Out d’Coup Podcast

** NOTE: apologies for some of the tech issues in today's show. We had some internet connection problems. I've had to cut several minutes of the show where Cyril's connection dropped out. We hope be be able to get this rectified for future shows. - Kevin Mahoney ** 

On today's show, Cyril and Kevin will be talking about the on-going freak-out over Critical Race Theory. We'll also be taking a look at some of the news coming out of Latin America.

We hope you'll join us! Check out Cyril's newsletter here: https://cyrilmychalejko.substack.com/

You can help support this show by becoming a patron for as little as $5/month at patreon.com/rcpress. Your support has helped make today’s show possible.

And make sure to join our Discord Server to continue the conversation all week long. Just click on the link in today’s show notes: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV

 

On this week's show, I welcome Cory Doctorow to the program to talk about his book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. 

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book is Attack Surface, a standalone adult sequel to the young adult novels, Little Brother and Homeland. He is also the author of Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; a young adult graphic novel called In Real Life. His first picture book for younger kids, Poesy the Monster Slayer, was released last summer. You can pick up all his books at the shop on his website.

He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

You can get all of his books on his website at https://craphound.com/

Joe Manchin decides to sink hopes of passing voting protections laid out in the For the People Act, taking out an editorial in West Virginia newspapers to spew nonsense about bipartisanship. His move happens, of course, while Republican state legislatures are passing voter suppression laws at a breakneck pace. 

A similar fate awaits Biden’s infrastructure plan as Manchin and Sinema refuse to get rid of the filibuster. Talks between Biden and West Virginia’s Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito fell apart after it was clear the Republican position “did not meet the essential needs of our country to restore our roads and bridges, prepare us for our clean energy future, and create jobs,” according to a statement from White House press secretary Jen Psaki. A new bipartisan proposal from a group of 10 senators led by Krysten Sinema and Mitt Romney was developed late yesterday, but sounds like it will gut all investment in climate infrastructure. Senator Markey and other Democratic Senators have said they will not vote for a bill that does not invest in necessary climate infrastructure. 

Turns out Trump’s justice department was secretly subpoenaing phone and other records from Democrats on House Intelligence committee. The practice continued under Biden’s administration until just a couple of weeks ago. 

The Keystone XL pipeline is dead. 

PA Republicans propose major changes in the Commonwealth’s election law, calling for stricter voter ID rules and restrictions on early voting. 

PA Republicans spent a good part of the week with attacks on women’s rights, passing more restrictive anti-abortion laws. 

The PA Senate also gleefully  passed a bill that prohibits PA health secretary from “mandating stay-at-home orders, imposing masking and social distancing guidelines, and ordering business closures.” The PA legislature also voted to end Gov. Tom Wolf’s pandemic disaster declaration this week. Republican Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward joyfully proclaimed: “for all practical purposes, the state of emergency in our Commonwealth is over.”

PASSHE hearings were held this week and Chancellor Daniel Greenstein spent much of the hearing happy texting on his phone. However, as Bill Schackner reported, with over 100 individuals calling in with comments, only ONE person endorsed plans for consolidation. 

Jeff Bezos announces that he is going to space with his brother for Blue Origin’s first crewed suborbital mission. Bezos announced his intentions in an Instagram video in which he said, “You see the earth from space and it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth. I want to go on this flight because it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.” Ah yes, that warm fuzzy feeling you get when the richest person on the planet gets to live out his boyhood dreams, built on the back of massive exploitation of Amazon’s workers. 

NASA says that Russia may pull out of the International Space Station. Russia has been a key international partner on the ISS since the beginning. NASA’s Chief administrator, Bill Nelson, is concerned that Russia may be looking to work more closely with China now that China has begun to build its own space station and has big lunar ambitions. 

Notch Brewing: Brave Noise - Pale Ale, brewed to show solidarity for all those that have suffered discriminatory behavior in the workplace, now available at our Salem Tap Room & Biergarten in 16oz 4-packs and on draft. The release party featuring @lagerdogofficial official and donation opportunities for @pinksbootssociety starts at 6pm!

New Show - Space Left

On today's show, Cyril and Kevin will be talking about his latest column, "PA must make a long-term commitment to fund public transport;" his latest post to his newsletter, "Wither Pennsylvania? QAnon, Bigotry, Coup Mongers, and (Sadly) More!!;" and so much more.

Check out Cyril's newsletter here: https://cyrilmychalejko.substack.com/

You can help support this show by becoming a patron for as little as $5/month at patreon.com/rcpress. Your support has helped make today’s show possible.

And make sure to join our Discord Server to continue the conversation all week long. Just click on the link in today’s show notes: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV

This week I welcome Colleen Gray Nguyen to the show. Colleen is a candidate for PA State House in Cumberland County - currently, that's the 87th district, but that could change after redistricting. 

Colleen has been living with type 1 diabetes since the age of 3. She co-founded the Keystone Diabetic Kids Camp where she continues to serve on the planning committee and volunteers as a camp counselor. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Nicholas Wolff Foundation which hosts summer camps for children with disabilities. She’s the co-founder of Harrisburg Beer Week, the state leader for the #insulin4all movement, and has worked in both volunteer and professional capacities for PA Stands Up, the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, the East Pennsboro Democratic Club, and campaigns for Nicole Miller, Tara Shakespeare, and Shanna Danielson. 

Colleen is a graduate of the Emerge PA training program, and was awarded the JFK Award for Visionary Leadership and Innovation by the Cumberland County Democratic Party. She lives in Enola, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania with her husband and three children.

You can support Colleen Gray Nguyen's campaign right now, right here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/colleenforpa

Follow her on Twitter: @ColleenForPA

Join Raging Chicken's Discord server: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV

Chatting on #livechat during and after the show.

The Arizona Republican election audit sham led by the QAnon owner of “Cyber Ninjas,” is quickly becoming the launching pad for a national, right-wing organizing strategy to delegitimize democracy and fan the flames of extremism. 

CNN reports that QAnon inspired right-wing radicals are taking to Telegram - a social messaging platform that is far more welcoming of extremists - to deepen their conspiracies and plan. Congressional sources told CNN that they are especially concerned about plans to support Trump’s re-installation as president in August. 

This past weekend, former national security adviser Michael Flynn seemed to endorse a coup at the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup,” a QAnon conference in Dallas, TX. When Flynn was asked why can’t a military coup like the one happening in Myanmar happen in the United States, Flynn replied: “No Reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason.” You’ll recall that it was also Flynn who called on Trump to invoke martial law to force new elections in key states. 

Meanwhile, the anti-democracy movement has been hard at work on their inside game as Republican lawmakers have continued to pass voting restrictions around the country. The Washington Post reports that this year has seen the introduction of 253 bills designed to restrict voting across 43 states, according to a new report from the Brennan Center. As of mid-May, 22 voting restrictions laws have been passed in 14 states.  

Media Matters for America released a list of all the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2022. 

Miami is considering a proposal to build a 20 foot sea wall to save the city from the impacts of climate change. As reported in New York Times, “Six miles of it, in fact, mostly inland, running parallel to the coast through neighborhoods — except for a one-mile stretch right on Biscayne Bay, past the gleaming sky-rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district.”

The FBI is investigating Trump appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for illegal political fundraising for Trump. 

Trump’s blog is shut down for good only a month after its launch.
Daryl Metcalfe’s annual Right to Bear Arms Rally is this Monday. 

The Arizona election audit sham attracted PA State Senator Doug Mastriano, State Senator Chris Dush, and State Representative Rob Kauffman to travel to the state like moths to the flame. 

Mastriano finally makes it to prime time. On Wednesday night, on Chris Hayes’s All In, Mastriano features prominently in the opening segment about the rise of dangerous, anti-democracy movement. The report points to Mastriano’s visit to Arizona as case in point in how it all works. 

State Senator Scott Perry ran into the woods to avoid taking questions from local media, according to Raw Story. 

Former State Rep. Ryan Costello is not OK. At least that’s how things seemed last night on Twitter. Apparently, PA Spotlight is squatting in his head after they published info showing that Costello donates to a school board PAC that recruits QAnon conspiracy nuts to run for office. 

State Sen. Lindsey Williams is preparing to introduce a bill in the PA Senate requiring lawmakers to publicly post how they are spending millions of dollars in tax-payer funded expenses. 

The New Jersey GOP primary for this year’s race for Governor has turned into a Trump bootlicker competition. 

Allegheny County DA Stephen Zappala found himself in a scandal this week.  He sent an email to prosecutors telling them to stop accepting plea deals from a black lawyer who called his office “systemically racist.”  Way to pull a racism, DA Zappala.

On Wednesday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the space agency is planning two missions to Venus in the late 2020s. The two missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS will gather evidence about possible microbial live in Venus’s atmosphere and more thoroughly map the planet’s surface. It's been over three decades since NASA launched missions to Venus. 

A new documentary, Woman in Motion, tells the story of how Nichelle Nichols, famous for her ground-breaking role as Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek, pioneered the NASA recruiting program to higher people of color and the first women astronauts in the 1970s and 1980s. The documentary is streaming on Paramount+.

Grist releases a list of new environmental films that you should add to your watch list.  

Books to read: 

• How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Cory Doctorow.
• Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, by Talia Lavin.
• Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility, by Alex Zamalin

Will Sean be live-blogging his vacation?

On today's show,  Cyril and Kevin will be talking "free trade," fair trade, and trade agreements like NAFTA. Both of us were involved with organizing against corporate globalization in the late 1990s/early 2000s. In many ways, that fight continues and becomes even more pressing as we confront challenges of climate change, deepening inequality, white supremacy, and rising authoritarianism. 

You should also sign up for Cyril’s newsletter on Substack: https://cyrilmychalejko.substack.com/

You can help support this show by becoming a patron for as little as $5/month at patreon.com/rcpress. Your support has helped make today’s show possible. 

And make sure to join our Discord Server to continue the conversation all week long. Just click on the link in today’s show notes: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV

A special shout out to Jonathan Mann who wrote our intro song, “There Are No People in the Future.” Check out all is great stuff on his YouTube page and follow him on Twitter @songadaymann

This week I welcome Brian Bailie back to the program to talk about a new report, "COVID-19 and Academic Shared Governance," by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The report finds that college and university administrations responses to the COVID-19 pandemic disregarded the norms of academic governances and "were affected largely by administrative fiat, with little or no consultation with the faculty ever where austerity and emergency measures had dramatic effects on the curriculum, an area traditionally considered the faculty's primary responsibility." We'll may also dip into a recent report by the Roosevelt Network, “The Financialization of Higher Education at the University of Cincinnati,” as well as the broader attack on public higher ed. 

Brian  Bailie is an Associate Professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash College. Brian’s latest articles include, “Are We an Academic Journal? Editing as Ethical Practice for Change,” co-authored with Steve Parks, in Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, and the ever-timely piece in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, , “So, Richard Spencer is Coming to Your Campus. How He was Allowed on, and How You Can Confront Him.” 

Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV
Chatting on #livechat during and after the show.

A special shout out to Jonathan Mann who wrote our intro song, “There Are No People in the Future.” Check out all is great stuff on his YouTube page and follow him on Twitter @songadaymann

More pressure to end the filibuster as Republican Senators refuse to back the Jan 6 commission.

More momentum for Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure proposal. A new polls shows that a majority of Pennsylvanians support the proposal, by the way. 

It was a trifecta for the climate on Wednesday.

A Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 in a case brought by Friends of the Earth. 

Shareholder activists pushed out two of Exxon’s hand-picked board members and elected members who “pledged to steer the company toward cleaner energy and away from oil and gas.”

And, shareholders at Chevron voted 61% to cut its emissions. Another proposal that would have required the company to prepare a report on the impact its business would have from the net zero 2050 scenario, lost with 48% of the vote. 

ConocoPhillips has a unique solution to the melting of Alaskan permafrost on Alaska’s North Slope - refreeze the permafrost so you can drill. 

A UK-based blimp company is looking to deploy hybrid airships for shorter trips between places like Liverpool and Belfast or Barcelona to the Balearic Islands. The company, Hybrid Air Vehicles, says replacing air and ship traffic with its airships could cut emissions by 90%.

Half of all U.S. adults are now fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

New book finally exposes Bernie Sanders as a sham! Yes, you will not believe what this foot soldier of the ruling elite demand! When he’s on the road he demands hotel rooms with...wait for it...a KING BED and temperatures as low as 64 degrees! The hypocrite!

Ladies and Gents (long pause) we got him.  Sedition Hunters, online sleuths, angry partisans and supporters of the ruling elite unearthed video footage that showed State Senator Doug Mastriano breaching police barricades & walking towards the capitol steps minutes before the building was breached on January 6th.  This latest round of reporting completely undermines the stories and statements Mastriano gave to reporters and Senate leadership in the days following the insurrection. 

If that’s not bad enough, Senator Mastirano issued a statement attacking the Huffington Post for reporting on this story and reporting on the fact that he posed for pictures with Sam Lazar, an insurrectionist wanted by the FBI for using bear spray on police officers.  Mastriano compared the photos to Obama taking pictures with Bill Ayers or Louis Farrakhan. Mastriano’s statements prompted reporters to dig more into his connections with Lazar and showed that he has posed for photos with Lazar at least 5 times over the past year.

Keeping up with the insurrection, Sandy Weyer, another Mastriano associate who is known as “Sedition Sandy,” was named in an FBI affidavit for entering the capitol on January 6th.  

Talking about Senator Mastriano.  The Arizona Mirror, a sibling outlet related to the Pennsylvania Capital Star, reported that Senator Mastriano ordered an unauthorized audit of the 2020 election in Fulton County.  The company that conducted the audit is associated with Sydney Powell and the Stop the Steal Movement.  On top of that, they spoiled over $20,000 worth of election equipment that couldn’t be used in the previous primary. 

Reps. Russ Diamond and Barabar Gleim began seeking co-sponsors for legislation that would penalize any school that teaches “critical race theory.” 

Another Bucks County, PA man, Leonard Ridge, was arrested for allegedly taking part in the Jan 6 insurrection. Ridge bragged about his involvement on Snapchat.

The battle of the billionaire space barons is heating up and the Senate prepares a $10 billion dollar bailout for Jeff Bezos’s “Blue Origin” after his fufus were hurt after he lost the bid to SpaceX for the moon lander. 

The European Space Agency is looking to develop a GPS and communication network around the Moon to aid in Earth-to-Moon communications for future missions. 

The chickens are coming home to roost in the craft beer industry. Brienne Allan, a production manager at Notch Brewing in Salem, MA asked an open-ended question on her Instagram account: Is anyone else experiencing sexist comments? As reported on Boston’s WBUR, “The answer was this cascade of experiences, flooding her private messages with a deluge of trauma. …’It escalated really quickly into people talking about sexual violence and sexual harassment, racism from owners and superiors and just how, the HR system in general is just failing people right now,’ Allan said. ‘It just escalated out of control. I have over a thousand stories up now’."

The reckoning is ONLY BEGINNING. 

It’s the second episode of The Wednesday Show! Today we’ll be talking about Cyril’s latest column, “Only a political uprising can save PA’s higher education system,”reclaiming our political imagination for organized action, and what stories Cyril is cooking up for future columns. And, maybe, we’ll check in on new reporting in Axios on right-wing PAC funding of school board elections. And then there’s the Keeping Kids in School PAC which is active right here in Eastern PA.

Check out Cyril's newsletter here: https://cyrilmychalejko.substack.com/

Join Raging Chicken's Discord server to continue the conversation: https://discord.gg/WMW98RQEYV