It Could Happen Here Weekly 227

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to I Could Happen here, a podcast about unions falling apart and in this case how they're not being put back together again. I am your host, Bia Wong and today we are telling a somewhat unusual story for this show. It's usual in the sense that it's a story about, you know, the replacement of democracy with bureaucracy, like the despiral business union of unionism. It's a story that's also as much about the defeat of the workers movement as it is like Lamar Jackson's counting stats, a thing that it also bizarrely is about. And this is the story of the crisis of the NFL Players Association, which is the NFL's union and it is so unhinged that the only way that this can actually be talked about reasonably is to bring in someone who knows ball. And that is Charles McDonald of Yahoo Sports and the wonderful Football 301 podcast. Welcome to the show. This is going to be a trip. Yeah, thanks for having me. I've listened to a few episodes, so I was excited when you asked me to come on. Love your work and this is going to be a good rant because, and not even really a rant because honestly, when you start to peel this back, it is really like a textbook case study from what we know on like just straight up organizational decay. Yeah. Like you get such a clear picture on how just really a few people, in this case, 32 NFL owners can just completely dictate the life of, you know, thousands of people who are literally sacrificing their bodies to try and, you know, escape whatever poverty they come from in their earlier life. So it's fascinating. It's sad. I mean, this is one of those areas that I have obviously because it's my it's my job, but you had just like extreme cognitive dissonance sometimes. Yeah. I love football. You know, I played from the time I was seven through college. Obviously, like I do this work. It's kind of giving me like everything and then you have to deal with just so much bad stuff that comes with. Yeah. Yeah. Like I remember like covering the Colin Kaepernick season, which was 10 years ago as of this year. God. Right. Jesus. 10 years ago. Yeah. And just really like seeing how alienated that was just like just writing like a column saying, Hey, you know, Washington, like they should work Colin Kaepernick out because they don't have a quarterback and this guy is a startable quarterback. Yep. And you would get like hate mail over that stuff. But I'm still doing every Sunday, you know, more jack stuff. I was on the front lines for that, but still tuning in to get my my race and slop every Sunday. It's like the fundamental issue here. Yeah. People will still do it. Admittedly, I am wildly proud that I wasn't watching that era, but I wasn't watching that era specifically because the Seahawks lost Super Bowl to the Patriots. And then I was like, I'm fucking out. Yeah. After like eight years. I've been watching this stuff my whole life. Like I remember watching like college football with like my dad and his friends when I was like five and six years old. I like legit just don't know anything else to do. Like I had to use this sport as like my vehicle to kind of explore the rest of the world. Like once I once I got out of college, just try to figure my shit out. Yeah. And I think we have a good combination here to talk about this because you come at this from the football angle and then exploring out of the like, Oh my God, this is so unhinged. Everything is broken. And then I come at this kind of from the opposite direction, which is one of the things that's been really frustrating about the coverage of this is that like, like there's lots of very good coverage on Pobletory who's done a lot of very good work about this. And it's like the guy who kind of instigated the whole like instigate is kind of putting it is putting it lightly. I mean, he got the union president fired basically. Yeah. He got the union president fired after it was revealed that he was using union money to go to strip clubs. Yes. That's like the tail end of this story. Yeah, that's like the end of it. That's where this is going. Right. But like the thing that's been frustrating to me about this is like the people covering this and people have done a lot of good work. There are not people who cover unions at all. Yeah. And like that's like what I do. Right. And like, I don't know. As much as this episode is going to be us screaming about this union doing unhinged shit. Like we're obviously like pro union. Like I had my union that I organized on my show to talk about our contract against you. It's like, yeah, I was a member of the first box union that yeah. God damn. I was almost 10 years ago now. Jesus Christ. I feel so old. And look, like I believe in this stuff. Like I like the stroke of a pen not to put it that simplistically because obviously a lot of fight went to it. But with a stroke of a pen, like I was able to live in DC after he very broke, you know, and it's crazy. Like my salary went up to a livable age and nothing died. Yep. Right. You know, no one died. It's amazing. It was business as usual, honestly. Like nothing was weird. So obviously people who listen to this show, like, you know that these people with the money, like they're out to get us. Obviously for their own gain. And it's so just brazenly clear through like this union story, especially through the past 20 years, which is where I think you kind of have to start it. I mean, just systematically stripped down. And the one thing that even Pablo on his most recent episode, like he talked about it last week because JC Tredder was elected executive director. One of the villains of this story. Right. Back in power. Right. And, you know, one thing about like Pablo and Mike Florio, who have really been on this more than like any other national journalist is like, yeah, we still don't know a big component of like the why and the how this is happening. Because, you know, we got to get it to because basically it feels like there's two or three guys kind of acting as liaisons to the owner. While also trying to respect and, you know, run the union, which are obviously just two completely incompatible ideologies when you're trying to work that out. Yeah, I guess that's actually a way to start talking about this kind of going back to there used to be a time when the NFL Union would go on strike. Like they did pick it. It's like they fought scabs outside of the gates of football stadiums. This was the thing that happened like regularly. Like, there's a whole bunch of stories of like you and W.A. guys and like guys from like the auto unions, like on these pick it lines with the NFL players. And, you know, like one of one of the sort of upshots of this. God, OK, that's a terrible pun. I'm realizing now because this guy. Okay, we got to talk about Jean, you know, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one of the guys who led this union was Jean Upshaw, who was a player for a long time and then was like ran the union for most of its history. And he's, you know, he's running an actual union. Like they go on strike, they organize, they like do shit. And, you know, Jean, like over the course of this runs into like they start losing strikes, which is just like a nightmare. And then he just like dies in 2008. You know, like it was really horrible. He had pancreatic cancer. Yeah. So so like not only like like Jean was a hall of fame off the line. Yeah. Like like when you think of the Raiders in the in the past, like he was kind of like the start of that era where you know, basically the only era where we still think of the Raiders is like, you know, an entity. Yeah, that should be respect. Right, right. Not a joke because it was a different time in the league, like especially when we see what the Seahawks sale ends up looking like. Yeah. And then we've seen like the Broncos and the commanders get sold within the past decade. These teams are now being run by people who don't have football backgrounds. Like when you think of, you know, even even even someone as despicable as Jerry Jones, like you can't. Yeah. You can't doubt at his heart that you know he loves this sport and will be an advocate to the sport, even in ways that that could be harmful to the sport at times. Oh boy. We kind of have like this influx of people who don't have football backgrounds, but they have the capital to kind of get in. And that that has also been a shift, I think just from an ownership perspective over the last few years. But but when you look at where Gene was coming out as a player after he retired in the early 80s, he kind of set the standard for, you know, for he was like he was elected. Well, executive director of the union, I think, I think in the 80s and he held that position until he died in 2008. So yeah, he died in office like in the middle of the thick. That's a long time and it's a lot of trust. And also I think Gene kind of solidified the idea, which is important now that players should run this union, which I agree with, you know. Yeah. That's what a union is. Right. That's what the union is. And even just like someone who played football by self, like it's kind of a cult when you're in there and you don't really, really trust the outsiders to understand like what is going on here on a day to day basis. And also when you look at like the start of this union back in the 50s, training camp used to be free for the owners. They didn't get paid for training camp or preseason games. They played they played six free preseason games and didn't get paid for training camp. Unreal. Unreal. I'm like, you can like you can get like people every single year get really, really seriously injured like it. Right. Trading camp and preseason games. There was no free agency. Right. So like the team that drafted you like they own you until you know you're ready to call it quick. So they trade you somewhere else where they cut you. And you kind of got to figure it out. But like the idea that you could just like have this agency and leave and your contract aspires, you can go side with someone else. That was not a thing. So obviously when you think about where football is now, like what I tell people is like, why should when they ask like, why should I care about this union? OK, think about how bad it is now. It can get worse. It was worse. Yeah, it was worse. It was significantly worse. But you know, you have like this idea that and it's a correct idea because the players are the basis of it that this person in charge of the union needs to be a player. And Gene, like coming from his background with the Raiders, we were talking about proud football organization, like the very material basis of being an NFL player was extremely important to Gene. So, you know, up until he passed away in 2008, I mean, he is, you know, he's like you said, he's leading strikes. He's fighting for more revenue. He's fighting for, you know, more benefits on the back end after guys retire. And it kind of culminates in the 2006 CBA. I would say this is kind of like the Empire Strikes Back moment for the the the owners. Because in 2006, the players in the owners, the sign of CBA that on the surface granted the players a 60 percent, 60 percent revenue share against the owners, 40 percent when you start actually digging through the numbers. Yeah, that's not. It's like, it was fake. It was fake, right? So I'll say this. It was fake in the sense that there was something called like a revenue credit or a revenue tax or something that the owners took off of the pie before it went down to like the 60, 40 split, right? So, you know, and it started, you know, in 2006, like, I think the first time they cut it, it was like, you know, $800 billion. And then, you know, within two years, they were taking well over a billion dollars before it got passed down onto the player. So, you know, the players, they got 60 percent of the total revenue. But by the time that they, the owners took a second look at that CBA and they use their opt out clause in 2008, it was functionally like a 51 and 52 percent split in favor of the players, which the owners deemed completely unacceptable. Right. Yeah. Like, and it's so funny because like this is like the first part, like where you start to see like at least in this era of football, you get to see how greedy these people are, right? Where you're already taking a top off of like this quote unquote total revenue and then you're pulling the clause in two years to get out of this. So, in 2008, the owners say we are going to get out of this and now the CBA instead of like the 10 year clause is going to expire at the end of the 2010 season. So, they had two seasons to kind of figure out what was going to happen next. But unfortunately, in 2008, Jean Upshaw gets pancreatic cancer and obviously just like just deteriorates pretty quickly and passes away right before the season. So, hey, listeners of this podcast probably know what do billionaires do when they see a power vacuum at the top of their labor force that they are actively, you know, fighting against. They pounce. Yeah. You have this vacuum of leadership and then DeMora Smith gets voted the executive director of the NFL PA and the owners at the end of 2010 season. They locked out the players and that's where things really start to get here. You're dealing with that amount of greed where they're already taken off the top and then they say that's not enough. So, we're going to rip up the CBA and the funny part was the 2010 season, like the last year of like the ripped up CBA. Since they didn't have an agreement on the next year, there was no salary cap for the 2010 season. And Jerry Jones, owner of the Cowboys and Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington football team. Oh, God, what one of the worst people ever, by the way, this is that week we don't have time to do this right for like one of the worst people ever. So like if you play Madden before, you know, sometimes you might turn off the salary cap and what do you do you spend and because Jerry has always been like, it's my money. Yeah, I'm going to spend as much of it as I want to if I please like within the rule of the salary cap. No salary cap. Jerry is going to spend. And the other owners punish those two with fines after the season. Yeah. For you're spending recklessly. That's how committed they are to like this consolidation of power. They will punish each other over it. Which, which by the way is on hinge because like so what what what are the fundamental like issues of the NFL is that it is a monopoly. Yes. Now the way they get around this is a they have the union and B the teams are supposed to be quote unquote competing with each other and they are not supposed to quote unquote collude. Right. Against the players and it's like, okay, you you find guys for paying people like right. Right. You find each other. Yeah, which is like just unreal. It's just like the most obvious collusion. If you look across like to the NBA where like the Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer stuff is going on. Oh my God. Another parvatoire. Another parvatoire exclusive. But hey, there's a reason why they are aggressively going after this, you know, because the other billionaires don't want people rummaging through their shit either. So, you know, they like the Microsoft guy being part of the gang. So yeah, they're not going to do anything. And that's when you see like, oh, wow, there's so much power here that these guys have. And but going back to the NFL, like the 2011 CBA is. By the way, CBA is collective bargaining agreement. This is the collective bargaining agreement. The union and the league. Right. So if there's no agreement, then like they can't play football games. Yeah. Because, you know, like you said, like the NFL PA functionally just exists so the NFL doesn't get sued for like antitrust stuff. Yep. Which takes us right back to the next point. So going back to 2011, the players are trying to figure out like, what are we going to do about like this lockout situation because they need to work. Honestly. Yeah. So the only career that you can only do for most guys like two or three years. And the idea of missing a season is not really feasible, which the owners, you know, they take advantage of all the time. But they know that these guys are on short, like short clocks. If you get to like year five of an NFL career, you are in a very, very small group of players that like honestly just represent the elite of elite of people who have ever played football like in this country. And I think the other thing about this too is like, that's really important. This is an unbelievably, unbelievably skilled labor force. Yes. And in order to develop these skills, you have to devote your entire life to it. Yes. And then what you get from devoting your entire life to this thing that is killing you because you're getting inter-constantly and you're getting head trauma from all of this every single time. Like, because I mean, start from like high school, you're starting to get brain damage from concussions and from like you're starting to get CTE. Yeah. And you have a couple of years to like make money from having devoted your life to this thing. Right. So think about like, it's March of 2011 now. Gene Upshaw has been passed away for a couple of years. They were in the fully in the DeMorsmith, in the DeMorsmith reign of union leadership. And the first move that the owners make, like now that the CBA is officially over following 2010 season, they lock out the players, which as we just said, if your career is two years, the idea that you miss one of those years is kind of unfathomable. Yeah. Your earning power is just like demolished. And let's say you're 24 years old, you got to play two years in the NFL, you're walking out with, let's say a million in your bank account. You still got to get a job, bro. You know, like you still got to find something else to do. So like, this isn't money that's going to set you up for the rest of your life for most of these guys, even though it does give you like a nice cushion to fall off to, even if you're someone who struggled a little bit. I just, I know when I was 24, I would have loved to have like $700,000 in my bank account. Yeah. Things would have turned out, you know, maybe a little bit different, probably still would have found something, somewhere like where I'm right here. But, but honestly, it's a good start. So what the union did was they decertified as a union in 2011, led by Tom Brady and Drew Breese. I'm a Falcons fan. And I will say this part has given me so much justification on my hatred. It's like it went past the football into like the, like the material realm of like real life. You guys messed up here. They tried to, you know, challenge the league by decertifying as a union and arguing, you know, that now this is an antitrust situation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get down to August. It sounded 2011 CBA in August of 2011. So like this is a month, a month before the season and the concessions that were made after, like after getting locked out for what, six, five months. Yeah. And you decertified, like you go through all this work to try and get a deal done and they gave up so much. So we said before, you had the total revenue split at 60, 40, but functionally it was closer to, you know, 51, 52% in favor of the players. That dropped to like 47% in the 2011 CBA. So now the owners are back in charge, like 53% revenue split in favor of the owners. So like you're, you just gave them back like billions of dollars, like over the course of really just like a couple years. But over the lifetime of a 10 year CBA, I mean, that, that's, that's egregious and also believable amount of money. Another thing that changed was Roger Godel has now like full autonomy over player punishments. I don't know why you gave that up either. That's unhinged. Right. That's like, like, that's the kind of thing that like the, like the only kind of unions that would sign something like that are like, like, I don't even think the organized crime unions would sign it. I think that's just like literally the fascist unions and the unions that are directly controlled, like the yellow unions that are directly controlled by corporation. Or like the only ones that would sign that even, even those ones probably would want to still have like some involvement in that. That's like unbelievable for a union contract. Just like nonsense. Right. And what's changed here is like, these players are not willing to go on strike, like to not play these games to, to not play these games. To not have a situation like in the 80s where, you know, Donald Trump is building up the USFL and saying, hey, why don't you strike and players that come play over here? And you got, you got some, some guys who were like NFL Hall of Famers who have briefly played in the USFL during, you know, during the strike stuff that, that doesn't happen here. And think about the timing. Yeah. August, what was it? August 4, 2011, 132 day lockout. They signed this deal. So, so I can imagine, and I was like, I'll give them this. It's hard out here, man. Like you're about to, you're looking at like the consequence of, you know, I'm about to not have checks and I maybe have a lifestyle where I am still should be getting you these weeks to be paychecks. That's kind of a tough, tough draw. So I will give them like the small grace of saying at that point, man, okay, fuck it. Just, let's just go, just get something signed. But what they gave up, I'm not sure like they were fully aware of what they gave up here. And the part of the biggest thing that where they gave up was part of the biggest thing after they after I say they gave the money back to the owners. They gave Roger Goodell, they made him dictator in terms of like the punishment workforce. But the rookie wage scale was a massive, holy shit, massive concession to owners. Yeah, because they, they, as in like Tom Brady and Drew Brees, more so Drew Brees from what I've gathered, kind of frame this as, hey, why are these rookies getting all this damn money? Like this is something that should be going towards the veterans. And ownership was like, oh, you see that you think like you think that's a good idea. We can agree to that. And what they got back was like less practice time. So, you know, you know, you don't have to have as many two days. That's worth billions of dollars really, like in terms of like what you, what you guys can set yourself up with. And what the, what the veteran players who, who were on board with this, what they thought was, oh, okay, well, if the rookie wage, if the rookie wages deal, like if that gets capped at a certain amount, then that's more money for us. So like the prime example is in 2010, Sam Bradford was the number one overall pick to St. Louis Rams. He signed a six year, $84 million contract. So the next year, Cam Newton is the first overall pick to the Caroline Panthers. And after this lockout ends, his contract was four years, $22 million, fully guaranteed. She's correct. You lost $60 million in terms of value from a year before. So what, what the players, what the veteran players thought was, oh, okay, well now there'll be this influx of cap space to sign veteran players. What do, what do billionaires do when they suddenly have access to, to a cheap workforce? They just load it up on rookies. Right. So, so these veteran players, like they sold themselves on like the fallacy of trickle down economics and got themselves replaced out of the league. So the only people that benefit really was people like Drew Brees, people like Tom Brady, who don't need it. Right. And, but also are so indispensable to their organizations that they can eat up the cap space that was left over from, from the rookies getting signed. So that's, it's like, that's when you start to see like the quarterback contracts, Balloon-O, where, you know, you go from like in 2015, 11 years ago, or 2016, I think, Cam Newton signed a contract that made him the highest pick quarterback contract. The highest pick quarterback in NFL history at five years, a hundred million dollars. Oh my God. You know, and now that number is what like, I think, man, who's the highest paid, is Joe Burrow the highest paid right now at like. I feel like it's Burrow. Yeah, that sounds right. But now like that deal is worth, you know, closer to 80 million, you know, 70 million dollars a year than it is to do anything like close to 20. Yeah. So you gave up so much and you got this whole middle class of the league just decimated. And, and, and that that's still tangible today. You can just go on over the cap.com or spot track.com and just look at like like average money like per year. And there is a top and then the middle class is literally like a couple players and for quarterback, it's like two or three guys. Like you'll have like, yeah, now it's like I'm a league willis or Daniel Jones, like 40, like as crazy as to say, like 44 million dollars. Like that's outside the top half of what guys are getting paid. And then it's all rookies, like all rookies and guys on rookie contracts. There's no middle classic that that's gone from the NFL. And with that, like you lose some of like, personally, this might be like you lose some of like the wisdom that comes with that of guys who have played in the league. Because now they get that now they're getting churned out so fast because the contract is so cheap. Yeah, I'm not going to extend you because honestly, this game beats your body up so bad that it's better just to get a fresh body in there. And these people, they have no attachment to the sacrifices that have been built over a long time. So you kind of build this player force that doesn't know what's going on. And I say that with a grain of salt now because I used to be one of these guys like, oh, you know, they don't care what's going on. And there is a good chunk that don't care what's going on. But I think now it's more clear there's like an obvious force stopping them from getting like information about what's going on with this union stuff, which is the meat of this like the recent stuff is just like the ultimate just fuck it. I guess we're pawns of the ownership stuff, you know. I think the arc of this is like it's the arc of sort of unionism in America, you know, you go back to like your early 1900s unions, right? And those unions, you know, they're unbelievably powerful. They're extremely dangerous. You know, you get to a point where like the IWW will show up to a town and like the bosses in the town will show up with guns and shoot them because they're that well organized. They're that dangerous. They're that capable of striking. They're that committed and they're that able to tap into all of their members and have everyone in the union be a part of the union and do things with the union. And that's, you know, how you can actually do collective action. And then and you can watch this was sort of like with the ability of the NFLPA like obviously like that's a much weaker union than you're like, you know, you're like 1930s CIO or whatever. Yeah. But but you can watch it like sort of decay into this sort of, you know, what you call like a service union where instead of it being run by the players, there is like, OK, we have some people they're going to go they're going to do everything for you. They're going to sometimes talk to you about it. But, you know, like they're going to be the runs like managing all of the contracts and all of the negotiations and like right. And as it like information circle gets tighter and tighter, you know, that makes it way easier for things to just get completely fucked. And then, you know, and this is one of the things that you see in the 90s is the is the complete dominance of business unionism where it's like, nah, fuck it. We're a union. Yeah. Right. The us and the employers actually have the same interest and we're going to work with them to make money. And it's like, how is that going for you guys? Like, and then that's what this sort of turns into. And one of the issues here and you're talking about this with like the information control is what once you get into this situation where, you know, a really, really small number of people like we're talking about. Maybe 30 people and then the executive committees, even smaller than that are the ones who are, you know, one of the things that happens in the later part of this is so JC Treader, who's like the guy behind the scenes for like the executive, the search for like the executive director, the guy who like completely truly was like the most hideous guy I've ever had running this union. He changed the process so that it was completely confidential to the point where the 32 guys on the board who were supposed to be voting for the executive director didn't know the names of the candidates until they walked into the meeting. Right. What the fuck. And to me, like that point is like so crucial because that's why I shipped from oh, it's not that the guys don't care about this. Like, they don't know what's going on. Yeah, it's being hidden from them. They can't know. They can't know. And I will say like part of what makes this difficult if you are someone in there who does care and wants to once to fix things is there's just the truth that like even the bottom rung players are comfortably living like off of their salary. So when you start to get to guys who are veterans like, man, like even if you don't take the best deal, the shit like what I still get. I'm still making $15 million a year like ultimately I'm still good. And that's what is hard to like get people galvanized about this sometimes. But yeah, I think that that part about like players not caring has kind of been overrepresented a little bit because I think if you're paying attention now, you're so much murkiness. And I think when when you get to the like the recent CBAs like in 2020, the COVID year one. So now that's like the more Smith and JC Trader who was playing for the Browns. Then he was the president of the NFL PA as they enter like this, this 2020 CBA at the end after the end of the 2011 10 year run where for 10 years they locked themselves into owners just being able to extract like as much value as as it seemed like they possibly could at the time. And then 2020 comes and the owners are basically just like, Hey, there's going to be another lockout unless you guys agree to a 17 game. Which you should say that. Okay, cool. Because there's no circumstance where you you can walk the football and know how the horrible this game is for your body and say we are going to play more football without like major concessions. Yeah, because I remember when that was going on, you know, I was talking to some older guys who weren't in the union more, but they were looking at like, man, like if they're if they're going to say 17 game, like we need something massive, like giving back to us on the other hand, because that's just straight up a revenue play to get more games on TV and make these TV contracts a little bit more lucrative and that didn't really happen. You know, like, no, like they just gave up the 17 game and they got I think 1% more in terms of like the rev share so that's like 48 or 49%. It's like, man, like that's it. You know, 1% rev share for adding like what's the percentage of games added to the season like. Right. And like there were some concessions made to like players made at the bottom rung of the ladder. So like like the veteran minimum salaries, like they got boosted, they practice squads got a little bit longer. And now you got into the space where you see like veterans can be on the practice squad instead of guys who are within like three years of, you know, accrued years in the NFL. But the 17th game while still having inequity in terms of the revenue share. I mean, the owners, they'll sign up for that every single time. Oh, you we got to throw your crumbs. Yep. And we still get to keep our billions and they timed it up right. So that 17th game being inserted into the schedule was lining up with new TV contracts with ESPN and NBC and Amazon. And when you see like throwing cash is so understated, like it's not throwing cash like billions of dollars is going to the NFL. Yeah, through these TV deals. Like it's funny. I had a friend, you know, one of these, you know, Shaddour Sanders stands, he was arguing. He's like, oh, you know, he was he was like, oh, you know, like the Browns like they took Shaddour because they need the Jersey sales. I'm like, dude, Shaddour could have the number one selling Jersey in the NFL and Jimmy Haslund didn't care about that. No, that's a drop of a drop of a drop in the bucket for like where the money is actually coming from. And that's the TV deal. So to get that 17th game is huge. And this term is for 10 years again. So in 2030, they can look at, you know, renegotiating and trying to figure it out. But in the meantime, like to even call this a union is so far away from like how it's actually functioning. Now now it's getting to the point like where it's kind of murky on what's happening because obviously if you're in a union and you know, like my coworkers like they've dealt with JC Treader, like I've seen him speak before. If you're in a union, obviously, like you don't want too many people outside the union to know what's going on. Like it's just not good from a standpoint of like leverage and power. But JC Treader, like he plays off of that by keeping everything a secret, you know. Yeah, which is a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea. Like, yeah, well, it's good for him. Right, right, right. Maybe you don't want to tell me a reporter like what's going on, but you should tell like the other people within your union was going on. So like when you see like a lack of information about or any information about like what's going on with these these elections is because no one's being told what's going on. These elections and that's how you end up with Lloyd Howe, which is just. Oh, God. Okay, okay. Let's talk about Lloyd Howell, who is. Oh my God. Yeah, one of the worst people to run a union I have ever seen. Yes, but it's purposefully bad, you know, like yeah, the Lloyd Howell, like a secret election, like it's not, I'm not even say like I was, you know, somewhat somewhat of a secret. No, a secret of election basically to get. Yeah, Lloyd Howell hired. What, what are you somewhere for booze Allen, man? Yeah, he was he was the CFO of booze Allen Hamilton. Right. Like his background was in busting unions. Uh huh. Right. That's his background. Yeah. And this but this is where you get like a look at the ideology of something like JC Treader, who also studied labor unions in college. That's what he guys degree in labor, labor relations and labor arrangement from Harvard. Yep. Yeah. You're not you're not doing the labor relations degree to like, right, be in a union like the people the people who like organize for unions are like fucking grad students who, you know, have like a I don't know, like they have they have some random degree and then they were like, Right. I organized my grad student, you know, I'm going to go organize the field. This is not what you go into that for you go into this to do union busting. Yeah. So but so JC Treader and you know, the people around him, they viewed that experience from wood how like busting unions as a positive. Yeah. Because, you know, there's this train of thought like, Oh, well, you know, well, if we know someone who knows how to destroy us, if we hire them, surely they will change their ways and they will start to help us. Like we're going to get inside knowledge on how to bust a unit. So maybe we could weaponize that and turn it back the other way. Man, that's dumb as hell. Why would you like that's. Oh my God. Right. And not only that, but but like how who is elected the executive director of the union is also a part of a hedge fund that is investing in NFL teams in minorities. Yeah. The Carlisle group, like you, your executive director of the union works for hedge funds that are extracting value from these teams like players. Yeah. That's that's disqualifying. It should be disqualifying. She's on camera. The union posted a video of him on camera talking about how he was talking to the odors about letting about letting the investment group in. Yeah. It's unbelievable. It's as close as I've ever seen outside of again, a union that is literally run by the bosses to like my union guy works for management. Like it's like. Bathroom. I don't know. It's like it's like state integrated CCP shit. Right. It's like. Dude, yes, you have a corporate consultant. Yeah. Is your union liaison to 32 billionaires and Roger Goodell. Like, yeah, it's completely incompatible on like a basic like ideological level. And then you start getting to like, well, okay, well, now he has like direct control over people's lives and the funds of the union, which as ESPN and public story found out, he was using to go to the goddamn strip club in Miami. Yeah. And to spend on other stuff. And also he was sued for sexual harassment while he was at Booz Allen. Yep. So he's hidden like the check marks for everything you see, like corporate sociopathy, right? Yeah. And they're like, that's our guy. That's our guy. Once all this stuff comes out about how he spent his money and, and, you know, how he's misappropriating funds. That was what got him out more so than like the material practices that he exemplified while he was running the union, which involves. Yeah. Hiding the fact that the owners were colluding against them. It is completely unhinged. And unfortunately, the other thing that's unhinged is that's going to be all for today. However, comma, there is more to this story tomorrow as we finish part two of this interview. And oh my God, holy shit. Somehow the worst is yet to come. So join us for part two tomorrow in which question mark. There seems to be good evidence of the NFL paying a guy specifically to be able to keep control of the union. Oh, dear. So if you, if you want to find more of Charles McDonald's work, you can do so at the football 301 podcast and at Yahoo Sports where he writes the column for verse. It's quite good. You should listen to it. And yeah, dear God, I don't know. Warm unions. If you're in unions that suck, make better ones. Welcome to it could happen here. A podcast about the most unhinged union story I have ever covered. I am your host, meal long. In a moment, we will return to my interview with Yahoo Sports journalist Charles McDonald. So if you have not listened to the last episode, you should listen to the last episodes. We can get you up to the 2020s in terms of the horrifying and depressing story of the NFL players Association's leadership gradually selling out more and more of their players. And in this episode, we're going to really sort of get down to the brass tacks of what's been happening in the 2020s and answering the question to what extent has the NFL paid in order to have a pro management regime installed at the head of the union. A question that is really distressingly. We have good evidence of this. But before we can get to that, we need to talk about one of the other absolutely horrifying things that this union regime has done. And that is the union covering up as reported by public Tory originally, a report by an arbitration judge about whether or not the independent teams in the NFL, which are supposed to be businesses competing against each other. And I kind of emphasize this enough because this is a major portion of how the NFL's anti trust exemption is supposed to work is that these teams are normally competing against each other. So there is supposed to be a labor market with competition. But this document that the union covered up from an arbitration process they were in is about it has very good evidence of the league actively colluding in order to pay players less and the union covered it up. So here we go back to our interview. Let's talk about this collusion thing because I've been losing my fucking mind about this for a really long time. And I cannot imagine just literally having evidence in your hand that the owners are colluding against your members. Like these are literally you like this is supposed to be you and you're just hiding the report. Even like, okay, so even if you lose the arbitration, the fact that a judge wrote an illegal document that it was like beyond the benefit of a doubt that Roger Godel and the 32 owners were colluding. We've seen text messages between the Cardinals owner and the Chargers owner talking about how much to pay Justin Herbert. Yeah, Lamar Jackson. Yeah. Okay, can we explain the Lamar Jackson situation and like explain who Lamar Jackson is for people who don't watch football so they can understand how unhinged this is. Lamar Jackson is a wizard is the best way that I could put it. Lamar Jackson, he is the franchise quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. And I just think that anyone with a brain could have seen what was going on. Yeah. Right. Like with this situation. So, so even before the song, even before Lamar Jackson, you have to take it back to the song Watson trade out of Houston. Oh God, the one trade we've ever covered on this show. Because fuck, holy shit. Oh my God. But this, this is what got the dominoes rolling on this stuff where as terrible as the Sean Watson is as a football player now and obviously as a human being. Yeah. Right. When he was in Houston, it feels like a different world. He was the man. Like he was incredible. Like to the point where the Texans, I think his last year starting there, they went four and 12. And it was like so obviously not his fault. Like in terms of efficiency, like he was right behind Pashkum home to the top of the league. Like he got an apology from JJ Watt that year saying like, dude, we wasted an absolutely incredible year from you. And then, you know, the 30 accusations of at best sexual misconduct at worst sexual assault. And in some of those cases. Yeah. It's really hideous shit. Right. So then it gets to a point where he, the Texans, they don't want them there. He doesn't want to be there anymore. But you have what looks to be a franchise quarterback in his mid 20s available for any team to have, you know, with the trade. So my team, Sally, the L.A. Shalkins, they thought that they had a deal done for Deshaun Watson and then the Cleveland Browns came in. And this is where the where the ownership, you know, feedback kind of gets broken where Jimmy Haslam breaks the ranks and says, I want this guy on my team so bad. You know, this is why like nobody ever hits free agency in the NFL, because this is what would look like in terms of like when owners actually have to bid against each other for elite talent. Yeah. Jimmy Haslam comes in and says, here's five years, $230 million. Every single penny will be guaranteed. No stipulations and looking like that. Which is like not how this works normally. Like no one gets guaranteed contracts. Right. And because the previously the the actual first place to get a fully guaranteed that contract from another team was actually Kirk Cousins with the Vikings. When he left Washington, they gave him like a three year, I think it was three years, $88 million fully guaranteed. Still, that ain't five years, 230. Yeah. You know. And what the owners were mad about was not that you would seek out someone with the personal background to Sean Watson to represent your franchise. It's that you would pay any NFL player $230 million guaranteed because now that sets precedent. Yep. Because if you're Lamar Jackson, whose contract was coming to an end at the season after the Sean Watson signed this deal, you look, I didn't touch those women. Yeah. I'm an MVP quarterback. I'm in my 20s. Why shouldn't I get a fully guaranteed contract? Yep. Right. Which is what he was doing. And the Ravens, they said, OK, fine, go out into the market. And I felt like I was going insane during this because. Oh my God. There were so many arguments from talking heads about why teams shouldn't sign Lamar Jackson. So he was hit with what's called a non-exclusive franchise tag, which means the Ravens. I don't even know how the idea of the franchise tag existing is another labor L. Hideously anti labor practice. Right. So his contract with the Ravens is over and they can hit him with an exclusive franchise tag, which means you will be playing for us next year. You basically have no say in it unless we remove this or we work out a trade with somebody else, but you cannot go negotiate with anyone else, even though your contract has expired. And to be quote unquote fair, like the payment is a average of the top five yearly salaries of the position you play. So you will get paid like a top five player for one year at your position. It really only goes to mostly valuable players that they're trying to extend. But they hit him with a non-exclusive franchise tag, which means they have right of first refusal on if another team offers Lamar Jackson a contract. And that team would owe the Ravens two first round picks in order to sign Lamar Jackson. So the shot was just went for three. Yeah. And this this rule is legally mandated. Yeah. That is two first round picks. And I'm sure you know the Ravens probably asked for a little stuff beyond that. But I only have to give you two first round picks and I can just sign Lamar Jackson. He's like a generational quarterback. Right, right, right. At this point, we're talking about a quarterback who was like 25 years old. He's the first unanimous MVP, which he won in his first season as a starter since Tom Brady. He's one of two players in like, you know, I don't know if it's two, but it's less than five players in the history of the league that have been unanimous. MVP's every single person voted for Lamar Jackson being MVP. And the Ravens said, go ahead and negotiate with another team. And no one, no one even brought him in to talk to him. Right. Like it's unbelievable. I grew up in Chicago. So like I grew up with the Bears and my family are like a family of like Seahawks fans, right? Neither of those two teams have ever had a quarterback who's in the same stratosphere as this guy. Like this is right. These guys never, like ever available. Ever hip three agency. Never. Ever. And the people like the bend the rules to things that aren't written where let's say, oh, you know, the Ravens will just match. Make them match then. Yeah. Make them. That's a competitive advantage for you. Right. Right. I hate that my favorite team keeps popping up in this Atlanta, but but Arthur Blank, he put his name on it. You guys say, you know, the Falcons, like they were trying to out, you know, backup quarterback quality guys because after Matt Ryan left. It says, like, Jesus Christ, Marcus, Marriota, dude. And and I'm sitting there like, you're telling me that I can sign Lamar Jackson and I got to give up two first round picks for him. Like, dude, pay him 60 million guaranteed every year. He's worth that much. Yeah. And Arthur Blank says, well, you know, Lamar Jackson, he's going to get hurt too much for us to sign him. So, so no, no team signs him. No team even talks to him. So obviously he goes back to the Ravens doesn't get the fully guaranteed contract that the Sean Watson guy. Yeah. And that kind of put an end to it for a little bit until the power of journalism pops up. Pollatory does his his investigation. Here's about arbitration hearing about collusion in the NFL. And he gets his hands like on the documents that say that while Lamar Jackson was going through his free agency, basically rejection by 31 teams, when he would have been an upgrade for like 28 of them. 29 of them. Yeah. At the time, I would throw a number one, like overall rookie quarterback that I just drafted with the first overall pick out the fucking window. Throw him away to get Lamar Jackson. Right. You can be a part of this. Two first round picks were given you two first round picks plus, you know, if at that time, like it may have been like Colin Murray, something like that. Yeah. Take him. Like it's unbelievable. Like I cannot. He literally like the game of football is a fundamentally a different game now. It was when Lamar Jackson like started playing because of him. And it's just like, he didn't take him. His influence on the NFL is so strong that we don't really do the black quarterback talking points anymore. Yeah. Because the league was like, oh, we can't let that happen again. Like when the Mar Jackson felt the 32 and everyone's talking about doesn't need to play a different position. And in year two, he wins an MVP. Yeah. And the year after he signs his deal with the Ravens, he wins his second MVP. Like that kind of cooled the fans. Like when you get to see you guys like Kim Ward going first overall, or even Colin Murray going first overall, and there's no talk about how smart they are as players. Yeah. Like that's his influence directly. His success contributes to that. Like he is a hall of fame. It kind of gives me chills. Like think about like what he's accomplished considering like what has been stacked against him. Yeah. Like he is such an important figure for this era of football and really just the whole league like on the field and off the field. Like what he means like culturally in society for like for the chances that black men can get to play a position that deemed like they were deemed not the place Marno. Because he was so good that they said we can't look that stupid again. Yeah. This player was available. This player was available in his athletic prime. Every team could have drafted him. Every single team in the league could have drafted him and they fucking didn't. The Ravens passed on him. It's like he was not even the first Ravens draft pick that year. No. They drafted Hayden Hurst 25 overall before they drafted Lamar Jackson. Every single team passed on him. And he's one of 11 players in the history of the NFL to win two MVPs. Every other player that has won two or more MVPs is either a Hall of Famer or actively playing Aaron Rodgers and Pat Mahomes. That's it. Like this guy is a Hall of Famer already. And he should have won a third by the way. Right. He should have won the third. He was in like either way. He's got a statistical like like statistical tie for like a third one. So yeah. He's first. He's the three times first team up pro. He's going to be a Hall of Famer. And the fact that nobody nobody called him in to say what what would it take. What kind of contract are you looking for. That that's what I was like something something something is so obviously not right here. The Colts traded two first row picks for a quarterback. Like yes. Right. Precisely precisely. And like they're starting a guy who broke his leg and then also spray near his Achilles like I just do it. Jalen Ramsey went for two first round picks. Yeah. And he's a great player. He's a quarterback. You know it's not even the same thing. So this is the most important position in sports. Right. A first ballot Hall of Famer was on the market in his prime. Yeah. And nobody talked about a contract except the team that owned that you know owned like the rights of first refusal. And it was so frustrating to see like my colleagues in the media say oh you know the reins were just going to match. That's so disingenuous. That's so disingenuous because you're you're stripping Lamar like of his agency as a player one like he's better than every other quarterback that just about any team has. It will be such a severe upgrade. And you're also just like holding the line for what you're not getting a cut of that money. Why are you lying to these people like that. But Pablo you know Paul to a back like in his reporting he found out that a judge agreed with. The union that the players were being colluded against like actively like there's there's text messages and JC Treader and Lloyd Howell. They hid this from the union. Bro if if you're a union and you have even if you lose arbitration and you have physical note from a judge that says you were colluding against. Take your megaphone to the top of the tallest mountain in the world and talk about this. Apply some pressure. Now like this is where I started to get curious. Like why why did this happen because that part we still don't have enough information on like like I need to know how much like if there's a kickback going back like JC Treader. Yeah. How much is it. And we do know that Lloyd Howell part of the reason also part of the reason why he was fired or had to resign was because he along with. Oh my. Former former MLB PA union leader Tony White who was recently fired for banging his brother's wife who he hired to work at the MLB. Oh my fucking God. Yeah. The NFL is so lucky that the MLB PA had a scandal that's almost as embarrassing to the club. Maybe more. Maybe. Yes. But Lloyd Howell and Tony White they were working together as part of an eight man group of like union parasites like at the top of the corporate ladder in America to siphon money away from the union into their own personal pockets. Yeah. Like this is what's running it. We know for a fact Lloyd and Tony White who's the you know baseball union head what it was because he no longer has his job or family. Yeah. Bad day for him but fucking you you you brought this upon yourself. Right. He can't go home for Christmas. He's done. They were part of a small group that was siphoning money away from union funds to line their pockets. That is verified. They've been sued for that. So what else is going on here. Yeah. What is the incentivization for JC Treanor to push someone like that through. And then the backside is JC's brain as the union president expires while Lloyd Howell is the executive director and Lloyd makes a new cushy role for JC as like you know I don't remember what the role was called but like. It's like. Chief of strategy or something. Yes. Chief strategy officer. And the thing that paid him like three million dollars a year very handsomely. He was actually Lloyd was off you know blowing money at the strip club and JC was kind of running like the actual data day things because he's the one that has a connection to players. Right. And now we've gone through a point where after Gene Upshaw dies the two executive directors who followed him as you know the head of union. And then we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've gone through a point where we've Yes, JC is still the Chief Tragedy Officer of the NFLPA. I think he resigns eventually from there. But! Yes, yes, yes. After what Hal resigns, JC resigns too. So now we're up to last summer, summer 2025. Yeah. Eight months ago, right? It's March 27th. Eight months ago, JC tried to resigns from the Chief Tragedy Officer role that was cut out for him and says he said in an interview to my friend, Jonathan Jones, I have no interest in any leadership roles in the union moving forward. He said I have given this my all. I have given this everything I had. I'm going to go home and be a family man. I have no interest in this at all. And it seemed like it until this month when JC pounced back up as one of the finalists for the new executive director role that was previously left by Lloyd Howe. Now, this is where he gets murky. I don't know like all the processes that go on with like how they decide like who's going to do what? Like apparently they have 300 candidates. It will have down the three. I asked some players what's going on in the past couple of weeks. They don't know like how like all this was selected, but they are presented with three finalists for the executive director role to vote on. JC Treader, who has popped up out of nowhere, then the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference. So like Temple and you know, those East Coast schools like like James Madison or whatever, like he's overseeing that. It's like a college football commissioner. Yeah, like like yeah, college football, college football commissioner. Like he's talking to like the president of Rice University about like scheduling games against Toledo or some shit. Christ. But see you JC Treader, the American Conference commissioner, not even like the ACC, the AAC, right? The St. Cass Conference. It used to be the Big East like they're stolen Big East Valor. This this guy was running against JC Treader. And also the third was a former Hollywood unit, Zett, who didn't really seem to be that interested in the role in the first place. So we get down to the election day and we find out the American Conference commissioner drops out. Oh, wow. On on election day, you drop. Right. OK. So now. So now we're dealing with we've had two executive directors back to back. The more Smith, Lord, how not football players didn't go well. JC Treader was a part of that. But he played football, right? So you see the JC Treader or this Hollywood guy who doesn't give a crap. I forget his name, but his background wasn't like always the cleanest in terms of, you know, actually getting things done in terms of, you know, being pro labor all the time. Ultimately, as fucked up as it is, that's an easy choice. If you're a player, these are my two options. I'm going to take the guy who at least has played football. So you had JC Treader, who is now back as the executive director eight months after he said he had no interest in being any type of union leadership. And like somehow this whole process has been like stage managed. So he's like back again. Right. But to me, this lynchpin right here is actually the most fascinating part of what's happened. And this is where, like, if you listen to this podcast, it probably won't sound like conspiracy. If you're not thinking about labor relations in America, it might sound like conspiracy to you. But JC Treader, when he was the president, like his right hand man, I think it was the vice president was Jailin Reeves Maven or was very important. And he was especially was linebacker for the lines for a long time. He became the union president after JC Treader left and became like the chief strategy officer. So he basically followed in JC Treader's footsteps as the union president. So, you know, while all this shady stuff is going on, Jailin Reeves Maven is an underrated part as, you know, the new union president, because Lloyd was executive director JC had this new role as the chief strategy officer. But Jailin Reeves Maven is sitting there as the president of the union. So obviously he is involved in this somehow. Right. Like he is involved with like the cover up for the players. Yeah. Yeah. Not being as aggressive as you should be towards ownership in terms of game about 17 game, dog. Like that's insane. And you've got nothing back for it. Yeah. So there's a clock, though, in terms of how long you can, like, be removed from being a player and still be the NFL PA president. And last year, Jailin Reeves Maven, he had been out of the league. So his clock was almost up. I think it's within, yes, two years, two years. So if you fall in the league, you're not signing a contract. Like no one's pursuing you. Like you kind of just get filed as retired, even if you're not. Even if you haven't come out and said, like, I'm retired. Like there's a bunch of players that never said I'm retired, but no way. Nobody signed them. Like T.Y. Hilton, T.Y. Hilton just functionally retired like two weeks ago. He hasn't played in like five years. OK. But he has been placed in a retired file in the NFL as far as just like labeling things go. And if you are retired, if you are labeled retired, you can't be the NFL PA president, makes good, perfect sense. So, OK, this does not sound crazy to probably the people who listen to this podcast, right? If you are one of 32 hours, right? And you have this power structure of an organization that you negotiate against the NFL PA, this power structure is very friendly towards you. You know, they've given you a lot over the past 15 years since you ripped up the 2006 CBA. Yeah. How much would you pay to keep that in place? Right. Yep. How much would you pay to keep in place? And I haven't seen many people talking about this part of it. But yeah, the Chicago Bidders signed Jalen and Rees-Maybin this fall. Oh, my God. Right. To a veteran in the deal. I looked it up. I think he played like 40 special team snaps for them this season. But that resets his clock. Yeah. That resets his clock to be president of the union. So now we get to the end of the season. Yep. Jalen and Rees-Maybin runs again to be president. I'm not sure anybody ran against him. No one's told us who the other candidates were. Yep. If there were other candidates. And now he's the president of the union again. After he was almost barred from it. Does any bear share remember like any play? The Jalen Rees-Maybin made? No. Right. Like I watched every game of that team. I guess we're like two that I missed for those on planes. But like, no. OK. But so think about it from this perspective. If you are an owner and you have this power structure that is generating billions, capital B billions of dollars back in your direction away from the people that they represent. Yeah. Would it be worth five hundred thousand dollars? Keep that going. And a little roster spot at the bottom. Absolutely. Now, that's the part that I haven't seen people bring up as much because we get stuck on Treader. But Treader's right hand man was almost ineligible to be the president of the NFLPA. Yeah. And he pops up in this little role when it looks like his career is over. Like they signed him late in the season to play special teams. Yeah. You just bump with someone from the practice squad to go do that. Because because you want guys that you've already, you know, developed a relationship. Guys, you've started you started training, working with to get those reps. Some outside guy like coming in to play special teams that, you know, that's it's unnecessary. It's unnecessary. It's been out of the lead, too. Like, yeah, there's no reason to do it. Unless you as a power structure are interested in him having eligibility to keep funneling you money at expense of the players. Yeah. And I've really changed my tune like on players not carrying over the past month, just from from talking to guys like because I used to cover the jets and the giants like for newspaper here in New York City. Like this is what I've done for the past 10 years. I've met a lot of guys. They are like curious because you're like, what is this mechanism? Yeah. That is allowing you guys to operate with so much secrecy where you have J.C. Tredder. I mean, shout out to like the people who ran against him or were there for a minute. But functionally, like practically he ran unopposed with the executive director role. And so you would have lived out to from 300 candidates to three. Yeah. And one of them is J.C. Tredder and the other is the commissioner of like the sixth most important college football conference in the country and then a Hollywood movie. Like, you need an exact guy. I mean, that's that's that's functionally unopposed. And then with J. L. L. L. L. Rating in the shadows that is allowing this to happen. And how much is it worth? Because now we're coming up on a new CBA negotiation. We're they're probably going to get an eight inch game. An eight inch game. Like you you have gone from in 20 years, you've gone from a spot where you had revenue majority, even if it wasn't 60 percent, it was 52, 53. That's better than 47. And like the literal death of Gene Upshaw. Yeah. It like killed this union in a way that I don't know if it's recoverable from because you've sent a precedent over two CBAs, likely to be three, that you will give up anything for what? Yeah, for nothing. But for what? Like like Roger Goodell should never be coming out insane. I'm glad that J.C. Tredder was named the executive. Like J.C. Tredder should be a pain in his ass. No. And and it just it's sad to me, like as someone like who like I love this sport so much and to see like what's happening to the union. It's horrible because ultimately, like we're so short-sighted that you know what what's happening for me like right now or today. It's the only thing that matters. But like there's going to be real consequences for these guys for decades. And then like my my first year covering the jets in the Giants for the Daily News up here in New York was 2019. And the jets had a legends day, like we're a bunch of guys that came back and they were on during halftime. It's what crappy things do when you have nothing to talk about then. Like you talk about talk about the good old days, right? Yeah. But you know, these guys that come up and they're hanging out with us in the press box before they went down on the field of halftime. These are like 50 year old men like on canes and stuff like that. Like like my dad's 60 and he still shoots hoops sometimes at the gym. And these are like 45, 50 year old men that can't walk with that assistance. They're like they walk around like and they're forgetting like, oh, what I just turned this corner to do like all the time. Like you're talking to them and you have to keep reminding them like refresh like refresh them on on on what we were talking about. Yeah. As if it's like chat, GPT, you know, like in and it's sad. But when you see like like the material restrictions that these guys have in their own lives post playing and these guys like they're not all rich. Like they're just normal people. It's it's sad that this union has capitulated to the owners for such a violent job. Yeah. And and sure, like you can say like, you know, no one's telling you to be a football player, but that's the only option a lot of these guys have. Like to go be football players and to go put their body on the line just so their family can live in comfort for a few years. Oh, it's sad. Yeah, it's like it's the actual poverty draft. And it hits way, way, way more people than the military does. Like significantly more. And I think it's something that's really, really, really badly understood on the left because like people on the left had not to care about sports stuff. But it's like football is a structural part. Yes, the entire American economy is a structural part of the entire American educational system, like half of the educational system is designed to funnel people into this sport specifically so these people can make fucking money off of it. Yes. And that stuff shapes everything. And I understand like why lefties like they don't care about sports. I get it. But if the NFL were to cease existing tomorrow, that would be like a major collapse within the US economy. Yeah. Like I'm not I'm not joking. Basically, everything you watch, especially now is subsidized by some NFL game. Right. Like, yeah, that's that's why these companies exist. If you if you go back every single year and you look at the top one hundred most watched TV shows of the year, 97 of them will be NFL games. And you'll have like two comfortable games in like the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Yeah, maybe like maybe the World Series. Like maybe the World Series. Right. Maybe the Oscars can get. But like maybe the Oscars versus like Jets, Bills like Week 12, that's not like a fucking they're on a shit on a Thursday night. Like, right. But that's how big this is. Yeah. And I I would implore people to not say, hey, who cares about this? It's important. And also like there's there's also just like clear, like you look at a game, there's clear racial divides. Yeah. And who has to play this game and who doesn't have to play this game? There's studies that show that like upwards of 80 percent of black boys who play sports want to be professional athletes. I mean, because that's that's it really. Like it's that. Yeah. Or I'm going to go. Do I don't fucking know. And and and those are really your options. And that's why I say like I've I've used I've used the NFL to kind of figure out my way like through, you know, how I feel about things because there's such real like desperation from these people to get out. And the problem, like also with the union is like, let's say, like, to some of these guys come from nothing, like the fact that they could figure out a way to get to a bus that will take them to a school where they can play football is like a major accomplishment. Yeah. In their own. And the fact that you can go from that to to them to making three hundred thousand dollars in a year at twenty one, that will distort you as well. Because now you've made such an extreme jump so fast, probably going to be a little bit complacent. You might not be thinking about what's next because and I say this for like a twenty one year old person, you spent the last twenty years of your life fucking fighting like just to get to the next day. I remember one of the craziest things back in the day, like when Larry Mead Tumsell was at Ole Miss, like back when they got busted before the NIL stuff going out, there's this text thread between Larry Mead Tumsell's O-line coach and his mom saying like, hey, like, can you send money for the light bill this month? Yeah. He's a five star starter. Yeah. On your team that is generating millions of dollars. Yep. And you could get in trouble for sending his mom like two hundred bucks to keep the lights on. Yeah. You know, there's a there's a real like systemic, like obvious extraction of value from these black men. And yeah, once it's over, they say good luck. Yeah, fucks until, you know, we had like the CTE lawsuit where they had to pay like billions of dollars. But ultimately, you just kind of come in and get discarded, which is why this union is so important. Yeah. And the fact that you can be JC Tratter, use the trust that you have earned through your own blood, sweat and tears of being an NFL player and good enough to stand on your own as like almost a decade long NFL starter. The fact that you would use that and turn around and like just capitulate the owners like that's scum. It is. It's scum. And it's it's it's sad. And just everyone here deserves better, except for the people at top. Yeah. And there needs to be some answers on why are you guys doing this? They're not doing it for no reason. There has to be something there. That's the part that we don't know. One thing I want to kind of go back to for a second is like how they're able to do this. I don't know the exact mechanisms of how they specifically have been able to do this, because every union is structured like kind of differently. But there's something that's actually, unfortunately, like pretty common in even sort of like progressive unions where, you know, like we've had people on this show a few times who were trying to dislodge this clique that used to run. I'm not sure if they're still running it, but they used to run the big nurses union. Like a huge portion of the country's nurses. And so OK, one of the problems here is that like union elections, even if they're well publicized, even if you were trying to get everyone to vote, have really, really low turnout. Members, unless they're really engaged, do not pay attention to it. Yeah. And that's not even really engaged in the sense of engaged in union activities, because even most people who like are really engaged in like I want to go on strike or like I want to show up to this like contract session aren't voting in the union elections because no one knows it's happening. No one knows who any of the candidates are. It's no one cares. It's like it's an even more extreme version of the problem with like no one voting in regular elections. And so with a really small amount of votes, you can just get you and your faction installed for generations. Right. Like there are admin caucuses in a whole bunch of unions. Like we're talking about like the teamsters and like unions on that scale. We're like, yeah, it was a huge deal when the teamsters like finally ran out their admin caucus. But like these people are in power for half a century. People are in power for like generations of these guys are able to stay in these unions and they're able to do it because it's really, really easy to control union elections, especially once you're empowered. And this is something like I've talked about on this fucking show. Like I have seen union staffers whose job it is to do organizing, get fired for telling their own members to read a contract there. But they were being asked to vote on because that was considered a threat to the power base, right? And the problem is, is that once you're running the union, you control the jobs of all of the staff beneath you. And one of the things that actually came out in public tourist reporting is that they offered anyone who'd been at the union for more than seven years to buy out. And so, you know, you can watch them do like they're doing a systemic purge of all of this stuff. And then like the moment Shredder is like leading the search, right? He's able to use his position, like his very specific position in this bureaucracy, like as a president of the union to like go change the terms of the search so that it's no secret. And you can just keep using whatever every position you take over gives you a little bit more sort of bureaucratic power that you can use to rat fuck people. And once they're in, it's like it is possible to dislodge them. Like this is something that happened with with the UAW in the last thing that was 2020, 2023 they got in. And they dislodge an admin caucus that had been in power and like doing similar shit to this for like decades and decades and decades. And so it is possible for, you know, reform caucuses inside the union to organize and drive the leadership out. But it's really hard. And the moment you start doing that, like every single person who's anyway affiliated with you will get targeted for retaliation by the union. And yes, that that's what has happened with J.C. Tredder. Again, Pablo Torre, he released an interview two weeks ago with, you know, longtime security officer who was basically one. Like the people was like, hey, yeah, what's going on here with this? J.C. Tredder and Lloyd Halstuck and they fired him for that. Like the union fired the security guy who been working. Like, yeah, he's been working there since like D and Upsha was working there. So he's part of the old guard that is there for like the material like improvement of players' lives. Like as far as they can take it without, you know, dealing with the real bounds of like, we got to kind of get this number for the season or our worker base is going to be harmed. Like those guys don't really work there anymore. Yeah. Someone like Dominic Fox worth his heat. Like he's on TV now, you know. And I know like he cares a lot about this, but he's off doing different things. And I think another thing that that's tough, like when you look back at like, OK, who is playing football? These are mostly young men who like they enter this union without any knowledge of like how unions work. Like what are the finances behind any of this? You're geared to take like your high school free time and your college free time, especially now that these colleges are throwing out cash. Like you are honed to care about football and get football done. And, you know, once we get to college, like we'll see what it is. Hopefully you can get your degree and keep it moving. But most of the time, like these guys, they don't know what any of this stuff is. So you have like this very unformed, you know, labor force that's getting churned out two, three years at a time. It would probably be pretty easy to honestly create a blockade of knowledge when the people who could be asking you about this are going to be irrelevant if you just hold the lines for a year. You know, it's sad. The other thing about this, right, is that these guys don't have even the basic incentive that even like the UAW in their most entrenched had, which is like, if you fuck this up enough, there won't be a union. But like these guys are always going to be something called the NFL Players Association, right? Because the NFL needs it for cover, which means they don't even have to do the minimal organizing work or like even the minimal like pretending to actually fight for the people who are supposed to be the union, because it doesn't matter to them. Like why the fuck would they try to onboard new people into the union and get them involved? Like, why do they care? They can just fucking go home and like cash their checks and get whatever the fuck benefits are getting from the league for doing this shit. Yeah. Yeah. I want to know those benefits are. I just want to know. Yep, me too. I would love to. Really? Because when it gets down to like, how much is your soul worth, man? Yeah. Like, J.C. is one of those guys, ultimately, who has made enough money playing football where he doesn't have to do this. Yeah. You know, he doesn't have to go around like this. Like it's it's a little baffling in that sense. Like, and I know that like, I guess something like I guess I struggle sometimes. Like, why are you all doing this? Fuck that shit. Like why? Like it's really like that. Like a couple more bucks really means that much to you. Like you're really willing to sell out all these people. But the answer is yes. Yep. The answer is yes. Personally, I can't really reconcile that. Yeah. It's a point. It's terrible. But it's just the truth of the matter. So hopefully they can figure out a way to kind of dismantle this. But like, man, even the fact that like, man, you got like the bears, they sign jail and reason maybe all of a sudden, like his clock's back. And now you have the same power structure as you hit another landmark where you're going to be negotiating for 18 games. That's a tough thing to topple over, man. That's a tough thing to get past. It's really difficult. Yeah. Eat at Arby's. Actually, don't do that. Arby's is not good. No, it's. Well, I think that's a decent point to sort of end on unless you have any. Yeah. Do you have anything else you want to make sure people know about this whole thing? I would say like, if you're not watching football, you should. It's a great game. I look, I say this as someone football has like materially harmed me. Like my back is messed up. I've had two herniatedis my back. So 17, I turned 32 this year. It's like half my life, you know. Would I do it again? Fuck. Yeah. In the heartbreak. I don't know. I don't I don't know. And like this, this is where like my, my like the people who know me, they like, man, you're wired a little differently. But I think that's standard for football players. Like it's a really complicated relationship. But like all my best friends are still like football related in some way, whether it's college or journalism now or, you know, going back to high school back the day, like I still talk to so many people that I played football with. Like I'm watching like I'm the guy watching these like crappy like Division two games like on a Friday night. It's it's awesome. So like, you know, you should check out Lamar Jackson. Like just go on YouTube, just look up a highlight and then. He's great. It's just wild. Like, you know, when you when you watch football or really any of these sports, like they are just inescapable. I hate to even say microcosms of like American society, because like this is obviously this is this is American society. Like when you just look on the influence that football has, like the economy as a whole and the way that people who are less fortunate are able to be extracted and run into the ground and forgotten even by the people who are supposed to protect them. I think that's something that we see here just about every arena of American life. So I would just implore some of our fellow lefties. You know, don't be the who cares about sports, because whether you know about it, sports is interacting and directly impacting your life in this country every single day. And I think it's important to kind of care about some of the labor practices that are going on, even if, you know, the labor practices are around. Lamar Jackson didn't pay, you know, $60 million a year over $50 million a year. But it's still it's still important. Yeah, you know, I think there's I think there's two there's two points I can make there. One is that like, yeah, I don't know, like it was it was it was the fucking like trans women in college sports thing was like one of the two avenues through which like, oh, wait, hold on, a bunch of us just don't have fucking rights now. Yeah. And, you know, and like that kind of like cultural stuff that comes out of places that were just not usually. Right, right. And just to to tackle onto that, as we've seen over, you know, the past few months and as many danger and misrepresented and punched down communities have said to y'all forever, I say this as a black person, if they do it to us, you will do it to you at some point. Yep. Yep. It's just sad that like we've gotten to this point where, you know, you've been fighting and screaming for so long like, bro, could you just turn your head this way and just look. Yeah. You see like, bro, we're the same, man. We're all just humans like you're trying to make it. That thought process is just so violently opposed by the powers that be. And it's just so ingrained in our society that like certain people have to get stepped on that you will let yourself get stepped on. And now, yeah, shit, we got videos of, you know, people getting executed in the street in Minneapolis and what's happened. Nothing. Just like every other police shooting, you know, of a black person or where a trans person is getting killed, like, yeah, nothing happened and nothing keeps happening. And ultimately we get to a point where that's just the norm. So shit, there's a lot of stuff to fight. But you can even see like how the NFL Union has followed that same like deterioration. Yeah. Shit. You know, you go back to the 2011 CBA, you threw the rookies under the bus. And then what the owners do, they came and took your money too. Yeah. Right. And then when it came down to, you know, the 2020 CBA, you guys have set such a precedent of us running your pockets that we will set the hard, non-negotiable stance of an extra football game and you will capitulate. That's everywhere, man. That that is everywhere in the corporate structure in life of America. So yeah, sports is inescapable. Check out Lamar Jackson on Sundays. It's good stuff. Yeah, I think I think the one last thing I want to say is that, you know, the reform caucus taking over the UAW was something that was seen as impossible, like it was like literally, I mean, like. Every union has a reform caucus. They normally lose every single time. And then one day they won and it like completely changed what the labor movement in America is. And, you know, the thing, the thing about organizing reform caucuses is that I know the people who organize these things, like they're just random people. Yeah. Like anyone can do this. This is this is not something that requires like, you know, an incredibly specialized skill set. You can just do it. And it was like actual teenagers do this shit. Watching people and how tenaciously they could fight and watching them win. That that's how I get out of bed in the morning is is I have I have I have seen the hope in how how people can fight fights that are just unwinnable, that are so unfathomable that most people don't even think there's a point in fighting it. And then one day they win. Yeah. And yeah, maybe one day. Well, I mean, I mean, yeah, even if you just think about the basis of the LFL PA, because like because now it's an antitrust blocker, right? That's what it is now. But the roots of it. Yeah. They were guys trying to get rights for trying to get paid for the amount of time that they put into this job. One of the the basis like complaints is when the league was smaller and you had like kind of other leagues, you know, that are defunct now or were absorbed by the AFC or the NFC before and all the merch, the NFL. One of the basis is was the NFL owners would ban you if you played in another league, like if you spent any time playing another league, they would ban you for five years. Man, that's your whole career. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I don't know if this made the show, if we're talking about before the show, but one of the things that got the NFL PA like organized in the 50s was guys were doing training camp and preseason games for free. They weren't getting paid for it. Like, but but these are just regular men who are just like, fuck it, I'm tired of this. Yeah. And sadly, it's been co-opted into something that does not represent what it was before, but, you know, this stuff is started by regular people who are saying, fuck it, I'm tired of this. We got to make a change. Yeah. And I think on that note, where can people find your work? Yeah, you can find me on Blue Sky or Virts. You can find me on Yahoo Sports, football 301 podcast trying to be found a little bit less these days. That's so reasonable. The Blue Sky is where you can find it for the most part. Yeah. You know, just a little less. I get that there's a reason I'm not putting my hand to live here. Yeah. But I will say this is not necessarily a friendly Blue Sky account. I'm not one of those guys who's just going to let you pop off. We do clap back around here. So it rocks. It rocks. We do, in fact, love to see. Yeah. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Elkurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Molly Cribb-Apple, an award-winning writer and artist. She's written three books, is co-author of the book Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Mounawan Hisham, which was a New York Times notable book, and longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. And her memoir, Drawing Blood, is a book that is a book that is a 2018 National Book Award. And her memoir, Drawing Blood, also received global praise. Her most recent book is Here Where We Live is Our Country, The Story of the Jewish Bund. And it'll be out on April 7th. I've already pre-ordered. I'm very excited. So I wanted to talk to Molly today, given how relevant the history she outlines in her book is to this current moment, especially for the American Jewish community. So thank you, Molly, for joining us. Thank you so much, Dana, for having me. It's my total honor to be here. So you describe in the book the Bund's philosophy of doike, or here-ness as a rejection of the idea that Jews need to seek a homeland elsewhere to find safety. How did you come to understand this concept personally? And why do you think it was, at least from my perspective, so thoroughly erased from mainstream Jewish historical memory after the Holocaust? I mean, I came across doke through studying the Bund, which I came across through the watercolors of my great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbard, who was a post-impressionist painter, who was a member of the Bund as a young man back in Russia. And the concept of doke, or here-ness, means it's a defiant assertion of rootedness in a place that wanted Jews dead. Jews had lived in Eastern Europe for over 1,000 years, but in the 18th, 19th, and at the dawn of the 20th century, these countries were some of the roughest places to be a Jew in the world. In the Tsarist Empire, Jews were a racialized minority. It's set it on their papers. They could only live in a certain area. There was military conscription for 25 years. It sucked, shall we say. And in interwar Poland as well, the government was trying to use racism as a glue to hold this diverse and quite impoverished country together. So what here-ness meant is it meant that Jews had the right to live and not just live, not just survive, not just cling to life, but to flourish and have beautiful lives in their homes that they'd lived in for the last 1,000 years. And that even if European Christians thought that Jews were, you know, Swar the Oriental aliens who needed to be forcibly deported to Palestine, which is exactly what the Polish interwar government thought, even if that's what those in power thought, Jews had a right to live and flourish in freedom and dignity in their homes because that's the right that every single human on this earth has. And in many ways, it almost reminds me of this precursor echo of the Palestinian concept of Samud, of the steadfastness to stay in your home despite the genocidal predations of the Israeli state. And I think that the concept of here-ness was crushed by a variety of things. I mean, first of all, as we all know, you know, there was a genocide in Europe that wiped out two-thirds of European Jews and wiped out 90% of the Jews in Poland. But it wasn't just that. It was also that after the genocide, countries like Poland were so psychopathically violent to Jewish survivors that it convinced the overwhelming majority of Polish Jewish survivors that they had to go somewhere else. There were about 1,000 Jews that were murdered by nationalists in the aftermath of the Holocaust, including dozens who were burned alive in this famous town called Kielce. Now, whether that somewhere else meant Palestine or whether that meant New York City, that was something that was very much up to the visa regimes of the era. The vast majority of Jews who survived the Holocaust did not necessarily want to go to Palestine, let alone to sign up to join the Haganah and throw themselves as cannon fodder into another war after surviving Auschwitz. The majority of Jewish survivors probably wanted to go live with their families in America and in other countries that had large Jewish communities. But the Western democracies, and tell me if this sounds familiar in the current moment, while the Western democracies preached a language of human rights and universalism, in practice, they were quite content to let impoverished refugees rot in camps. Does that, I could see no other echoes. Of course not, no. No, it only happened once, ever. Yeah, yeah, definitely we've learned our lesson. And yeah, exactly. The world has definitely learned its lesson about the corrosive effects of hypocrisy. And so Zionist groups were able to take over camp administrations and use them as recruiting grounds and to convince and, in fact, sometimes violently coerce survivors to go to Palestine and, in many cases, to do the Nakba. And I think that these are the concrete reasons that the concept of dokite was so crushed, so erased, like it was physically erased with violence. But there's something more than that, even, because there are many, many movements that are physically crushed with violence whose memories are vivid and alive and resonant. I think about the Black Panther Party in America, who were subject to the most brutal violence by the state, but who remain as legends. And I think the reason that the Boons wasn't just physically crushed by the 20th century, but the reason that it was so ideologically marginalized was because they always opposed Zionism. From the very first days of their founding, they opposed Zionism as a capitulation to the same European racists that wanted to kick Jews out of their home. And not only did they oppose Zionism, because many Jewish groups opposed Zionism, the Satmar-Pacific community, where I live, also opposed Zionism. It wasn't just the Boons' opposition to Zionism that made Zionists so angry. It's that Zionism is built on this very self-hating dichotomy. And that dichotomy is that there are diaspora Jews who were weak, and that's why they were murdered. And then there are the brave, big-dicked Israeli saboteurs who are strong and bravely oppressing and murdering themselves, and that's why they live. And what the Boons did was it chose the lie of that because the Boons were strong. They didn't just fight for their right to stay in Europe with graduate school seminars. They fought for it with brass knuckles and with guns. The statement here, where we live as our country, isn't something that has the same meaning as it would mean if I said it in New York City. Of course, New York is my city, it's fucking awesome. When they said it, I always felt like there was an implied motherfucker at the end. Here, where we live as our country, motherfucker, whether you like it or not, we are born here in its hours. Right. It's so powerful. And I'm glad that you mentioned other kind of ideological resonances. Like the Black Panthers, they don't really exist in the same way anymore, but they're still resonant in Black Lives Matter. It brings me to this next question, which is that especially younger Jewish Americans, they increasingly are questioning Zionist narratives, and they describe their solidarity with Palestinians, not as a rejection of Jewish identity, but as an expression of their commitment to universal justice, and as a rejection, maybe of Zionism, but not their Judaism. Do you think that this is a boondist inheritance, even if unconscious, or is it something new? I think that decent people of all stripes are seeing what Palestinian journalists and Lebanese journalists have risked their lives exposing. They're seeing a genocide live streamed on their smartphones and live streamed by these amazing journalists who are living in killing cages. And anyone who's a decent person, whether you're Jewish or not, will turn away from the ideology that is responsible for that genocide. So I wouldn't say it's a boondist resonance that's making people turn against Zionist institutions. I think it's just their basic humanity, the same as so many other groups of people are. And I credit it a lot to the amazing work of Palestinians who have done so much work with so much grace at such huge risks to their lives to be able to tell these stories for the world to at least see. However, I think that there's something a little bit different going on, which is that young Jews are seeing the Israeli mass murder machine for what it is. But if they've gone through the standard issue, like Hebrew school education, they don't really learn a lot about Jewish history. Like the way you would learn about it would be ancient kingdoms, the Park Hockba revolt, maybe if you're lucky. And then like a big, long 2000 year gap of horror and murder where nothing interesting or good ever happened and where you were just a victim of all of history. And then glorious creation of the state of Israel redemption. Like that's the sort of bullshit narrative you'd get. And when young Jews reject that narrative as they should, when they learn about the reality of what Zionism means, a lot of them are left with a real hole in them because they haven't learned anything positive about their own heritage. They've just been fed fairy tales that are meant to legitimize the state. And so there's like a lot of shame, a lot of pain over that. And I think what a lot of young Jewish people are trying to do is they're trying to look back to like their own grandparents and their own great grandparents. And for Jews in America, like most Jews in America come from Eastern European backgrounds. You know, it's a different, different sort of demographic breakdown than in Israel. And that sort of like Jewish socialism is something that's very, very, very present in so many people's family history. Not necessarily that, you know, your grandfather was like the greatest socialist revolutionary in the world, but just that he belonged to a socialist garment union and was part of like a socialist mutual aid thing. Because that was just the culture that so many American Jews swam in 100 years ago. And so I think there's this huge rediscover of the boond and of Jewish socialism that's inspired by the rejection of the Sinist genocide. On the one hand, I'm witnessing what you're saying, you know, like we're all kind of witnessing, like I said, it's not specifically to the Jewish community, but because the Jewish community has been fed, you know, this idea that Israel is so integral to their Jewishness and to their safety and to the to these kinds of things. There is a very maybe specific way that that they are metabolizing that or acting out against it. But at the same time, you know, we've seen a number of different polls, including most recently, the Jewish federations of North America, they put out polling results where 37% identified as non-Zionists and 7% of their polling identified as anti-Zionists. But it was an interesting poll because it's like both people who were like critical of Israel and those who were supportive of Israel took it to mean that it, you know, confirmed their their biases. Because despite the fact that the genocide has has happened and is happening, that anti-Zionism component hasn't really risen very much. And then still a lot of polls show that like people presume Israel is vital to Jewish continuity. So how do you make sense of that contradiction? Well, that's one question is how do you make sense of that contradiction? But the second question is like, do you think rediscovering Dundis thought like offers a way through it? I do actually. I mean, I think that, you know, people have not just been fed this idea that Israel is, you know, like essential for their safety, for continuity, but also that it's like an essential part of themself. And I do think that it's very life affirming and important to know that you have something better that you can reject this shitty ideology. I mean, in terms of polls, I often feel like, I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm just wrong about Americans. But I sometimes feel like people don't even know what the hell they're signing on to with polls. Like I will see something where people be like, we want strong borders and to like, you know, deport all the illegals. But also we fucking hate ICE. And I'm like, you just you just want like wildly contradictory things. And I wonder like how I don't know, like how educated people even are and how much like the framing of questions affects what people think. I mean, I'm trying to think of what to make of it. I mean, I do think, you know, very sadly, like there are a large number of, you know, American Jewish people. And in some way, I'm talking like outside of my own experience, because my own family is not Zionist. So this is more like my speculation type thing. But, you know, they're they're very progressive. They believe in, you know, like, out of kid for all, they believe in, you know, they believe that cops shouldn't be constantly murdering black people as they do in America. All the time they believe even ICE should be abolished. But they also have this like unthinking emotional attachment to Israel, even if they literally hate everything that Israel is doing. And I feel like a lot of those people, what they'll do is they'll try to blame it on Netanyahu and not on the entire system. Like, like I would see people who supported the protests, you know, over the judicial reform, but they weren't willing to like fully confront the absolute fucking horrors, not just of the occupation, but of Israel itself. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I've also, you know, obviously experienced that kind of block, you know, where it's easier to blame a particular government than to maybe think about, I mean, the specificities of Israel's founding and Israel's ideology, but also like the violent nature of nation states. And like just kind of thinking through that, I think can be a little bit difficult for people. And as someone who works on polling, like, yes, there are so many contradictions. We take polling to understand the starting points, but that doesn't restrict our political imagination. Like, that's how I think of it. It's obviously also difficult for people to start to kind of maybe disentangle their emotional commitments to the state of Israel, especially in this moment where there are like white supremacists and Nazis and neo-Nazis and all sorts of evil people regaining control of all sorts of, you know, state institutions and finding, you know, a great deal of legitimacy and a great deal of traction amongst the American public. It's difficult to tell, I think, some parts of the American Jewish community like, hey, Israel's not a safety valve for you when, in fact, there's so much anti-Semitism now in the United States. I mean, I think it's a self-reinforcing loop, though. I mean, on one hand, you have Jewish institutions who are literally sticking up this fucking flag of a state that is converted by the ICC of doing genocide and, you know, waving that flag around and having soldiers from an army that's doing a genocide, speaking there, like, honored guests, and saying, like, this is what it means to be Jewish. It's that we back Israel. And on the other hand, you have these wormy little neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes, who have always hated Jews and not because of Israel. Nick Fuentes also thinks all women should be put in breeding camps and all black people should be locked behind bars. He hates Jews because he's a neo-Nazi who are seeing the rightful anger that people have with the ongoing genocide. And they're seeing people's disillusionment with both political parties who are continuing to provide weapons and Q&A cover to Israel, and they're exploiting that. And that's something that fascism has always done, right? Like, fascism has always exploited issues that are popular. It will try to exploit the desire that people have for peace, for instance. It will try to exploit the desire people have for economic justice. But instead of, you know, actually giving people economic justice, they'll just say, oh, it's the Jews. Oh, it's the leftist billionaires or it's George Soros. And yeah, like, you absolutely see some of the worst scumbags on earth who are exploiting the anger that people feel over the genocide in order to warm their way into power and to warm their way into legitimacy. And I always think about this with Tucker Carlson. I mean, for me, like, OK, like, he's like, you know, standard issue. He has anti-Jewish shit. That's like standard issue, Christian shit. But like, for me, the thing that's so I hate so much about seeing smart people boost Tucker Carlson is that Tucker Carlson advocates the ethnic cleansing of the United States of immigrants. Ten months ago, he was on Megan Kelly praying about how he wanted one million people deported in Trump's hundred days. He was even saying, we don't have to put them in detention centers. We can just force a million people, a million people over the border into Tijuana. And, quote, let the Mexicans deal with them. This is hardcore white supremacist ethnic cleansing. And it's not just a speculative thing. There are tens of thousands of immigrants right now in concentration camps in the US. And the fact that anyone, because he gives good clip on Palestine, thinks that he's their ally when he would happily support the same eye system that is locking up Palestinians right now is insane. It's madness. And I just, I mean, I know that people are so traumatized and so heartbroken and, you know, even being like driven crazy by the ongoing genocide and by the American enthusiastic collusion with the genocide. But there has to be a certain basic level of solidarity with other groups who are also under threat, like all the other immigrant communities that are getting rounded up and putting in concentration camps right now. No, absolutely. I mean, there has to be a basic minimum level of solidarity and like a basic minimum level of like analysis. Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. The animating force behind Tucker Carlson is not love for Palestinians or like some, you know, desire for justice or or or anything. You know, so it's like the natural conclusion of a Tucker Carlson is something like the ethnic cleansing that he's asking for. It has been disturbing to see and continue to see how people have really convinced themselves that this is something to to try to capitalize on. I mean, Tucker Carlson went to the Middle East and people were taking photos with him. And I'm like, this man hates you. This man doesn't care about any of these things that you care about. But like you said, it's just the situation is so bad that people are willing to forego solidarity and basic political truths to engage with someone like him. I mean, you've kind of mentioned it and alluded to it in your answers already about Jewish institutions like finding Israeli flag and things like that. Who are the forces today? What are the institutions today that benefit from something like the Bund and like its philosophy not being revisited? And what do they stand to lose if these Buddhist ideas become widely known again? I mean, I feel like the vast majority of mainstream Jewish institutions. I mean, there's obviously like the ADL, right? You know, a ridiculous group that I almost feel like primarily exists to try to like terrify elderly people so that Jonathan Greenblatt keeps getting his ridiculously inflated salary and keeps getting to like prance around like he's important. There's, you know, like the the campus Hillel's right who claim that they're just, you know, a neutral thing for Jewish identity, but make it a prerequisite that you're Zionist. There's just like a vast amount of institutional Jewish groups that are not democratic. They're not things that we vote for. I did not fucking vote for Jonathan Greenblatt to be appointed my spokesman. You know, I didn't I didn't vote for these things. Like these are institutions led by very wealthy people that are in no way responsive to young Jews. They're not responsive to like ordinary people. And they want to keep having their sort of stranglehold on getting to be the like spokesman for these very, very, very diverse communities. And I think that, you know, as the boond and as other anti-Zionist forms of Jewishness are discovered and rediscovered that these spokespeople are terrified because I mean, the biggest thing that they want that they're so terrified about is they're terrified about losing the young people. The whole project, it's about, you know, like this Jewish continuity, they call it. And, you know, Jewish people like getting married to each other, you know, having having kids like contributing money to their institutions, you know, maybe making aliyah to Israel. And if people are like, no, I reject this. I reject this state that's committing a genocide and I reject this ideology built on supremacy. And actually, it's like fine to live in New York City and to, you know, live and love and struggle alongside my neighbors. That's directly antithetical to their project. And I think that's why the boond has not just been erased, but it's mere mention provokes such anger. Like sometimes I just look through my comments and it's just these endless fucking comments from people being like, boondall died in the Holocaust, LOL. Like, what do you say to this? Right? That's so disgusting. Yeah, the boond was all gasped. LOL. You want Jews to be gassed, you know, Zionists are thriving. And I'm like, this is the most psychopathic talk about self hating, right? Mocking people for being murdered in the Holocaust, you know, it's because the boond's ideology of solidarity across difference of here in us and of socialism is profoundly threatening. And honestly, like what what thriving is happening? Like people in Israel are terrified. There are missiles raining down. Like a garrison state cannot keep people safe. No such ethno state can keep people safe. But and I'm reminded also from your answer about Ariel Angel's article, I think last year in Jewish currents, we need new Jewish institutions. I think it's like they see the writing on the wall, that this is something that's going to happen. And with with books like yours, with kind of a re revisiting of this history, it only hastens, you know, this this kind of political project coming to fruition. My last question that I have for you is more about the the memory project nature of it all. You write in your book about your great grandfather, you've already mentioned Samuel Rothbard, about how he painted these memory paintings to kind of resurrect the vanished world of Eastern Europe. And you've also kind of written this book in the same way. What do you think the relationship is between this kind of recovery of erased history and building a politics for the present? Thank you. I mean, I spent seven years on this book. I learned Yiddish. That's wild, by the way. I know, right? You know, I resented because I studied Arabic for so long and I like had finally gotten like, I don't want to say good, but mediocre at it. And then I feel like Yiddish pushed it out of my brain. And I'm just like, no, I want my Arabic back. But yeah, so I studied, I learned Yiddish. I went to, you know, all the countries that I could that the Bund was active in. I wasn't able to go to Belarus or Russia, but I went to like Poland, Latvia, Lithuania. I went to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. I translated so many books. I think I'm probably the only person who has read all five volumes of the terrifically boring a Geschichte von Bund, official for history. And I felt like I was doing necromancy. You know, I felt like I was in love with these rebel ancestors, these gun-toting seamstresses, these lovers on the barricades, these stubborn people who constructed whole worlds out of love and grit, even when society wanted to crush them. I just like fell in love. And I didn't just want to resurrect them from a rations because their philosophy was opposed to Zionism, though that was also part of it, of course. I wanted to resurrect them because the Bund were amazing, because they fought back against every single bastard of their age. They fought for an ethos that was rooted in human dignity and human flourishing and freedom, but also in economic justice and leftism. I just fell in love and I wanted them to live again. And, you know, one of the things that the powers that be do is that they try to impose themselves onto the past. They try to say, because we won now, it was inevitable that we would win. It was always going to be like this. There is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher said. And what you do when you preserve these rebel histories is you show that that's not the case. It expands our capacity for fight. It expands our capacity for imagination. Things could have been differently and people still can change the world. Yeah, there's nothing inevitable. And you always have agency. I think that that's like the thing that like I can't go stumps thinking about when I think about these kinds of people because they give you so much hope in the present that things could be different. Thank you so much, Molly. This has been such an interesting and provocative conversation. And thank you so much for learning Yiddish and for sending all those books so that we can read your book and we don't have to do all of that. Exactly. So you don't need to know to suffer through the world's dullest socialist prose stylings. Yeah, no, you've done it for us. And I'm so excited for the book. I'll put it in the show notes. Everybody should read it. Thank you so much, Molly. Thank you so much, Dana. Right here in rural tranquility. Saturn's rings. Is that a bull? Giga clear. Faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month. Teas at seas apply. 18 month contract. Prices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. For decades, people in northern Nigeria have been suffering the violence of jihadist groups in the region. More recently, following the lobbying of some questionable interest groups and figures in the United States, President Donald Trump has dropped American bombs on Nigerian soil. What exactly is happening in Nigeria? Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrew is on YouTube and I'm joined again by James. Glad we're doing this one. Yes, to talk about what's been happening in Nigeria since it has captured Trump's attention and thus Western media interest as of late. So first of all, what or where is Nigeria? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Nigeria is a West African country with a diverse geography and an even more diverse population. Hundreds of languages, hundreds of ethnic groups, several religions in the most populist country in Africa, and one of the most populist countries in the world. Over 239 million people call Nigeria home and the Nigerian diaspora is well over 10 million strong. Like much of Africa, Nigeria is rich in natural resources, particularly petroleum and natural gas, but heavily exploited by international and local capital. Thus, much of its population by some estimates over half of its population is considered multi dimensionally poor. Modern Nigeria was stitched together from the British protectorates of northern and southern Nigeria and against political independence only recently in 1960 and became a republic in 1963. That north-south divide is particularly relevant because it continues to define Nigerian politics today. Nigeria splits almost evenly between its Christian population, which dominates the south and its Muslim population, which dominates the north. Alongside ethnic, linguistic and other political divisions, corruption and all the other baggage of a typical New Colony has made Nigerian politics quite the powder keg of some time. They have been tragic and deadly episodes of political and religious violence throughout Nigeria's history, going in both directions, including the 1987 crisis in Kaduna state and the early 2000s had several notorious riots and massacres as well, including the Yelwa massacre and the Joss riots, linking the show notes for the details on those. Since 2009 however, militant Islamist group Boko Haram has engaged in a protracted insurgency against Nigerian government and terrorized the Christian and Muslim population through bombings, assassinations and abductions, with the overall intent of establishing an Islamic breakaway state in north Nigeria. For the past few months, there has been a concerted effort to paint a narrative of Christian genocide in Nigeria, a narrative that has long been cosigned by the likes of Donald Trump. So back in 2018, Trump had actually called out the killing of Christians in Nigeria, yet stopped short of calling it a genocide. But according to an article by Ayula Bavolula on the myth of Christian genocide, it was not long after Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shatiman's September 25 remarks at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, where he reasserted Nigeria's long-standing solidarity with Palestine, that the Western, largely pro-Israel far right, began the campaign of claiming Christian genocide in Nigeria. In his address, Shatiman did mention the problem of Nigeria was having with extremism, but these commentators are running with a much more specific narrative. The same people who deny the past Indian genocide and prop up the mythical white genocide in South Africa, have gone on to push this Christian genocide story. Bill Meyer, the guy who still can't prove the claims he made about October 7th, has gone on to tell people that what's happening in Nigeria is, to paraphrase, so much more of a genocide than what's happening in Gaza. In late October and early November, Trump tweeted that Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria, named Nigeria as a country of particular concern, and announced the United States was ready, willing, and able to see our great Christian population around the world. And for some reason, Nicki Minaj is out there backing Trump's Christian persecution narrative as well. Perfect. Why are you in it? Yeah, just to be clear for anyone who's not aware, Nicki Minaj is not a person from Nigeria or with any particular insight into the situation there. She's also not sure in that area, and I just want to clear that up. Yes, her birth certificate is from the Republic of Trinidad's vehicle, but we do not claim her. Since her statements about how COVID and the vaccine and her cousin's balls, from that moment on, people have been distancing themselves from her and Trinidad. Anyway. You can see why. So in November 25th, according to a BBC report, Trump also said that he would send troops into Nigeria, guns ablazing, if its government continues to allow the killing of Christians. Then in December 25th, according to another BBC report, the US has launched strikes on the 25th of December as a Christmas present against militants in the Islamic State group in northwestern Nigeria. What should be noted though is that they did not strike Boko Haram, which is based in northeast Nigeria. Yeah, it was really interesting to look at the bill that I wrote about this bit from my newsletter, but the US was flying intelligence gathering flights, essentially, for some time of Nigeria. There must have been some kind of agreement with the Nigerian government to allow this, but they were clearly trying to identify where its Boko Haram were. You could see them winding up to this strike. I guess they waited until Christmas Day to go for it. Yeah, so there was the Christmas present of the US bombing there. Yeah. And this happened less than a week, by the way, after the alliance of Sahel states, that being Bikinafaso, Niger, and Mali, commissioned a joint military force of 5,000 counter-terrorists. And that move was following the Economic Community of West African States, or ICOAS plan, to launch a 268,000 member counter-terrorism force. So there's a lot of military action happening in West Africa right now, coming from the inside and the outside. In a January 2026 report, Trump claimed, quote, I'd love to make it a one-time strike, but if they continue to kill Christians, it will be a many-time strike. Encore. Trump has also accused the Nigerian government, as I said, of repeatedly failing to protect Christians. So Trump is a known liar. Take everything he says with a grain of salt, as is the rest of his administration. In general, you really can't trust politicians and pundits. So let me break down what is actually happening in Nigeria. The Nigerian government has said that Muslims, Christians, and those of no faith alike are targeted. According to Ayula Balula, the government of Nigeria is indeed failing to adequately address the devastation being wrought against communities in Nigeria. But critically, it is not religious nature, or rather, religion is only a part of the picture. It can be used to explain the whole story on the ground. So there are several groups we can have in Northern Nigeria. You have a few different Islamic State-affiliated groups. You have Boko Haram, which is the main one, and you also have the conflict between the Fulani-Hurdsmen, who are mostly Muslim, and various farming groups, who may be Christian or Muslim. So where the Hurdsmen are concerned, that kind of conflict has actually been taken place between the Hurders and the settled people for literal centuries. The only difference is that now you have them carrying AK-47s, instead of just sticks and machetes. How they got those AK-47s is really thanks to the history of the West's intervention in Africa. But we'll get to that in a moment. Critically though, if you step outside of the religious freemen, you would see a criminal, economic, and political motivation behind these actions. They may be going after land, or wanting to extract ransom, or pursue a particular political goal. The Muslims in Northern Nigeria are not safe just because they're Muslim. Boko Haram's victims are mostly Muslim because Boko Haram's target is anyone who stands between them and their political aims. Everyone who isn't Boko Haram or aligned with Islamic State-West African province is considered an enemy. One article on Trump's beef with Nigeria by Yusuf Bangura talks about six types of violence in the country. We have the Boko Haram Islamist-inspired violence in the northeast, whose main victims are Muslims who reject the group's Islamist ideology. We have the Banditry in the northwest, which affects Muslims and Christians in equal measure. We have the Hurder-Farmer conflict in the middle belt, which affects Christians and Muslims, while the reports indicate the Christians are the main victims of that violence. You have the Hurder-Farmer violence in the northwest, which is distinct from the Hurder-Farmer violence in the middle belt. So the one in the northwest has Fulani Hurders, reportedly pitched against Hausa farmers and both groups are Muslim. You have the violence inflicted by the indigenous people of Biafra and bandits in the east against their own people, Iboz, who are Christian. And you also have General Banditry in large parts of the country, which is rendered travelling by roads between cities very risky. So there's been a lot of Western attention drawn to just some of the victims, the churches, the church leaders in the Christian communities, even though mosques and imams and Muslim communities and animists have also been devastated. And it's turned a multifaceted violence into a narrative of targeted anti-Christian violence. Seemingly at least from the Trump and Zionist camp for the purpose of demonizing Muslims, and I guess in some convoluted way, we can end global support for Palestinians because Palestinians are also Muslims, so they're all the same. I don't know. That's just speculation on my part. Even Christian leaders in Nigeria have been calling out this frame in though. Archbishop Matthew Manoso Ndagoso was quoted extensively in an article for aid to the church in need, which is an international Catholic organization. Rather than pin the blame on Islam, he said, quote, in the Northwest, the farmers are mostly Muslims and they also have conflicts with the Fulani. As we move the middle belt, it is enhanced mostly by Christians, so that there will most likely be a Christian farm. Religion and ethnicity have very sensitive problems in Nigeria. They're always used for convenience. But primarily this conflict is not religious, I am absolutely sure. If you apply for a job and you don't get it, you might say you were rejected because you were a Christian, and the same for Muslims. Opportunists, such as politicians, use these factors to their own advantage. But if you go to the root, you discover it is little or nothing to this religion. End quote. It's an excellent analysis from the church. I'm surprised it came from that source, but I'm glad it did, you know. Yeah, Catholic Church of all places. Yeah. So he even claims that the kidnappings of priests have little to do with religion, and I'll quote him again. In the last three years, seven of my priests have been kidnapped, two have been killed, and one has been in captivity for three years and two months, four released. In 50 of my parishes, priests cannot stay in their directories because they are targets. They are seen as an easy source of money for ransom. So he's emphasizing there that it's really about the money that the church has perceived to be able to provide to these kidnappers, more so than any religious targeting in particular. Of course, that is only one archbishop's perspective on the situation. I think Baba Lola makes an important point in his article on the myth that I would like to quote as well. Crucially, Christians at times become the chosen targets in particular assaults. Churches have been attacked during worship, priests abducted, and entire Christian villages razed in plateau, venue, and southern Kaduna. These episodes are not separate from the general crisis, but are rather moments when Christian identity is weaponized to mark a community for terror. In this sense, Christians bear both the general weight of insecurity shared by all Nigerians and the sharper trauma of faith-based targeting in certain attacks. But Baba Lola doesn't forget that these groups' terror has a severe impact on the Muslims as well. In fact, he makes an important comparison I wanted to highlight, which is that in areas ravaged by armed groups, the first victims tend to be those who have religious or ethnic groups in common with the militants, killed because they are seen as infidels or not noble enough or not committed enough to the ideals of that movement. If you look at the history of Zionism in the Middle East, for example, before the founding of the State of Israel, there were bombings of several Jewish heritage sites across the Middle East, and records of later shows that they were carried out by terroristic Jewish gangs who sought to instill a fair in Jewish communities across the region to sow discord between the Jewish communities and their neighbors for the purpose of forcing them to abandon these Middle Eastern states and relocate to Israel to further Israel's economic and geopolitical goals. So it's not unheard of for a group to target its own core religionists for its geopolitical economic ambitions. If we talk about specifically the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, as opposed to the Islamic State in West Africa, they killed more Muslims than anyone else. Those were the bulk of the people it murdered. We can even look at a very old historical example, the Latin crusade. You had all these Christians from Europe going on a crusade, and because they didn't get paid, they decided to ransack their core religionists in Greece and in the wider Byzantine Empire, and eventually deconstruct the Byzantine Empire entirely and establish their own Latin Empire. So I didn't want to gloss over the real challenges that Christians specifically are facing in North Nigeria, though. Since 1999, Sharia law has been introduced and enforced in 12 northern states, and according to the same archbishop that I quoted earlier, this has ensured that religious persecution in the north is systemic. He said in a quote, I cannot build a church. Even if you buy land, you cannot get a permission of occupancy, and therefore you cannot build. In many of these states, they're going to allow the teaching of Christianity that the government employs and pays imams to teach in schools. Every year, they have money to build mosques in the budget, but they will not let you build churches. If I say there's a university and across the street, there are five mosques and no church. If you wanted to build one, they didn't allow it. If you build a church without permission, the government can tear it down. And this is what we are going through. It is serious. We want our government to be held accountable for people to be treated equally. End quote. So again, religious conflict is still part of the picture, but not in the way that Western governments are painting. What's happening is these issues are being amplified by opportunists and far-right lobbyists. And as I established earlier, we should be addressing where these terror groups have even come from, because the West's hands are not clean in that picture either. Groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have known connections in their history to Western Midland. And American policy in Africa has at least indirectly armed these groups thanks to the fall of Qaddafi in Libya and the American-led destabilization of other Muslim countries in South West Asia and North Africa. The death squads armed with AKs that are spursed across the Sahel region, victimizing Africans of world face, or at least some of their firepower, to that Western intervention, to the flow of arms coming out of Libya. The West has repeatedly shown that it is not care for people's lives. So what is the real beef that Trump and Co have with Nigeria? Well, according to the Bangures article, Trump is not feeling the fact that the US is dependent on China for rare earths. Nigeria is very resource rich when it comes to rare earths like Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, and all that other stuff. Chinese companies have invested more than 1.3 billion US dollars in Nigeria's lithium processing industry. And Russia has grown leverage in the region thanks to their involvement with Niger, Vicky Nafaso, and Mali. So in an effort to win America or China, Trump has been trying to after the deal with the situation. So he signed agreements in Southeast Asia to increase the production and processing of rare earths and exports to the US. He stepped into a broker of peace deals, code and code between the DRC and Durewander, so the US can invest more in the DRC's minerals. And what Trump really do like in Nigeria's case is that Nigeria's president, Tunugu is not playing ball with him, at least in this case. In Trump's eyes, Tunugu do not do enough to reverse Nigeria's military coup. And Tunugu do not let the US relocate their Nigerian military base to Nigeria. Tunugu also didn't let Trump relocate the Poates to Nigeria, even when Ghana, Rwanda, Eswatini, Sultana and Uganda all accepted that. Furthermore, as I established before, Nigeria continues to condemn Israel's genocide in Gaza. Now, when it warms to, the US can intervene other countries without the talk about humanitarianism. Because look at Guatemala in 1954, when they tried to implement some land reforms, and that went against the United Food Company's interests, the US invaded. And you also had the US willing to simply support whatever opposition exists in the country, like in the Congo in 1961 against Patrice Lumumba in Chile in 1973 against Salvador Allende and in Iran in 1953 against Mohamed Mosaddegh. So they will use humanitarian talk, whether they use that talk or not, the results tend to be disastrous for the people in those countries. US intervention sucks pretty much everywhere. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and more besides. So we can count on whatever Trump attempts in Nigeria being an abject failure. More recently, the United States announced it'll be sending a military team to Nigeria after a string of recent attacks. That being 200 troops. So we'll see what happens next. But it's clear US intervention is not the solution. Its intentions are definitely malicious. So what can the future be for the people of Nigeria? How can its people be free? Obviously the battle against these reactionary forces rages on, but military solutions and militarization will not be enough. In fact, they carry some serious risk in the region as a whole in terms of escalation. An article by Ayodele O'Alaibi in Al Jazeera recognized that with Nigeria's entanglement with the US and the 260,000 strong E.Q.A.s force, the A.S. is going to feel threatened in our system trying to keep Western influence out of the region. So there's a danger of future E.Q.A.s deployments overlapping with A.S. operations and potentially leading to clashes. And if there isn't a de-escalation of tensions between E.Q.A.s and A.S., we can end up seeing interstate wars that would devastate communities in the region and give the insurgents opportunities to expand. It could very well set up another proxy battleground for global powers and some kind of new cause for. So they have to find some way of avoiding this clash and see if they can build a cooperative security framework despite their vastly different interests. Yeah. And to a degree, we already see like global powers right like Russia has been honing its most horrific war crimes in parts of West Africa for a long time right with its like private military contractors. Exactly. Ukraine has sent special forces to assist the people fighting against their Russian private military contractors. Like we've seen Nigeria's own government kill its own civilians in its counterterrorism operation. Like all of this just makes life less livable for people who are ready like on the thick end of climate change for one thing and have suffered under centuries of colonialism for another. So that's a geopolitical analysis. I suppose it's been a long term. I think there's much to be done to rebuild the revolutionary front within Nigeria led by Nigerians themselves to chart another path for the future of the country away from a status of vassalage. Yeah. You know, left and left adjacent movements were very diminished in relevance and credibility after the end of military rule in Nigeria in 1999. Due to several reasons that we could get into at another time. But by the time we got to the end SARS movement in 2020, left forces were present but didn't have the level of organization and strategy necessary to rise the occasion. But according to an article in Progressive International by Ayula Babalola, there's potential for a resurgence. The end bad governance movement had demonstrations in August, October of 2024, which saw leftist groups like Take It Back and the Socialist Workers League play a central role in organizing and mobilizing protests. Unlike earlier moments, these groups articulated clear demands, coordinated protest strategies, and attempted to provide ideological direction. This is in spite of facing crackdowns and arrests of key figures in the left and progressive spaces. Of course, not everyone mobilizing against Nigeria's struggling economic and political conditions are committed to left or left adjacent ideas. Still, the question remains unresolved. Can this renewed street level influence be transformed into lasting organizational power, or will repeat the cycle of mobilization followed by fragmentation that has littered movements before it? This violence taking place in Nigeria is bound up with the violence taking place across the world. It is bound up in imperialist interests and capitalist interests and status interests and in petty tyrants interests. From Nigeria to Congo to Sudan to Palestine, violence and suppression tactics we live in one place often brought to another. Baba Lula says in his article that quote, a genuine pursuit of justice must confront proximate perpetrators as well as the transnational systems of power that sustain them. What we must not allow is for the global perpetrators of criminality and terror to tell the world where to focus its attention. End quote. In other words, don't let the perpetrators of these violences tell you where to focus. We must look everywhere, look holistically at what's happening and put the power and solidarity in the hands of the people affected to resist that violence. That's all I have to say. As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. This is It Could Happen Here, an executive disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode we are covering the week of April 1st to April 8th. The DHS shutdown has surpassed 50 days. Last week, House Republicans tentatively agreed to the Senate deal to fund DHS without ICE and CBP, though this agreement is stalled while Congress is out of session till April 14th. Fox News has partnered with Kalshi to incorporate its political betting data into news coverage. Fox joins CNN, CNBC and the AP in entering into deals with the so-called prediction market. Kalshi announced quote, prediction markets add accountability by rewarding accuracy. That's why the three leading networks have chosen Kalshi. No spin, no partisan lens, just incentives to be right. It's just gambling. It's so cool that the whole world, all media is now just ESPN. Incentives to be right. Again, like people are, there's like one of the sub markets within Kalshi is people like bringing in lawyers to make threats over like tiny differences in grammar that invalidate them either losing money or mean that they should have won the art. None of this is about what actually happened. It's becoming as much about what you can game or like threaten the news and not reporting as we talked about the week before last with that case in Israel. And insider trading. And insider trading. Yeah. No, it's just turning politics into like a corrupt casino. Yeah, it's just mob support spending. It's worse than sports betting because sports betting is actually based on like real odds, right? These odds are completely created by users with their money. Like it's completely manufactured. There's no actual basis for a lot of these bets, right? Like the betting on the paper conclave. There's no basis for an American pope getting elected, right? There's no actual odds that were like mathematically certain. It's just created through money. Well, to be fair, the sports odds are also just kind of made up by guys too. But like, yeah, you know, it's just a tiny bit. It's vibes based. Like it's people looking at horses. It's a lot of what's happening in sports betting. Yes. Making a proving or just yeah, I think I saw that something close to a billion dollars was bet on oil prices as we approached Trump's deadline. We already had that just play the oil futures market. Too complicated for people, I guess. God damn it. No, it's really bad. According to a March poll from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, sampling almost 600 Texas Democratic primary voters, 76% say Israel's committing genocide in Gaza and 80% support ending weapons funding to Israel. 44% of Tallerico voters said his criticism of Israel was important to them and swayed their vote. Over one in five voters, 22% said reducing support for Israel was one of their top three factors impacting their vote, while only 2% said the same about increasing or maintaining support for Israel. And 88% of voters said they agreed with a statement to Tallerico made during a primary debate about cutting off weapons to Israel. On Sunday night, 13 gunshots were fired into the front door of Indianapolis City County Counselor Ron Gibson, who just voted to approve a half a billion dollar data center. A note was left under the doormat that read no data centers, quote unquote. Gibson and his son were home at the time of the shooting. Yeah, these data centers are really staggeringly unpopular. There's been a bunch of reporting on even the ones that are attempted to be built. Something like 50% of them are just not able to do it because of massive public local backlash. Because it makes life worse around them. Thank you, power bills go up. They're loud. Yeah, it's like old school, it's like old school environmental nimbyism, sort of like, I don't want these assholes in my small town stuff. There's just like the anti-AI sentiment in general. They're hideously unpopular and this kind of stuff is just going to continue as these data centers continue to be built. Okay, time for me. So Donald Trump has said that he will discuss United States withdrawal from NATO for those who work in the New York Times. That's a North Atlantic treaty organization with Mark Rutter, who is the NATO Secretary General during their meeting, which will happen today, which is Wednesday, April 8th. If question mark, this happens, it would be utterly apocle. It would be one of the two things they're going to point out as the dawning of the new era of... Yes, seismic shift. Yeah, like what geopolitics is. This is like the fundamental basis of this in this week or like ceasing to exist. Yeah. Shelley Kittleson has been released by Katipa Zbola after they made her read a video confession in which she confessed and to be very clear, this is very clearly extracted. Yeah, it's a coerced confession. Yes. Yeah. Nothing in this is true, but in the video they made her confess to passing information to US consulate in Baghdad. In one point in the video, she said she had been collecting information on leaders but forgotten their names, which is very credible and true. Most real confession. Yeah, it's ludicrous. Her release came after Iraq released several Katipa Zbola members. So it seems like a straight swap, which is what this was about in the first place, right? It's not about her or her work per se, it's about her being a trading chip that they can trade. Finally, Republican Brandon Gill has sharply criticized the Dignity Slash Dignidad Act recently and this has become like something of an online discourse topic on the right. I'm not exactly sure why it's happening now. Rep Salazar from Florida has tried to introduce this act several times in the last few years. We've actually covered it when it was introduced in 2025 on this show. It's a bipartisan act to reform the immigration system that is bad. It creates what's called a dignity status, which is essentially like an underclass of people who there is no pathway to citizenship, there is no pathway to voting, but it comes with the right to renew it and the right to residency, right? So it creates like a sub-citizen class. It's bad, it is not progressive immigration reform. But is Brandon Gill criticizing it from the right? Gill is coming from another perspective than I am. They think it gives incentives for illegal immigration and it's an amnesty. Okay, yeah. So he's criticizing from the right. It's interesting to see the split among Republicans on this and that's why I wanted to bring it in, right? We spoke last time about the Florida Sheriff's breaking with Trump on mass deportations. There are a number of things which indicate that there is clearly a faction of the Republican Party, which has realized massive deportation of people who have not been accused or convicted of any crime is not a popular stance, especially when you keep killing people. On that note, actually, ICE have shot somebody else. This broke relatively late on Tuesday night. They shot someone in Paterson, California. The person has been identified as Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez. He's wanted in El Salvador for questioning a connection to a murder. It is another of those incidents in which they accused a person of weaponizing their vehicle and there is a dashcam video which has been released which shows a person attempting to leave in a vehicle. It's a little hard to tell if the person is attempting to weaponize their vehicle, but it doesn't look that way to me. It looks like that person is trying to make an exit. We have seen a number of these, right, where federal immigration agents have shot people behind the wheel of their car. I should add that his attorney claims that he is not wanting a connection with that murder and has provided a document from the government of El Salvador which seems to confirm that. We have once again the DHS said versus what we seem to be seeing proved out by documents, right? Before we get to Iran, which there's a lot to discuss, there is another news story a little bit closer to us that we think deserves some fair coverage. Statements made on a podcast last year by a top FEMA official resurfaced this last week. Greg Phillips, who is in charge of disaster response, claims that he once teleported to a waffle house in Rome, Georgia. Phillips also says he experienced a separate incident in which he teleported in front of a church. The fact that this was a waffle house does lend the story a bit of credibility. I have suspected for years there's some sort of paranormal field around waffle houses. Personally, I believe that when you walk into one, there is a small chance you could walk out of another in a separate location. The craft store Michaels has a similar energy to it. Like anyone who's gone drunk to enough waffle houses knows that that's true. Right. So there is an aspect of the story which is very believable, but there's some details that Phillips has included that makes me a bit more skeptical of his characterization of this incident. Let's listen to his claim on this podcast right now. We had a teleport incident, two of them, which transported me about 40 miles from where I was and near Albany, Georgia to the ditch of a church. I end up at a waffle house like 50 miles away from where I was. So to defend these statements, Phillips has taken to Truth Social to share biblical accounts of teleportation as supporting evidence of teleportation. Great. Oh, my God. Employees at the three waffle houses in Rome, Georgia were interviewed by the New York Times and they say they do not recall anyone being transported there by means of teleportation, nor did they recognize pictures of Greg Phillips. But in a follow-up statement by Phillips on Truth Social, he said he was going through cancer treatment at the time of this alleged teleportation incident. Quote, I was healed of cancer and it was a miracle. The podcast at the center of this controversy was part of chronicling that journey. And during that journey, things happened that I can't explain. I was in the opening days of intensive treatment, heavily medicated, not thinking about future headlines. That context was nowhere in the reporting. I think it is important here that he says he was heavily medicated during the time around this incident. I love how he uses cop voice like a teleportation incident. Yeah. But however, I'm going to point out that Garrison, the next thing you're about to read, he was not heavily medicated when he said this. So Phillips added to this Truth, quote, the word teleportation was not mine. It was used by someone else in the conversation, reaching for language to describe something with no easy names. Which is not true. He said teleport. He said teleport. I think what he means is he wasn't his initial term that then started using it. I guess. But he keeps using it. He continues, quote, the more accurate biblical terms are translated or transported. Not new ideas for people of faith. If you believe that God moves in ways we cannot fully explain, as I do, then having faith is not a sound bite. It is the whole point. I believe in miracles, all caps. God bless America. He has risen, unquote. Now, one detail from the podcast that has not been mentioned as much, I think offers to help some idea of what's really going on here. It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car flying through the air. It was possible. It was real. He was teleported in his car. He was in his car. Which for me changes this entire thing. Because the way that these headlines were kind of imagined is if his body dematerialized somewhere, rematerialized in a waffle house. Something that's certainly... He just blacked out while driving. Which is very different. Which is very different. Robert and I went to a guy teleport in a car when we were driving around Texas. Yeah, I teleported on Xanax once, about 30 hours into the future. The fact that he zoned out while driving and ended up at a waffle house, much more explainable. Because many people in slightly altered states... Downright believable. Downright believable. ...outside of waffle houses in their car. This is a very common occurrence. This is probably about maybe 10 to 30% of the waffle house clientele shows up in this sort of environment. Where they are not operating on their full faculties either through some sort of drugs, alcohol, medication. What have you? I've seen UFOs at a waffle house before. No, right. The waffle houses have some kind of pull that I think attracts people like a magnet who are in an altered state towards them as like a beacon. Yeah, that pull is smothered and covered hash browns. Yes, yes. And the fact that they're open at 4 a.m. Oh, and bathrooms you can do heroin in. Don't forget that. Says it on the sign. I also want to make sure that we mentioned that in the same week in which the New York Times, the guy who was riding the headline didn't know what NATO stood for. They also titled, the initial title of the article they wrote about this was, and I quote, FEMA official says he teleported to waffle house. Experts are dubious. This is, this might be the worst experts disagree headline ever made. I think this is good. I actually, out of the two polls of New York Times headlines this week, the data one is iffy. This one fully, I fully agree with. I fully agree with their choice to say that experts are dubious about the teleportation. This does make me sad because in New York Times is also the outlet that ran, what is in my opinion, the best headline ever written. It was about the fact that more. Oh, that one's good. Okay. It was other subject of a scientific study which looked at more eels and their ability to climb a ramp out of a pool to eat some food, which proved in theory that more eels could hunt on land. And the headline was, when an eel climbs a ramp to eat a squid from a clamp, that's a more. Title from a better time. Yeah. Yeah. What a different era. Truly a masterpiece. Yeah. Whoever wrote that, I hope you're doing well. We will now teleport to an ad break and and we materialize to discuss the back and forth ceasefire, not ceasefire with Iran. We're back. And depending on what you listen to this, we may either be back to war with Iran. The straight-in-form moves could be closed or open. We're in like just this beautiful like fucking. Rotingers. Rotingers. No one knows where it's going to go after this. Yeah. If you don't open your phone, then you never know how many wars and ceasefires have started since the last time you opened your phone. That's right. They can't make you believe that a war is going on if you choose not be informed. Other than by looking at gas prices. Yeah. Yeah. That is a thing. God. All right. Let's try and do this in chronological order, because this week has been bonkers. So let's start with last Friday when you last listened to ED, if you listen on the day we released them. Good Friday. And that is kind of important because a United States Air Force F-15E strike eagle belonging to the 48th fighter wing crashed in southwestern Iran last Friday after being hit by a man-pat. The man-pat is a shoulder fired surface to a missile. The plane carries a pilot and a WISO. WSO is an acronym. It means weapons systems officer or weapons systems operator. I'm just going to call them weapons officer just to make it easier for everyone going forward. And both crew members safely self ejected from the plane. The United States very quickly launched a massive CSAR that's combat search and rescue operation involving helicopters, low flying aircraft and close air support. From both MQ-9 Reaper drones and 810 aircraft. During this operation in which the aircraft flew within small arms range of the ground in Kuzhestan province, several aircraft were damaged. One of the Jolly Green II rescue helicopters was hit with small arms fire. An 810 Thunderbolt crashed in the Strait of Hormuz and the pilot was recovered. Another was hit and the pilot ejected over Q8. But this effort did result in the safe recovery of the F-15's pilot, but not the weapons officer. The following day that happened during the day, right, in daylight hours, which is remarkable. Like it is extremely rare to see this happening, right? Like low flying helicopters over what is notionally enemy territory in the middle of the daytime. On Easter Sunday, the United States launched a huge operation which resulted in the recovery of the weapons officer. This was preceded by a disinformation campaign which hoped to make the Iranian state believe that they had extracted the weapons officer by land, which they hadn't. The operation involved a ton of special operations forces assets who flew to an agricultural airstrip outside Isfahan. Yep. This seems to have gone largely unremarked upon in the reporting. There is some like crackpot theory that this was all cover for an operation that extracted enriched uranium from Isfahan, because there was a nuclear research facility Isfahan. I have not seen any evidence to support that, but I think it is likely that they knew of this agricultural airstrip because of plans which were made for a potential raid on the Isfahan nuclear research facility. During the operation, MQ9 Reaper drones bombed, quote, military age males who were close to the airmen. Iran had offered a reward of $60,000 for capturing this person before the United States got to them. And it is common for people in this area who, if you're like herding animals, right, to carry a gun, like to protect their animals or to protect themselves, there were some kind of propaganda videos of like local people looking for the airmen, right, they were carrying like Iranian flags and they're like antiquated bolt action rifles. But it's also very possible that some of these drone strikes may have occurred against people who were just going about their business in the region, right? Like if they didn't, they said military age males, that's a broad remit. Anyone who would doubt that being a shepherd would be a military age male, right? Would be a military age. Yeah. This is like one of the most sickening terms that US warfare is invented. Yeah, military age male, it's like anytime people are using that, like you got a dozen past the sniff test. No, it could be anyone from to like 14 years old to like 69. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll be surprised who looks like an adult when you're a scared man with a gun. Yeah, yeah. Or looking from thousands of feet up on a drone camera, right? Yeah. It's a term invented for we are just going to start shooting at random people. We have no idea who they are. We're just going to kill them. Yeah. And it's hideous. I was recently rereading, I think it's called a theory of the drone. It's a philosophy book about drones and drone warfare. And there's a scene in the opening of that, which I think is, which you can probably get the free preview of the book if you have a Kindle and read that scene. But it's very illustrative of how vague this term can be. The rescue operation saw the planes land at an airstrip. Then a little bit of helicopter took off, collected the airman, who had been evading capture in a mountainous area. He was then carried back by a helicopter to the airstrip, where the two larger aircrafts that had bought the helicopter and all the personnel had become stuck. Incredible. Yeah. I mean, I guess normally they would do some kind of soil sampling, but I think there probably just wasn't time. Yeah. So the United States elected to destroy those aircraft in place and send three more aircraft to recover their personnel. We can see that Iran has published footage to that, right? It seems that they also destroyed the Little Bird helicopters. I've seen some reporting that the Little Bird helicopters were just like on a one-way flight, that they flew into Iran knowing that their range wasn't long enough for them to fly back, and that they always planned to destroy them. I don't think that's the case. I think they got them out the back of the C-130s and assembled them quickly. Yeah. That is a thing they have the capacity to do, and that is what makes the most sense. So on that same day, Easter Sunday, kind of a big deal for the Christian folks, Donald Trump truced the following. I love the president. Yeah, that is a leader of the free world. My extremely low-stakes conspiracy is that this was not Trump. This was written by Trump's staff because it's slightly off. It could have been. It doesn't sound like him, really. He's not normally a swearer. Like, he gets angry. The alas stuff isn't really him. That's a weird thing for him to throw in. I can very easily believe that this is him going nuts on something. Yeah, like, he could have done this. It's possible. I think there's a low chance that this was like a staff-written thing. It's just, it's weird wording from him. Like, it's a strange message, although the last couple from him have all seemed kind of strange. Yeah, he is just out of it. The one he put up after the ceasefire announcement, where he puts in quotations that the navy will be hanging round. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not, doesn't sound like him much either, but also, like, who else would he let write that it's just, but it is weird, right? That does not sound like any previous Trump post, hanging round. To say fuck in a Trump, in a presidential tweet. Like, I don't know why a staffer would do that. No, and I agree with you, James. These things are usually transcribed. Like, usually he reads these out loud and someone writes them down, and then he looks at them, and then they hit post. Like, that's how all of his truths were structured in that documentary. Yes. Does he dictate the capitalization? When he looks them over, like, he may. Okay, because he has a fascinating and quite unique approach to capitalization. Yeah, I mean, like, specifically, like, there will be nothing like it is definitely like a Trump, a Trump verbal tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a super Trump line. Yeah, but then, like, the next part is weird. Yeah. But hanging round, that's not really a Trump sounding line. Okay, sorry. It's weird. We've all been distracted. Yeah, so let's talk about what he said on Tuesday, power plan date. Bridge day. Yeah. He said, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be bought back again. That's a Trump line. Yeah. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something. Did they? Maybe something. Do we? Yeah, I don't know. I'm not so sure. Maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world, 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran. Real journey that you go on. Yeah. From a civilization will die tonight to God bless the great people of Iran. Nightmares. I don't know what to make of that. It seems like he's just, obviously, striking civilian targets. It is a war crime. It is a war crime Israel does all the time we covered that last time we spoke. A whole civilization will die tonight seems borderline genocidal as a threat. Yeah. And that's not borderline. I think that is. I think that's a threat of genocide. Yeah. Which, by the way, is also like, if you say this and then kill one person, you are guilty of the crime of genocide. Yeah. Like I kept the genocide. It's not good. It is not good. Let's talk about what's actually happened, right? Since then, just before the deadline, a huge number of strikes hit Iran, including the Ministry of Intelligence, Building in Shiraz. There's some evidence that may have had some tunnels underneath it. Aerospace Research Institute, Bridges, and Aluminium Factory, Brigadier General Majid Hademi, who is the head of IRGC Intelligence, was also killed in the targeted strike and we hit Karg Island again. Good. Finally. Yep. Yeah. Let a lot of people think that this might have been a precursor to some kind of U.S. land operation, however. Or nuclear weapons a lot, right? Yeah, right. We've seen this a lot, right? Again, when the president's saying you're going to wipe out a culture. It doesn't make me feel calm. You should assume that the president might actually try to wipe out a culture. I mean, like that is my strong stance on this, is that based on what he's saying, it is not unreasonable for people to flip out over the statement. No, it's absolutely not. People should be outraged that a president said that. They weren't really strong enough. It's really bad. But like, it's very bad. Yeah. Like, he should be holed up in front of a tribunal like Milosevic. Like, I am not on team. We should just move past this. Absolutely not. Like, it's easy because everything's so insane to be like another insane thing. Everything's fucking nice. This is a guy who has to trigger for all the nukes saying he's going to wipe out a civilization. I would love to be the nothing ever happens, nothing happened here. It's fine. Yield the Trump derangement syndrome guy because it's a lot easier. But like, this is not something anyone should move past. He should go on trial for like this alone, like outside of the other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Each of these tweets would constitute a reason for a trial in any previous presidency. Since then, Pakistan offered to mediate a ceasefire. And these are negotiations were all going as Donald Trump was truiting. Iran reportedly made a list of its own demands. This is a translation from Persian. So like, not a word for word quotation, right? It listed these in its telegram channels as control passage through the straight of Hormuz coordination with Iran's armed forces. The necessity of ending the war against all components of the axis of resistance, the withdrawal of US combat forces from all bases and deployments in the region, establishing a secure transit protocol in the straight of Hormuz that guarantees Iranian control, full payment of damages to Iran, removal of all primary and secondary sanctions, the release of frozen Iranian assets and property abroad, and the ratification of all these items in a binding UN Security Council resolution. The parties then agreed to a two week ceasefire. Trump again shared the news of this on Truce Social, kind of done reading on Truce. I'm going to skip that one. That was a hanging around one. Very shortly thereafter, Israel began a massive bombing campaign in Lebanon. And Iran continued to launch missiles at the occupied territories. Caroline Levitt has said that Trump refused the Iranian plan. The Iranians originally put forward a 10 point plan that was fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded. It was literally thrown in the garbage by President Trump and his negotiating team. Many outlets in this room have falsely reported on that plan as being acceptable to the United States. And that is false. So she was pretty emphatic about that. Trump attacks CNN for publishing the plan. This morning, Trump has said that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were, quote, a separate skirmish. Israel struck Lebanon 100 times in just over 10 minutes today. They dropped whole tower blocks in Beirut. That that is not a skirmish. Nah, he said they're not part of the deal because his fellow is not part of the deal. Of course, in Iran, state media are pushing that they have somehow achieved all of their 10 points, which I think were their sort of goals for negotiation or basis for negotiation. Trump has said to one reporter that the tolls on the strait could be a joint venture between the United States and Iran, which is the job. Which suggests there are some parts of this of this deal that are true that he has kind of agreed on. That are at least on the table, right? Like these are the bases, which was how they were initially reported by CNN and others, that these have been accepted as a basis for negotiation. They have not been accepted whole cloth. People of some whom I think are acting in bad faith have said, since this morning, the Wall Street Journal has reported that tolls will be paid in cryptocurrency or Chinese one. Yeah, and that Iran is broadcasting VHF messages. It's very high frequency. It's radio frequency. Warning nonpaying ships crossing the straight-form moves that they will be targeted. Trump has proved he said straight-form moves is open. This doesn't seem like that. The toll is about like 2 million, right? Well, there have been various proposals. Sometimes I said $2 million. I've seen different dollar sums per barrel of oil transiting the straight. I guess it would depend if it's the US Iranian partnership, how are we going to account for the exchange rate? Everyone has to get their piece, right? Yeah. But yes, the $2 million number was thrown around a lot. Yeah, and it's worth noting that the straight is not open. It is simply not. Israel hasn't stopped launching strikes. Well, even if they wanted to open it right now, they would have to remove the mines that they've put in it, right? We don't know how many mines there are if there are. So there are still ships going through. There's not many of them. The number I saw for today was four. Yeah, it is possible to go through, but four is one of the lowest numbers that has happened since the straight was first closed. So it is simply not been reopened. Trump says this constantly. It's down to one channel would be my guess, right? And then they're advising those ships. I'm guessing we're sending a pilot craft perhaps to go between the mines. Yeah, I haven't seen any reporting on how they're getting them through. Yeah, I haven't. The extent to which they've laid mines is really unclear. Yeah. All we know is that they have the capacity to do so and that the US has been striking craft that are set to lay mines. But I haven't heard of any evidence of a ship getting hit with a mine yet. Right, yeah, neither have I. So perhaps they haven't laid any or... We don't know what they've done. They may have decided that that was more than they needed to do at this point. Yeah. Yeah, and so far all of the attacks on ships have been with other more conventional weapons. Yeah, either sea drones or missiles of various kinds. Yeah, shooting them with guns in a couple of cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Garrison, let's start with this clip of JD Vance talking about the inclusion of Lebanon in this ceasefire. First of all, I actually think, and there's a lot of bad faith negotiation and a lot of bad faith, you know, propaganda going on. I think this comes from a legitimate misunderstanding. I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn't. We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case. What we said is that the ceasefire would be focused on Iran and the ceasefire would be focused on America's allies, both Israel and the Gulf Arab states. So, yeah, let's talk about Israel, right? A country which famously loves to respect a ceasefire. Israel has continued to strike inside Iran. It has not stopped since the announcement of this ceasefire, right? It has shown no indication of wanting to stop. It has also continued, as I said, it's massive bombing campaign inside Lebanon. It seems to be the case that whatever was negotiated, the Israelis do not perceive the ceasefire as applying to them. Or at least the IDF does not, I should say, rather than the Israelis, right? And therefore, Iran does not perceive it as being obliged to no longer strike Israel. The whole situation right now is very unclear and is literally changing by the hour. Yeah, by the time we're done recording this. Right, yeah. So, we're recording this Wednesday afternoon. By the time this comes out Thursday night, Friday morning, there could be a whole different situation. Yeah, yeah. I'll try and record a pickup if we have to. But yeah, as of Wednesday afternoon, this is what the sort of ambiguity around the deal looks like and the level of compliance regarding Israel and the United States. Yeah. There are two more things I want to talk about that have been reported on the list. Obviously, this has been reported on widely because it is a threat to all of our lives. If we're going to start a nuclear war, the PAK's Kurdistan Freedom Party says its leaders' headquarters, this was initially reported as home. They did send me a text that used the word home WhatsApp. But I think judging by what I have heard from other reporters in the region, it's better described as headquarters, was struck with several Iranian missiles. This came after, according to Fox News, the president claimed that the United States sent weapons to protesters in Iran in January, but that quote, the Kurds kept them. Now, a video of Trump addressing the issue does not explicitly name the Kurds. It doesn't imply that. They don't have guns. You know, we sent some guns, but the group that was supposed to give, which I said would happen to my people, I said it, I called it exactly. We sent guns, not a guns. They were supposed to go to the people, said they could fight back against these thugs. You know what happened? The people that they sent them to kept them, because they said, what a beautiful gun. I think I'll keep it. So I'm very upset with a certain group of people and they're going to pay a big price for that. But the Iranian people will fight back as soon as they know they're not going to be shot and as soon as they can get weapons. This is one of the most interesting things I've seen. It's up there with him threatening to nuke around while flanked by the Easter Bunny. I hesitate to use the word lynchion because that word gets misapplied a lot. And this is not a perfect invocation of lynchion either, but it's getting closer. One of the more lynchion things to happen in real life. It's incredible stuff. With the Easter Jazz in the background. The clash of vibes. Yeah. As there's flowers over the archway. Yeah, I think half come. No, there's sort of juxtaposition, which I think is the key part of lynch. Is the surreal with the mundane. And you have parts of this here where you have the sort of intensity of the stuff Trump's talking about with the Easter Jazz and his purple tie. And it's beautiful. And the Easter decorations in the background. This is this is a stunning piece of media. Yeah, stunning piece of history. Oh, God. Yeah, I saw this yesterday and I thought I need to expose my colleagues to this. Like one of the most incredible 30 seconds of video to come back to the topic at hand. Various rogelati groups have denied this. And it would be an extreme logistical challenge to provide weapons to Kurdish armed groups. Most of whom have most of their personnel in Iraq. And for them to transit those weapons to Tehran. I don't believe that that would have been something that any U.S. administration would entertain. What guns would they give them that they don't? Because if these groups tend to be pretty well supplied with small personal arms, we're talking about like your battle rifles and, you know, long range precision rifles and the like, what they lack is man portable anti aircraft and man portable anti armor. Those are kind of some of the most precious pieces of gear to them. And I doubt Trump was offering to send that into Iran. Among other things, we probably don't want to be sending a bunch of man portable anti aircraft into Iran right now. Yeah, like that could backfire. But that's the only shit I could see these different groups wanting to take for themselves. Yeah, it's especially strange because like, I watched a lot of videos of armed attacks on like Iranian police in January of this year, and they were using very basic weapons to include quite a few of the PAK using pump action shotguns. I don't think the U.S. sent them pump action shotguns. No, that would be a weird, we don't, the U.S. military doesn't have a lot of pump action shoddies just laying around. That's not like the first gun they'd have a bunch of to hand over to somebody. They probably got more AKs than that. Yeah, and like there were AKs used as well, but like these are very basic weapons as you say, like this doesn't seem like anything that would come from the U.S. Also in Kurdistan, the Iranian drones struck Zaga Zawi village, killing Musa Anwar Rasul aged 39 and his wife, Musta Assad Hassan. Their children both survived. This is really heartbreaking and like, there were really horrible videos of their children like confronting the fact that they are now orphans, right? Because of stories like this one, which I do not see any basis for in fact, Kurdistan is being absolutely hammered by Iranian bombs, right? Little children are losing their parents. And like I'm really disturbed as I say every week by the campus tendency to ignore this or to say that it has to happen because the Kurds don't have a state or even the sort of blue wave tendency to sort of hand wave this and say, well, Donald Trump started the war, so Iran gets to murder Kurdish civilians. Like I just find it so heartbreaking and I spent time in Kurdistan and the kind of fondness for the people there, but it makes me mad. It's all pretty bleak and disappointing. You know what else is disappointing? Every week we have to do this. It's an ad break. All right, we're back. We still have three or four important stories that we're going to do here before we close. James, do you want to start with your section on the threat to press freedom? Yeah, so I think this is important. President Trump has said that his DOJ will seek to prosecute the person who quote, leaked the information that the F-15's weapons safety officer was missing and evading capture in Iran, quote, we're going to go to the media company that released it and we're going to say, national security, give it up or go to jail. Trump said, quote, the entire country of Iran knew that there was a pilot that was somewhere on their land that was fighting for his life. It wasn't a pilot, it was a weapons officer, but airman, right? I can't quite find who broke the story because it's not really a story that broke. It didn't require anyone to leak anything to know that someone was missing because the wreckage, and without seeing the wreckage, people weren't really willing to publish the story, right? Because they had no confirmation in Iran, says, wild shit all the time. The wreckage was photographed and published by presumably Iranian sources, and it very clearly showed the livery of the US Air Force F-15 based out of Lake and Heath, which is near Cambridge in the United Kingdom. There were some very early reports before we saw photos that the plane shot down was an F-35, and that would have been a single-seater, right? But as soon as the images came out, everyone knew that wasn't the case, it was an F-5 Strike Eagle. Yeah, and there are single-seater F-15 variants, but I don't believe any of them are active duty US Air Force. Strike Eagles will always have two people. It's not a single-seater, right? So nobody had to leak that information for it to be obvious that if they had collected one person, then there was still one person. This does represent quite a serious attack on the First Amendment. People are killing and dying over Iran, and our tax dollars are supporting that. Have a right to know. Journalism has played a role in the way Americans perceive conflict for a very long time, right? We can think about the Napalm Girl photo. Understand that photo now has disputed authorship. We can think about Walter Cronkite, the Vietnam War. We can think about Abu Ghraib. There is no federal press shield law, though, and journalists have been held in contempt for refusing to reveal sources on that security issues before. This is a serious threat, and it's one that I think everyone should take very seriously. Yeah, well, and it's a very important part of the last little section of the Newsroom TV show. There's a whole plot line about this, and it shows... Yes, yes, yes, Gareth, there sure is. So I just thought that's worth mentioning. You guys have told me not to watch, so it'll make me angry, and I've respected that. You should not, James. You will lose your mind. It's not good for you. There's a lot of stuff that's making me angry right now, so I'm going to give that one. Too much sorkin at the moment is very quickly becomes toxic. Too much sorkin has really fucked up a lot of people in this country. Yeah. Speaking of things that'll really fuck you up, our beautiful tariff music. So glad that we're back to talking about tariffs. So, okay, we have a couple of Iran-related tariff things. Gareth, are we playing the nightmare clip? We had to play the nightmare clip. We're playing the nightmare clip. Okay, this is... Okay, when inevitably in the course of humanity, they have to make a museum to explain to people what capitalism was, this is what they are going to show. This is a clip from the quote-unquote news agency CNBC. Deadline that President Trump has set, APM has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk? Big upside risk or downside risk to genocide? How do we do that? She kind of looks up and then just goes right in. When they have to explain to people how eight billion people were consumed into these roles that they were forced to inhabit by the machinations of capital, this is going to be the one. Oh, God. Turns out the markets responded very positively to Trump's threats to destroy a civilization. It's... I... You know, what if we didn't have market? What if there wasn't a line? Oh, God. Okay, so speaking of bad things, I guess, so on Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, a country, capital C, country supplying capital M military weapons to Iran will be immediately tariffed on any and all goods sold to the United States of America, 50% effective immediately. There will be no exclusions or exemptions. So can he do this? Yes. Key nine listeners may remember that the legal authority he was claiming to have to do this, the Supreme Court, may go away. So can he do this? Look, okay, the way he's describing this, right, sounds like he's using trade authority. It may be that buried somewhere deep in the annals of like sanction policy or some shit. Maybe there's something... I went through all of the trade authority that I know of to try to find any legal authority for this. The short version is there isn't. The long version is, okay, so I guess in theory, maybe if you squint, right, you could use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, but that's supposed to be a national security risk from unfair trade practices. So it could technically work, but the thing is you also have to... That specific one, we've talked about this on the show before, you have to like set up a commission and do a trade study and there's like all this stuff, so it can't work immediately. No, and Trump doesn't seem like a big set up, a commissioned guy. I mean, well, they actually have done this for China already, but I don't know. If you squint like really hard, like if you like really, really squint at like Section 232, like maybe in theory, like, but no, if you're really willing to believe that like the president has the ability to be like, this is what the law says, then maybe the only way I can see this working is if he invokes Section 338, which is the, this is like the remaining part of the Smoot Holly tariffs now. The famously good Smoot Holly. Yeah. So like, okay, there is a small chance that like you, the listeners may have heard of the Smoot Holly tariffs and that's because it's the one that like made the Great Depression worse. Yep. And no one's ever used them since. It's not even clear if they're on the books anymore because in like, this is a legitimate thing of academic discussion, just like whether these are even still in effect because they haven't been used. They're technically still there, but also no one has like ever used them. And also there's been like subsequent laws regulating trade. So I don't know, there's no, there's no way he can do this legally that wouldn't immediately fall apart or wouldn't fall apart eventually to a court challenge, except maybe the like Smoot Holly, like nuclear bomb desperation thing. I don't know. It's very unclear to me whether any of this is ever even going to be attempted to be implemented. He shouldn't be able to do this. It's just Calvin Ball bullshit, but who knows. Yeah, it would be China or Perjumis, what he's going for there. Right? Like China's so weapons to Iran. Yeah. And like there's also a lot of speculation. Like I think Reuters reported this that this might be a thing because there's going to be a trade summit with Beijing. But if you're a trade person in Beijing, you also know that he can't do this. So it's not real leverage. I don't know. Nightmare. Let's talk about some relatively fun, I guess, news back at home. Interesting, certainly. Yeah. So one of the things that happened this week was there was a series of elections and the result of those elections was the Republicans got absolutely hammered, like all up and down the ballot in Wisconsin. Oh yeah. They did perform terribly in Georgia. So the big Democratic win was in Wisconsin. So polls had Chris Taylor, who was the Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, up by about seven or eight percent. Chris Taylor won this election by 20. Oh wow. Yeah. There was also a full sweep of the whole like Moms for Liberty school board slates in a bunch of elections in very conservative Waukesha County. The specific one where every single one of them lost and they fully cleared out all of the Moms for Liberty people was a very specific one that was famous for doing a whole bunch of these right-wing book bands and stuff like that. And they're all gone. And this is a continuation of a trend that we've seen over the past couple of years, really like year, year and a half, where all of these weird Moms for Liberty weirdos just get clobbered. Now, also in that same county in the actual like mayoral election of Waukesha, like the city of Waukesha, the Democrats won that election, which they haven't done in ages. Yeah. This is like one of the biggest Republican like a stronghold victories that like they will always win this seat. Yeah. And you know, and this is something that like everyone from Wisconsin has been talking about, which is if they can't win here, they can't win Wisconsin at all. Yeah. There's no way. Yeah. Right. And again, like, you know, I'm going to get into this more in a second, but like the Democrats were projected to win this seat. And this is obviously a by-election. And this is this Supreme Court seat that they won is like them getting to five to so it wasn't like the majority seat in the way that the last one of these elections were. But they were projected to win by like seven and they won by 20. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's big. Wow. Which is astonishing. Part of again, you mentioned the a bunch of these like school board elections in Wisconsin. Yeah. It's not just Wisconsin. I mean, in a lot of the most conservative territory, the most conservative counties in Texas over the last like year, basically every school district that was taken by the moms for liberty types has been completely like they have been completely thrown out. And that has been happening around the country. There's a lot that people are focusing on when looking at like why are numbers so fucking dog shit for Republicans right now? Right now, why are they getting beaten by such wide margins? And it's certainly way more than one thing is responsible. But I think something that has not gotten enough attention that has been dooming the Republicans electorally is that they got what they wanted in the branch of the the chunk of our government that is hardest to ignore for the average American, which is like what's happening to their kids in schools and a bunch of regular people who were not all that political saw that like my kid can't like check books out any the fuck is wrong happening here. And they went crazy. Not crazy. They got really pissed off. Yeah. Rightfully so. And I think this is going. My hope is that this turns out to be one of their worst like strategic missteps in this period of time is their belief that we can just go fucking ape shit on schools and no one will care. Yeah. Well, and this brings me back to something I've been talking about for a while, which is that so like one of the other results that we're sort of looking at here is so there was an election in Georgia in this like as a special election for the seat that was merged with other Greens old district. This is like one of the most unhinged Republican districts in the entire country. Trump wanted by 40 and the Republican Clay Fuller did win, but he only he won by 12 points in a county that Trump carried by 40. Yeah. Yeah, that's like a 28 point shift. Yeah, right. It's unbelievable. Now, obviously they didn't win here, but there's been a lot of stuff about how. Okay. Well, this is just because Democrats Democrats do better among high information voters. Those are the people who vote in these off cycle elections and aren't during the normal election cycle. Blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of this kind of stuff. That's a kind of stuff that puts you ahead as as the polls were showing in Wisconsin. That puts you ahead by like seven that does not that does not explain a 13 percent over performance. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I think what is happening here is something I've said consistently and this is something that I think Robert is sort of explaining why this is happening is that pollers are still using. There's they're still using as as their basis for what what they assume the elector is going to be they're using the data from the electorate from the 2024 election. Yeah. Because that's that's the standard practice, right? You use as a sample, you know, and you make some like adjustments because it's a by election and stuff like that. But like they're using as as a sample base of voters, the people from 2024. And that electorate does not exist anymore because it's been completely destroyed. Yeah. Right. All of these people have suddenly been mobilized like the whole city of Minneapolis has been like turned into this like weird. I don't know. I'm making that sound negative. But it's like there's like Minneapolis had a level of mobilization that is like possibly has never been seen before in US history. All of these like people who had been, you know, just like not political at all. Or and this is the other thing with like the school board elections is that these are mostly people who were not political people at all who just swept in because they like their schools got fucked with the entire electorate has changed. It shows there's like a deep fluidity here, right? There's a lot of people who supported Trump because of economic conditions, which were blamed on the Democrats and they moved for Trump. And there was a lot of these same people are not like Trump or Republican loyalists. They're they're reacting to the economic conditions and the messaging from each party. And this is reflected in the, you know, the number of Trump's Zoran voters, even the number of people who vote Trump and AOC in New York, right? Yeah. They're not like mega loyalists, right? But it's showing how there is a big fluidity among the types of people that do decide elections. Yeah. But then there's also, and this is I think the other side of this too, right? Is that there's one people who haven't voted, George just didn't give a shit at all. And those people are suddenly being mobilized. And this is turning into like the Democrats are like winning a whole bunch of like rural counties in these elections, right? Yeah. Yeah. And now the last thing I want to talk about in sort of this kind of section of everybody hates the Republicans is that the issues and insights TPP survey for April shows Trump with a 39% approval rating. This poll, which is done a bunch of times every year, they give they give like a bunch of topics where they give a few F rankings from like immigration to the economy to like the wars in Iran, Ukraine. And like a plurality of the votes were an F on every single one. Even immigration. Immigration was the one that was kind of close. Okay. Between that and like a every single other one was down double digits. Okay. If you look at like CDF versus like AB or if you like ignore C, right? It's so much more in the category of like Ds and Fs on the negative side in general. Yeah. Yeah. Like this is for every single issue. I'm guessing it was kind of a binary distribution, right? Like a lot of A's or a lot of Fs and not much. There's actually a surprising number of B's but that's interesting. Yeah. And like a decent number of D's but yeah, it was like mostly Fs and then everything else is kind of spread out between the other ones. I mean, all of this is before the like I'm a civilizational diet tonight stuff. Which which did cause negative reactions from people in the conservative base. Yeah. And the people voting in Georgia and Wisconsin. I want to play this clip here. This was a clip from from from Georgia of a Georgia voter who was interviewed on election day. It's giving war crime. You can't do that. We don't just annihilate people because we can and you know, make a grab for the money and the oil. And that's what we've done in Venezuela and that's what we're doing in Iran. It's giving war crime? It's giving war crime. I need to take a second. This is this is this is good. You know, it's good. It's good. It's positive. Yes. That's the embedded message of the Democrats has managed to come up with on this. No. I just need a second. This is this is this is like a woman in her 30s or 40s holding holding a kid at nine. This broadcast was at 933 in Rome, Georgia on election day. Yep. It is it's giving war crime. Yeah. And you know, if you look at that, like the You Gov economists poll, which is from like April 1st. But like even at April 1st, he had a just an atrocious 35% approval rating, which is that's like that's like end of the Bush administration. Shit. All of this, the important part of this is that like the Democrats are still really historically unpopular right now because everyone's pissing them for not doing anything. But the actual mass of people in this country fucking hate all of this. They're pissed off at everything that is happening. Anything you ask about that Trump is doing, they are fucking angry about. And you know, this is this is this is the kind of anger and the kind of just generalized rage that I think there's no really good way to measure outside of the tools that we've developed for elections or in terms of just like, you know, sometimes you get street mobilizations like this anger, like is the defining thing of the United States right now is that everybody's pissed the fuck off about this. And yeah, and every opportunity they get to express that this shit fucking sucks, they do. This is what American politics is, even as everything is unbelievably hideously leaked from all of the shit these people are doing. Speaking of people who are pissed off, there's one final story that I'll go through pretty quick before we close this episode. Last Wednesday to celebrate April Fool's Day, Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general. Trump told Bondi about his plan to fire her while in the car together to watch the Supreme Court oral arguments on birthright citizenship. There's video of it. There's video of it. It's amazing. Like credit to Fox, but they got a shot of them in the limo and Trump is clearly telling her. And it's when we know he was telling her, it's an amazing little artifact. All you can make out is their faces kind of and their body language, but it rips. It's so funny. Bondi tried to convince Trump to let her stay on until at least summer, but to no avail. Trump appointed deputy attorney general Todd Blanche to serve as acting attorney general until the president nominates a full replacement. On Tuesday, Blanche said, quote, nobody has any idea, unquote, why Bondi was fired except for President Trump. Those sources close to the White House have told multiple outlets that Trump had a growing frustration with Bondi for a while, especially related to her failure to successfully prosecute certain political enemies and the fallout from her handling of the Epstein files. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has been floated as a prospective replacement for Attorney General. At the EPA, Zeldin has led efforts to roll back environmental regulations and climate protections related to endangered species, wetlands and emissions. Before working in the second Trump administration, Zeldin lost the race for New York governor to Cathy Hockel by seven percentage points, a relatively close race for New York. Zeldin is a Trump loyalist fought against the president's two impeachments while in Congress and refused to certify the 2020 election results. Zeldin's a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who served four years in active duty as a military intelligence officer, federal prosecutor and military magistrate, and in 2006 was deployed with the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Wait, so he's a troop cop, military magistrate, troop judge. He served in a few roles. Yeah, that's troop cop shit. He served as a prosecutor and a judge. The hated and reviled troop cop. He looks like maybe he at some point went to law school there, right? He went to law school in New York either during that time or beforehand. It all kind of takes place around because I think he got out of law school around 2004. At the time, he was the youngest person to finish law school in New York. He was in his early 20s. After he got out of the military or out of active duty, he briefly served as an attorney for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and also private practice for a little bit before he went into the state Senate and then eventually US Congress. Now, before Bondi's firing, Pam Bondi was scheduled to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee about the Epstein files on April 14th. Now, Democrats on the committee still want her to testify as she holds relevant knowledge, but on Wednesday morning, the Justice Department released a statement saying Bondi would not appear at the hearing on the 14th, quote, since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General, unquote. This is a little bit untrue. She was not subpoenaed by her title as Attorney General. She was subpoenaed by name as Pam Bondi. Now, Oversight Committee Democrats have responded by saying if Bondi does not comply with the bipartisan subpoena addressed to her by name, they will, quote, begin contempt charges, unquote. Republican Nancy Mace has said, quote, Pam Bondi cannot escape accountability simply because she no longer holds the office of Attorney General. Our motion to subpoena Pam Bondi, which was passed by the Oversight Committee, was for Bondi by name, not by title. She will still have to appear before the Oversight Committee for a sworn deposition. The American people deserve answers and we expect her to appear as soon as a new date is set, unquote. So it appears they will try to reschedule her for a new date. Bondi's firing is interesting in the context of Kristi Noem's firing as for the first year or so of Trump's second term, he really resisted making changes to his cabinet, right? These sorts of frequent changes were a hallmark of his first term. And for the start of his second, he seemed to not want to do that and instead got like his ranks of loyalists that he was going to work with. But since Kristi Noem's firing, that has clearly changed. And this has prompted speculation about who could be next from people like Tulsi Gabbard to Kashpatel or Pete Hague Seth. I think Gabbard is certainly one of the people. If I was one of these three, I would be most nervous if I was Gabbard. But he tells an odd, he's an odd character. I'm really not sure what's in the future for him. A podcast. And I think that what happens eventually in Iran will determine what goes on with Hague Seth. There have been rumors that some of the reason that Hague Seth has been sort of purging High Command in the military is that he has concerns that those people could be his replacements like alternates for him a sect F. Yeah. Yeah. Patel was under more heat, I feel like during following the shooting of Charlie Kirk, greatly assassination and that their failure to find the assassin for some time. Yeah. And his plane tickets and his trips with his girlfriend. The failure with Savannah Guthrie too. Yeah. Trump did not like that clip of him in the hockey locker room. Yeah. I mean, that happened if quite a few now you mentioned them. Before we go, we should mention there is still about a week left of Webby voting. It could happen here is nominated for a Webby as is James series migrating to America, which aired on it could happen here. And of course, behind the bastards, links to vote for our shows in the Webby Awards will be in the episode description. Voting goes till April 16th. Most important election of our lives. Stay in line. Vote early and often, et cetera, et cetera. If you'd like to email us with tips that are relevant to our news coverage, you can do so. Coolzone tips at proton.me. If you have a marketing message to send us, I will block you. All right. That does it for us here at it could happen here. Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Coolzone Media. For more podcast from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. 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