that if Iran nuked, Los Angeles or San Diego, that would be a small price to pay for us to beat Iran, for us to then destroy Iran. That's what he's saying.

2:45 He was previously talking about gas prices. Yes, there's no other context.

2:50 He was saying it would be awesome if this liberal city was wiped off the face of the earth because it would let us do what we're going to do already.

2:57 We also have most of the Pacific fleet, a massive Marine Corps base, fucking nuclear submarines. It would be very inconvenient for the United States if we lost San Diego, but Yeah, there's this line in 1984, the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was a final, most essential command.

3:12 No, he didn't, you buffoons.

3:14 Yeah, people love to be fucking wrong about George Orwell. It is the bane of my existence. This is an excellent time to be quoting 1984 by George Orwell, because this is the kind of shit it is about.

3:25 Moving on.

3:26 A lawsuit in Texas has stopped the border wall construction, not just in Big Bend National Park, but also in the region at large.

3:32 Oh, wow.

3:33 Yeah, yeah.

3:34 People seem a little confused about the implications of this. Border wall construction is still ongoing in other places. There are other areas where there are still waivers for land protections, which they're still using. And I think it's worth noting that the ultimate victory is at a temporary pause in the wall, right? The ultimate victory is the wall comes down and the land is restored as best it can be.

3:55 Like this wall is still doing damage. The construction has still done damage. And I think sometimes people get a little lost in the source, but it's still a good thing. United States troops have completed their withdrawal from Iraq, leaving the Kurdistan region of Iraq especially vulnerable without the air defence it's relied on so heavily. Since February, there have been 1,000 drone and missile attacks on Kurdistan. Following this withdrawal, there was an Islamic State attack in Kirkuk last night.

4:22 It looks like they attacked a PMF position and killed one person, but they already claim responsibility for destroying a thermal camera.

4:30 Can you explain what the PMF is?

4:31 Yeah, a popular mobilization force is like militia that was mobilized to fight the Islamic State.

4:37 Right. In the fighting against ISIS in Mosul, you had like two primary like non-state militias. There was the Peshmerga, which is like the Kurdish militias from the north. And then you had the popular mobilization forces, which were the Iranian backed guys. And the dudes you wanted to avoid when you were there, to be honest. They were not the least trustworthy of the Iraqi state forces.

4:58 Yeah.

4:59 Some of those guys run a wild one.

5:01 Yeah.

5:02 And remain on a wild one to this day in some cases. Yeah. Oh, boy. I know Iraq is supposed to be doing some sort of regularization there, but they keep pushing back the deadline of that. It's a big ask.

5:12 It is.

5:13 Yeah, that's a lot of people with guns who don't want to come back.

5:16 Well, the Iraqi state has never in its modern incarnation managed a functional military without huge numbers of like non-state but state-aligned militias.

5:27 Yeah.

5:27 And so it's just a massive change for them to make.

5:30 Yeah. Their monopoly they have on legitimate violence is very tenuous if at all. Like it's just not– It's not the way that it is in the U.S.

5:38 It's certainly not a monopoly. The Iraqi state is like the Microsoft of having like a legitimate.

5:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

5:46 It's like an oligopoly.

5:48 There's like an Apple out there. There's an Android.

5:52 You got Samsung up in Kurdistan.

5:54 Yeah, yeah.

5:55 That's a good analogy. Yeah. I want to move to Spain, right? There's been a huge series of protests in Spain following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman named María del Carmen Abascal. She's known as Mari Carmen. It's pretty common to contract your name. People began occupying the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.

6:15 Many of you will remember this as one of the very early seeds of the Occupy movement, right? Or of the movement that became known as the Occupy movement. Pedro Sanchez attempted to pass a reform package, but he ran up against right-wing opposition in parliament, which he then dissolved and called a snap general election. He has now proposed a new set of steps which would need to be ratified by an interim legislature because parliament has been dissolved.

6:37 In Barcelona, over the weekend, there were huge protests. Cops ordered people out of the street. The protesters in Gracia, where I used to live, filled the streets with burning trash and threw stuff at the cops instead of leaving. You love to see it. It's so funny to me that I can picture the exact street that is being filled with burning trash because I have been there several times where that has been happening. The circle of life continues.

7:01 On the Rambla, people use construction materials to try and hold arguably one of the most iconic boulevards on the planet. It's ironic this is happening. 90 years and a couple of months after Catalan workers fought the country's army and defeated it in the same streets. Moving on to crocodile news. Florida crocodile. Did you guys know they have crocodiles in Florida?

7:24 What? No.

7:24 Are you sure? Yeah, I've heard from Florida men and their allies on this one. It does seem they have crocodiles. James, I have heard from Florida. We've all heard from the Floridians. Yeah, thank you.

7:37 And let's put people in quotation marks there. We're talking Florida.

7:43 Okay. The Floridian transgenders are cool. I'm not talking about that.

7:49 I'm talking about people from the northern part of Florida.

7:52 Yeah, the Florida, Georgia. People in quotation marks. Well, unfortunately, there is one less crocodile in Florida now.

8:00 Yeah.

8:01 Crocodile has been found dead from lead poisoning. It got into a pool and started behaving weirdly and had this kind of foul smelling, I think like vomit. And then they got it back into a canal and then they found it dead the next day. Did an autopsy and it had a bunch of lead in its stomach, 23 air rifle pellets and a fishing sinker. This is important because like this is a policy issue, right? Like specifically the use of lead projectiles for hunting is It's something that's been prohibited in California and in like Condor. I don't think it's prohibited in Condor region. I think it is prohibited in Condor parts of Arizona, but it's also like a voluntary program where they'll pay for you to have copper monolithic ammunition. And there's been a whole lot

8:43 of pushback on this recently. In Florida, I know a lot of people hunt iguanas with air rifles, but like this is a very direct causal relationship that we can point to from like lead to dead animal. I don't know how commonplace this is, but I thought it was interesting as a relatively rarer species. I do want to get into depth on this, on natural causes, but I'm going to find some people to interview so we can be clear on where the science stands on that. Finally, in the Strait of Hormuz, Hormuz News, Iran is once again attacking ships with anti-ship cruise missiles, things that they still have despite months and months and months of the US trying to bomb them. I think there have been six attacks since the UN General Assembly happened in late

9:26 September that were recorded on Wednesday. It seems like they've taken along about one a day at the minute. So there might be a couple more by the time you hear this.

9:34 Also this week, Paramount has closed the $ 111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, forming a new conglomerate called Skydance, which is the Ellison company that originally bought Paramount a few years back. So now both CNN and CBS are in control of the Ellisons. Ellison sent out a day one memo to all these new employees, which warned them, quote, integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce. Layoffs are obviously expected in the next few months.

10:14 Yeah.

10:15 The state of California was able to secure concessions such as a promise to release about 30 movies a year for five years and a $ 5 million fund for independent movies. Cool.

10:27 That'll fix it.

10:28 Yeah.

10:29 This will put a dent in, obviously, the absolute and total consolidation of media in general, of all forms, into the hands of an extremely small number of people who absolutely suck.

10:39 This is the worst merger that I can, like, remember in my life. Like, is it the worst thing that I can, like, see and remember as, like, a conscious living human? Like, the scale of this is, like, absurd.

10:50 It shouldn't be allowed.

10:51 Yeah. No, it very clearly violates antitrust. If Lena Kahn was in charge, this obviously wouldn't happen.

10:57 No, they would have the Navy SEALs at the Ellison compound. Yeah.

11:02 Hey, minimum viable 2028 program. Yeah. No, breaking up this company should become a project that gets promoted by people like Khan and us.

11:12 And if we're going to have Navy SEALs, this is what you use them for. Yeah.

11:16 The anti-Ellison SEAL division. Yeah.

11:20 I will note that the very last Warner Brothers production as an independent studio was the movie Digger.

11:26 Which I heard is actually pretty good.

11:28 It is not doing well. It's a catastrophic box office bomb, but I heard it's really good.

11:33 I'm looking forward to seeing it. Very divisive film.

11:35 Very divisive film. I'm not anti-Digger, but it is very funny that that is their last release, is Tom Cruise's biggest box office bomb in a generation.

11:45 Obviously, David Zaslav has been in many ways, a disaster for Warner Brothers. And his reign of the company is partially what's led them to being acquired here. But Warner Brothers has put out a bunch of really interesting and good films the past few years. And the current batch of executives promoted and fought for those. Movies like Sinners, movies like One Battle After Another. Those executives are already gone.

12:11 Those executives are not going to be sticking around David Ellison's new... New Warner Brothers. So the people that brought you One Battle and Sinners are no longer at the helm.

12:24 So I wanted to update everyone on what's been happening in Likio. If you didn't listen last week, you can get the very basics. But I was there last week, not there now. A number of people had been defending a pair of cottonwood trees that had once been part of a stand of cottonwood trees that joined canopies over the border. construction workers for Fisher Sand and Gravel. I previously dropped three of them in their construction of the border wall, at which point someone had been sitting in the one remaining tree on the northern side. There's another tree which seems to be very close to or spanning the border, which had been sat in briefly by someone who'd come from the Mexican side before they came down.

13:05 On the 5th of October, Border Patrol staged a huge raid on this camp The camp, for what it's worth, is on private land. Generally, BP doesn't need a warrant to enter private land unless it's a domicile, if they're 25 miles or less from the border, which they were in this instance. So they raided the camp. They then came in with a cherry picker, pulled the person who was in the tree out of the tree, detained them, and then pushed over the tree with an excavator very, very quickly. They moved extremely fast to do this whole thing.

13:36 They detained 10 people that day. I'm not quite sure what those people or if those people have been cited or charged yet. I'm still trying to get that information. The next day, five more people were detained and somebody began defending by sitting in it. The other tree, the tree that straddles the border, perhaps, or the tree that people thought was in Mexico, but it's not exactly clear, like without seeing the border monuments exactly where they line up.

14:03 The thickness of a line on a map is way too thick to have this kind of definition. And so currently, the other tree is still being defended. That doesn't mean the border wall construction has completely stopped. It seems they're working at a very frenzied pace. As we recorded on Wednesday, they began working overnight on Tuesday night. And what they're doing now is it appears that they are building... So this is an area where they have double barrier, right?

14:26 Two walls about 60 foot apart. One wall just inside the Roosevelt Reservation, and then one wall just inside the United States. And then there's a road between them that BP can drive, right? And it kind of, it cedes hundreds of acres of the United States to Border Patrol control, right? Most of it was public land in this case, right?

14:45 Forest Service or some of its state wildlife refuge. Some of it, I think BLM manages that Roosevelt Reservation, for what I can understand, because BLM posted notices that they were closing it last week. So What Border Patrol is now doing is building that northernmost wall first to prevent access to the southernmost wall. And it seems that they're doing this at a very frenzied pace. It seems like they might be skipping some of this, just from pictures I've seen, they might be skipping some of the usual smart wall, fiber optic conduit that they would put in there and just trying to get up a barrier as quickly as they can, obviously to prevent people continuing to protest.

15:23 The protest had the permission of landowners to be on their land and their local sheriff had said that he wasn't going to be arresting any of the protesters. So BP decided to do it themselves after 71 days of that tree being defended. So that tree is now gone, but the other tree remains. I thought it was also very sweet that people have taken cuttings from the trees that were taken down, and those cuttings are already growing too, which is nice to see. Nature springs eternal. But yeah, I'm going to cover this in a two-parter on natural causes.

15:55 It will not be the Monday after you hear this, but it will be the Monday after that. And that'll be the first episode and there'll be two episodes. So you'll have to wait until then to get the long version of this. Talking of long, we've got a long time without advertisements, which I know makes our listeners sad.

16:10 Let's hear from Fisher Sand and Gravel.

16:23 So we mentioned earlier that there are large protests going on in Spain. There are also very, very large student protests going on in France right now. These started September 18th, where high school students, and this is an interesting development because most of the written history of student movements is about college students. These are high school students. And they have started en masse blockading their schools and taking to the streets to These protests started in the Parisian suburbs.

16:55 It is worth bearing in mind that French urban infrastructure is effectively the exact inversion of the way American infrastructure worked with white flight, where in the US you have white people fleeing the urban core into the suburbs. France is built the opposite, where working class and non-white people were forced into the suburbs because they were not able to live in the urban core, which is predominantly whiter and significantly richer.

17:20 Everyone watch Lehane. It's great. I wish I had any idea what that was. It's a French film about this.

17:28 Ah, okay.

17:29 It's about people living in these sorts of suburbs. It's two immigrants and I think a young Jewish kid who then travel into the city center and bad things happen. It's very similar to the story that you're going to be talking about. Yep. But it's like looking at the conditions 20 years ago. And the same conditions now. Yeah, and conditions are worse. Not the same, actually. Yeah.

17:55 So these protests spread very, very quickly. And it is now spread effectively everywhere. It's not just in Paris. It is across the entire country. I think right now, the last number that I saw, and this changed while I was writing this, the last number that I saw was 500 of France's 3,500 high schools were fully shut down.

18:18 Damn.

18:19 So these protests, again, started a couple of weeks ago on September 18th. As of Wednesday the 7th, they are not just continuing, but escalating. Now, We're going to get into the police response in a second, but I can't count the number of times on this show I have said there was a giant police crackdown and the images of the police crackdown spread the protests. But that's what happened here. Why is this happening? Why is it specifically high school students who are now in the streets in full on conflict with riot police who are reacting to and treating them the way that they treat? I mean, frankly, worse than most protesters get treated in France, which is sort of astonishing.

19:01 Yeah.

19:01 So there's actually a good crimping piece about this. There's a lot of things happening here. Part of it is a reaction to class sizes, where you have 30 and 35 kids, sometimes a lot more than that.

19:12 Class sizes is.

19:13 An issue that's familiar also to you. I mean, a lot of these demands look like the demands you see in teacher strikes effectively everywhere.

19:19 Yeah. Yeah.

19:20 These class sizes are enormous. Part of it is the structure of the French education system, which is French schools have breaks, but also you're in school from 8 a.m.

19:30 To 6 p.m.

19:31 Which is longer than most places and also causes– this also causes teachers to have to work longer hours. And that means that because they're working longer hours, the number of teachers you have is strained because.

19:46 You're covering more time.

19:47 This plus you know, decades of neoliberal austerity has led to conditions where there will just not be a substitute teacher.

19:56 So a teacher will get sick.

19:58 They'll have like maybe a person there, but it's not even a substitute teacher who could take over lesson plans. You just have a week at a time where you're in a subject that's on the national exam system and there's no teacher. which is just sort of appalling given one of the other things that these protests are about, which is this sort of algorithmic program. I remember we had a much less, I don't know, ferocious, a much more strict version of this when I was in high school.

20:28 But in France, they have this sort of student program where you're supposed to like put in your choices and it like looks at your test scores and it spits out what you're, what you should be doing after like high school.

20:37 Okay.

20:37 And this is one of the things that like, it feeds you into what track you're going into, right? So it feeds you into vocational schools. It feeds you into like what kind of colleges you can get into. It has turned into the system kind of like we talked about with the Indian student protests where there's this incredibly intense pressure on students to like fight against each other basically for, you know, like it's, it's been promoted intense competition.

21:00 And then also it's just, it's, it's a weird algorithm system and everyone is like forced to manage these issues you have with this weird algorithm, taking what your information you're giving it and spitting you out this thing that like determines the rest of your life. I mean, there's a lot of other problems. The actual conditions in the schools themselves are very bad. Like, you know, it's leaking roofs, things like that. There's also I saw a thing about like lunch breaks where students weren't able to eat because the lunch break wasn't like they don't have enough cafeteria staff.

21:35 The lunch break wasn't long enough for all the students.

21:36 To like get food.

21:38 Jeez. Yeah, that's a problem.

21:40 Yeah.

21:41 These conditions are emblematic of. I mean, just a lot of what of this sort of deterioration of social services and, you know, the sort of death of opportunity is. for these students in a way that the more I'm thinking about, the more it's just, oh, this reminds me a lot of the Indian protests. And so the protests themselves, the Macron administration made a decision very, very early on that they were not going to negotiate with the students. They have kind of become more open to it. In the past day, we'll see what happens there. But their immediate response was, you know, a brutal police crackdown, which has been the Macron administration's administration's response to most things and this has been this has been a full-on french police

22:27 assault on a bunch of children a 15 year old got his hand blown off uh i've seen conflicting reports about this it seems like he was trying to pick up what he thought was a tear gas canister but was actually a stun grenade yeah but i've also seen reports that like it hit him i don't know but regardless somehow the police fired a grenade and it blew this kid's hand off yeah Another student has lost an eye.

22:52 I think that kid was 16. The kid who got his hand blown off again was 15. I'm going to quote from Crime Think here because there's another really bleak case. But currently, the 14-year-old boy can't open his mouth as all of his bottom teeth were knocked out by the impact and all of his upper teeth are broken.

23:07 Jesus.

23:09 So, yeah, that kid is 14.

23:12 Yeah.

23:13 Again, I cannot emphasize enough. These are actual children. And this is also kind of part of what's complicated in covering this, because I think it's important to mention that, like, a cop should not be knocking out the teeth of anyone. The fact that they're doing this to 14-year-olds is particularly brutal.

23:29 And also, I think that it's true, and this has been one of the debates that's been sort of raging across French society, is like, are these students legitimate political actors? Like, do they have the right to have their voices heard and, you know, like, go and take political action like this? And the right has kind of said no and argued that these people are sort of pawns of you know, they're opponents of what I would describe as the center-left party, France Unbowed. The media will describe them as hard left, but, like, come on. They're, like, to the right of the old PCF, and the old French Communist Party was, like, not a particularly, like, communist Communist Party. But it's worth noting that while France Unbowed, like,

24:11 has talked to students and, like, spoken at some of their protests, this was not a protest that was organized through the parties at all. There's an interesting interview in Le Monde with the French sociologist Vincent Taberge, where he points out that France is a country that has seen organized high school student protests too, but these are not those kind of protests. 2006 was kind of the last big high school student protest, but those ones were organized by leftist student unions that were directly affiliated with the parties.

24:42 This is not that. This is a bunch of students taking action autonomously. They are self-organized and they are not particularly connected to any of the French political parties, even the sort of.

24:54 Far left ones. And the scale is like huge, right? Oh, it's massive. For something that's more autonomously organized, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of participants.

25:04 Yeah, like all across the country.

25:06 Yeah, I mean, they fully have shut down. Okay, I'm not going to try to do the math on there. Hold on.

25:11 One in seven, 500 out of 3,500. Yeah, that sounds right.

25:16 That's why they call him PhD James, everyone.

25:18 Arcane historian over here.

25:21 Hell yeah, hell yeah.

25:24 I picked an anthropology degree specifically so I wouldn't have to do this kind of math.

25:29 You just get to measure people's skulls instead in anthropology and do that kind of math.

25:33 Yeah, well, look, anthropology consists of two things, racism and a discourse about whether or not it's doing racism. So, you know, this is why I'm a podcaster now. A discipline that has never done anything wrong.

25:44 That is most of what my anthropology class is.

25:47 There's some good stuff in there.

25:49 Every once in a while, they accidentally start a social movement. Yeah, yeah.

25:54 Or you do linguistic anthropology and it melts your brain.

25:56 Oh, that's so scary. Yeah.

25:59 From the perspective of La France Insoumise, it's a French word for France Unbowed, right? It's like a Demsoc in that it has people who are left of other people. But like Mir's right, this isn't a particularly radical party, at least sort of on a global scale. You've seen some politicians do a lot better than others. I'm sure everyone by now will have seen the Bali Bagayoko video of the mayor getting tear gassed with the kids.

26:27 Yeah. But like....

26:29 It's not about politicians and like attempts to make it about politicians other than being pissed off at them.

26:36 Yeah. And people asking for like huge, like structural changes. Yes. And frustration at both the left's inability to address this political situation in France. And, you know, continuing a sort of like, like, like we talked about in like Brazil and, and in some parts of the States, it's sort of like gerotocracy, even among the left, where we have these kinds of old guys who may have done good things, but they're, still in their 80s, and you need to pass the torch. And a lot of what I'm seeing from these protests in France, it is a very generational uprising. Yeah.

27:07 Also built on the frustrations about how 10% of the school budget is being diverted to the pension system. So there's a lot of this kind of generational frustration, and the left in France has also run into that.

27:23 I was going to say, I did use calculator for this one, But it is 58 years since 1968. But you have this generation of 68ers. They've gone in a number of directions, right? But to include part of the electoral left. It's not like we haven't seen protests since 1968 in France, right? But it shouldn't be that one generation gets to have the... We were the radical students who changed the world. And therefore you students now have to listen to us even though we're old as fuck and don't understand the shit that you're going through.

27:56 Yeah, and I think the sort of structural issue in terms of how, yeah, on a generational level, like how the left has been and has not been connecting to these students, I think it's also very important, again, like where this started and the kind of like working class suburbs that the French left has had a really tenuous relationship with, like kind of since the 70s. We talked about this, like, so like, I got three years ago now, there.

28:24 Was a huge... There's a huge.

28:27 Uprising over a police killing in a different set of French suburbs that really came in this moment of what had been really fierce upheaval in France, like in the wake of the Yellow Vest and all these other protests.

28:44 Other pension protests. Yeah, right.

28:47 But this was the one where the non-white people in the suburbs went up and the rest of France was like, oh God, no, fuck off.

28:55 We hate you. To this day, the interview.

29:00 With the sociologist I was talking about in Le Mans, which is the biggest newspaper in France, is talking about how these students are actually different than the urban disturbances from those 2023 protests. about police brutality and sort of structural racism and class violence. And when you look at it, it's like, no, they're not. Like, they're actually a lot, in some ways, they're a lot more similar to that than they are to the other protests which have been going on, which is where I kind of want to close this, where we have also started to see the rest of French society move slowly in sort of line with the student protests where, you know, obviously part of the student protests are about this, neoliberal kind of austerity

29:42 budget that the Macron administration keeps trying to pass. And so there's also been a one-day strike of about like 300,000 workers from the sort of like traditional labor like leftist unions. Also, about 11% of teachers and faculty are now on strike in the middle of this too. So it remains to be seen exactly the extent to which the rest of the French left is going to join into these protests. I want to mention something briefly about schools here and why it's important that these are starting here, which is that schools are not just places where you get education. They're also places You know, it's not just the basic part of like the reproductive labor that reproduces capital.

30:27 It's not just that it produces future workers, but it's also a place where like the basic care for students and the basic social reproduction of like children is carried out by the state, which allows workers to work.

30:38 Right.

30:38 And this is why shutting schools down is also a giant lever that allows you to like actually fully shutting down schools en masse. is a lever that allows you to disrupt the rest of the economy because it forces parents to not work. It's not exactly analogous, but it can serve the effect of what coal strikes used to, where if you shut down the supply of coal, it shuts down all of the workers down the line. Where if you force all of these parents to have to stay home, all of these workers are now also on strike as a sort of secondary thing of shutting these schools down. This is why the state always tries to make it really hard for teachers unions to strike because schools are a lever of power that you can use

31:16 in the labor system if you use them correctly. I want to close by mentioning that as this has been going on, there's been unrest building in France over, I mean, a whole bunch of things. There's a police bill, I think we talked about in this show, that is trying to allow the French police to... Basically, what it would do is, it's a proposed bill that if it was passed, if a French police officer shot someone, they would be immediately assumed to have killed them legitimately. And then they would have to be proven that they illegitimately killed them instead of there being an investigation immediately. So it's a bill that says that if a cop drags you to an alley and shoots you and there's no one there,

31:55 there's nothing you can do about it. That's been causing unrest. And one of the old sort of signals that's been set up in the middle of this, and it's unclear who is doing this, but there's been this giant call put out from these mass demonstrations on October 17th. And there's this question, you know, crime thing is talking about this.

32:14 I've seen this in other places of, Are these student protests going to last until then, until that giant uprising? Are people going to come out into the streets before then? And at this point, all we can sort of do is wait. And also, I guess if you're in France, go now. You're not going to get a better shot.

32:34 If you're trying to overthrow the government, stay in line, you know?

32:38 Yeah.

32:40 I want to end on one actual point. important note which is you see this a lot in the nature of french protest you see this in american protests where like one section of society will go into revolt and everyone else just kind of waits and you get these like cycles where like the people who were kind of who are in the industries and occupy like weren't the same people necessarily i mean some obviously there was crossover but they weren't the same section of society that went in like went into revolt in ferguson right they like waited until the next one was out or like you see this with like the British student movement. And then right after the British student movement kind of gets crushed, there's the riots in London in 2010. And you've seen

33:18 this here, where there were a bunch of strikes by the organized left, and there was the yellow vests. And then when the suburbs went up in 2023, everyone else stayed home. And if you do that, they're going to line you up, and they're going to knock you out one at a time.

33:32 And the only way.

33:34 that you can win is like when one sector of society goes out, even if it's not yours, go with them. Don't leave, don't leave the kids to die alone. Like go support them, go fight with them.

33:45 I do have something that's not on my script that I wanted to bring up really quickly because this just came out today. And I do think it's an important story. This happened back in August, but we didn't know about it until today. So, A congressional candidate in Arizona, Bernadette Green Placentia, who is running in Arizona's 8th congressional district and trying to unseat incumbent Republican Representative Abe Hamada, was raped in August while she was repairing a damaged campaign sign in Sun City. This was like a regular thing for her. Signs would get damaged, you know, either purposefully or just like by the climate change. And she would go out and fix them in the morning. And one day when she was out doing this in August at

34:29 about 2 a.m., she was struck in the head and lost consciousness and regained consciousness to a man sexually assaulting her. She believes he had said something about her being a democratic bitch, although she's not 100 percent certain about what he was saying. I think this is just kind of an important thing for people to be aware of for obvious reasons.

34:47 God, that's bleak.

34:48 Yeah, it's pretty fucking horrifying. Anyway, this story came out within hours of us recording this, so I don't have much more on it than that.

34:55 The way that we tend to talk about sexual violence, we tend to talk about it as something that's like an individual phenomena and not as a regime of violence that's done to discipline people into falling in line. And this is a really bleak and blatant example of like, oh yeah, no, sexual violence also is a social phenomena that is designed to keep people in line.

35:21 Fuck that.

35:22 I mean, it's just worth noting that, like, even in a position of, like, relative cultural power to certainly the average victim, she didn't feel safe coming out about what had happened to her for months.

35:34 Yeah.

35:35 So that's pretty worth acknowledging, too. Moving along, on October 4th, 2026, Russian public health regulator Rospotrin... Rospotrin... Sorry, guys, it's going to take a second.

35:48 This is a bad one. It looks rough, man. I'm not even going to try it.

35:52 The Russian public health regulator, their equivalent of the Department of Health. I'm not going to try to say the name. You don't listen to this podcast because of my pronunciation of foreign languages, right? I'm not even going to try here.

36:05 Famously, our strongest suit.

36:07 I've never seen a B and an N come together without a vowel. It's really soft.

36:13 Yeah, there's some complicated phonetic shit going on in that word.

36:18 Gnarly. Fascinating.

36:21 Well, now I have to try to say it. Rospotrebnazor? Rospotrebnazor. Yeah, the Russian Department of Health issued a... Sorry, it took a long time to get to the meat of this. issued a public statement that one employee of the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East had perished due to her accidental exposure to pneumonic plague. This employee, 28-year-old Daria Shipilova, had apparently broken a vial containing plague bacteria and contracted the deadly disease. In short order, 200-some-odd people who had close contact with Daria before her death were isolated and put under observation. Multiple hospitals and other facilities in the area were closed and or put under observation.

37:08 As news of this all trickled out into the wider world, people began to freak out. I think I first came across this story and like it was pushed to me. I don't even follow this subreddit, but the Prepper subreddit like pushed it to me. People were freaking out about it so much.

37:22 Right. Yeah, that makes sense.

37:23 That makes sense.

37:24 To be fair, this is not not worth being concerned about. Right. And I think this panic was an equal mix. of PTSD from COVID, and quite frankly, the enduring popularity of Stephen King's best novel, The Stand. I bring up The Stand because, I can't lie, I initially got a little worried because the way in which this started is exactly how the world-ending plague in The Stand begins. There's like a U.S. scientist in a bioweapons lab who like breaks a vial and it kills everybody and it escapes containment and it wipes out, you know, the whole world, right?

37:56 And to be clear, this is the sort of story that should generate some anxiety. It's not unreasonable if you were concerned about this. But on closer inspection, I truly don't believe the specific case is worth freaking out over. For one thing, there's zero evidence that it has spread beyond its initial victim. It sounds scary to hear that hundreds of people have been contained after an accidental fatal plague exposure, but that's what you'd want the Russian government.

38:22 Or any government to do, right?

38:24 You would want them to take this kind of precaution, right? I don't normally say this about the Russian government, but they seem to be responding responsibly to this. They seem to have an understanding that you have to respond very seriously to this sort of thing.

38:41 Yeah, and it being the Plague Institute where this happened does raise the odds of the people dealing with it knowing what to do.

38:48 Right, right.

38:49 It's the Plague Institute. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. I do want to note here, so far, 60% of the people who have been detained have already been tested and been declared free of any sickness. And it seems like the rest are going to be given a good bill of health soon. A spokesperson for Russia's public health entity that I will not try to pronounce informed the New York Times. Laboratory tests have identified two cases of COVID-19 and two cases of rhinovirus infection or the common cold, the regulator said, according to the Interfax News Agency. No other infectious disease pathogens were detected in any of the contacts. Sorry, it wasn't directly to the Times, it was to Interfax. And

39:25 you do have to imagine that those like four people who had the cold or COVID were like freaking the fuck out.

39:31 Yeah, yeah.

39:32 So like, oh my God, is this the end?

39:35 Worst days of your life.

39:37 I don't think sniffles are a sign of the pneumonic plague, but I would imagine you're not thinking super logically in this instance.

39:43 Yeah.

39:44 Now, the pneumonic plague is insanely deadly. It has a 71% case fatality rate. For some idea of how bad that is, the case fatality rate for Ebola is only around 50%, right? Although rates in past outbreaks have varied wildly, there's a lot of factors that can influence that. Ebola case fatality rates in different outbreaks have been anywhere from 25% to 90%, right?

40:08 Right.

40:10 There's different variants of Ebola, right? Just as we don't exactly know what variant of the pneumonic plague this is, right? It might actually have a lower or higher case fatality rate. This may be the only case of someone getting infected with this specific strain of pneumonic plague that we have.

40:23 I don't know that we really know exactly what she has. But yeah, this is a scary, deadly plague. But that also makes the case that like if it had broken containment, there would be way more sick and dying people by now. And given the overall competence of the Russian state, If this was an out-of-control plague in Siberia, I don't think they'd be able to keep this locked down very long, right?

40:46 No.

40:47 No.

40:48 If 71% of people exposed to this were dying, right, like had contracted it and were dying, I don't think they'd be able to keep this. I'm like, we'd be able to keep this thing secret, right? The other thing I should point out is that scary as that case fatality rate is, that's not the only thing that should make a disease worrying to you, right? That's super worrying if you catch it, but pneumonic plague is not widely transmissible.

41:11 Think back to COVID. If one person on a bus or a plane or in a room has COVID and sneezes, not back to you, but think, I mean, COVID's still here. If one person in a room has COVID and sneezes, a bunch of people around them have a very good chance of getting infected, especially if they're not vaccinated, right?

41:27 Pneumonic plague does not work this way. There's a very good CNN interview with virologist Angela Rasmussen, and she points out that this plague variant requires a lot of contact with the infected person. And even someone dying of plague is not coughing up a bunch of infectious material, right? It's just not the same kind of illness in any way, shape, or form. This is why none of the contained people who were close to Daria have gotten sick. Pneumonic plague victims are not super infectious. That interview with Dr. Rasmussen also brought up a very good point. This anti-plague lab is being described often as like a bioweapons factory. And the Russian state has surely done weapons research at this

42:06 and other similar facilities. I'm not going to doubt that. But if absolutely no one anywhere on planet Earth was doing any bioreapons research, this facility would still exist because plague is endemic to the region.

42:19 Right.

42:19 Right.

42:19 It's not there's not plague in this facility because the Russian government loves cooking up plague. It's because this part of Siberia, tons of animals have the plague and people get plague all the time in this part of the world.

42:31 This is the exact same thing with like Wuhan and like the Wuhan CDC there, which is like, yeah, there's a bunch of infectious disease research there because that's a bunch of bats there.

42:40 This is where you do it. Yeah. You put you put the lab in the place where stuff is happening.

42:45 Right.

42:45 Study it.

42:46 And yeah, plague is carried by animals. And by the way, Siberia, this part of eastern Russia is not the only place where plague is super endemic. The Midwestern U.S. is riddled with plague carrying prairie dogs and occasionally a person here.

43:00 Yeah.

43:01 Right. California. I'm not saying that's not the end. Those aren't the only animals that can give you plague. Occasionally, a person will catch bubonic plague in this country, which is a variant of the same disease as pneumonic plague, and they'll get it from, you know, some fucking animal. you may recall that the whole U.S. has not been wiped out by an outbreak of the bubonic plague. This is because the bubonic plague is super treatable, but also not super easy to spread in the modern world. This may sound weird given that bubonic plague wiped out much of Europe, but that was because the primary vectors for plague are wild animals that bite people and fleas from infected animals. The OG plague took centuries to get its

43:39 teeth into the populace and only succeeded because back then people lived in super close contact with livestock and had no real way of dealing with fleas. And we also didn't have like antibiotics, right?

43:49 Yeah.

43:50 You know, there's a ton of reasons why that happened then and it doesn't happen now. Now, not to say a treatment resistant form of the plague that's more infectious couldn't And like in terms of.

44:11 Like where a disease like this would come from, this is something that that Angeles like talked about before, like the odds that this comes from a bioweapons lab is significantly lower than the odds that it comes from just like a factory farm. Right. Where you have all these animals in really close containment and diseases spread extremely fast and get to mutate extremely quickly.

44:32 Like that's that's.

44:34 That's like the primary disease factor risk is that and the human contact in the wild.

44:40 Yeah, that's a great point, Mia. And we should probably move to ads right now. And then when we come back, I will talk about Brazil, which is honestly a little more worrying than a plague right now.

45:01 And we're back.

45:03 So moving across the world to what some people call the Russia of South America, not me and not anyone I know, but you could call Brazil that. It wouldn't be very accurate, but you could call them that.

45:15 It's big.

45:16 Flavio Bolsonaro emerged ahead of the current Brazilian President Lula in the first round of voting. Neither candidate emerged with an outright majority, so the election will proceed to a runoff, but most experts seem to consider Flavio's victory all but a foregone conclusion at this point. Political consulting firm Think Policy told Reuters they estimated Lula would need to win 62% of voters who supported other conservative candidates in the first round of voting to have a chance. This does not seem likely. If you read a lot of coverage of this election, one thing you'll encounter is that every expert on Brazilian politics is very convinced that Flavio's presidency will be an extension of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency. A lot of

45:54 Brazilian voters are convinced, and in fact, it's probable that most people who voted for Flavio did so because they wanted another term for Jair, right? Flavio himself said at a recent rally, I ask God for the opportunity to walk up the ramp of Planalto Palace next year alongside President Jair Omecia's Bolsonaro, right? It's a pretty... Pretty clear signposting there. Jair is currently serving a 27 year sentence from house arrest. He is legally forbidden from holding office again as a result of his conviction over the coup attempt.

46:25 Flavio has promised to seek amnesty for not just his father, but for the rioters who marched on Brazil's capital to keep his father in office. He's also promised to impeach the Supreme Court justices who ruled against Jair and his supporters. This is deeply concerning for a number of reasons. I want to quote from a New York Times article that came out today on the subject. The Bolsonaro family's comeback mirrors the enduring hold of other powerful political dynasties around the world, including the Marquesas in the Philippines, the Sharifs in Pakistan, the Fujimoris in Peru, and the Kirchners in Argentina.

46:57 But Mr.

46:57 Lula's political movement has failed to produce a successor and appears to have lost touch with its base as many Brazilians link it to corruption and government mismanagement.

47:06 If Mr.

47:06 Bolsonaro now succeeds in unseating his leftist rival in the October 25th runoff, he would gain unusually broad powers to shape Brazil. The next president will be able to appoint up to four new justices in this nation's Supreme Court, which has 11 seats in total. So one thing that's really worrying about this is that Flavio and, you know, Jair kind of through the transit of property will have nearly total power. When he takes office, for a lot of very frustrating reasons to do with the way Brazil's democracy is structured, there's very little, if anything, in the way of constitutional governing rails that would limit what Flavio can do. This is an extremely concerning situation. It's very dispiriting.

47:52 It's a good reason not to listen to, quite frankly, most of the Western left's takes on Flavio. politics outside of and sometimes including the United States. Yes. Because if you would listen to what people were saying about Lula prior to this, it's entirely like he's this wonderful, like leftist hero. And the reality is, you know, Lula has done some great things. He has some great political stances.

48:17 But you can't look at his regime as anything but a failure if it's led to Bolsonarism.

48:22 Yeah.

48:22 Right.

48:23 It failed to stop this, you know. It just says twice Biden failed, just as Clinton failed.

48:29 Right.

48:29 Just as Obama failed to stop the rise of Trump.

48:33 Right.

48:33 We can't pretend that in this case, because we can ignore the downsides and the failures of Lula's regime because we don't live in Brazil, that like he didn't fail.

48:44 He did.

48:45 You know, and and that's just something the left has to grapple with. Like this is a guy who said and did a lot of the right things and who went pretty hard after prosecuting. Bolsonaro. And it was a catastrophic failure. I don't know what else to say.

49:01 Yeah.

49:02 I mean, I think something I've talked about, God, back in the last election, I did a very long series of episodes on Lula. And one of the sort of structural problems of the program of the Workers' Party was that it was always dependent on the commodity boom and the massive export prices you get from that. And the moment the commodities boom collapsed, the entire project was on borrowed time because it became impossible to do the kind of class negotiation of redistributing a bunch of the profits from the commodities they were selling overseas and raising living conditions for people while paying off Bolivia's sort of, like, oligarchical ruling class. And the moment that coalition fell apart, you know, everything went to shit. And the problem is, like,

49:46 there isn't really a way to deal with Bolsonaro without, like, systemically going through and, like, destroying, like, the media oligarchy and, like, a whole bunch of different sectors of the Brazilian ruling class. But Lula wasn't... It was a difficult position for them even in the 2000s when they had a really, really strong...

50:06 political mandate, and there wasn't any way to do it, even if they'd wanted to, under the last electoral coalition, which was this very fragile coalition with a bunch of anti-Bolsonaro conservatives and this weird parliamentary left-center-right coalition that ended up with a bunch of very shitty neoliberal economic policy going through that just continued to enable Bolsonarism and Yeah, you have to grapple with like if you aren't able to fundamentally destroy like the material basis of your opponents, they're eventually going to overthrow you and you're going to be back here.

50:45 Yep. Yep.

50:46 It's I don't know.

50:48 It's disappointing. We'll we'll have more coverage on this in the future because this is really important.

50:53 Right.

50:53 Just as it's very important to look at what's happening in Hungary right now as like an example of what a post-Trump United States might look like. It's very important to look at Lula's and his coalition's failures in terms of like, well, number one, this also does mirror in some ways mirrors what happened with Biden. But this is also evidence of like, you know, you don't want to take anything too directly because, again, these are all very different countries and very different from the United States. But there are some there are some lessons here for the entire world and like how hard it is to unseat an authoritarian regime.

51:33 Right.

51:33 And that you're always going to be in an uphill battle if the other guy is just spouting fantasies. And if the media goes along with it, that's a huge part of it.

51:57 The media aspect is a huge part of this. That's a massive aspect. As much as this is a warning for us going forward, I think this is an example of like, what if someone even much more progressive than Joe Biden would take office in 2028? What if we get a sort of like ineffectual social democratic administration who might actually do some things that.

52:16 Are- Might say the right things and fail.

52:18 And might even do things that are kind of sensible. Might actually put forward some good policies.

52:23 Yeah.

52:24 But that does not end up mattering because of whatever kind of structural limitations they hit, whatever kind of media narratives really take hold. You see this kind of really big focus on fraud and corruption on the right right now. That's a big part of what government is supposed to do. And this is something that Zoran has tried to take by the horns and try to make sure that the right can't fully co-opt that sort of language. Be like, if we want to have a a socialist or a social democratic government. It needs to be efficient, and that should be actually real efficiency.

52:57 I continue to think one of the things that any leftist movement trying to unseat authoritarianism in the United States particularly needs to have as a central issue is fighting fraud and fighting scams.

53:10 Yeah.

53:10 Almost nothing is.

53:11 More important from an electoral standpoint, in my opinion. Yeah.

53:15 There's a new poll from KFF looking at issues that voters care about For the midterms, cost of living is the top issue for Democratic and independent voters.

53:26 Yeah.

53:27 Of course. While Republican voters want candidates to discuss, quote, fraud. And I think that's a really interesting look at where we are right now as a country.

53:38 I think tying this back to Brazil, too, like this is one of the problems that the PT, the Workers' Party, had was like, the way that the media was able to steer like all anti-corruption stuff in Brazil, like ended up going after the workers party, even though all of the corruption scandals implicated literally everyone across the entire political spectrum.

53:56 Yeah.

53:57 Like this is part of what happened this election where like, there's a bunch of fraud scandals with like the Supreme court, but that's been like tied to Lula. And he's the one who's taken the hit from it, even though it also involves like all of the right-wing political parties. And that's, that's like one of the dangers of sort of, I don't know, it's like one of the persistent problems of like the way that fraud and the way that anti-corruption politics get deployed by the right. That's just this like decades long issue.

54:23 Another weird example of this is that the mayor of New York went on to a podcast by a guy named Theo Vaughn, if you're familiar.

54:32 Yeah, I know.

54:36 And one interesting thing that happened is Zoran was talking about how the city just secured a historic $ 130 million settlement from DoorDash. And $ 115 million of that is going to go directly to DoorDash workers, who DoorDash was underpaying for years, with workers receiving anywhere between $ 500 to thousands of dollars in pay that was stolen from them. But part of this settlement is also $ 16 million in civil penalties and funding to build this tool, which will be operated by the city and workers to monitor DoorDash to make sure that they don't rip off their workers going forward.

55:13 And something that was very interesting. When Theo heard that, he's like, why? Why would you use that money? Why not just give that money to the workers? He kind of inquired about this as a possible example of fraud. Like, why is the city taking $ 16 million? Is it actually going to be you know, good? Or is that another example of fraud and corruption? And I think that that's a really interesting look at like the mind of the kind of like right wing, you know, focus on fraud of like, no, that money is actually going to build a tool to make sure that DoorDash cannot defraud its own workers. Yeah. Going forward and will be operated by the city and workers themselves. But it's a really interesting

55:54 look at like this sort of like distrust of And even in something like a $ 130 million settlement, which is historic, that's the largest worker labor settlement in municipal history.

56:07 It's massive, yeah.

56:09 Even in that, there's this kind of worry in the mind of the right that somehow this will be used for fraudulent means. Yeah.

56:18 I do want to reiterate here, when I say that Lula failed, that's not even coming from a point of necessarily moral condemnation. It's just like- We lost. We have to be factual. It didn't work. We have to look at what went wrong here. You can't just pretend that this was a good presidency because he said the right things and went after Bolsonaro. We lost, right? We have to deal with that. We have to play the ball where it fucking lies, right? Anyway- Let's talk about Dennis Hastert, huh?

56:47 Everybody loves old Denny. Denny was his nickname.

56:50 Unfortunately, too many people still do love Denny. Yeah, Jesus Christ.

56:54 Yeah, a lot of people sharing our profession have some serious fucking issues.

56:59 Multiple articles that I've read today all pointed out that he went by the nickname Denny and was considered a very cool and approachable Republican Speaker of the House. Oh, I'm sure.

57:10 Yeah, he was real approachable.

57:11 He was approaching some fucking other people.

57:14 I'm saying this because Dennis Hastert, the longest serving Republican speaker of the House and a serial pedophile, died earlier this week on October 5th. Hastert's legacy, such as it was, was ruined after he left office when regulators noticed a bunch of really weirdly structured payments that he initially characterized as blackmail payments based on false allegations. Oh, some guy made me, you know, is blackmailing me and it's all bullshit, but it's just easier to pay.

57:43 This was a lie.

57:44 The payments were to a man who, as a boy, had been molested and I think raped by Dennis. This was during his time as a high school wrestling coach. This guy was 14 when Hastert abused him. And when he approached the former Speaker of the House decades later, Hastert agreed to buy his silence with three and a half million dollars in hush money. This is not an amount you would spend on like bullshit blackmail allegations.

58:10 Right.

58:10 This is a fortune.

58:11 Yeah.

58:12 That's a lot of money.

58:13 The financial crimes are the only ones Hastert was actually convicted over. His abuse of his students had occurred too long ago. The statute of limitations was up. But the resulting investigation and court case revealed at least four victims. And I don't know that I know of any... convicted pedophiles who had four victims and only four victims right.

58:34 Yeah once you're doing it a lot like.

58:36 Four came forward this is a guy who was abusing kids in his years long time as a wrestling coach he had other victims The judge in that case declared him a serial child molester. Now, the kind of abuse he engaged in varied. Sort of the most common thing that he did was he had a recliner that he set up outside of the boys' locker room.

58:59 What?

59:00 Jesus.

59:01 He also engaged in fondling and outright rape on at least one occasion in the form of forced oral sex. Make no mistake, Dennis Haster, was a serial child rapist and molester. During his court case, he made a... He stated that, Now. That was solid speaking out in court on her part. A lot of journalists and media figures could stand to take a lesson from that. The AP's obituary for him just read, Dennis Hastert, longtime Republican House Speaker who went to prison, dies at age 84.

59:46 Oh my God. Went to prison.

59:48 Went to prison. Like he went on a visit to check it out.

59:53 Why?

59:54 Yeah.

59:55 What could have happened there?

59:57 Now, Fox's main article on him did note, although I think this may have been, I'm not sure if this was like something they added after the fact, but it did call him like a child molester. However, and I'm going to quote here from an article in Yahoo News, Fox News gave former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert an in memoriam send off Monday, memorializing a man whom a federal judge called a serial child molester while relegating a sexual abuse of teenage boys to a brief reference to allegations that had tainted his reputation. As we go to break, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has died, Bayer said, as archival footage played beneath a banner reading. In memoriam, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert dies at 84. Bayer then highlighted

1:00:37 Hastert's political resume, noting that the Illinois Republican served as Speaker from 1999 to 2007, was the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in American history. Then came an extraordinarily sanitized depiction of why Hastert became one of the most disgraced political figures in modern American history. His reputation was later tainted by allegations he had molested athletes during his career as a teacher and wrestling coach, Baer said. He spent more than a year in prison.

1:01:00 Allegations? Allegations!

1:01:03 A judge called him a serial child molester. You don't have to say allegations anymore, Brett. You can just say he fucked kids. You're legally in the clear here. You're not going to get sued for just being a coward.

1:01:14 Point to the judge. Like, who's going to sue you? Dennis Hastert's people? Like, do they really want that discovery?

1:01:22 Like, yeah.

1:01:24 OK, man, go for it. Anyway, that's that's all I got.

1:01:30 Last Tuesday, in a short and unsigned order, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue sending people to countries that are not their own. It's a protest. It's often referred to as third country deportation. It's hard not to see this as just rendition, right? Like you're sending people to places where they have no ties, often to be tortured. The court will hear oral arguments about this in December, but for now, this practice can continue. This is manifesting in New York, for example, in the removal of people who have a status called withholding of removal.

1:02:05 According to reporting in the City Reporter and documented people with this status, which there's a very high burden of proof for this, right? Like it's a higher burden of proof than just saying it. People have to prove that they will be in danger if they're returned. They're being called into federal buildings for a, quote, ICE check-in. They're sent these like very brief letters or like document update or like some... Some pretext for bringing them into buildings where they're then detained and sent to third countries. Yeah.

1:02:37 The Trump administration has been doing this more and more. It is trying to find loopholes in the law, which is very clearly designed to protect very vulnerable people and prevent a risk of what is called chain refoulement. Chain refoulement, if you're not familiar, is a process whereby someone is sent back to their country where they have proven they're not safe by route of a third country. So let's say I'm trying to send garrison to Canada, but I send them to France and then France sends it to Canada, right?

1:03:05 People deported to third countries have faced torture, harassment, extortion, and worse. The Trump administration has managed to cajole nearly two dozen countries into accepting people this way. Previously, this practice was extremely rare. Obviously, rendition, which is not really an immigration procedure when it is carried out as rendition has happened before. There was also the practice of returning people to Mexico who had crossed the southern border. Biden did that. Trump won, did that, right? But those people weren't being removed when they had withholding of removal. They were being removed under Title 42, which is, again, legally distinct.

1:03:43 In several cases, there has been an effort by the states involved to cast doubt about who is legally responsible for people removed this way. So in the United States case, it claimed that people moved to Secod, if you remember that, scandal, I guess, a travesty, the US claimed that they were the responsibility of the Salvadoran government. The US then went on to broker a deal with Venezuela in which it returned them to Venezuela. Panama has claimed that people who are non-Panamanian there were in the custody of the UN, but the UN said that they were in the responsibility of the Panamanian government. The government clearly uses this practice, I guess, as a punishment. We can see it in the was offered a chance to be deported to Costa

1:04:26 Rica if he played guilty and threatened with Uganda if he did not. And you hear this a lot from people, migrants who have signed a quote-unquote self-deportation paperwork, perhaps saying, oh, I didn't want to get sent. Generally, the way they wave this is we'll send you to Africa. Large portions of the United States population still believe that Africa is a country, not a continent. This is an ongoing issue.

1:04:48 But for migrants who have never been anywhere in Africa... That is extremely scary, right? A continent where you know no one, where people's human rights are abused.

1:04:56 Well, and honestly, as you noted, James, we're probably, for most people, your only knowledge of the continent is like war and disease.

1:05:06 Yes, through this dark continent trope, right? Yes, people's understanding of Africa is extremely problematic, but it's understandable that people are very afraid.

1:05:14 But that influences why this is such a scary thing.

1:05:18 Yes, absolutely.

1:05:18 Yeah.

1:05:19 So let's take the example of more than a dozen people who have been sent to Eswatini. They were held in a maximum security prison without meaningful access to counsel. For nine months, the government there prevented them from meeting a local attorney and denied them unmonitored calls to attorneys in the United States. The government of Eswatini has repeatedly said that they want to participate in chain refoulement, saying the goal of the procedure was, quote, facilitating their eventual repatriation.

1:05:48 This is happening all over the world, like right out in the open. It's a very clear attempt to evade the protections that these people have. Evidently, international law is not a real thing for powerful countries, and that's what we're seeing here. All of this comes as ISIS once again surging arrests. They were in San Diego. ISIS SRT were in San Diego today. There's been a sharp increase reported in Los Angeles. These call-ins are happening more and more in New York. Like I think we can probably expect to see them doing liberal cities before the midterms.

1:06:23 They're all over Chicago right now too.

1:06:25 Yeah.

1:06:26 Yeah.

1:06:27 They're really going after it at this time. And I think that's because it's red meat to their base, right? They want to kind of own the libs, especially in New York where Mamdani has had success, right? And they don't like that. It is also going to result in people who have every right to go to the polls and vote being afraid to do so.

1:06:45 Yeah.

1:06:46 And that is not a coincidence. This is all part of a coordinated strategy going into next month.

1:06:55 Now, that's what we talked about a little bit last week with this new save verification system. And part of the system... is so that people who are eligible to vote might be too scared to even register to vote if the system flags you as a non-citizen and then puts you into contact with ICE. And even if you are, you know, legally here, maybe you're living with someone who isn't.

1:07:16 And it could just scare people out of exercising their right to vote.

1:07:20 Yeah, maybe you just don't think it's worth all that stress, right? You don't want those people around your neighbourhood. Like, all of those are very real concerns. Especially if you feel like your vote, you know, doesn't matter or... Whatever. It's all part of voter suppression.

1:07:36 It's a really advanced and insidious tactic of voter suppression. Yeah. Obviously, the Trump administration wants as few people to vote in these midterms as possible.

1:07:46 Yeah.

1:07:47 Certainly going forward. Yeah. Speaking of voting, it could happen here as well as two other Cool Zone Media shows, Behind the Bastards and Weird Little Guys, are nominated for a Signal Award. which is not related to the encrypted messaging app. As cool as that would be.

1:08:04 As cool as that would be if they had a podcast award for some reason. As opposed to an award for the people who have said the most things on Signal that they would not have wanted to say on any other app.

1:08:16 Which is, I think we might.

1:08:18 Also be in contention for a victory.

1:08:20 Reward for most bonkers group chat would also be.

1:08:24 Yeah, oh my God. If you would like to vote for us for the Signal Awards, voting is open until October 15th. This is good prep if you intend to vote for the midterms. I know voting is scary. Not everyone believes in it, but if you could at least vote in the Signal Awards, that would be appreciated.

1:08:41 This is not electoralism, folks.

1:08:43 No.

1:08:45 This is not going to give us any power. It will give some of us small statues.

1:08:49 I don't know. I think it is harm reduction to beat Prof G Market. Yeah.

1:08:53 Can I just say one of these people repudents? Fuck me.

1:08:56 Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:56 We gotta beat g markets prof g markets the fuck is g markets my god yeah yeah prof g it's a it's an economist who talks every fucking day about capital markets i cannot imagine what that does to the human soul why nightmare i mean i don't i guess not why but yeah We.

1:09:15 Are polling at 41%.

1:09:17 We are a few points ahead, but it's still fluctuating. So if you would like to be a big part.

1:09:21 Yeah, if you're in line, stay in line.

1:09:22 Stay in line. If you want to be a big part of helping beat profigy markets, follow the link.

1:09:28 And some other shit there.

1:09:30 And some others.

1:09:30 Housing Wire Daily polling at 1%.

1:09:33 LOL. Yeah.

1:09:34 Owned.

1:09:35 Look, you can't stop Flavio Bolsonaro from winning in Brazil, but we can stop him from winning a Signal Award. And of course, by that, I mean... Prof G would clearly hand his Signal Award over to the Bolsonaros. We all know that. A vote for Prof G is a vote for Jair Bolsonaro to win the Signal Awards.

1:09:54 When I discovered this was happening, I did go on the Prof G Market's YouTube and they were discussing what the Bolsonaro would mean for the market.

1:10:02 Well, there you go.

1:10:03 There you go. Let's not look any further into that, James.

1:10:05 Let's not look any further into that.

1:10:08 I have a high threshold for stress, but I wasn't able to watch that. I've seen too much.

1:10:13 But what will the markets think?

1:10:14 What will the markets think? They'll think vote for CoolZone. Yeah.

1:10:18 If you would like to help us beat Prop G, follow the link in the show notes.

1:10:23 Does G stand for Jair? No, because that's spelled with a J.

1:10:26 But it might.

1:10:27 Theoretically, it might, you know. Vote for us just in case.

1:10:31 Yeah.

1:10:31 Yeah.

1:10:31 If you want to email us, it's CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. Unless you're a marketing person, then go fuck yourself.

1:10:37 We reported the news. We reported the news. Thanks for listening.