Executive Disorder: ICE Shooting in NYC, Russian Diesel and Ukraine, Protests Around the World

0:08 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder.

0:11 Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you.

0:16 I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and Sophie Lichterman.

0:22 Not allegedly. Yeah, no, that's definitely Sophie. You can't prove it's me. I can prove it's you. Sophie.

0:27 Sophie.

0:29 You have no idea where I am, Sophie, or what I'm doing. I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you're doing.

0:37 This is the first episode where we're testing AI Robert.

0:40 Oh, no. We're not testing. There's no AI Robert. Don't yell at me. I'm Blue Sky. It is the shit. You'll know there's no AI Robert because they would have trained an AI Robert on like the subreddit and all of the different jokes that I can no longer do because people have taken it too seriously. Like if I start talking about a child hunting island, like you'll know it's the AI me.

1:04 It'll pull like a bagel throwing reference from like nine years ago.

1:08 Yeah, all of a sudden you start talking about Doritos like you did 10 years ago.

1:14 Yeah, talking about Doritos like 10 years ago or talking about the Jamie Loftus murder thing, which I don't do anymore because now there's a real serial killer in the area that people were making comments about. And being like, what is it, Jamie? I'm like, guys, there's really people dead. We don't keep the bit up at this point. All right.

1:29 Here.

1:30 This episode, we're covering the week of October 7th to October 14th. And we're actually going to jump straight to our first main story. Last Thursday afternoon, October 8th, ICE shot a 28-year-old man named Oscar Belgal in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, which is physically located in the Bronx, but technically in the borough of Manhattan.

1:55 Oscar was in a car with his five-year-old son.

1:59 Per video released.

2:01 By the NYPD, around 4 p.m., just in the middle of the day, masked plainclothes agents, some wearing yellow construction vests, ran up to a parked car with guns already drawn, The driver, Oscar, started backing away, and then an agent began hitting the car windows with the butt of his gun. Oscar then pulls into the street and drives off screen, as agents point their guns at the windshield. The actual shooting itself is not captured on this video, but I'll play it here for us to reference. This is security camera footage.

2:38 Yeah.

2:38 One of the things that was like noticeably unsettling besides all of it was the fact that like these guys were dressed like crossing guards, like construction workers, crossing guards. They had like on normal clothes and then just like a high vis vest.

2:55 Yeah.

2:55 Which, you know, if somebody in a high vis vest and a Machine gun comes towards me.

3:03 That's scary.

3:04 They look like, like, especially the guy with the long gun. He looks like a mass shooter. They look like fucking mass shooters. Like, I would not assume those were police officers. And I might take steps to defend myself in that situation because they just look like fucking mass shooters.

3:17 Correct.

3:17 Mayor Zora Mamdani said, quote, There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents. School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children.

3:28 Unquote.

3:30 According to the NYPD, at least one agent fired seven shots. We do not have footage of the actual shooting. As I said, Oscar's five-year-old son was in the backseat of the car. Thank God he is physically unharmed. But, of course, he still had to watch masked men with guns run up, shoot his dad in the neck, and drag his body away.

3:54 Jesus Christ.

3:56 DHS Secretary Mullen said that agents were not aware a kid was in the car.

4:01 Uh-huh, because they didn't care. Air check.

4:04 Shoot first, ask questions later.

4:06 The child's mother told Governor Hochul that her son is traumatized and won't talk.

4:13 Quote, the child is not speaking.

4:16 That's terrible. Yeah, I mean, sure, of course.

4:19 Jesus.

4:20 That's horrible, you guys. I mean, I can't really think of anything worse that could happen to a child than to watch their parent shot in the neck at random when, like, in a normally safe situation like that. Jesus Christ.

4:34 ICE has still not released body cam footage of the shooting. DHS has said that they were conducting a, quote, targeted enforcement operation and that Oscar, quote, weaponized his vehicle. This is the thing they always say when something.

4:49 Like this happens. Spoiler plate ass statement. DHS also claimed that after Vice shot and arrested Oscar, agents, quote, rendered first aid and then took him to the hospital. This is a lie. This did not happen. This is a plain-faced lie from DHS. Body camera footage released by NYPD from when they first got to the scene, when the cops got to the scene, show Oscar... just sitting in the street, bleeding out, with his hands handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by ICE agents who are just standing in a circle around him, offering no assistance. Yeah, and they do this all the fucking time when they shoot someone. They just stand there and handcuff them. The NYPD rushes over in this footage, picks up and carries Oscar, who now

5:33 appears to be going unconscious. They take Oscar into a squad car, they render aid, put pressure on the wound, and drive him to the hospital down the street. Do you know how hard it is to have less concern for human life than the New York Police Department?

5:46 My God. That's astonishing. That takes some work.

5:51 Jesus Christ.

5:53 We're reaching average Los Angeles Sheriff's Deputy levels of empathy here. It's shocking.

5:58 It's like the CPD detectives they brought in to do torture after 9-11.

6:02 That kind of shit.

6:06 We don't really know what would have happened if NYPD did not get to the scene as quick as they did. In the body camera footage of them carrying Oscar, his body is fully limp.

6:19 He's out of it.

6:19 He looks like he's been shot in the neck.

6:22 NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation prior to this point, prior to the shooting.

6:28 Quite frankly, this kind of shit isn't what they do. They do other bad things, but they don't just like, shoot and, like, charge people's cars with guns when they're, like, driving away from school with their, like, that's just, that's, this is so much of an escalation of, like, our normal police bullshit, is what I'm saying.

6:46 DHS has tried to justify their targeting of Oscar, calling him a, quote, criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic.

6:53 Great.

6:53 And pointed to prior arrests and a criminal conviction for grand larceny. And claim Oscar's, quote, associated... With a gang. That's the word they keep using. Associated or association. They won't even say he's like a member. They'll say he's associated with a gang.

7:12 Yeah.

7:13 I'll play a short clip here from the mayor's press conference later that evening, just down the street from the site of the shooting.

7:21 There is no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a five-year-old in the car.

7:30 There is no explanation.

7:31 We are standing here so close to the site of where this actually took place. And look at how many people live right here. This is a residential neighborhood. We are right here by a subway. And the pretext of ICE is, in their words, to keep this country safe. How is it keeping anyone safe to have, as you just heard from the police commissioner, individuals wearing construction vests in masks with long guns? Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street. And when it comes to ICE, it begs the question, what's the difference? There is no explanation for this.

8:11 After the shooting, soon-to-be DSA Congresswoman Daria Liza Avila-Chavier quickly went up to the Bronx and saw that federal agents were going door-to-door, quote-unquote, collecting evidence and trying to question residents about the shooting, writing down people's names and numbers. So Daria Liza followed behind these HSI agents, informing residents that they did not need to speak to or answer questions from these federal agents. Meanwhile, soon-to-be former congressman Adriano Espaillat And Oscar's own family weren't allowed.

8:43 To see Oscar at the hospital.

8:44 Jesus.

8:46 Now, outside the hospital where Oscar is being treated, a few hundred New Yorkers gathered to protest ICE and the shooting of one of their neighbors. Earlier in the evening, ICE vehicles were driving through protesters. But pretty quickly, NYPD arrived to do crowd control and clear the street for vehicles to enter and exit the hospital. This led to violent shoving matches over metal fence barricades that NYPD was trying to set up around the street. Daria Liza moved to this protest, and she was trying to de-escalate conflict.

9:18 But NYPD got very aggressive, and Daria Liza was shoved to the ground by a community affairs officer. The NYPD blue shirts.

9:25 The ones that are, you know, supposed to de-escalate conflict at protests. Yeah, average example of community affairs is shoving a congressperson to the ground. I arrived at the hospital just after this first big clash over police barricades, during which NYPD arrested five protesters. After that, things seemed to settle down for a little bit. The crowd got smaller, and about like a little over an hour later, just before 11 p.m., police rapidly cleared the street again, pushing protesters onto the sidewalk as a small caravan of feds departed the hospital at dangerously high speeds.

10:06 They were zooming by. This is our right! This is our right! Ice just pulled away. The crowd chased them a little bit.

10:25 It's 10.40 p.m. We've got a group of NYPD now leaving the area, and the crowd is falling behind, yelling at them as well.

10:38 Again, NYPD is putting off into two directions.

10:44 Oscar was in one of these vehicles leaving the hospital. After the feds left the hospital, the crowd continued to dwindle to about 40 people who then marched up over the bridge to protest in front of Zoran's press conference. At the press conference, Zoran said that for the past two hours, he had been on the phone negotiating with President Trump and Secretary Mullen for Oscar's release, but that those negotiations were unsuccessful. I think it is worth noting here that earlier this year, Trump did release someone from ICE custody following a request by Mayor Mamdani. With the cries of protesters heard in the background, the mayor reiterated calls for ICE to be abolished, saying, quote, ICE is

11:28 rotten to its core, operates with impunity, sows chaos and terror across our country, and they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could have ever claimed to save.

11:40 I stand here not just as the mayor of our city, but as someone who is proud to be an immigrant in our city. And I know that these kinds of raids, this kind of terrorizing of this city, leaves the three million immigrants of this city asking if they are safe here, if they belong here, if this too can be their home here. We will not normalize ISIS's viciousness. We will not accept its cruelty. We know, and I have said this directly, whether to the president or to the public, ICE undermines public safety. It makes us less safe. New York City will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers. And we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward time and again. This is an agency that must be abolished.

12:30 Commissioner Jessica Tisch then gave some more details about the shooting, some of which I've already echoed. but also read off Oscar's NYPD rap sheet.

12:40 Average commissioner to shh, move.

12:42 Including two prior arrests, one for robbery, which he pleaded guilty to and received probation, and another for drug possession. When Zoran got the microphone back, he again undermined ISIS legitimacy and said that while negotiating with the president and Secretary Mullen, He requested ICE agents leave the scene entirely and demanded that ICE stop its enforcement actions in the city.

13:05 There is no justification for what we have seen today. And we know that what we have seen today is but a microcosm of what ICE does on a daily basis across this country. How can that be how we describe public safety?

13:19 It can't be.

13:20 And I've shared that with the president. I've shared that with the secretary. This city wants ICE out. We want ICE out of our city, ICE out of our schools, ICE out of our hospitals, ICE out of our streets, ICE away from our kids. We want that because we want to keep the city safe. We do not need them to do so. All they do is terrorize the city.

13:41 Now, the people chanting outside the press conference weren't just protesting ICE, but also the NYPD and Zoran himself, with chants of, quote, Mamdani is complicit. most of the ire directed at Mayor Mamdani was due to NYPD facilitating ICE's exit by clearing protesters in front of the hospital off the street before the agents sped off. After leaving the hospital, DHS moved Oscar to New Jersey and then back to New York, where he's currently in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center. On Monday, Oscar's lawyers released a statement, quote, Mr.

14:20 Belgal is living through an unimaginable nightmare. While he is currently in solitary confinement, a bullet remains lodged in his neck. The left side of his face is numb and he can barely hear out of his left ear. Doctors have told him he urgently needs surgery, unquote.

14:39 Awful.

14:40 A federal judge has also temporarily blocked Oscar's deportation. The day after the shooting, Daria Lisa called for NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to step down in a statement, quote, Last night, the NYPD and Commissioner Tisch violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies and fueled the Trump administration's attempts to demonize our communities. The NYPD's strategic response group, or the SRG, must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down. New York City DSA also released a statement, of which I'll quote a small portion of. ICE's devastating shooting of a New Yorker in front of his child cannot stand. Neither can the NYPD's attack on New Yorkers who stood up for

15:25 their neighbors. ICE is a terrorist agency that must be expelled from New York City and abolished. Jessica Tisch must get ICE out of New York and end NYPD complicity with these terrorists. If the commissioner can't put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired, unquote. Now, initial reports claim that SRG, the strategic response group, was deployed to handle this protest at the hospital. And this is notable because Zoran ran on disbanding the SRG. And right now, any SRG deployment must get approval from City Hall, according to reporting from Politico. So the idea that Mamdani personally sent the SRG to crack skulls of anti-ice protesters fueled a lot of the anger coming from protesters that night.

16:11 The SRG, or the Strategic Response Group, is a specialized unit within the NYPD, which focuses on counterterrorism.

16:20 But also policing protests. They're sort of the city's de facto riot cops. The unit has been long criticized for violently suppressing political protest. The SRG did not respond to that protest, though. Instead, NYPD sent officers from community affairs, as mentioned, and the transit bureau's, quote, anti-terrorism unit, which doesn't need city hall's direct sign-off. So while Zoran did not personally send the SRG to crack down on this protest, the violence from NYPD demonstrates that this issue is bigger than just one specific unit. But there is this larger question of like crowd control at these protests. And I think this question demonstrates the diverging interests on the part of protesters and city hall. Some protesters are want no

17:16 NYPD crowd control. People want to directly fight ICE, and they're willing to put their body on the line, even if that means they might get hurt. As we've seen in other cities, physical confrontations against ICE could result in DHS sending more troops to New York, possibly triggering a political crisis, which some on the left also desire. There is a sort of acceleration spent towards some of these protests.

17:38 They kind of want this political crisis, and they want to directly fight and oppose ICE. On the other hand, for someone in Zoran's position, there's a desire to prevent ICE agents from hurting more people, whether by running people over or shooting more New Yorkers. I think all of these questions definitely exist in the shadow of Minneapolis. And furthermore, the mayor wants to limit the amount of DHS and ICE agents deployed to the city. So to that end, NYPD may end up doing some level of crowd control to limit protesters' interactions with ICE to avoid provoking a larger deployment. So even if protesters and Zoran have similar ultimate goals vis-a-vis ICE, their respective positions lead them to

18:21 contradictory impulses. Zoran has said that he will not justify the use of force against protesters on Thursday night and told MSNOW he'll be conducting a review of the entire 24-hour period, quote, from the ICE shooting to the NYPD response to the incident and the ensuing protests to ICE's use of a privately owned parking lot as a staging location, to every tool that we have at our disposal to keep New Yorkers safe, unquote.

18:47 And on one of those last parts, AOC has also mentioned this, that ICE has been using the rooftop parking lot of a Target in the Bronx to stage before going out to do arrests. And that's something that electeds are looking to crack down on if they can. But Zoran has said that there are no plans to replace Commissioner Tisch. pointing to her history of uprooting NYPD corruption in the later Adams administration and the record low number of murders, shootings, and shooting victims. But Zoran has reiterated multiple times this week his intention to disband the SRG and said he will provide an update on that timeline in the coming months. Also to the dismay of the police union... The mayor announced this week that his administration

19:32 will be conducting the first comprehensive review of NYPD use of force policies and practices for the first time in a decade and will crack down on officers getting out of misconduct proceedings by retiring before disciplinary action can take place. After this was announced, there was a very angry situation.

19:50 statement from the police union about this. And because New York has already ended qualified immunity, the biggest thing City Hall could do to undermine police power is to move certain public safety and administrative roles outside of the NYPD, which Zorn wants to do with the Department of Community Safety, but that has faced budgetary constraints, especially following the discovery of the $ 12 billion deficit left over by Mayor Adams. Now, 10 months into his administration, Zoran has not been eager to spend political capital taking on the NYPD. Where he has been spending political capital, it's mostly been to strengthen labor, investing in the Department of Consumer and creating and enforcing

20:31 a new click-to-cancel rule to crack down on impossible-to-end subscriptions, winning hundreds of millions of dollars for delivery workers, fighting to pass the Delivery Protection Act to strengthen Amazon workers' right to unionize, and partnering with labor unions to modernize the process of applying for city jobs and launching the Mayor's Office of Worker Power. This is in addition to universal childcare and the rent freeze which just went into effect earlier this month. But after attending protests this week, my general sense is that when it comes to NYPD and ICE, protesters want more than just well-worded statements and these reviews. They want to see more actionable change, whether that's using his position as mayor as a sort of

21:16 bully pulpit to rally the masses against ICE or employ more direct measures to protect New Yorkers from ICE. What those measures may be is not entirely clear. And if the left wants to be effective in agitating for larger social change, beyond making just general demands of electeds, it may be worth closely considering why an elected is taking certain actions, the constraints of their power and the contradictions inherent to holding office, so that those not in office can apply targeted outside pressure to counteract the pressure coming from the federal and state level, and just the pressures of governing itself. Though firing Tisch may please some of Zoran's left-wing base, more broadly, it is politically risky and

22:03 could damage Zoran as he tries to enact his economic agenda while contending with a centrist governor and a very hostile federal administration. From City Hall's perspective, choosing to go to war with the NYPD right now could undermine Zoran's ability to protect New York from ICE, whether by limiting the scale of ICE operations, or ideally keeping ICE out of the city entirely. Of course, none of this means that people should stop protesting. Protesting is the crucial thing that could apply pressure here. But it's also going to have to be more than 400 of New York's most left-wing protesters. It's going to have to require mass engagement.

22:40 But the thing I wanted to emphasize here at the end is that a socialist elected to an executive position and a protester and an organizer outside of government are very different kinds of political actors, whose positions strongly influence the actions they take, or may be inclined to take. Protests supply an important pressure on city leaders to pursue certain aims, but our political analysis must take account of the balance of forces within the state. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I'm sure Mia does.

23:12 Yeah, well, I think part of what's happening here on a broader scale is that, like, One of the reasons that ICE has been successful over the last, call it like three or four months, in significant escalations of raids, and we've talked about this a little bit on this show, but there have been huge escalations in raids in Texas and raids in Florida. And there's also been kind of beneath the notice of people who aren't there, a really significant escalation in places like Minneapolis and But they're doing it quietly. They're not fighting with protesters. They're going in, they're grabbing people, and they're leaving. And I think this is one of the things the protesters are thinking about to some extent, which is part of why their calculus

24:00 is different in the mayor's office, because one of the things that's been allowing all of this to happen is that ICE has been able to do this smoothly. The fact that they'll do it smoothly, quietly, and without disturbing the broader public order. is a big part of how they've been able to really ramp up rates without the kind of mass resistance that we saw earlier in the year. And, you know, but this leads you to like a structural problem with, you know, like with the position of someone, of someone holding office, which is that like a holding office in the U S does not give you a monopoly on violence because the police are effectively a semi-independent force. And, you know, you can, do oversight on them to some

24:45 extent but you know as long as you're sending them there even if you tell them hey don't beat up protesters like they're going to go beat up congress people and then you have a secondary problem which is that like if you're running the government of new york your job is to maintain public order yeah and the way that you defeat ice is through breaking public order and this puts you inherently in tension with the state itself when in a position where mondani ends up being aligned like, structurally with the police trying to do protest control, right?

25:19 And this is just sort of, like, the structural limits of what kind of power you actually hold in the United States when you are elected. Because, yeah, like, no, like, we're keeping on fucking Adams-era police commissioner because. If you want to try to have the body that's nominally enforcing your legitimacy on violence, you have to go to war with people who can fight you. And that's just a huge structural problem with power in the American government.

25:52 Yeah, and Tisch was also retained. essentially following requests from Hochul as a sort of like sign to Hochul that like Zorn will still be like a competent administrator, essentially. It was assigned to her to kind of get her on board during the general election.

26:09 Yeah.

26:10 And then also, you know, extract economic wins and revenue from the state so that Mamdani can have the funding for things like universal childcare. And that was one of the calculations that was made. And he did like announce his intention to retain her during During the campaign. So this wasn't, is it, this isn't necessarily one of his campaign promises, the way abolishing SRG is.

26:30 Yeah.

26:30 And which he seems to be still trying to work on and you can apply, but as we see from, you know, NYC DSA, Zoran's political home, a pressure can still be applied on both of these things.

26:41 Yeah.

26:41 And, and, and should be in that pressure is necessary. Even if that means you're going to be going against someone who is like, you know, an economic ally, right. In terms of, in terms of how he's trying to run the city. But there are going to be these contradictions that part of the left winning power in these places means we have to deal with those contradictions. You have to go through them, not just avoid them. You can't just avoid a conflict here. You have to pursue it with focus and determination. I think sometimes, at least in conversations in New York over the NYPD aspect, I definitely do not want to distract from the ice angle here as there is a man with a bullet still literally in his neck. And I hope that that gets

27:22 some more focus in these next few days. Because that situation has not resolved itself.

27:29 Yeah.

27:44 In the episode description, I will link New York City's immigration resources, the Immigration Legal Support Hotline, the intake form for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative for people facing the threat of detention or deportation, as well as the Know Your Rights booklets that the city offers in multiple languages.

28:04 It's time for us to go on an ad break, and then we will return for more news, because it has been a busy week. We are back. Let's now go through some of our small things here. Mia, do you want to start us off?

28:30 Yeah. So speaking of the filmed shooting of people in America, Pete Hegseth has announced that he is planning to live stream the execution by firing squad of the 2009 Fort Hood shooter. He announced this by email. Quote tweeting a CBS News tweet about the Pentagon's plan with a quote tweet that says, quote, correct. And that's that's how it was announced by the U.S. government that we were going to execute a man by firing squad. A thing that the military hasn't executed someone in 65 years.

29:07 And live streamed.

29:08 The live streaming part specifically is that is 30s lynching shit.

29:13 That's crazy. Like, to be honest, I don't support the death penalty for the military. Like, the state shouldn't be doing that, in my opinion. But among death penalty options, I don't care about, like, a firing squad. Like, I actually think that's more ethical than the fucking lethal injections they're doing. But live streaming? It's depraved. It's sick shit. Yeah.

29:32 That also just more so points to the brutality of lethal injection, despite it being this, yeah yeah you know thing that's marketed as like as as like peaceful and like civil.

29:40 I'm not saying it's nice to shoot yeah it's also horrible it's much worse than shooting them.

29:45 Like yeah the fact that lethal injection is by all accounts actually a more horrific way to die it's a nightmare then then a literal firing squad is itself crazy If you know what you're doing, a bullet's quick. But I mean, the live streaming thing is insane.

30:00 Yeah, it's horrible. Like, obviously, there's been widespread condemnation of this. The people who have been really in support of this have been a bunch of the worst Silicon Valley fascists. There was a quote from Palmer Luckey, who is one of the founders of Andriel, which is a Silicon Valley weapons manufacturer we've talked about.

30:19 They make drones. They make a bunch of other shit.

30:22 Who said, quote, And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary, it is normal, good, and aligned with our natural order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself.

30:41 And the thing I would say about this is to everyone who wants to do this, like, are you sure you want to live in the world where you've opened this door?

30:51 Yeah.

30:51 Like, are you sure you want what follows? Do you want us to talk about live streaming executions? Because I will tell you, I don't think a lot of Americans want to watch this execution live stream, but there are some executions I can imagine a lot of Americans would want to watch on a live stream. Read up on your Chochescu is all I'm saying about this. Look at your poll numbers and read about Chochescu. Yeah.

31:15 You can't help but think of like, When our term comes, we shall make no excuse for the terror.

31:20 Like, I'm there, baby. I've never understood those words so much as I do now.

31:28 I would prefer that that door remains shut because I don't think you should be publicly executing people. I don't think you should be publicly executing people on livestream. But, like, you're opening this fucking door. If that's what we're doing.

31:38 It's like.

31:40 I can I can agree. Perhaps the country would be better if everyone couldn't buy an AR-15. But you opened the door. So I have like six. Right.

31:50 It's also it has been reported that Trump is debating canceling the live stream only after he learned that the shooter was paralyzed, which is very interesting.

32:02 My every now and then you get like a little insight into the fact that Trump does have some kind of moral schema in his head, and it's always baffling when you get a hint of how it really looks. It's always just completely unhinged. I mean, that just might be an optics thing, too.

32:20 Yeah, that is an optics thing, but it's showing his awareness of the moral component and the optics.

32:29 Yeah, exactly. It's just nuts. It's just like, that was your line, huh?

32:33 Maybe.

32:34 Like, okay.

32:36 Oh, God.

32:37 All right.

32:39 Quick update here.

32:41 On Thursday, President Trump did, in fact, cancel the planned live stream of the Fort Hood shooter's execution.

32:49 Moving on.

32:51 On Monday, DHS and HSI Homeland Security Investigations raided the D.C. home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. This follows confirmation at the midterm RNC from Secretary Mullen that There's an investigation into the allegations of immigration fraud made against Omar, based on a years-old racist conspiracy theory. After the raid on Monday, Ilhan made a statement, quote, I'm okay. Make no mistake, this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced, unquote.

33:37 It's also worth noting, like, we're coming up on the elections, and this is the shit that's happening right now.

33:42 Quick update here. Shortly after recording, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration's investigations into Representative Omar is specifically aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. We will likely talk about this more next week.

34:03 I do want to take us a little bit further from the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There's a long ongoing conflict there between the Congolese government and the rebel group M23, which is backed by the Rwandan state. Eric Prince and his mercenary corporation Vectus have been contracted by the Congolese government to fight against M23.

34:27 What I'm talking about actually happened on September 17th, but we just found out about it within the last couple of days. During intense fighting in the Minemwe Highlands, a group of Prince's mercenaries were ambushed and roughly 20 of them were killed or injured. This came after a clash earlier in September in which several Colombian contractors were killed.

34:46 During this most recent ambush, a New Zealand military veteran was killed. And an American named Tim Kennedy, who was a former Green Beret, and then after being a Green Beret, a former UFC fighter, was badly injured. I think he got shot three times in the leg. Sounds like there's a good chance he'll lose a leg, but I don't really know for certain. and was evac'd and wound up eventually at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. So there's a couple of things about this. First off, I've seen people being like, why is the U.S. military paying for the health care of a mercenary? Because he's a veteran.

35:18 It's not weird that he went to a military hospital, right? He's entitled to that, to health care of that kind. The bigger issue is that Eric Prince has a mercenary corporation that's active in the Congo. Things do not seem to be going well for Prince or for Vectus in the Congo. Although, again, we don't know that we just know 20 injured and killed. I don't know how many killed.

35:36 I don't know what their nationalities were. They're not a real military. So they don't have to tell anybody that shit.

35:41 Right.

35:41 Yeah. Once James is back, I'm sure we'll put together an episode covering in more detail like what's happening in the Congo, because that's important. And it's not really a topic we've covered a lot on this show. As a little bit of a fun note, because this really pissed off a lot of people on X, the everything app, like a lot of right wingers who are angry that turns out U.S. special forces guys aren't nearly as badass without air support. Yeah, they can just get killed in the jungle like anybody else. Bullets don't discriminate on how much training or whatever you have, how cool you look in pictures. So this started a discourse that ended ultimately with a poll and a week long discussion as to

36:16 whether or not all of Europe in 1939 could conquer modern 2026 Africa. 78% of X voted they believe 1939 Europe. Let me tell you something, folks. This is objectively true. Anyone who knows anything about modern 20th century warfare will tell you it wouldn't take all of Africa. Egypt alone could wipe out 1939 Europe. to the man militarily without a single soldier landing in Africa. They have Rafale fighters.

36:43 They have 1,100 Abrams tanks. Even if you were to take somehow and magically transport all of the tanks in Europe in 1939. And remember, in 1939, none of the cool shit from World War II existed yet, by the way. The German army, I mean, it ended the war horse-based, but it was really horse-based in 1939, right? They're going to take all of the tanks, every armored vehicle, and put them against just Egypt's Abrams tanks. And by the way, there's 600 T-90 tanks or something like that in Algeria.

37:11 I don't know how many Abrams tanks fucking Morocco has, but it's a lot. But if you take just Egypt's Abrams tanks, there was not a single man or vehicle portable weapon on the planet that could pierce Chabam armor in 1939. The battle would be over in seconds.

37:24 Yeah.

37:28 Anyway, one of the more amusing pieces of derangement online lately. Oh, God, I just love it when people are crazy. That's what I got.

37:37 One of the other things that James, I assume James will want to talk more once he gets back, is early this week, J.D. Vance, as part of his fraud task force, announced big crackdowns on H-1B visas at Microsoft and J-1 visas at universities.

37:54 Hmm. So this is.

37:55 Something that does deserve more dedicated focus in a future episode. Netflix this week has laid off about 1,000 employees.

38:04 That's roughly 6% of their workforce.

38:07 Oh, it sucks.

38:08 Before Paramount acquired Warner Brothers, Netflix was trying to acquire Warner Brothers. In election news, but an even cooler kind, Sean Fain and his left-wing slate at United UAW just swept the United Auto Worker elections.

38:26 We are the incumbents now.

38:28 Yes, yes, yes.

38:29 Just totally demolished. And look, do some of us find it entertaining that his name sounds a lot like the Irish political party Sinn Féin?

38:38 Of course.

38:40 That's all I have to say.

38:41 How much did he win by, Ger?

38:44 Sion Féin won with 67.98%. To runner up Rich Boyer's 14%. Nice work, Rich. I'll glitter it.

38:57 Nailed it. You really hit the zeitgeist there, my man.

39:01 You think that like regular politicians have incumbency advantage? You have never seen a union election.

39:06 Oh, my God. Especially a union election for a guy who like made things better in the union. Like, damn.

39:13 Yeah, yeah.

39:14 Yeah, there's just a Catholic school in Oregon that fired their football coach because he won by too much.

39:18 Oh, yeah.

39:19 He was scoring points when it was just kind of mean. I feel that way about Sean, where it's like, okay, man, did you really need 67% of the votes?

39:26 For details, by the way, that guy ran an upset an onside kick before halftime up 57 so that's some sicko shit but also I.

39:37 Did not know Sean had game like that yeah Starting this week, the White House has a new press secretary, Katie Zachariah. And I'll be the first to say she's doing great.

39:50 She's amazing work. You know, no notes. I think we can move on, right?

39:56 I adore my family.

39:57 I love them.

39:58 They are my priority. I love being with my kids. The idea of not spending evenings with my kids is completely unacceptable.

40:08 So my president, excuse me, my husband... That's a good one.

40:13 My husband is out here.

40:15 Incredible.

40:16 Oh, my God.

40:16 Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Incredible slip. Oh, my God. Is she the one that was like claiming to be a lawyer? Yes.

40:25 Yes.

40:26 In China.

40:27 In China.

40:27 She passed the bar in China. Let me be clear. No, she didn't. Like, I would.

40:36 Bet my life she did not pass the bar in China. Like, I am that certain.

40:41 Wow.

40:41 Like, I am as certain of that as I am certain that 90% of people who write about Taiwanese politics can't name three Taiwanese cities. I don't know, Mia. She seems to have a pretty solid grasp of foreign policy.

40:53 Let's hear her Mandarin.

40:55 Here's her talking about Venezuela.

40:58 He had a historic one-day war, and now we have a booming economy and a great relationship with Venezuela.

41:07 Incredible.

41:08 I'm looking forward to covering her.

41:10 I don't know what you're talking about.

41:12 This is going to be great.

41:13 By the way, for people who can't see this clip, the amazing part is she, when she stops before she says Venezuela, she is looking down at the page.

41:22 She looks down at her notes. To remember what country she's talking about. Got it. Incredible stuff.

41:29 We could do a whole episode about this first press conference. There's some great clips going around if you want to have fun.

41:35 God.

41:37 Less fun, on the afternoon of October 7th in Sacramento, a day after the county began mailing out ballots, an SUV pulled up to a USPS mail truck. A masked man got out of the SUV and stole trays of mail from the truck. Residents have reported their mail-in ballots are now missing.

41:56 Great stuff happening here.

41:57 Love this country. A few days later, the National Guard were videoed standing in front of Ballot drop boxes in D.C. They claimed that they were not legally guarding the boxes because that's illegal. But they were meandering in front of ballot drop boxes.

42:20 Yeah. God.

42:23 Not great stuff just a few weeks before the election. Lastly, while addressing a MAGA crowd in Tennessee... Trump made this very accurate comment.

42:37 No, it's true.

42:38 No, there's such love. It's like, like, I mean, it's amazing. When you stand up here, it's just like the love. I could say the stupidest things and you're clapping, oh, I love you so much.

42:54 That's true.

42:56 But we don't say the stupidest things. We say things of common sense.

42:59 There's someone clapping to that.

43:05 He knows his fans.

43:06 What can you say?

43:07 He certainly does. And speaking of fans, I have a segment here for us.

43:13 It is sports season for me.

43:16 With the WNBA and MLB playoffs going on and the NBA season starting, it's exciting.

43:21 I have not approved this message.

43:23 Fuck off.

43:24 It's exciting for.

43:25 Me, but it also means I'm exposed to television commercial advertisements.

43:29 Oh, my God.

43:30 It's so bad.

43:30 Besides the alarming number of sports betting ads, a new trend I'm upset about is AI ads targeting seniors.

43:37 Let's take a listen.

43:39 Can you go to my calendar and find me a half an hour tomorrow so I can mail some of these cookies to my grandson?

43:45 I've added a post office trip at 10. All right, Esther, we're ready. ChatGPT boys.

43:51 ChatGPT boys got a whole lot more useful.

43:54 It's no longer just answering questions.

43:57 It's better at getting things done.

44:03 Let me show you an example.

44:05 Can you go into my finances and let me know if you see any duplicate charges?

44:08 Jesus.

44:09 Checking your accounts.

44:10 Okay, it looks like you're paying twice for a magazine called Sound and Stereo.

44:14 Well, that's odd. Can you cancel the duplicate and send an e-refund? Of course. So you're just giving it access to your bank details as an old person. That doesn't seem like it'll lead you to getting scammed anymore. Yeah, I was pretty angry when I first saw that.

44:28 I thought I was being irrationally angry, but now I think I'm just rational and that it sucks.

44:32 I can't think of any way in which a chatbot that pulls for its answers from places like Reddit and the social internet would spread like bad advice on what old people should do with their money once it has access to their bank accounts. I can't imagine that causing a problem. So I don't see what your issue is, Sophie.

44:51 From the New York Post quote, it's very concerning, says Dr. Stacey Wood, clinical neuropsychologist and professor at Scripps College. Older people are maybe less aware of the algorithm's power, like how they work. It's really hard for them to discern what's credible and what's not. Older people are also taking up AI en masse. Pew data from February found that a full 23% of senior citizens use chatbots and 42% of those aged 50 to 64 are the same. And, you know, like, keeping up with tech is not necessarily a bad thing, but Dr. Stacey Wood says it's a slippery slope. As people of age would note it, they also tend to be more likely to believe something is true because it is simply repeated to them over and over,

45:30 and they're generally more susceptible to sensationalized and highly partisan content.

45:35 I can say the dumbest things, and you people would clap for me. Yeah.

45:40 One of the issues, as you stated, Sophie, is that, like, It's actually more important, I think, for the elderly to be aware of what AI is capable of than a lot of other groups because they're being targeted so relentlessly by different kind of AI based scams. Unfortunately, that usually gets translated into you should be using AI, which is going to make a lot of these people more vulnerable to scams.

46:00 Yeah, I mean, like, I don't like that there's this like trend that AI can can replace like human to human contact for our seniors. You guys, Garen, Robert, you saw a number of products at this year's CES that were targeting seniors in that way.

46:15 We saw one or two reasonable ones and a lot of bad ones.

46:18 Yeah.

46:19 Yeah.

46:20 And, you know, I guess slippery slope, but this commercial comes on a lot with different versions of seniors, almost always seniors that are women doing things and, you know, the chat GPT or whatever AI helping them. I just don't see a reason why chat GPT should have access to these people's calendars, finances, etc. that kind of a thing.

46:42 I don't see this ending well for so many folks. It lacks security and I'm angry about it. And I wish it wasn't a trend that I see increasing, but that seems to be the path we're going on.

46:54 Yeah.

46:54 That's all I had on that.

46:56 I just felt it was worth mentioning because it was on my mind.

46:59 Yeah.

47:00 Yeah. Another story that's come out this week is that a bunch of anthropic researchers are now, or at least there's been stories in San Francisco, and you should always take this stuff with a grain of salt, but this is consistent with a lot of internal conversations that a lot of them have been taking up smoking because they're like, AI will cure cancer, right? And this has been occurring alongside, like there was just an interview with an AI researcher on the Delphi podcast for Anthropic who said he's enjoying his last six months. Part of the issue here is That if you try to engage with what these people are saying, then you wind up sounding to a lot of folks like you're just like ignoring the potential of

47:37 AI and the things that it is actually capable of doing. But you have to engage with what the people making it are saying. And everything that the company's making this stuff is saying, it's nuts. It's bullshit. It's lies.

47:49 And it's insane.

47:50 And that doesn't mean that these are not incredibly powerful and very dangerous tools.

47:54 They are.

47:54 They are extraordinarily dangerous because, among other things, they have automated the ability of small groups of nation states, of non-state actors to carry out massive digital attacks with a level of penetration and speed that was not possible before. And that's a huge problem. These things are very capable tools.

48:13 It's just that everything being said by the people making them is insane bullshit. And it makes it very hard to have reasonable conversations about what should be done.

48:22 Anyway. That's a really good point.

48:24 Fuck these guys. Yeah. Let's go to ads real quick.

48:28 Enjoy these hopefully non-AI products.

48:31 Yeah. And we're back. And I think it's time for us to head south of the border that is south of the Polish border to talk about Ukraine. I don't know why I decided to lead in that way, but I did. Baffling. Things have unfortunately been very spicy in Ukraine over this last week. Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and he had made a deal to release 300,000 tons of Russian diesel fuel to, quote, the American and global marketplace immediately. This came as a massive surprise to everyone because last month, Trump signed a massive sanctions law to stop Russia from making money selling oil and gas to fuel their war against Ukraine. The midterms crunch is really hurting. It's really

49:26 making strange, not strange, but I guess normal bedfellows. All of this seems to be in response to continuing disastrous polling numbers of Republicans in the midterms. An APNORC poll published on October 1st showed that most Americans disapprove of Trump's war with Iran and and blame him personally for higher gas prices because he's why we have higher gas prices.

49:47 He has destroyed a generation of work trying to tell people the president does not control gas prices by finding the only possible way to.

49:55 Actually increase gas prices. He definitely did. This is the first time that's been true.

49:59 I'm so mad.

50:00 This is like the first time we've been in what is effectively a recession. You can say, no, it's directly as responsive to current policies, like literally direct. Like, I mean, obviously the 2008 crash, a lot, Bush did a lot to do with it, but most of that didn't hit until anyway. You know what I'm saying, right?

50:13 I did that.

50:14 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Trump's goal was to make a deal with Putin to lower diesel prices in particular, as diesel prices have been debilitating to American farmers who tend to support Trump. And I think also just a lot of the ads that have been running with farmers being like Trump fucked me are really bad for Donald and for MAGA. in addition to the immediate 300,000 tons of diesel promised to be released, another 500,000 tons of Russian diesel were to be released by Russia in November, and one million more tons were to be released immediately hereafter.

50:45 It's not actually clear if this is any kind of formal deal or if any of this is actually promised anywhere, what these numbers are based on. A lot of what Trump says is just nonsensical. So he says that in November, we'll get another half million, and then another million immediately hereafter, and then three million more tons within a short period of time. That's not what we what are you at?

51:06 How much fuel is supposed to be released? This might be market manipulation. Genuinely, this might just be market manipulation. It's entirely possible as that probably leads you to believe there are serious doubts as to whether anything like what Trump has promised is possible to get out of Russia right now. And we'll talk about the ethical and like Ukraine stuff. But I'm just talking about like, can they do this?

51:26 Right.

51:26 Like, do they even have the ability to get this fuel on the marketplace? Per an article in The L.A. Times, quote, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski questioned whether Russia could deliver at all, citing his embassies reports of fuel shortages even in Moscow and serious sources saying Ukraine has damaged about half of Russia's refining capacity. He asked on X. So where will the surpluses for export come from? Now, while he says half of Russia's refining capacity has been damaged, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're down by 50%. The IEA, the International Energy Association- Estimates that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have cut Russia's diesel output by 30 percent or so.

52:03 That also could mean that they're like gas fuel output is by more than averages to 50. I don't fully know. I don't know anyone has other than the Russian government exact numbers on how much Russia's like refining capacity has been damaged. Russia's deputy prime minister has tries to riposte claims like what the Polish deputy minister said. Our foreign minister said, arguing that Russian exports would rise in November and December as previously damaged refineries return from maintenance. And obviously, I don't doubt that the Russian state is actively repairing and refurbishing damaged facilities and that some of them will come back online periodically. But they also will continue to face targeting from Ukrainian drone strikes.

52:40 Yeah.

52:40 This current phase of the war is largely focused on deep ranging drone strikes into Russian territory with retaliatory drone swarms and missile attacks from Russia into Ukraine as the front remains locked in a relatively stable position. Ukraine's hitting 1500 miles beyond the line of contact now with drones, which is nuts. Like that's air power levels, right?

52:59 Yeah.

52:59 There's a lot of kvetching about like, oh, it's going to change warfare. We've already seen the biggest change in warfare that I think will occur in my lifetime, maybe I'm wrong, but it's drones. Careful what you wish for. Yeah, I may be biased because a drone tried to kill me once, but I have trouble imagining something altering the experience of the regular soldier on the ground more than drones have. Robert, I'm so excited for the plague weapons.

53:23 We'll see. Obviously, I'm not counting the possibility of like currently illegal weapons like biologicals or nuclear weapons becoming like regularly deployed, right? Immediately after Trump announced this deal, Ukrainian President Zelensky issued a furious statement on his nation's behalf. In Kyiv, a protest gathered at the Memorial to Fallen Soldiers in the Maidan to express their anger. Within a matter of hours after Trump's announcement, Ukraine hit the loading terminal to Russia's Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery, causing a massive fire.

53:55 For weeks prior, Trump had begged Zelensky to halt strike. strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, even as Russia has continued to hit Ukraine's energy infrastructure. When news broke of this new Ukrainian strike, Trump reacted with fury, telling Ukraine that it needed a new president and blaming Zelensky for losing 30 percent of your country. He claimed two million people had been killed in a war that never should have been started. I agree. Putin shouldn't have started the war.

54:19 Trump has repeatedly stated his belief that it wouldn't have occurred if he'd been president when Biden was I think that's nonsense. I should also note that Trump made this announcement, complaining about Ukraine hitting Russian energy infrastructure and promising to buy Russian diesel directly after 20 civilians in Ukraine were killed by Russian strikes, including three children. Russia has continued to devote significant effort to striking Ukrainian civilian property and infrastructure.

55:01 On October 13th and 14th, Russian strikes cut power to more than 600,000 Ukrainians. This came just four days after Trump licensed imports of Russian diesel. It also came after an energy ceasefire that Trump unilaterally announced during the weekend in response to Ukraine's strike on that binary. Trump was like, there's an energy ceasefire now. Nobody's striking. And then there were strikes. He was like, well, nobody's striking diesel. And then there were more strikes. Yeah, right. And Zelensky pointed out on Monday that Russia had already violated the ceasefire.

55:29 Since his announcement, Trump has escalated his efforts to defray blame for the high cost of gas, and his current strategy is blaming high diesel prices in the states on Ukrainian resistance. In speeches, he is saying, like, Ukraine is why your diesel is so expensive, which it's not. And again, they've been fighting in Ukraine for years. Diesel prices didn't skyrocket until Trump decided to fuck with Iran. On October 11th, Ukraine also struck a facility belonging to Yandex, which I would casually describe as Russian Google. This facility hosted a massive supercomputer, two massive supercomputers actually, used to train neural networks.

56:04 It also part of like the Yandex facility there was like a military research facility. By any term, this is a valid target in war, by the way. Just I wanted to make that clear. The strikes caused massive disruption to Yandex services across Russia. Yandex is an interesting company. The founder, Arkady Voloz, was not willing to fall in line and support Putin after the expanded invasion of Ukraine.

56:25 He went so far as to condemn the war. This forced his exit from working in Russia, and a deal was arranged in 2024 to put Yandex under Kremlin control. This is why Arkady wins my least problematic Russian billionaire award. The strike on that Yandex hub was Ukraine's third major hit on Russian tech infrastructure in four days. It cut access to huge numbers of services for Russians and people, not just Russians, right? A number of countries that border Russia, including countries that are worried about getting invaded by Russia.

56:52 Yandex is still like an important service for them. And this was not just like they lost access to Google. They lost access to like ride sharing apps and like AI, like all their AI apps. Like it did a bunch of damage to just like people being able to use the Internet the way that most people do. people are used to in the 21st century, not just in Russia, but in bordering countries. This has caused confusion online. In the immediate wake of the strikes, reports began to spread that Yandex going down had cut bot traffic to huge portions of the internet. That is objectively true. What bot traffic means is often misinterpreted. Specific claims were made that traffic had plunged for Ofde, the German far-right party, that

57:30 their people commenting and pro-Ofde boards and stuff had fallen off a cliff and that the conservative subreddit was also down, that there were no more Magabots online, that the Russian bots had declined. And evidence for these claims was posted in the form of cloud flare graphs that purported to show plunging bot activity.

57:49 And again.

57:50 Some of those graphs were real. Some of them weren't. There is plunging bot activity. The problem is that, and I made a joking comment about like, this is why we should keep airstriking data centers and then tried to follow it up by claiming like, look guys, no one has to abide by the truth in politics anymore. Like, why should we, right? But the reality of the situation is that bot traffic did drop And precipitously, as a result of this attack, Cloudflare reported that Yandex bot traffic is like 0.4% of the max number of HTTP requests that had been reported over the prior two weeks. But that doesn't mean there are fewer Russian bot accounts on the internet, right? I'll refer to an analysis by Brandon

58:30 Beeb that he put together on his Substack that does a good job of explaining the disconnect in many people's understandings. The bots that dropped are mostly Yandex's own search engine crawler. They aren't troll accounts. No primary data shows that Russian social media bots went offline. None shows that engagement reform UK, the off day, or MAGA accounts fell because of the strikes.

58:49 Here's what matters. In CloudFare's language, a bot is any automated web request. Nearly all automated traffic from Yandex's network is Yandex bot. It's search crawler, which is Russia's version of Google bot, right? So that's what has declined. Now, While the people who were saying like, no, it's wrong that like Russian bot, you know, influence operations collapse as a result of these strikes. That's also led some people to say like there's been no impact in Russia's influence operations as a result of these strikes. I can't imagine that's true. It's just not true in the way people online assumed it is right. Like they lost a massive access to a massive supercomputer center that the military used.

59:25 Right.

59:25 This has certainly done some damage. degree of damage. It certainly frustrated some to some degree, some of the shit that the Russian government does online. It just hasn't gotten rid of all of the bot accounts because that's just like not how any of this works.

59:39 No, like there's not like a Death Star you can blow up that like make Russian influence operation go away.

59:44 Like, no.

59:46 It's bad for Russia that these got struck, right? They prefer that not happen. And that will presumably have impacts that are broader ranging and that are probably kind of obscure to us on a number of their operations. But it's not as simple as all of the bots went away. That's just not what happened.

1:00:01 Interesting.

1:00:02 Interesting and informative.

1:00:04 So let's close with a segment I am calling Dispatches from a World in Revolt with the starting claim that, yeah, we're kind of back, by which I mean we're kind of back in what appears to be at least the beginning of another global era of mass protests along the lines of sort of 2011 or 2019, 2020. We have talked about some of these protests on the show. We're going to be going through a few areas that have seen large protests here. Today, we are mostly going to be focusing on India. Now, previously on the show, we've talked about the massive wave of student protests in India under the banner of the meme Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after a Supreme Court justice calling unemployed youths

1:00:47 their cockroaches. So it's a play on the BJP. It's like the BJP, but it's the CJP because it's cockroaches. Okay, with that out of the way, Those original protests from a few months ago have sort of won. The CJP declared victory recently after forcing the resignation of the Minister of Education, after government officials leaked the answers to standardized tests. But, comma, Protests in India have continued, and they have continued over the BJP's attempt to remove 130 million people from the voting rolls.

1:01:20 Now, Mia, I've never done a number before. Is that a lot of people? That would be the 12th largest country on Earth. That is larger than the population of Japan.

1:01:30 It is slightly, slightly less than the population of Mexico that they are trying to strip from the voting rolls. The rhetoric coming out of the BJP is in a lot of ways very similar to the rhetoric you see from fascist parties around the world. They're screaming about illegal Muslim aliens casting fake votes. And so basically they're doing on the scale of 130 million people a thing that you see in the US where they go through the voting rolls and purge everyone with a non-white name. And here it's like, yeah, they're purging people with Muslim names at the scale of the 12th largest country on earth. So- In response to this, India's, I would call them largely feckless opposition parties, actually finally did something and they deployed their...

1:02:15 So Congress, which is like the main INC, are India's main opposition party. They are the party that is like the party that did Indian independence. And they have connected their legacy to Gandhi. And so they deployed their one strategy, which is throwing Gandhi's at the problem. So they staged a protest outside of the Electoral Commission.

1:02:36 That's not honestly an enjoyable mental image. I'm just savoring that for a second. Literally, physically, it is what they're doing. They threw Raul Gandhi. How many Gandhis we got? A lot. They have a lot of Gandhi descendants. Like, they got a lot of his family tree down there. Pick on the ground the Gandhis are these days. That's good to know.

1:02:54 Yeah, so Rahul Gandhi and his sister, who's also in the party and is like a high-ranking party official, Rahul Gandhi is like the opposition leader. They went and were, nominally, they were trying to like, they went to the Electoral Commission, were trying to talk to the guy who's in charge of the Electoral Commission, and they got arrested like multiple times.

1:03:12 There's a bunch of scenes of like Rahul Gandhi trying to like crawl out of a bus that he was being held in. This was like a week ago Wednesday, right? Yeah, on October 7th, or maybe it was October 6th or 7th. Basically, it was last week from when we were recording this. And this has led to a bunch more protests, including the CJP, like the cockroach party, like going out against these electoral purges. But it's also led to a sort of astonishing level of repression in India and particularly in the capital of New Delhi. that has turned it over over the last weekend into effectively a fairly overt police state.

1:03:53 On Saturday, Indian police arrested the founder of the cockroach party as an attempt to try to stop the protest. There was a huge militarized police deployment in New Delhi itself, trying to stop anyone from being able to assemble and form protests in the first place. They've also shut down The mile-long road to Junter Munter? Basically, there's a road there that has been a massive site of protest since the 90s. Basically, whenever someone's doing a protest in the Capitol, you show up here and you do a protest down the street and you occupy the street for a while.

1:04:24 And this was also a huge hub of the car crash movement. It was a giant sit-in here. And the entire street has been declared not a valid site of protest. by the police and the police have been trying to funnel protesters into other sites around the city that are like significantly further from the center of the city.

1:04:41 Man.

1:04:43 Sometimes the, the, the just international like reflexive solidarity between police officers is just really beautiful. You know, it's always the same, the same move. No, no, no. You can't do it there though. Can't do it there. Sorry. This is just free speech zones. Sorry.

1:04:57 Sorry.

1:04:58 This is not a free speech zone.

1:04:59 Yeah.

1:04:59 It's a free speech zone.

1:05:00 Yeah.

1:05:00 They always do this like, oh, but there, no, it's fine what you're doing, but not there.

1:05:04 Yeah.

1:05:04 Yeah. Yeah. Like over the weekend, there were these massive attempts to stop the protests, and that did kind of cut down on numbers. But on Monday the 12th, the Congress party, the terminology is mildly confusing to Americans. But yeah, like a lot of like Congress political leaders and a bunch of protesters were able to take the streets again on Monday. On Tuesday, cockroach protest leaders like tried to retake that street and a bunch of their leaders got arrested after trying to take the main square. The protests do not seem to be slowing down as of now.

1:05:36 Congress has been trying to turn this into a sort of sustained attempt to challenge Modi's rule. I think even as he's trying to purge 130 million people from the voting rolls, which would be the end of anything even remotely democratic in the Indian system, this is a real moment of weakness for him. And the escalation of these protests has been very damaging for the regime, even after they were kind of able to like slow down and stop the original cockroach protests. Now that's been reignited and Congress has been throwing their base into it. So we're going to continue to fill you in on what's going on there. Do they have any specific demands when it comes to.

1:06:19 The voter roll purchase? Yeah.

1:06:21 The main one, obviously, they want everyone put back in and they want the chief of the electoral commission to resign. Okay. Those are the demands that everyone seems to agree to, basically. Congress and the cockroach protesters aren't one-to-one overlapping political bases, right? So, you know, it's a bit complicated there. But yeah, those are the main demands that we've seen so far. I want to turn to Europe, where we've also seen continuations of, well, both the protests in France and Spain, there were large French student protests over the weekend. I've seen numbers that suggest it was down to about 160,000, down from like 300,000 the week before. You know, and obviously the police have continued to attack student protesters. Things are still really bleak.

1:07:08 There's like a horrifying picture of like a kid getting crushed by a gate that a bunch of like a giant metal gate that a bunch of cops are pushing. Yeah, so they're still doing absolutely horrific stuff there. We did a larger episode about this earlier this week. Now, the student protests have also begun to spread, although kind of in small forms as of this week. We've seen versions of them break out in Greece, Albania and Belgium. Greek protesters, student protesters put up tents in Stigmata Square, which is another historic protest site that was, I mean, it's been the core of a hundred million protests, but it's notably was one of the places that was the core of the protest in 2011, which, you know, I think links

1:07:49 back in a lot of ways to the ways that the protests in Spain have been reoccupying a lot of the like 2011 historic protest sites. The Albanian ones, I think, have been pretty small so far. The of multiple fairly large protests going on. There was a student protest on Monday, but then also earlier in like last week, there was a giant anti-austerity protest. There's about like 10,000, well, it's about like 10,000 people. Pretty large, much smaller than the sort of full-scale stuff in France and Spain, but also, yeah, similar cops have been attacking them fairly significantly. The cops arrested 10 people, like nine of whom are minors. So the student protests are very, of a very similar sort of composition of like, it's like these high school students

1:08:35 going into revolt that you see in France. Meanwhile, in Spain, there was like another massive round of the giant protest they've been having. A bunch of the occupations are still going. We're probably going to talk to James next week, a bit more in detail about what's been happening there. I think it's also fairly notable that there's been a pretty significant attempt by the. OK, so this is where we have to make a distinction between socialist party and like socialist.

1:09:02 The socialist party government of Pedro Sanchez, with the caveat that in Spain, the socialist party has been kind of the equivalent of the Democrats for like many, many, many years now. The Socialist Party was one of the two parties that the protests in 2011 were against, which led to the formation of Podemos.

1:09:21 That's a whole other story.

1:09:24 But Pedro Sanchez has been trying to use these protests to save his government, even though it has also been his government that has been presiding over the housing crisis and these evictions. But he's been attempting to co-opt the protests in order to save his flagging electoral things, which obviously, yeah, it would be worse if the far right took power, and that's kind of what things have been looking towards. Yeah, because the far right killed two pro-tenant bills in parliament earlier this month. And then he's kind of used that and the protests to call for an election. Yeah, but this has also been paired with attempts to sort of directly co-opt the protests themselves, which there's been a whole

1:10:05 bunch of stuff around that there that we can get into more detail with later. But that's a dynamic that we're going to see frequently here. I mean, you don't often get... one as blatant as the like, Hey, this is the government that did this. That's like now trying to use your movement to do something. But yeah, this is, this is a very common dynamic in protests like this.

1:10:26 And yeah, we're going to be seeing it more and more as protests continue. And we will let you know what other places start having mass protests. Like I'm just going to briefly note, there were some like also education protests a little bit before this in Chile, there's been anti Bolsonaro protests happening all over Brazil and, But, yeah, we will keep you updated as we get more, like, really large protest waves. Yeah.

1:10:50 All right.

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