Chapter 1: What shocking event occurred at City Hall?
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Ten, ten shots fired in City Hall building. How could this have happened in City Hall? Somebody tell me that. A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down. Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten. And a mystery. That may or may not have been political. That may have been about sex. Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of the Prairieland trial?
But like this person started shooting like just from a legal standpoint, this is a nightmare for the defense. Yeah. From the jump. Yeah. Some of the defendants attended a daytime protest outside of this facility earlier on July 4th, after which they then reported back to fellow defendants details regarding the facility's security prior to this nighttime action.
I think it's time for a quick break, and then we'll return to discuss the Antifa terrorism cell aspect of this case. Great. Well, I hate all of this so far, Garrison. Here's some ads. I guess we're back. So let's talk about quote unquote Antifa.
Yeah, let's talk about quote unquote Antifa.
The government argued that the defendants were members of a quote unquote North Texas Antifa cell. The indictment describes Antifa as a quote, militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist
or autonomous Marxist ideology, which explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law, unquote. So basically, they view Antifa as left-wing anti-authoritarians, right? That's how we can kind of collapse the use of this term down into like a single sentence. It's left-wing anti-authoritarianism.
Though the defendants never actually organized altogether under the Antifa name, The prosecution argued that they were linked through a triple Venn diagram of the Socialist Rifle Association, the John Brown Gun Club, and the Emma Goldman Book Club. And this all converged on quote-unquote direct militant action. I'm assuming people are familiar with the SRA or the John Brown Gun Club in some way.
Yeah, yeah. The Emma Goldman Book Club was a local zine distributor and publisher that also put on community events from a radical anti-capitalist, usually anarchist friendly perspective. Emma Goldman obviously being an anarchist. Yep.
And like the fact that obviously these three organizations aren't actually tied together in any sort of like like they're trying to frame it as like, you know, an Al Qaeda and an Al Qaeda affiliate type deal. Right. Which is not sure accurate to how these organizations work or to what's going on here. But I'm not surprised they went with this line of argument.
I mean, the defendants had connections to these groups, right? Sure, yeah. And because these groups have an ideological underpinning that can be seen as being quite similar in some ways, they're viewing that as part of the connection that connects the individuals who were involved in these sorts of organizations or community events. Yeah, and I'm not surprised that's how they tried to argue it.
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Chapter 3: How did the prosecution link defendants to Antifa?
on behalf of Israeli politicians and military leaders, one needs to know this to understand why they act in certain ways in Lebanon. If it was just about targeting their enemies or whatever, that would be one way of doing warfare. But it wouldn't explain detonating entire villages as they've been doing during the so-called ceasefire.
It wouldn't explain spraying herbicide, which they did about a month ago, over large parts of South Lebanon, including parts of Syria, for that matter, which killed crops and so on. It wouldn't explain them not allowing farmers to harvest their crops. It wouldn't explain all of these things.
What would explain all of these things is if you take into account what they say their intentions are in Lebanon, or at the very least what they want it to happen in Lebanon, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it really seems like the Israeli policy, especially now that there's been really no accountability for what happened in Gaza, is like basically to pursue maximum violence, including against civilians, and create, I think, kind of like a no man's land situation. buffer zone around Israel.
Now there are some elements of Israeli society that are like religious Zionist, like messianic types who want to like settle and like expand. But aside from those, those people, like I think, Even we would call like centrists in Israel or like the liberals in Israel are like, OK, well, yeah, we do need we do need a buffer. So we need to flatten Gaza. We need we need to flatten southern Lebanon.
And what this translates to, I mean, in Lebanon in particular, is I think, you know, some estimates say over a thousand have been killed in just the past like two, two and a half weeks. Yeah. And then millions displaced. Right.
Yeah, 20% of the country. Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the world. And South Lebanon is one of the only regions in the country that you might call like a breadbasket in terms of agriculture. So yeah, 20% of the population has already been displaced, and those are those that could be registered. You can imagine numbers being higher than that.
And as I said, a lot of those people have already been displaced a number of times before, even in 2024, when there was the initial escalation. But many of them even going back to 2006, when there was the war, and in some cases even further back in the 80s and 90s, when the Israelis occupied southern Lebanon.
And I guess this is really important to note because obviously what's happening today is connected to the war on Iran. Of course, it's directly connected. But if one only knows this, I think we miss what I would describe as a bit of an Israeli obsession with Lebanon specifically for a long time. There's like historical roots to all of this.
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Chapter 4: What humanitarian efforts are being discussed in Lebanon?
And she said that, like, we're sending humanitarian aid and we have UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon and so on. UNIFIL forces, those UN peacekeeping forces, as I said, don't have a legal right to even retaliate against the Israelis, including when Israel bombs them, which it has done at least twice in the past few weeks. The Lebanese army rarely engages with Israelis.
They don't even have the means in the first place. And so what are people expected to do? And this is sort of the context in which everything else almost doesn't matter. Like in terms of whether you personally like the Hezbollah, I certainly don't.
And whatever like one's personal feelings or even politics is towards a political party, because they are also members of the Lebanese parliament, towards the state itself, whatever it is, that it really feels that ultimately it's like out of our hands.
And this is like a component of this entire thing that I really see, to be honest, discussed as though there are like two sides to the story or like two equal armed actors for that matter, even non-armed, like equal states for that matter. And it's just not the case.
Yeah, thank you so much for laying that out like that. I think that you're right that it's not well acknowledged how disempowered the international community basically expects people in the region, including the Lebanese, to behave and accept the fact that they are collateral damage in Israel's perpetual desire for domination.
American political scientist Nathan Brown just published this article called Israel's Forever Wars for the Carnegie Endowment. His argument is that there's been a shift in the Israeli policy where he says it used to be deterrence, domination and diplomacy have long blended in Israeli statecraft.
And today he says they've been eclipsed by something harsher, quote, a preference for domination, degradation and the prevention of the adversary's recovery. I mean, I think he's right, though I think that we've seen kind of at least a lower intensity, maybe not as high intensity, but we've seen a long scale policy of domination even before this moment.
But I think this moment does definitely bring it out, which brings me to my question of like for Hezbollah in particular. In the last year, two years, like there have been assassinations. We saw the Pager attack. You know, it seems that Hezbollah has been very effectively weakened.
And since the Israelis are now kind of going all out, what do you think is going to happen to Hezbollah as a group, set aside perhaps their public support or, you know, lack thereof?
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Chapter 5: How is Hezbollah's role contextualized in the current situation?
And again, this is completely regardless of my personal opposition to a lot of their politics, whether it's in Lebanon or especially in Syria. But that question, if you want to call it the Lebanese question, is completely being sidestepped. It's not being tackled whatsoever.
And in fact, it's not that dissimilar, I think, from the Israeli attempt to erase or try to pretend as though the Palestinian question as well as can be completely sidestepped, that they can just continue to pursue this policy of just complete domination, as you said, you know, make these Arabic accordions with the UAE and some of the other Arab states, for example, without any mentions of Palestine or Palestinians and so on and so forth.
And in the case of Lebanon, it's less official because there isn't that component, but the spirit of it is pretty similar. There is a sort of like a legalistic framework of the land for peace. And I think explaining that at least briefly would, I think, contextualize the quote that you just read out to us here. That, you know, the Israelis occupied Arab territories in 1967.
Palestinian territories, obviously, there being Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt, of course, was the Sinai and Syria was and still is the Golden Heights. And so the land for peace, quote unquote, worked in the case of Egypt. They occupied the Sinai, and then as part of a peace deal with Egypt, they returned the Sinai to the Egyptians. It didn't happen with Syria.
The Syrian Golan Heights have been occupied since 1967, were effectively de facto annexed in 1981. They've been annexed for so long that Smotrich himself was born in an illegal settlement in the Syrian Golan Heights.
And I'm mentioning this because the Lebanese state, the prime minister I mentioned earlier, about what, a week ago, 10 days ago or so, said that he's hoping for a land for peace framework, which to me shows just how desperate even they are. Like they don't know what to do. They have no options in front of them.
So what they're hoping is that by doing all of these things, public declarations against Hezbollah, by declaring some of their activities illegal, by, I think like a few days ago, they said that the media cannot call them the resistance, for example, which is there in Arabic, how they would be referred to and so on and so forth.
These attempts to placate the Americans especially and so on, and maybe like show that, you know, we're doing something about this. Can you stop the Israelis essentially? haven't achieved anything. The Israelis have just escalated, continued to escalate, continued to bomb more and more and more larger and larger parts of the country.
But that land for peace framework, which is the framework since the 60s, basically, is, as far as I can tell right now, the only thing that the Lebanese government hope that they can even use. But the difficulty in all of that, like, A, I don't think it's realistic because of the Syrian example. Like, they haven't, they have never given up the Golden Heights.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of shadow banking on the economy?
Now we need to pursue instead peace for land. There you go. Yeah, which means acceptance of Zionism earns these people a right to govern themselves.
It's a political vision that does not see the other as human, as having agency, as deserving anything, really. It's not like they have an opposing side or an opponent that they want to defeat, but ultimately have some kind of settlement and move beyond that or whatnot. There is no long-term plan, is what I'm trying to say, I guess.
And maybe to emphasize a bit more in the case of Lebanon, so what happens next for Hezbollah, for example... I'm not entirely sure. I don't think anyone really knows. It seems clear that the Israelis underestimated their capabilities. But to what extent that will matter if the Israelis continue to just bomb and bomb and bomb Lebanon for weeks on end, if not months on end and so on, I can't tell.
What I can tell is that in the same way as the Israelis want to ignore the Palestinian question, but it's still there. It haunts them in a way, because I work on hauntology. And in case of Lebanon, there is also that in many ways, that if you look at the shift in discourse, even within Israeli politics from like, let's say, 70s, especially 80s onwards, I'm not going to say it was never good.
But there was a stronger component of Israeli politicians, let's say, like a higher percentage of them anyway, that were, for lack of a better term, pragmatic.
that were willing to have concessions, that were willing to have whatever, because if only because they just did not want to deal with like occupying a foreign country that they had no intention to legally annex as they did with the legally, none of this is legal, but like within Israeli law, I mean, as they did with the Golan Heights.
And so that's what I'm saying in the case of Lebanon, that it's almost like the worst case scenario is what's currently happening. And that's like completely regardless of what happens to Hezbollah, because Hezbollah can disappear tomorrow and the problem will continue to be the same, if not just get worse. The country has no economy to speak of.
The currency was already devalued during the economic crisis, was one of the highest devaluations in the world. And there are no prospects going forward in terms of like making this a country that can even sustain itself. It's already very like import dependent. But if you exclude the South Lebanon and it being a breadbasket, East Lebanon as well, by the way, is also a breadbasket.
And that's another area of Lebanon that the Israelis have been constantly bombarding. To paraphrase that Israeli minister, that like Lebanon is not a state, it's not a nation. It's just a place that's on the map. That will pose a problem, obviously, first and foremost for us, like for the Lebanese and people who live in Lebanon. But it is also a problem geopolitically.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of shadow banking on the economy?
They're taking on real debt to buy hypothetical debt.
Oh, it's about to get so much worse. That doesn't seem like a good idea. So I think it's so much worse. So that's what like the leveraged part of that. I don't even know how you do that in burgers. I don't know. You're going into debt to, like, buy the promise of burgers in the future so you can sell those future burgers? Yeah, but burgers are real. We're not talking about a real thing at all.
Chapter 8: How do credit default swaps work in the financial system?
Well, technically speaking, somewhere at the bottom of this is mortgages. However, comma, we're about to get into a kind of asset where there isn't anything behind it. And this is where the really, really, truly unhinged shit starts. It hasn't yet? Which is that these companies figured out a way to bet on whether these mortgages were going to fail or not.
That's so tight, Mia. I fucking love that. I love it. Yes.
By the way, I can't emphasize enough how unhinged this is. The mechanism they're using to do this is called a credit default swap. Oh, I've heard that phrase. This was supposed to be how they did insurance. Their mechanism for doing insurance on all of these insane loans they were doing was originally like... Okay, so you have a bank, right? The bank has given out a risky loan.
So this bank goes to another bank. They shouldn't do that. And they say, hey, if this person actually pays a loan back, I will pay you money.
Okay, so the other bank is like taking a gamble here.
Yeah. So the other bank that's giving out the loan, right, gets money if the loan goes under. So in theory, they're sort of like insured against the risk. They call it like hedging. So theoretically, it's less bad for them because now even if the loan goes under, they still get money back from that other bank.
So the other bank is just a bookie.
Yeah. And the other bank is betting that they are going to get it. So then if the loan does get paid, then that bank makes money. And this is legal for everyone to do. Yep. This is real banking or shadow bank? This is real bank. No, this is technical. Actually, no, this is actually both. Both of you do this.
Technically speaking, the instrument, like the actual credit default swap or whatever is made by the shadow banks, but then they're brought by the regular banks. I'm starting to think that the banks are the shadow banks and that all of this is just fake and bad. Like, so here's the thing.
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