It Could Happen Here Weekly 175

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hello, and welcome. Today could happen here podcast the world
falling apart, and its mostly just about that at the minute,
but we do sometimes talk about how to put it
back together as well. Joining me today is Garrison Davis.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Garrison, Hello, Hi, And we're on the falling apart theme,
and I think that we've been on that one quite
a lot that last few weeks, but today we are
specifically talking about the what I'm going to call the
rendition of non US nationals by the Trump administration over
the last week. The reason I'm calling it gets rendition

(01:00):
and not deportation is because these people aren't being sent
back to the countries they're from. They are being sent
to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place
called second. So the Trump administration has attempted to send
three hundred people who it accuses of being members of
a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how

(01:21):
they get there under the Alien Enemies Act to a
prison in El Salvador where they will be detained for
a year at the expense of the United States.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
We're going to.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Break down exactly how we got there over the course
of this episode. So, the Trump administration has accused these
people of being members of two different gangs. The majority
of them, there's two hundred and thirty eight people are
accused of being members of trend de Ragua. Trindragua is
a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a

(01:57):
foreign terrorist organization. Another twenty three it's accusing of being
members of MS thirteen, which is a Salvadoran gang. The
Trump administration use something called the Alien Enemies Act to
remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act we actually spoke
about it in November of last year when we were

(02:17):
looking at provisions of US law that the Trump administration
could use for its mass deportation gender. This is when
we spoke about the Trump administration in the past has
been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United
States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole
series about Title forty two on that. That's kind of
the paramount example. Right. The Alien Enemies Act is a

(02:40):
two hundred and twenty six year old piece of legislation.
The last time it was used was to inter Japanese
people during the Second World War. Right, that's a pretty
shameful part of United States history, and it's great that
we're going back there. So who are the enemies in
this case? Right, it's generally, like I should probably point out,
the Alien Enemy Act is intended for like the people

(03:03):
you were at war with. Right, So, if the United
States is at war with let's say Canada, and there
are Canadian citizens in the United States and people who
have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people that are
individuals within that group are suspected to be spies or
suspected to be like serving the interest in Canada not
the United States, that they could be excluded or detained

(03:26):
under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country,
as it's the case here, and as we saw in
this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal. Right,
This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing
where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have
even a hearing. Right. These people were rounded up and
booted out the country in very short order.

Speaker 4 (03:49):
Yeah, and like with or without due process, Like we
should not be black begging people and sending them to
the like Al Salvador Labor prison, right, Like this is
like just doing this at all, even with du process
would already be horrifying.

Speaker 5 (04:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
The fact that they're just doing it like without even
any like court process entirely and like trying to like
bypass that just adds like another level to an already
like horrifying and you know, evil and shameful action.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, it's terrible. I want to define some of the
categories here. I want to start with Tendgua. Spanish understanders
will will notice the word trend meaning train. That's because
they came out of construction unions who are building trains
as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which
is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs. Trendliano

(04:41):
is the other one that springs to mind, which has
come from the same place, and that's have similar names,
but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They
also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have
in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf
of the Venezuelan state. By twenty twenty four, I thought
to blame them for the protests after his election. People

(05:01):
remember that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I
covered that in my series on the Dariant Gap. If
people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics of migration
to the United States. In twenty twenty four, Biden names
that I were a transnational criminal organization, and then Trump
named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled several cartels

(05:22):
as ftos as well. At the time, there's a lot
of speculation about why was it to allow for like
drone strikes or co operations. I think we're now seeing
that this was part of this large employ of deportation.

Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah, because like quote unquote terrorists had even less quote
unquote rights than quote unquote criminals. Yes, right, Like it's
it's like like the like the triangle of like which
which deplorable class has the least about of rights. Terrorists
are always like the ones with the least.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah, And we've been doing that for twenty odd years
now with Tiamo Bay and renditions to Egypt and Syria
and other places. In this case, people are being sent
to Sikot, which is this prison in El Salvador sometimes.
Can you spell that, yeah, Cecot centrocult Yeah, sea Cott. Yes.

(06:12):
It stands for Terrorism Confinement, Terrorism detention Center. It is
largely referred to as a super prison. Right. It was
built in El salbad Or by part of his Iron
Fist would be the way you translate. It's iron Fist
policy against gangs and against crime, and it has been
widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into

(06:35):
cells with more than one hundred people, but there are
fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right, so they can't
even all lie down at the same time. The bunks
don't have bedding, they're just flat like metal sheets. They're
four high, so you have to climb over other people
to sleep. For more than one hundred prisoners, there are
two open toilets. That's the only access to a bathroom

(06:56):
that you have. They might be allowed out for half
an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with
their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave
their heads and they all wear white. The lights are
left on all day. As I said that, they're provided
with no bedding, no contact with the outside world, very
little access to anything other than standing in that cell.

(07:17):
There's two bibles in each sat. It's the only sort
of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Like, yeah,
this is completely inhumane, right, It's horrific. And for a
couple of years now, bu Kelly has been doing like
these media tours the of SICOT like using it to
generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image

(07:39):
of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote,
what will happen to you if you're a quote unquote
in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote
his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs.
And as we saw when these people were sent to
us ABAD or this tendency to use I don't know
what you would call it, incarceration as a way of

(07:59):
making content, it was was very much the case here, right, Yeah, I'm.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Going to break for ads.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
When we come back, we will be consuming content that
is people being stripped of their human rights and we
are back, Garrison, Do you want to go ahead and
play this? And so the the tweet in question, the

(08:25):
zet in question, it's by Naibuke, the president of Bel Salvador. Right,
should I read out?

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (08:32):
I think you should. I think it's worth noting that
like this style of propaganda close to the mirrors a
lot of what like DHS and the Trump administration is
doing on their official accounts. So a lot of a
lot of the like mimified content creation format and like
aesthetics being used to just display like torture and deportations
and human arts abuses is very common among government accounts

(08:54):
in the States right now. It's pretty pretty horrifying to
look at. And this this kind of follows this suit
and is possibly even more bleak. Yeah, but yeah, we
should read read this whole message and then and then
we'll price skip around on the video and talk about
what we're seeing.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah, So I'll just read it obviously, you know, to
understand I'm quoting it hit early from him today. The
first two hundred and thirty eight members of the Venezuelan
criminal organization trend Raguas arrived in our country. They were
immediately transferred to sikor the Terrorism Confinement Center for a
period of one year. Parentheses renewable. The United States will

(09:33):
pay a very low fee for them, but a high
one for US over time. These actions, combined with the
production already being generated by more than forty thousand inmates
engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program,
will help make our prison system self sustainable. As of today,
it costs two hundred billion per year. On this occasion,

(09:53):
the US has sent us twenty three MS thirteen members
wanted by Salvadory Injustice, including two ring leaders. One of
them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure.
This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after
the last remnants of MS thirty, including its former and
new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always,

(10:14):
you continue advancing in a fight against organized crime, but
this time we're also helping our allies, making our prisonessest
them selves sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence to make our
country an even safer place. All in a single action.
They God blessed Sarbador, and may God bless the United States.
I should probably just add that the US sent three
million dollars to pay for these six million dollars I'm

(10:36):
sorry to pay for the three hundred prisoners that intended
to send.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
The Zero Idleness program is like one of the most
sinister things I've read recently.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah, I mean you could put out of a George
Orwell or like a old Huxley or something right, and
it wouldn't sound out of.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
It's even like you know, it's almost cliche now to
point like German work camps.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
But like yeah, I mean come on, yeah, yeah, that
we're doing it again.

Speaker 4 (11:04):
So yeah, we'll probably play a clip of the music
and then I'm going to skip around on the video.
You can just talk about what we're seeing here. It's first,
we have a shot of an airport with three different
planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in
single file. It has like this like action movie type

(11:28):
music lines of soldiers.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
So as as the.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
People getting loaded on the plane, they're getting like forced
forced down. There's like people with like guns, police military
like manhandling people pushing their heads down, physically removing clothing.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, they're showing their tattoos there, right, that's what they're
pulling up his shirt. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (11:52):
But like even the way that they just like walk
around with these people like like like forcing their heads
almost to like their concrete as they make them shuffle
on the ground, like basic dehumanization. Shows them getting transported
onto buses.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah, so they said they're arriving at SECOD now sort
of bright white, very sterile facility. Now they're being forced
onto their knees, yeah, and shaved.

Speaker 4 (12:24):
Getting their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while
being forced onto their knees on the ground.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Then the cops doing this are all wearing I guess balaklavas.
I would describe them as face masks and hats.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
Yeah, all of all of the military police officials are
trying to hide their identity as they you know, publicly
display the actions that they're doing, as when they're you know,
shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (12:55):
So it it's it's a lot of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
You see.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
You see them like pushing some pushing people all in
matching white clothes in single file into cells.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Yeah, and this is the cell. So we spoke about before.
We will include this link in the in the sources.

Speaker 4 (13:11):
It's basically just three minutes of torture porn. Like that's like,
that's what that's what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
I guess, yeah, it's it's it's pretty bleak, honestly, Like, I.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
Don't know what else to say about it, besides like
it's it's just it's just like channeling pure evil, Like
I like, it's it's I there's nothing else to say.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah, there's I mean, that's I don't know how anyone
can watch that and think good. So we should talk
about how they're identifying these people, and we should talk
about the process by which they were sent there. ICE
policy says a person could be deemed a gang member
if they office a note to quote gang membership identification criteria.
One of the criteria that they seem to be using

(13:49):
in this instance is their tattoos. So there are some
gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang.
Right MS thirteen Mara Salvastructure, it's what they're mess stands
for being one of them. These like Mara Central American
gangs have tended to use that in the past. This
isn't really something that happens with Trend de Ragua as

(14:13):
far as I'm aware of. Some people they've pointed to
tattoos of trains in a document they get found from
the Texas Department of Public Safety. They're pointing to stars
as evidence that people were part of Trend de Ragua.
So I remember where Trend de Dragua does not have
a policy of tattooing people specifically, because this is a
thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members,

(14:36):
right like, it would be silly to keep doing that
once once it's become so clear that the state uses that.
So the one sort of case that I've seen legal
documents on of these people, the one name we have
one of these people who's been sent is a man
named Hersirees Barrios.

Speaker 5 (14:52):
He was a.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Footballer professional football in Venezuela who protested against my daughter regime,
was tortured and detained a result I've spoken to. Probably
I would imagine thousands of Venezuela and migrants. Right again,
I would like you to listen to my series on
Italian Gap if you haven't put a lot into it.
All of these people have stories of watching people be shot,

(15:15):
the brutal repression of protest, state violence, economic collapse, persecution
for supporting the opposition in the country, right, and this
is one of those stories. The criteria that they used
to identify him were a tattoo which had a football
with a crown over the top and then the word
Dios God in English underneath. Rais Barrios' lawyer says that

(15:38):
this is an homage the logo of Reel Madrid, his
favorite football club. They have claimed that his evidence of
gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The
other criteria that they used is a picture of him
throwing up the horns. I guess which I believe it
means I love you in sign language, I'm not sure
if I think an urban legend or of that's the case,

(15:58):
and there are obviously different languages. But this is a
hand gesture. It's especially common in the Spanish speaking world.
If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and
my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled
up as if I was making it fist.

Speaker 4 (16:14):
Almost like almost like a spider man hand symbol.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
I guess sure, I'm not familiar, but if you say
so to visually reference for people, if you are making
a little cow like a bulk with your hands, sure
you would be doing your shadow puppeting.

Speaker 5 (16:26):
It's very common. Like, yes, it's a very typical hands.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
It's a thing that people do when they're taking photos,
like I've even seen it, like when you know, if
there's if I'm working with a photographer and they're snapping
photos of larger groups of people, people just do it,
like just like people do the peace sign. You know,
it's a thing to do with your hands. Those are
two criteria they use. So I should point out that
none of these people have been accused or convicted of

(16:50):
a crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador. Right.
Even if they had been accused of a crime, even
convicted of the crime, the United States is very unclear
what legal basis they would be to then detain them
in Thel Salvador, right, Like the United States doesn't have
a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies.
At the time of writing, this has been challenged in court. Right,

(17:11):
a district court judge attempted to block the A district
court judge did block these removals. Now he actually blocked
them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However,
despite this, the planes didn't turn around. And I'm just
going to quote directly from what the judge said here
quote any plane containing these folks and it's going to

(17:33):
take off or is in the air, needs to be
returned to the United States. And then it's another quote later.
This is something you need to make sure he is
complied with immediately. This didn't happen, right. The planes went
from the US torn d Salvador. They didn't stop even
when the judge had given its order for them to stop. Now,

(17:54):
normally in illegal proceeding such as this, right that the
government or one of the parties may not agree with
the findings of the judge, and they may choose to
appeal it right, that's very normal. You still comply with
the order, then appeal it right. You don't just keep
doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think
the judge was right. Like, that's in theory, not how
this works. Now in practice, what means does a judge

(18:18):
have to force the executive to listen to him?

Speaker 5 (18:22):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute.
The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling.
One of them, Press Secureary Caroline leave It claimed that
there was quote no lawful basis for the ruling. Go
back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to
appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal
order is not the same as a written one. That's

(18:46):
not something that's generally understood to be the case, and
that because the flights were over international water, the order
did not apply. This was then part of the foreign
policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is
particularly worrying. It's you effectively don't have your rights in
international waters role like humans don't have rights in international waters.

Speaker 4 (19:10):
Yeah, it's just allowing the US government or the EUSt
government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever
it wants if the action is being taken or not,
like immediately on US soil or other foreign soil.

Speaker 5 (19:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
So we're going to take another break, and when we
come back, we will talk about their response to this
judges ruling.

Speaker 5 (19:40):
All right, and we are back.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
So Tramp's response to this Judge Boseberg's ruling was I'm
just going to read this is a true social post
aka a truth quote. This radical left nudatic of a judge,
a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barak Hussein.
Obama was not elected President.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
M Dash.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
I'm not going to say when it's capitalized, just to
understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that Trump
likes to do. He didn't win the popular vote parentheses
by a lot exclamation mark comma. He didn't win all
seven swing states. He didn't win two seven hundred and
fifty to five and twenty five counties. He didn't win anything.
I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate, but

(20:27):
fightaling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason
for this historic victory and just doing what the voters
wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the
crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached.
We don't want vicious, violent and tormented criminals, many of
them deranged murderers, in our country. Make America great again,

(20:47):
Tom Homan. The borders are also told Fox News quote,
I don't care what the judges think.

Speaker 6 (20:54):
We made a promise to American people. The President Trump
has made a promise to American people we're going to
make this country say again, I wake up every morning
loving my job because I work for the greatest president
in the history of my life, and we're going to
make this country safe again. I'm probably be a part
of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what
the judges think. I don't care the left. Thanks, we're
coming too.

Speaker 7 (21:15):
I just love seeing you going through these protests. Is
just crunching on the apple as they're liberal tears just
just fle out the hallway. Tom Holman, thanks so much
for joining the program.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
You gotta think this is open defiance of the courts, right, Like,
I don't really know.

Speaker 4 (21:32):
It's what we've been talking about the past month on
executive disorder. How we are just continually like ramping up
this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch.
The congressional branch has already basically given up all of
their power, and yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis. Yeah,
very few people are taking this as seriously as what
it should be, and even the courts seem a little

(21:54):
bit tepid to like actually enforce their own power or
like try to.

Speaker 3 (21:59):
Yeah, I mean Boseberg mentioned contempt once from what I
can find on PACER. But like, obviously these judges I
think are somewhat concerned that if they, you know, they
find the government in contempt to court, then what happens
because if you, like, yeah, if you play your Trump
card and no one cares, then you have no carves
left to play.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
It's it's kind of odd how the judges themselves are
seemingly afraid of like pushing this constitutional crisis into a
explicit territory right to be like what if we do
the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else
like we have no power, like like we actually have
like like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch. Yeah,

(22:40):
it's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this
like very obvious accelerationist push of like, no, we need
to actually test test this out.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yeah, because we need to know where we're at.

Speaker 4 (22:51):
Like, and they're scared too, because they're scared what if
what if that testing causes like the Trump side to win?

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, but they were already winning in the in the
absence exactly.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
And the problem is that in absence of that, you
were just giving up and letting Trump win.

Speaker 5 (23:06):
Yeah, Like after Trump called.

Speaker 4 (23:08):
To impeach the quote unquote radical leftist lunatic of a
judge who tried to temporarily halt the deportation of of
these three hundred Venezuelan immigrants. Chief Justice John Roberts made
a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for
rulings that don't align with political agendas. And that's as

(23:29):
far as they're going right now. They're making rare public
statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile,
Musk complaints on Twitter dot com about a quote unquote
judicial coup, and it mistakenly calls for sixty senators to
impeach a leftist to judges. Now, of course, the Senate
does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate
requires sixty seven votes to convict it and remove someone

(23:51):
from office once impeached. So, haha, we got you, We
got you, Elon, you made a mistake, We win, not coing.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
Yeah, it's where we're at right now with this case.
We're recording this. On Thursday, Boseberg gave them twenty four
our extension to provide details about the flights. The government
has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets,
despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights,
including in the video that we discussed.

Speaker 4 (24:20):
Yeah, they're turning these into fucking like tiktoking Instagram real
hype videos.

Speaker 5 (24:25):
They're not state secrets publicly.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
You're publicly displaying these to show that these people are
not human. Yeah, like you're trying to scare everyone into saying,
we decide if you are a person or not, and
if you're not a person, this is what we can do.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
This, we can do whatever we want to. Yeah, it
should be noted as well. There is actually a process
in US law, through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for
the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing classified information publicly.
In fact, Bosberg was chief judge on that.

Speaker 5 (24:54):
Court for five years.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
But we are not using that process where were using
their Alien Enemies Acted today. So yeah, this is a
new exciting territory. In On Monday, so that's the day
that you're hearing this, a panel of judges from the
District Court in DC will hear an appeal by the
United States Government against Bozberg's attentive restraining order, the one

(25:20):
that it didn't obey anyway, So we will have more
on this, and we will keep updating you on this,
and suffice it to say that I guess again this
is a constitutional crisis. Like this is what it looks like.
I don't know if people expect like fireworks to go
off or like some confetti to drop and it to
be like the separation of powers is gone, but if

(25:43):
the government can ignore the courts, and that is what
is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime.
These people, many of whom one of them was a musician,
one of them was a football player, right Like, I've
interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of fens word of migrants,
and most of them, it will shock you to hear,

(26:04):
are just people who don't want to live with the
state on the neck, people who want to make a
decent living for their their families. For what it's worth.
None of the Venezuelan migrants are met in the Dadian
Gap or in the United States or have come to
United States or my knowledge, just for people who are
like wondering how those stories kind of resolve, they resolve
with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions,

(26:26):
either working for very little or unable to work at all,
and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty
bleak for them, it's pretty bleak for us to if
this is the duration that things are going. I don't
ever have much more to say.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
No, I don't know what else there is to say
about them, just bypassing the courts to do a complete
authoritarian overgrab so that they can send hundreds of people
to essentially like a labor camp black site in a
different country for an unknown period of time without any
legal process.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Gets to be clear, not all of these people even
entered the United States between ports of entry, which has
been charged as a misdemeanor generally isn't charged. Some of
them came with the CBP one the fucking app the
thing you're supposed to do.

Speaker 5 (27:12):
These are not proven criminals like these.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
These these are just people, some of whom who immigrated
legally and have been detained by ICE. I don't now
shipped off to a like torture labor prison in a
different country where they're going to stay for at least
a year in parenthesis renewable, so like in depth ary,

(27:35):
Like it's like.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
They can be forced to labor for the rest of
their lives, a thing that has happened before in human history.

Speaker 4 (27:44):
No, Like, if you're like history understanders should look at
what's happening and be like, oh, we're doing that again, huh.
And the only way that this ends is with people
getting angry enough to start doing something about it. And
I feel like we are we're so like everyone's become
so complacent that it's even hard to get people to
care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
Yeah, and you don't have to be like, I want
to phrase this in radical terms that you don't have
to be like anywhere on the left to understand that, like,
this is an assault on basic human rights. It's a
sort on the foundational principles of the United States government.
And everyone should be concerned about this. You shouldn't be
a left right issue. This should be like a right

(28:25):
wrong issue. So hopefully you can all have some talks
with your family this week. I don't know, like, I
think it's really important to push back on the idea
that these people have done any crimes, because they have not,
that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable
degree of evidence to be members of gangs like trend
de Ragua.

Speaker 4 (28:44):
And even if they have been convicted, they should not
be sent to the Al Salvador Order labor camp. But
the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just
random in some cases, like random Venezuelan men who have
been rounded up.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
For the crime of having tattoos. For the most part, horrifying.
It is petrifying.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah, it's happening like it.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Is happening here.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
Every every day, We're getting closer to the Cool Zone
as more and more people start taking this situation seriously.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah, so, yeah, take it seriously, you know, advocate for
these people. Best of luck, And if you want to
email us, you can do Cool Zone tips at proton
don't me that's an encrypted email address, but it's only
encrypted end to end. If you also send from an
encrypted email address, do your due diligence, and yeah, send us,

(29:34):
send us tips if you have tips, ideas, if you
have ideas, and we will be back tomorrow with more
things that are happening here.

Speaker 5 (30:01):
Welcome to could Happened Here? A podcast about bad things.
Usually I don't know. This is mostly a bad Things episode.
I am your host, Miya Wong, And one of the
kind of things we've emphasized on the show a lot
is that a lot of the structure of the kind
of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that
was put in place under liberal administrations and it's practices

(30:24):
that are carried out by Democrats. And one of the
biggest ones of those and this is something that I
think you can trace the violence here and you can
trace the politics that it inspired directly to how we
got to Trump being in power is the just continuous
crisis in the US of governments doing sweeps of encampments
of unhoused people. And to talk about really one of

(30:47):
the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country
of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does
advocacy work for on house and disabled people and Alameda County,
and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when yeah,
this fucking got hintshit happens. So both of you two,
welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you appreciate the chance
to talk with you.

Speaker 5 (31:11):
Yeah, I always want to say that I'm excited and
like it is true. However, I wish I ran a
podcast that was about like good things, so that why
I could talk to people. It wasn't like, it wasn't
me being like, yeah, I'm excited to talk about like
the worst thing that happened. So I think a place
to start on this is when we talk about what

(31:32):
a sweep actually is on a physical level of what happens,
because I think people really don't have a sense of that.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think stopped ya. Maybe you want to
take this one.

Speaker 8 (31:44):
Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. Yeah, thank you.
I feel like, first of all, before I even go
into it, yes, I think a lot of people who
have never experienced a sweep or don't have loved ones
who have been swept. I think a lot of people
have no idea what a sweep actually can, even if
in a general sense they feel that it's a bad
thing or a wrong thing. And I think part of

(32:06):
that is deliberate. Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during
nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland, they're
conducted by the Department of Public Works. They're city employees,
they work nine to five, so accept in cases where
they work over time, or when the city uses loopholes
to get around posting notice and ends up doing a

(32:26):
sweep on the weekend. They're usually happening when a lot
of middle class housed folks are at work and not
out and about seeing what's going on. So a sweep,
and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California,
but I think it's safe to assume that these operate
in similar ways around the country. Generally, what will happen

(32:47):
is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a
sweep has been posted in Oakland. There is policy that
states that you're supposed to have received at least a
week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice,
might not even know that it's happening. You might wake
up at around nine am to a bunch of heavy
machinery pulling up dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of

(33:10):
sort of like heavy equipment. And then you'll have somebody
from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going
around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know,
making noise that your tent or your car or wherever
you're staying, saying hey, this encampment is being closed down.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
You have to be out of here.

Speaker 8 (33:30):
There usually are representatives of the city's contracted outreach organization
called Operation Dignity. They're supposed to be there. Very rarely
do they actually have referral for somewhere to go. They'll
basically just be like, hey, do you want services. They
won't usually specify what the services are. They'll just show
up and be like, hey, do you want services. If
you say yes or have questions about what services are available,

(33:53):
they may give you a sort of very vague rundown
of whatever might be available that because they don't usually
even find out what openings are available until ten am
on any given day, so at the time that they
roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet.
So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every
sweep is a little different, but the commonality between all

(34:16):
of them is that what the city is there to
do is essentially to erase all signed that anybody ever
lived there. So either you are able to pack as
much stuff as you can and get it out of
the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your
turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends
up in the back of a dump truck. There are
other sort of specific pieces of policy and operational things

(34:39):
that can vary from time to time, like, for example,
they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which
means that they're expected to store up to a cubic
yard of somebody's belongings for ninety days at a storage
location in East Oakland. They rarely do this unless hounded
to do so, and most of the time, the actual
process as of going back and reclaiming your belongings from

(35:02):
that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages
to do it.

Speaker 5 (35:06):
Yeah. So, so to just make this clear, the thing
that they're doing is they show up and then they
fucking deshoil your property, yep. Like the thing that it
most closely resembles is like we're doing our own miniature
ethnic cleansings. Like that's just like what that is.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
Ye, Yes, And every suite there are at least several
police you know, depending on the size of the sweep,
that can be even more. And so there is a
very real threat of police violence like underlying every single
encampment suite. And so the SUITEP that Oakland this week

(35:45):
practices that Oakland has set up are like very kind
of odd, and they are associated with different like lawsuits
that have occurred in the past couple of actually since
the seventies. But so there are certain requirements that the
City of Oakland is obligated to follow in like certain

(36:08):
provisions and offers that like homeless people are technically supposed
to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons,
like rarely ever are so for instance, like the bag
and tag policy that Satya was just discussing, Like da've
recently somebody did a pra request to see whether or

(36:31):
not to say he was actually following faithfully following that policy.
And I think in like over a year there were
I believe eight bagging tags that were registered in the
city system. And that was in that same period there
were like well over one hundred sweeps you know, I

(36:56):
don't have the exact number on me, but or yeah,
actually five hundred and thirty seven closure two instances of
storing property. So you know that's people's their whole lives.
All their possessions like precious items that they they're able

(37:17):
to hang on to are just yeah, destroyed and they
never see them again.

Speaker 8 (37:22):
And I would also add to the piece around like
the quote like offer of services, Like that's also something
written into their policy that they're supposed to be connecting
people to housing ahead of sweeps, and that's what they
use to continually justify the way that they operate. Is
that in for example, city council meetings and Homelessness Commission

(37:42):
meetings where city admin is questioned on their procedures because
they get complaints, like the Homeless Commission gets complaints constantly
of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting
referred to housing, and so forth. And the justification that's
constantly used is like, well, we're offering people service, says
every time, and they just refuse them. And I think

(38:02):
that that is pretty much the number one mythology that
is continuing to spur a lot of the like pro
sweep discourse in Oakland specifically, and I'm sure in other
parts of the country as well, and people are not
like to be clear, most of the time, people are
not actually being offered services. It's just not happening.

Speaker 5 (38:25):
Yeah, this is a national discourse, he shares alt. I mean,
you know, I think a lot of it kind of
is concentrated in the most unhinged like tech sectors in
the Bay. But like you hear like officially Elon Musk
has talked about like, oh, there's there's like a homeless
industrial complex and like all of these people are just
like they want to live on the street, and like
they're like turning down houses all the time, and it's

(38:46):
just like it's so it's so completely unmored from reality.

Speaker 8 (38:50):
But what's funny is I've actually used the term homeless
industrial complex myself. I didn't know that that's hilarious. There
is a homeless industry, it's just that the people making
money off of it are the people who are perpetrating
those sweeps. The reason that they're not actually putting forth
real solutions that will get people into safe shelter and

(39:11):
housing is because they're the ones benefiting from the perpetuation
of these economic conditions.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, there's so many things that I want to pick
up on, but I guess just on that point specifically, Like,
there was an audit into California spending on homelessness. I
believe it was over a period of seven years, and
it showed that there was twenty four billion dollars spent

(39:38):
on grants to nonprofits or cities to provide people with
different services that are kind of designed around homelessness and
providing housing or legal services. Like there's a whole range
of things that's out there, but a lot of the
time like these are the only options that are available

(40:01):
to people, and they tend to produce less than stell
the results. So, out of the twenty four billion dollars
that was allocated to help homeless people in that same
period of time, homelessness in California just like skyrocketed, right,
So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting

(40:25):
plumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of landlords
and developers. It is an issue that people on every
side of the political compass like they like to use
this point to their own ends, right, So Elon Musk
talks about it, and like people on the left will

(40:48):
talk about it. But I think like the experience that
people on the street have is very different than any
of these narratives that you tend to hear in the media.

Speaker 5 (41:01):
Yes, unfortunately, we need to take an ad break. I
don't have a good transition here. I don't know, We'll
move of one set of horrors to a slightly different
set of horrors and go back to the first set
of horrors.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
All of this money is being dedicated to these programs,
and homelessness is only rising. I think, like one thing
that I've heard before that's a kind of useful way
to think about this kind of government spending is if
homeless people would be better off if you just gave
them the money directly, you know, then that kind of way,

(41:45):
it's really hard to justify these programs when that can't
be said of them, you know.

Speaker 8 (41:52):
And I think the thing that you pointed out, Emma,
about the fact that we have huge amounts of money
allegedly being spent on my homelessness abatement or homeless services
at the same time that homelessness is skyrocketing is really
not an accident, because what that money is really being
spent on is to fuel exactly what is it, like,
the homeless industrial complex. There's a reason that most of

(42:12):
that money is going into the pockets of landlords and
developers and then sort of like these sort of large
like nonprofit almost like conglomerates of like service providers. And
it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it
exists in this country is not to get homeless people
into housing. It's to line the pockets of the people

(42:35):
that are making the most money off of the real
estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is
not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness
like escalating at the same time. It's because this is
the feedback loop, Like, this is the way that our
you know, economic priorities in this country are structured, are

(42:56):
such that those two things are going to feed into
each other because that money doesn't actually exist to serve
the populations that they say that they're using it to serve.
What they do get to do is by claiming that
that money is going into homelessness abatement, when clearly it isn't.
They then get to spend a narrative where they say, oh,
we've spent all this money, but the problem is just

(43:17):
getting worse. That must mean that it is the fault
of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly
the services must exist to get them off the street.
In reality, that's not the case at all.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah. I think also it's super important for people to
understand that these programs, housing programs, shelter programs, they are
out there but they are decoupled from the sweep operations
that are occurring. Right So, the City of Oakland, they

(43:48):
are contracted with a nonprofit softia mentioned earlier called Operation Dignity,
and they are required to check in with its different
encampments that are scheduled to be closed at least a
week before the suite and the purpose of that is

(44:09):
to notify people that it's happening. The City of Oakland
is required for the terms of this lawsuit back in
I believe twenty nineteen, the Moralees lawsuit, and there was
a settlement that resulted in the city being required to
provide clear notices whenever they're going to close like a site.

(44:33):
So yeah, this nonprofit providers was to like notify people
and try to get them connected with services. However, the
services for the most part, like housing for people who
are unhoused, is largely funded through the federal government and
through this very like complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry.

(45:00):
The coordinated Entry system is not something that the City
of Oakland or Operation Dignity like that is not something
that they're providing people with during the sweep. So when
the City of Oakland, like for instance, and one of

(45:20):
the Commissions on Homelessness meetings, the city administrator Harold Duffy.
He presented actually in response to a question about somebody's
wheelchair being destroyed by public works. Yeah, he gave this
really like roundabout deflecting answer where he said basically that

(45:46):
everyone who is at an encampment at the time of
the sweep has like expressly refused services like shelter or
housing or whatever, and that they kind of presumes that
the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with,

(46:08):
which is just not the case. The Coordinated Entry System,
it is a program that is first of all, like
only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent
supportive housing through the program. But also it is in
such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs

(46:30):
that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're
in that the wait list is like thousands of people long,
and it can take well over a year before someone
can get housing through that system. So it's just like
it's not true. They do offer people what are called

(46:53):
community cabins, which are tough sheds.

Speaker 8 (46:58):
They're not even offerend people that they're full.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, that's what they say. They offer sorry I had
me to cut you off.

Speaker 8 (47:04):
I feel strongly about this, so I think it's also
worth saying, like in terms of I feel like that's
a really a really useful layout, Emma, in terms of
like the way that the system is actually structured for
people not to be able to access services, I feel
like it's also worth pointing out that just day to

(47:24):
day on the ground, I feel like I feel like
I get to see a lot of sort of like
minute details and changes in the way that they're operating
in response to what they're like internal systems actually look like.
And what we have seen over the last six months
to a year is not only this pattern that I'm
I was talking about of like they're like people are

(47:44):
consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused
of refusing services just due to the conditions that they're
living under, but also everything that Oakland has and that
approaches like livable transitional housing, which is kind of laughable
in this case because we can also go into like
the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in

(48:05):
Oakland which are abysmal, but everything that they have that
approaches livable transitional housing is full.

Speaker 5 (48:12):
I very rarely.

Speaker 8 (48:13):
Every few weeks, maybe I see one or two people
get referred to one of those programs, and far more
often I'll be in a situation. For example, I was
I was at a sweep over near twenty third and
Northgate a couple of weeks ago, and I was there
when Operation Dignity rolled up and I heard what they
were saying when they were talking to people, and this
one dude was going around talking to folks and he

(48:34):
kind of he wasn't even approaching talking about services. He
was approaching being like, Hey, I just here to let
you know that this area is going to be closed down,
Like there's so sweet that's going to be happening. So
you guys have to be out of here. So that
was what they led with. And then I prompted him
because I was there chatting with one of the guys
that he was talking to, so I prompted him. I
was like, do you have any services to offer? And
then he was like, oh, you can go over to

(48:55):
Saint Vincent de Paul, which is congre Get shelter in
West Oakland with about four and nobody is guaranteed a
spot is just a room full of cots, a lot
of people refuse to go there because the conditions are
so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping
in a room full of a bunch of strangers with
no kind of security, no guarantee of being able to
hold onto their stuff. People are only allowed to bring

(49:17):
in like a backpack sort of stuff, I'm pretty sure.
And you also have to it's first come, first service.
You have to line up outside every single day, and
you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even
if you line up outside. So what we have is
a situation where the availability of services varies from day
to day. I cannot think of a single sweep in

(49:37):
the last year that I have been to, and I'm
at usually multiple sleeps a week where there were enough
guaranteed spots available for every person being swept. So the
implicit assumption at every single sweep and the Operation Dignity
people know this too, like they know this, the implicit
assumption when they roll up, and the assumption that colors
even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're

(49:59):
having with people, is that the majority of people are
just going to have to figure out how to pack
their shit up and find another.

Speaker 4 (50:04):
Place to camp.

Speaker 8 (50:05):
It's the assumption, and it's gotten to the point where,
like od employees will roll up and like I said,
they won't even necessarily lead with an offer of services.
They'll lead almost in the hopes that the majority of
people already have a place to relocate. They'll ask do
you have a place to go before they offer services,
or ask if people are entered as services, they'll ask
like do you have another spot to move this stuff first?

(50:25):
Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many
people as possible from their list of people that they
feel obligated to offer services too because they know they
don't fucking have anything.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, I think it's super important to just emphasize that point.
The city is telling the media, they're telling businesses, anyone
that comes to them with problems related to like hopelessness
or concerns, they're telling them that everyone is being offered

(50:55):
shelter and housing and it's just not true. That is
reflective in the city's own publicly available data. So they
actually publish like a list of all of the encampment
suites that they've they do throughout the year, and in

(51:16):
the Commission on homelessness meetings will report back to the
Commission about like service enrollments that they've done through a
certain period of time, and like from May to September
they had enrolled I believe it was sixty people and
to services like non specified services. And during that period

(51:41):
there was approximately eighty sweeps. And if you assume there's
at least five to ten people at every encampment when
they do a sweep, and usually it's more that is
like nine percent four point five of people like getting

(52:02):
enrolled into into services, and like of those, maybe a
smaller traction getting into shelter. And when they get into shelter,
they just languish there, right, they aren't connected with case
workers who help them get through this really convoluted coordinated

(52:25):
entry process and like lengthy coordinated entry process, and so
within a few months they're just right back on the street.
You know, it's just ridiculous. And unfortunately, because homeless people
have very little, like I guess you could call it
social capital, you know, the city can get away with

(52:48):
a lot of this stuff they do, like blatantly illegal
things that are against even their own policies, and nothing happens.
And I guess maybe we should back up a little
bit and discuss the city's policy.

Speaker 5 (53:06):
It's from second at break and then we will come
back more ads. I don't know by them question mark
we are back. Yeah, so yeah, let's talk about I

(53:28):
think what the city's policies are supposed to be versus
like what they're actually doing on the ground.

Speaker 8 (53:34):
Yeah. I mean, their policy is their cover your ass technique, right.
Their policy is what they refer back to whenever they
want to sort of like like Emma said, if they're
interfacing with businesses or house people, you know, and we
have a whole range of house people calling free one one,
which is basically their tip line for like go you

(53:54):
see a homeless person that you don't want to be seen.
But there's all a range of people. There's people that
are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going
out doing vigilanti shit and like destroying almost people's stuff
on their own. And then you also have people that
are well intentioned and really think the city is offering services.
So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that
the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy.

(54:16):
That's the purpose their policy services, not to inform their actions,
but to inform their pr So I think it would
be helpful. Emma, how do you feel about if you
want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's
policy and then I can kind of give a breakdown
into what that translates into on the ground.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Yeah, So this is like, it's kind of a complicated situation.
But the city has what's what they call their Encampment
Management policy, and it was initially passed in I believe
twenty twenty, but it's gone through like several evolutions over

(54:52):
the past ten years or so, and it is related
to different Supreme in Court cases and the settlement that
I mentioned earlier. So this policy, it provides certain very
limited protections for people who are homeless in the city limits.

(55:17):
The city is required by this policy to offer shelter.
I believe it's a week for any person who's subject
to one of their encampment closures. And also we mentioned
the bag intag policy. So if somebody, you know, they

(55:39):
are evicted and they move somewhere outside with the tent,
they bring all of their possessions with them, they are
provided with I believe three foot by three foot like
storage space. And this facility that is super inaccessible and

(55:59):
kind of like, I don't even know if it's actually real,
to be honest, because it's just like nobody ever. I've
never heard of anybody actually like getting their stuff stored
and getting back. But technically that is a possibility. However,
the city will only hold on to it for so
long before they throw it away. And then the last

(56:19):
protection or provision is the city was until recently supposed
to provide people with shelter. So a few different Supreme
Court cases are behind that provision specifically, and I think
a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy
framework that they were following until the Grant's Pass ruling,

(56:43):
and I guess maybe we don't need to get into
that too much, but basically, the whole idea of that
policy was like, if somebody is outside the thing outside
and the city suites them, they have to provide them
with some kind of alternative accommodation, because according to like

(57:08):
the Ninth District Court, it was consideredly cruel and unusual
punishment to penalyze somebody for being homeless without offering them
some kind of temporary like accommodations, And so that was
more or less the city's nominal framework for several years basically,

(57:33):
and the degree to which they actually followed these policies,
you know, they really didn't, except for in certain situations
where there are like, for instance, legal advocates who will
file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep

(57:55):
on the basis of like failure to provide an alternative accommodation.
And typically those arise when there is a very large
encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue.
You know, a lot of the time, for instance, they'll

(58:16):
be people staying on city or like California state land
and the city will like force them to move because
of some development project that they're planning to do. And
so in those situations when the media has kind of
narrowed their their focus and begun like discussing some of

(58:39):
this stuff and the local press, then like something like
that became possible. But after the Grants Past ruling this
past year, the city was no longer like obligated under
federal law to follow those policies, and in September of

(59:01):
last year, the late mayor Shankal she issued an executive
order that more or less like just totally rendered that
policy framework irrelevant. So she put forth a new framework
that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered

(59:26):
system of what are called emergency suites. So if for instance,
a encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then
it is a hazard to the public quote unquote, or

(59:46):
if it's somebody has a tent that is up against
a building of some sort, it's a fire hazard. And
so in this tiered system, there's like different levels of
safety hazards that they're doing. And basically what that looks
like is like a fire marshal and the city administrator

(01:00:06):
will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody
that's staying outside by their business. And with the fire
hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without
any prior notice, whereas the other two there is some
level of notice that they're technically required to provide. But yeah,

(01:00:29):
so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it,
they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own
city resolution, but there is this provision that like, if
for instance, they issue somebody like a no or a

(01:00:51):
one hour notice to leave because of like a fire hazard,
and like advocates can't make it there because they don't
really know they know but knows it's happening. Then the
city can just do that and not offer people anything. Right,
So these policies have the effect of disempowering our ability

(01:01:13):
to respond to like a scheduled operation, Then the city
can really just do whatever they want because nobody's watching
what they're doing.

Speaker 5 (01:01:24):
And I guess we can. I think we can take
this here towards something I think probably good to start
closing on, which is like, what can people actually do
about this?

Speaker 8 (01:01:33):
First of all, I think listening to all of this,
it can be really easy to feel disempowered and to
feel like, you know, the walls are closing in and
there's nothing that we can do. And that remains not
the case, you know. I think people should feel empowered
to be able to physically intervene, because the most effective
way of physically intervening with this kind of violence is
to commit to relationship building. Something that I've talked about

(01:01:57):
a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks
that are kind of involved in like sweeps response and
crisis response in Oakland, is that the one thing that
the city cannot take away from us, that we have
an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of
the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are

(01:02:19):
so inefficient and so you know, seemingly bad at their
jobs is not just the fact that they don't have
anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street
knows they're full of shit because they never show up
with anything real. And addressing house people in particular right, like,
one of the things to get out of is sort
of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh,
like I don't have any housing to offer, therefore I

(01:02:39):
can't do anything, Like I can't fix the problem, I
can't fix the roots, so I can't do anything. In reality,
all you really need to do is to learn to
set that mentality aside and show up and like start
meeting folks where they're at, Start meeting your neighbors where
they're at, start building relationships. You need to know, like
if you live in a particular neighborhood to yourself, I

(01:03:01):
need to know that if any un housed person within
a mile radius of my home was disappeared, I would
need to I would need to know, you know what
I mean, Like I would want to know if that happens.
So if you go out with that understanding that you're
starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are
living outside in your neighborhood, ideally a lot of other
people in your neighborhood too, you know what I mean.
But like, what they're banking on is right now, while

(01:03:26):
while they're still trying to use a pr cover for
what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not
talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses,
people not finding out about the violations, people not being there,
and people not having relationships that will remain strong even
as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what

(01:03:47):
you can do to start is start investing in those relationships.
Make sure you know what people's names are, make sure
you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted. Hey,
Becky used to be on that corner, you know, every
couple days of weekend. Now I never see him anymore?
What happened to him? And I think you can start there,
and there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean,
one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up

(01:04:07):
at this point is direct on the ground sweep's response.
So we're still able to keep track currently of what
their schedule is on a weekly basis more or less
Like there's definitely operations we don't find out about until
after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations
we do still know about ahead of time, and so
we'll show up. We'll make sure we get there before
the city does, so like by eight am ideally right,

(01:04:28):
Like we show up, talk to people, will be like
what do you need? Do you need physical help moving
your belongings out of the eviction zone. Do you need
to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody
who said they were going to come help you. Do
you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number
of things really, but just like being willing to show
up and ask questions about necessarily knowing what answers you're
going to get, and being down to follow up and

(01:04:50):
like do aftercare with people and chicken on folks and
like keep building those relationships. I think that those are
the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to
need to be doing in the future, because you know,
what this he is counting on is that they're going
to be able to successfully create a scapegoat. Right. They
want to create like a faceless, nameless mass of people
that they can pin all their problems on and then
incarce rate. And the best thing that we can do

(01:05:12):
is make sure that they can't successfully do that, because
we all have relationships to each other.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Yeah, I really appreciate those sentiments. Yet, and I think
like the Oakland like advocates doing like eviction defense for
people who are living outside. It's grown in size and
like capacity quite a bit in the past year, and

(01:05:38):
like the city has noticed that, so they've actually like
they've passed various resolutions and honestly, a lot of their
practices and their policies, like their encampment management team, they
seem to be like responding to the increasing effectiveness of

(01:06:00):
this response, just like network of community defense. And so
I think that like all of those things are are
so important, especially as the term regime starts to eliminate
the very like modest social safety net that there was.

(01:06:22):
And you know, before we end this conversation, I just
want to emphasize that in Oakland, like a majority of
the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence.
They are non white, mostly black, and are homeless in

(01:06:45):
neighborhoods where they used to be housed. And so the
gentrification that has happened, particularly in like West Oakland, and
the like influx of high end tech workers that displaced
them and moved into their family homes, they are the

(01:07:09):
same people who are calling three one one to push
the city to displace them again, but from a tent
or a car this time. And I think it's it's
just so so important that particularly like housed people try
to tap into the networks of community defense that exist

(01:07:31):
in their areas. I'm sure that most cities probably have
something comparable to Oakland, but with the measures that we're seeing,
cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is
about thirty minutes south of Oakland, where they basically banned

(01:07:53):
or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can
get one thousand dollars fine or for six months in
jail for dating and a betting a homeless person. And
you know, it's an extremely vague.

Speaker 8 (01:08:12):
Law, so like giving someone a blanket could fall under this,
so you could be fined or put in jail for
giving an unhouse personal blanket and free month currently.

Speaker 1 (01:08:22):
So it's very important that people try to be aware
of their city government, how they're maybe passing anti homeless
measures and they're in their cities and trying to mobilize
against against that from happening.

Speaker 8 (01:08:40):
I also have one more thing to add to that.
I'm so sorry, just specifically for anybody, for anybody thinking
about getting involved or organizing strategically around community defense, sweep defense,
whatever that looks like in your particular area, I would say,
first of all, especially if you're a house person in
this case, like invest valuable time into getting to know

(01:09:02):
people on an interpersonal level and getting to know people's
needs first, instead of falling into the trap of sort
of imposing what you might have learned through like other
sort of direct action organizing, because this is not that
you know, like I think, yeah, first of all, just
making sure that you're being you're organizing is being led
by the needs of you know, homemost residents that are
expressing what they need to you. But also on top

(01:09:24):
of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves
of legislation that are being passed around like anti homeless
laws and stuff. Don't preemptively obey, you know what I mean, Like,
if you live in Fremont, don't preemptively say, oh fuck,
I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen
in Oakland with the particular iterations of anti homeless legislation
that they've passed here is that just because they've passed

(01:09:46):
legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet.
And what you need to do really is step up
real hard and show them you can't enforce this the
way that you want to, and they're going to push back.
There's going to be this back and forth interplay that
we've seen, you know, for example in Oakland with the
safe works and ordinance, which we can probably get into
another time because it's way too much to get into

(01:10:06):
right now, I think at this point in the episode.
But it's a two way street. It's this fight that
you have to play to show them just because you've
passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in
a particular way. You have to give them something to
fight against, you know what I mean. So that's just
the other piece, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:10:22):
Yeah, and like and the rest of their policy is
absolutely one hundred percent evidence that if the state doesn't
want to follow the law, it isn't real. But that
also means that, like, if they can't enforce a law
like it also effectively ceases to exist. That's just the
sort of balance of forces here.

Speaker 1 (01:10:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And there is a lawsuit currently against that,
and it sounds like, you know, the City of Fremont
is probably going to be removing that aiding in a
betting clause from the resolution, but because that specific provision
is actually like in the city's municipal code as a

(01:10:59):
general provision provision, so you know, even if they do
remove it, charges could still be brought against somebody. So like,
really the entire ordinance needs to be eliminated all together.

Speaker 5 (01:11:13):
Yeah, I guess do you have anything else that you
want to make sure that you get in before we
close up?

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
I don't think so, not nothing that comes to mind.
But yeah, again, I super appreciate you having us on
to talk about this. Yeah, you know, shit is rough
right now. I think for me personally, it's been really
helpful to direct my energy towards things in my social

(01:11:42):
network in a way that's like constructive and helpful to others.
So I would definitely suggest if you're feeling like any
despair or like worried about becoming like black pilled or whatever, like, yeah,
just try to tap in and focus on things that
are happening in your community. It's good for you and

(01:12:06):
it's good for the people in your community.

Speaker 8 (01:12:09):
Yeah, just seconding that, I think like being able to
tap in specifically with like the types of unhoused organizing
and underground economies that exist wherever unhoused people exist, and
like being able to like tap into that and like
you know, again like speaking from the perspective of a
house person, like really humble yourself and learn from that.
Like you're going to learn a whole lot more relevant

(01:12:32):
life skills just hanging out in social settings with people
in the street than you are in any other area
of your life. So just go balls to the wall,
just start hanging out, just like spend all your time loitering,
Like just that's that's where we need to be right now.
Is loitering in the street. That's where the organizing is happening.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
So yeah, street claim space, Oh yeah, this.

Speaker 5 (01:12:52):
Has been ni could happen here. Go loiter on street
quarters and make the state's life miserable until it cannot
do the things that is doing right now.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Oh, welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about
how it's happened here and it continues to happen here.
Sorry about that, but we're not changing the name of
the podcast, you know, because we're not anyway. I got
Jams stout with me, I got Garrison Davis with me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:37):
Woot woot, huzzah.

Speaker 4 (01:13:40):
So the past few weeks, myself is as well as
probably everyone else on this call, has been getting a
lot of questions from listeners via the various social media
apps that we damage ourselves by logging into on a
much more than needed frequent basis. But one question that's

(01:14:02):
been kind of on a lot of people's minds and
something that we've been discussing as like a group, is
the idea of should you flee the country?

Speaker 5 (01:14:11):
Is the party over?

Speaker 4 (01:14:13):
Do we need to use the time we have now
to get out? The Trump administration is cracking down on
a whole bunch of groups of already marginalized people, people
with fewer resources, immigrants, people who are here for asylum,
trans people, queer people in general. It's getting pretty scary

(01:14:34):
out there, and the thought crosses your mind, maybe there's
somewhere else that's better. And this has always been a
tough question for us to kind of think about because
we don't want to like inspire panic. That's not the
purpose of what we do here.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
You should try to spread calm when times are bad
if you can here.

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
But the situation politically in the country and in many
parts of the world right now is extremely fraud and
it does feel how closer towards like the bad nightmare
scenario than kind of I've ever thought it has before.
So it's so.

Speaker 5 (01:15:13):
It's a really tough question.

Speaker 4 (01:15:15):
Yeah, And I think what we're going to be doing
this episode is just kind of talking about this question
and our thoughts around, you know, various responses to this
line of thought, And I guess Robert kind of has
a baseline like, kind of quasi answer that I think
we can use as a jumping off point.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
You know, if you're someone who is being targeted, you know,
or in a community of people who are being targeted,
you know, you're a naturalized citizen, your hair on a
green card, you're trans, you're any kind any of the
many different groups of people that are being targeted right now.
And you have the opportunity to leave and you think

(01:15:57):
that that's the right thing for you, and you should
do it. You shouldn't feel bad about it. You know,
if you've got a job that is in demand in
other countries and you know the process and can start
the process to like get residency somewhere else and work
somewhere else, and you know, make your life work that way,
then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that.

(01:16:18):
If that's what you decide is the right thing for you.
That said, it's not, it's just simply not going to
be a realistic possibility for most people. What is more
realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving
from states where the risk is higher to states where
maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long
the risk will be lower, you know, but I, you know,

(01:16:39):
I certainly that's more achievable for a lot of people
than getting set up in a foreign country, as James
will talk about, if your hope is just I'm going
to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever
as an asylum seeker. As again, James will go into
more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers, and
that's not really again, it may not be nearly as
much of an option as you think that is right now,

(01:17:01):
I you know, had to go through kind of my
own process after the election of like, well, am I
going to like, you know, get my finances in order
and move to another country and basically try to like
pay my way into getting a visa somewhere like in Spain,
which is an option for someone like me. And I
came to the conclusion that like, nah, you know, if

(01:17:21):
the worst case thing happens, I'd rather like die here
or whatever. It's just not worth it, you know, to
try to get out. So I'm committing to trying to
like hold the line here with everybody basically that I
love in the world, because like what else are you
going to do? You know?

Speaker 3 (01:17:36):
Yeah, Like I will just say that, you know, I
probably have met more asylum seekers than most people, you know,
and it is one of the more miserable fates available
to a human. It will if large numbers of people
start leaving the US, only get worse. If you're someone
who's a US citizen, you have probably not experienced much

(01:17:58):
in the way of like strict immigration enforcement. If you
have traveled around the world, right, you have one of
the more high value passports in the world. You can
you can go almost anywhere with a visa or in
many cases without a visa. Seeking asylum is an extremely
different process. If you think you're just going to get
on a flight and leave and stay somewhere, like understand

(01:18:20):
that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas
with the United States soon if we continue our current
sort of pathway with by more isolationist immigration policy, and
then you'll have to get that visa. And then you know,
if you overstay, you will be subject to enforcement. The
sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be

(01:18:41):
something you enjoy again. And that's just if you're able
to fly somewhere, and so you try and overstay a
visa or you try and apply for asylum. I have
people I've met in every facet of my life, Like
I know guys who I met as a bike racer
who have applied for asylum. Guys I met a bike
racer are staying on that bus in the UK. It

(01:19:02):
is it is a miserable fate. And I think that's
that I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying that
you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and
it's tripped you of all dignity and in some places
extists people of of like their lives right, people die migrating.
It's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that

(01:19:24):
migrants do because that everyone is trying to make a
buck off them.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
I was just talking on another podcast about how the
journey that people took up through the Darien Gap who
tried to come to the United States, it would have
cost them way less just to fly, but they couldn't.
They couldn't get the visas. Right. That doesn't mean like
if you know, if you have a historical right to
citizenship through various you know, certain people have rights to
Spanish citizenship, or German citizenship or Irish. Irish is one

(01:19:50):
that many people have access to. Yeah, why not? Why not?
You know, if you have the financial resources, when not
try and see where that will go? Why not begin
pursuing that totally?

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:19:59):
Sure, I think becoming a dual citizen, if you have
the capability to, is a fantastic idea that I will
like never dissuade someone from.

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
I would go so far as to say, even if
you plan to stay here. If you have the ability
to get dual citizenship, you should be pursuing that right now, absolutely, Like.

Speaker 5 (01:20:18):
Is it's something that you should do.

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
It's often not hideously expensive, and it's something that might
be Yeah, you have options, and options are good.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:20:28):
I am very hesitant to like openly call for like
now is the time to leave the country. I do
not feel comfortable saying that for a number of reasons,
like some of them are or more political, as in
like I don't really subscribe to a politics of escape,
even the idea of like fleeing states.

Speaker 5 (01:20:46):
I feel a little bit iffy about.

Speaker 4 (01:20:48):
Now. There's certainly, you know a lot of cases where
families are trying to move, you know, outside states that
have more restricted access to trans healthcare for minors towards
more friendly states, which I totally understand.

Speaker 5 (01:21:00):
But I have greatly enjoyed getting.

Speaker 4 (01:21:03):
To know a whole bunch of trans people in the South,
and a whole bunch of trans people here are not
willing to leave their home. This is this is their
home and it always will be and they're going to
stay and fight for it even as things get you know, harder,
And I don't think you should write these people off.
I don't think you should write these places off. These
these places are still a terrain of battle, and there

(01:21:26):
are going to be places where trans people can still
live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And
that is that it's worth acknowledging, that's worth putting effort into.
To the point that, like after the election, I was
already considering maybe, you know, trying to travel around the
country some more, And after this last election, my line
of thought was way more on the side of I

(01:21:47):
would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia
as possible. I would actually want to stay in this
South for as much as I can, because this is
like not a place that I think people should be
walking away from. And in some ways that does come
from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons.
As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport as

(01:22:07):
well as an American passport, that is, you know, something
that I like to have as a back pocket option.
But that's something I'm not like considering like at all,
Like I do not want to move to Canada. All
my friends are here, my life is here. There's certain
scenarios where things get much much much worse, even though
things are already getting quite bad, But there are certain
scenarios where, yes, that passport will come in handy. And

(01:22:31):
that's why I do encourage, like, no matter what you
should you should see if you have any options to
become a citizen in more than one country. It is
a great thing to be. It's it's good to not
be just tied down to one place. But the process
of trying to to you know, immigrate somewhere where you
do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging. And
we will probably discuss some some more of this later

(01:22:54):
because I think there's also a sort of like onion
of a threat of people when you're when you're thinking
of this question and like which people will will be
or are currently being targeted the most, and how that
kind of affects the options in terms of like relocation
to places view it as like safer havens. And I
like to jumpstart that onion of protection discussion. After these messages,

(01:23:27):
we're back.

Speaker 2 (01:23:28):
And we're talking about onions which you need to wear
around your neck to protect you from evil spirit scarce,
And that's what you were getting at, right, Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
Une move on to the next.

Speaker 4 (01:23:39):
Topic where five different onions to drive away the various
secret police forces trying to hunt down individuals. Yes, speaking
of I guess like the big thing I'm thinking about
right now, or one of some big things, is there's
different levels of scrutiny being placed on individuals currently in
the United States. One you have like people who are

(01:24:00):
completely undocumented, right. You have people who are who are
currently here on like valid asylum claims who are about
to get those rights like stripped away. I'm trying to
think of like the list of refugees that were allowed
under Biden that are now like like imminently going to
get their stuff stripped away from the Trump administration. I
know Venezuelan, Yeah, I know you run Haitian immigrants are

(01:24:23):
another off God, but groups that have that have been
able to come here the past few years that are
going to be now seen as like quote unquote illegal
by the White House and Immigration Customs Enforcement. You then
have student visa holders which are already like currently under
threat getting visas taken away. You have people on work visas.
You have green card holders, and you even have naturalized

(01:24:46):
citizens and among just regular citizens a naturalists, I guess
people that were born here, you have other factors that
could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or
based on gender and sectional reality. And that's kind of
like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of. So as
much as it's like dangerous to be like, you know,

(01:25:07):
like a trans anarchist right in the United States, I
think that is that is fairly different than a Haitian
immigrant who's about to get like literally hunted down by ice, right,
And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options
for how they're going to like handle this question and
handle like the decision of you know, preemptively choosing to

(01:25:28):
relocate somewhere else. James, do you have any kind of
thoughts on this like onion?

Speaker 3 (01:25:34):
I guess yeah. I mean, I think you described it well, right,
Like I think a lot of folks are for the
first time finding themselves in that onion at all, right,
and certainly with respect to like immigration enforcement or potentially
being forced to leave this country. And I think it
would be good maybe to to look at folks who
have been there for a long time and look at

(01:25:55):
how they've done right, Because there have been people whose
existence was precarious in this country for decades. Right, Maybe
we'd go back to nineteen ninety four in Operation Gatekeeper,
Maybe we go back further whatever, I don't care. Maybe
we go back to the operation whose name is also
a slur in the nineteen thirties. And I'm not going to.

Speaker 4 (01:26:12):
Say I mean, and indigenous people here have, like for
all of America, I'm sure have been been people that
like exist in a wildly different reality than like, yeah,
most US citizens, right.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
Yeah, where, Yes, this country is predicated on the genocide
of indigenous people.

Speaker 4 (01:26:29):
Well, and even in the ways that they're the like
continue to live here. It's it's like a different world from.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
Yeah, like that genocide is ongoing, Like it's a it's
not a thing that stopped. Yeah, it's not a historical thing.
It's the thing that exists. As long as this country exists.
I would look to those people, right, Like you said, Garrison,
Indigenous communities, Indigenous people continue to exist in this country
despite the best efforts of this country to eradicate them.
Undocumented communities, right, Migrant communities of mixed status have continued

(01:26:58):
to exist for a very long time. And like the
way that they have got through this is together, and
that's the way that we will get through this too.
When there have been threats to migrant communities, migrant communities
have shown up for each other. Right, they're doing that
right now. You see groups like Anon dela Barrio in
San Diego right like going around announcing when there are

(01:27:19):
ICE presence of ICE offices in the neighborhood. The way
that they have got through it is through other people
in positions of procarity, showing up for one another and
taking care of one another. And if that is a
new position for you, if finding yourself further along the
intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you, then like

(01:27:40):
it's scary. I do understand that that that procurity is petrifying,
but understand that communities and people have been here for
a long time and look at how they've got through it.
And in queer communities too to a degree, have been
persecuted in this country for a very long time and
have developed ways of not just like existing, but also
like continuing to and to joy and experience joy and

(01:28:02):
not just like live in fear, because I think if
you live in fear, like you've kind of given up
to a degree, oh you've let them win. To agree,
I should say, like, I do understand that being new
to this is petrifying for people, and like I don't
want to just say like, oh, you shouldn't be scared,
or you know, you should look at how migrant communities
have taken care of one another, but like now is

(01:28:23):
the time to begin establishing solidarity as well. So like
those communities which have been precarious for some time, they're
not closed spaces, right, Like you can be in solidarity
with them and you can learn from them, and I
think that now is the time to do that, Like,
now is the time to build stronger links. If you're
really worried about things being really bad in this country,

(01:28:44):
and you have good reason to be right, like.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
Oh, yeah, shit's fucked up and bullshit, yeah it's really
fucking bad, really bad.

Speaker 3 (01:28:52):
Yeah, Like you know, we're sending people to labor camps.

Speaker 2 (01:28:55):
If you're scared, panicking thinking I got to get out
of here, I get you.

Speaker 4 (01:28:59):
Yeah, No, I mean I think the thing that you
should be doing, regardless of who you are, is you
should be giving yourself options. You should be increasing the
amount of options that you have, And like that is
something that is never a bad idea. That is something
that you can never do too early. It's something that
you should have already been doing. Frankly, like I've been

(01:29:20):
advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport,
because that does make it easier to leave the country.

Speaker 5 (01:29:27):
You should be getting that.

Speaker 4 (01:29:28):
And it's going to be harder, especially if you're trends now,
to get a passport that matches what you look like. Right,
But this is still something I think is worth doing
because it gives you an option, and you should be
increasing the amount of options you have.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):
Yeah, I think, yeah, it's never a bad thing. And
like that community structure is an option too, right, Like
people showing up for you and you showed up for them.
That is one of your options. Don't forget that. And
like that will also bring you join You will feel
safer when you We're supposed to live in can munities.
And like I you know, I've seen a lot of

(01:30:04):
people in very difficult circumstances. And one of the Kurdish
guys once said to me in the desert, he was like,
whatever we do, we do together. And I thought that
was very profound because they were at that time like
dancing around a fire in the midst of what was
like an open air concentration camp, you know. But if
you can find a community, and you can find a
way to continue to experience joy, then I promise that

(01:30:25):
things won't be as bad as they seem right now.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:30:29):
Within the Kurdish Shrina movement, there's a phrase that is
commonly used a slogan. You could say, I guess in
Kurdish you would say beershudan jiane means resistance is life.
And we should remember that for whole groups of people,
many of whom we've featured here, if they had all
just left, they would no longer exist in the way

(01:30:50):
that they exist now.

Speaker 1 (01:30:51):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:30:51):
Kurdish people have been oppressed by various states for centuries, right, Turkish, Iraqi,
Iranian and Syrian. They've been subject to genocidal violence, and
they've still remained there, right, and they've continued to fight
against that state oppression, and they've created something beautiful today
as a result that we can see in Raja. But
the same is true of the Karen and Kareni people

(01:31:14):
we've spoken to in Meama. Right. They decided to remain
rather than to leave, and in doing so that they
created a culture that was based on resistance and that
resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly
on violence and to determine their outcomes. And I think
we should look to those examples as we consider, like,

(01:31:35):
what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here.

Speaker 4 (01:31:40):
Something that like I think I think Robert said in
our work group chat, which thankfully has not been turned
into an Atlantic article.

Speaker 2 (01:31:47):
I did invite Pete hegseeth, so we'll see if he
happs in. You know, he's rejected us all the good times.

Speaker 3 (01:31:54):
Yeah, if you're trying to add the Atlantic editor in
chief for years, he is not welcome.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
He's absolutely not Welbome fucked that guy.

Speaker 3 (01:32:02):
To seed him to manufacture consent for bombing another country
in the Middle East on our podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:32:06):
It's so funny because it is like that is like
the dream of every journalist that you just get added
to the entire government's war planning chat and he just
uses it to dunk on the Trump admin, like you
get more info onlike anything.

Speaker 3 (01:32:19):
Than he like Home's back into the head.

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
Yeah, it's it's it's fucking hysterical.

Speaker 3 (01:32:24):
Yeah, they could have had four years and maybe not
maybe even any one off chat.

Speaker 2 (01:32:28):
Yeah, would they would have they would have accidentally invited
a different journalist. It was going to happen eventually.

Speaker 4 (01:32:32):
But yeah, But something Robert said in our chat is that, like,
if you already had like plans or the ability to
move to a different country of your choosing, then yeah,
why not? Right Like if if you already were thinking
about moving to Germany, which is very funny to say now, right,

(01:32:55):
but if you already had plans and you had the
ability to do that, then then sure that's something that
that you that you should like consider. If you do
not already have pre existing plans and means, maybe it's
not something to put all of your effort into doing
right now, because that is such a massive undertaking in general,
and not everyone has that option, and there's gonna be

(01:33:15):
people stuck here, and you know, part of like my
thinking on this is is like I'm in a relatively
privileged position. I would rather use the sort of benefits
and the stability that I have to help other people
that are going to be living in this country. So
I'm going to stay here to do that. And that's
part of kind of my thought process on a personal level,

(01:33:37):
do I you know, one day, maybe one to live
off the continent. Yeah, but that's like for personal reasons,
not for political reasons. That that's because I think Glasgow
looks pretty. And if you also think Glasgow's pretty and
you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess,
like the politics of escape, I do find a little
bit troubling in some ways, and I guess I would

(01:33:59):
like to talk about that a little bit more after
this at break.

Speaker 5 (01:34:13):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (01:34:15):
James made a horrible face when I when I complimented Scotland.

Speaker 3 (01:34:19):
What was up with that when you said glass Gow? Like, oh,
so Glasgow not not a city that's traditionally like aesthetically prized.

Speaker 5 (01:34:30):
I guess, uh, okay, well that's maybe Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
Edinburgh is where if I was going to go to Scotland,
I'd probably aim.

Speaker 5 (01:34:39):
I'm not going to live in the Harry Potter town.
Are you kidding me?

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
It existed? Okay, Yeah, that is rude, Garrison.

Speaker 2 (01:34:47):
Don't take that away from Edinburgh. I don't give her
that all.

Speaker 4 (01:34:50):
The coffee shops are like fucking wizard themes. Now, absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):
You haven't been to Edinburgh. Don't tell me that ship.

Speaker 5 (01:34:56):
I've seen your travel pictures Robert.

Speaker 3 (01:34:59):
I'm they were mostly hard liquor themed.

Speaker 5 (01:35:04):
Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 3 (01:35:05):
You can Edinburgh is a nice city. Glasgow is a
nice city.

Speaker 4 (01:35:09):
You can enjoy it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:10):
You can enjoy it by stop by Karla on your
way down the Uh my family are from.

Speaker 2 (01:35:15):
My favorite Glasgow fact is that there's a beverage called
Buckfast that is twenty percent alcohol mineral wine made by
monks that has as much coffee as a red bull.

Speaker 3 (01:35:25):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:35:25):
And in Glasgow, Scotland, for a significant period of time,
roughly one percent of all violent crimes were committed with
the bottle.

Speaker 3 (01:35:32):
Yeah, Bucky is it's it's a whole subculture.

Speaker 2 (01:35:35):
Buckfast gets you fucked fast, That's right, folks.

Speaker 4 (01:35:40):
So a term I've used for like the past few
years to like discuss this, to discuss this question of
like can you like outrun American fascism is the politics
of escape. And for a while I really was vocally
opposed to this sort of politics because it felt like
the entire world was going through a global far right

(01:36:02):
power grab and no matter where you run, you can't
really get away from it. And now kind of curiously,
you know, some of some of this is still happening right,
you can look at the AfD in Germany. But but
some of what's happened with this Trump administration has almost
weakened a degree of like this global.

Speaker 5 (01:36:20):
Far right power grab.

Speaker 4 (01:36:22):
Like for a long time, it looked like the Conservative
Party of Canada was about to just completely take control
over the whole over the whole country due to like
be pent up frustration over Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. And
now due to the actions of the Trump administration, the
Liberals have retaken a significant portion of like popular support

(01:36:44):
and are probably gonna do a big sweep in the
general election. That's going to happen, I'm guessing next month
with the new Prime minister like about about to call one,
which makes sense because he should call one.

Speaker 5 (01:36:56):
At the at the peak of support for the Liberal Party.

Speaker 4 (01:36:59):
Yeah, after Conservatives have taken like a twelve to seventeen
point depth, depending which pool you use. So for a
while I was like, it doesn't even really make sense
to flee to Canada because Canada is right on the
coattails of America. Canadian politics are kind of historically but
like ten years delayed from American politics, And now the

(01:37:19):
new Trump administration is kind of thrown a curveball in this.
British politics are always really hard for me to diagnose
because all of their parties there are pretty wacky.

Speaker 5 (01:37:30):
In my mind.

Speaker 4 (01:37:31):
Oh, like, you know, what the Tories have been doing
has been extremely worrying, Like the NHS, like trans stuff
is pretty bad. Now that the you know, Labor Party
is in, it's hard for me to figure out kind
of where the country is going because this Labor Party
is a pretty conservative labor party.

Speaker 5 (01:37:49):
But like, this idea of.

Speaker 4 (01:37:51):
Like being able to outrun American fascism is still something
I find like unconvincing. I guess, like you can't fully
run away from all of these problems, and there may
be certain people that that it's still like makes sense
to start making these moves, just to start planning for
that option, right I am. I am pro options, even

(01:38:12):
if this idea of like total escape I still find troubling. Yeah,
and anyone else makes any kind of thoughts on this
on this saw.

Speaker 3 (01:38:20):
Yeah, I mean, like as goes to US, goes the world, right,
and but that is changing. But like maybe I think
if it gets to the point where large numbers of
people are fleeing the US, we might see some of
that same anti migrant rhetoric that we've seen in the
US in even relatively liberal Canada, the United Kingdom or

(01:38:43):
other anglophone countries. Right, Like, it's already very hard to
immigrate to Australia. It's not the easiest to immigrate to Canada. Frankly, Yeah,
I'm not as familiar with the Canadian.

Speaker 4 (01:38:52):
Ones, especially as like an American. Yeah, unless you have
like a job that you need to do in Canada
and you're the only one who can do that job,
or you get a Canadian girlfriend, or that's that makes
it slightly easier, but still still not like completely easier.

Speaker 3 (01:39:07):
Frankly, yeah, that is a I guess that's the alternative. Yeah,
I think, like, I know, like a lot of people
who listen to this listen to this because they have
a fairly radical politics, right or left politics, and like.

Speaker 5 (01:39:20):
Or you're a journalist or you're a federal worker.

Speaker 3 (01:39:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're looking to steal our stories.
Fuck off, if I may say so, But like, yeah,
we've all grown up on the stories of people who
stood up for what they believed in, right, And Margaret
makes a whole podcast about it, and Robert does on Christmases, yep,
and like there's a reason why they did that, Like

(01:39:43):
you know they I know that the idea of running
away and being safe could be tempting, but like, if
this country gets as bad as it needs to be
for people to run away in large number, it's then
like the world gets markedly less safe. Oh yeah, you're
going to be running for the rest of your life.

Speaker 2 (01:40:02):
Just look at how much food the US produces, how
much medicine. Seventy percent of all of the blood used
in every single country's medical system around the world is
exported from the United States. Oh wow, Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 4 (01:40:18):
And like, particularly for for like US citizens right looking
looking to flee, the people who are going to be
able to pull it off are people with pretty pretty
extraordinary means in most cases. I'm not saying all cases,
but like, if if you have the capacity to move
from the United States to Germany, you're probably not living
on the poverty line, right, Like this is this this

(01:40:41):
takes a considerable financial investment. So instead, part of what
my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a
whole bunch of like the like most at risk people.
A part of this even extends out to like moving
from state to state. I'm obviously in support of free movement.
I've traveled around, and I'm going to continue to travel around.
I want to see as much as in the world
as I can. But like another facet of this politics

(01:41:03):
of escape is that something I hear very consistently from
my my friends in Atlanta, And this is something like
I can attest to, like personally, the most amount of
like like vocal transphobia from people like on the street
that they have faced has not been in Atlanta, where
they live. It's been when they're visiting people in Seattle

(01:41:24):
or Portland. Like you actually get a lot more like
weird anti queer harassment in Seattle, which just just like
on like the street level. It's bizarre, Like cities all
have different kind of like modes of operation. People have
different like informal like manners in terms of how how
you like behave on the street. And it's it's it is.
This is something I've definitely actually I've definitely experienced. There's

(01:41:47):
there's a lot more like open openness towards like certain
types of of like anti trans harassment in like these
like liberal safe havens like quote unquote Yeah, I've been
called slurs on the street way more or in Portland,
Oregon than I have in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is
this is another like interesting aspect which I'm not saying
Atlanta is like quote unquote safer city than Seattle if

(01:42:10):
you're trans I'm not saying the vice versa either, But
this is like just an aspect of like the politics
of escape, like especially in the in the United States,
like the there like is really no like real escape
like there there is no mythical safe haven where you
can live your your free life and frolics through the
park and never have to face any kind of hardship

(01:42:32):
or like political disenfranchisement. If you still want to relocate somewhere,
that's something that you should consider and again create options.
But I also do not want to like abandon my
friends here because I just you know, have a more
stable job, Like I want to be here for them
and and help them, and not in like a patronizing way,

(01:42:53):
but in like a solidarity way. Like that's like really
important to me. And I think of people who are
who are thinking about these same things and kind of
running these same questions of of if they want to
commit to sting in the United States. I think should
also make those considerations of is like you know, which
which one of your friends is not going to be
able to make the same calculation. Yep, And frankly, I

(01:43:13):
feel I feel like better as a person and like
my mental health feels better knowing I'm going to be
here with them rather than going to a Berlin nightclub.

Speaker 5 (01:43:22):
Which does sound fun. And I still might on vacation.

Speaker 2 (01:43:25):
Oh, you definitely need to go to Bergain, Garrett.

Speaker 5 (01:43:27):
Oh yeah, I have.

Speaker 2 (01:43:28):
I have planned three days that feel like about four
hours in Bergain.

Speaker 5 (01:43:32):
I am, I am, I'm excited.

Speaker 4 (01:43:34):
I am for the first time planning to leave the
continent this year, which is a little bit scary because
re entering the United States has is pretty tricky right now,
which should also play into your considerations.

Speaker 3 (01:43:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
Yes, the general safety of air travel at the.

Speaker 4 (01:43:48):
Moment, safety and air travel now that we don't have
a gay man running the planes.

Speaker 5 (01:43:53):
Uh yeah, it turns out he was actually all right.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
At that.

Speaker 5 (01:43:58):
Woke was keeping those planes in in the area, you.

Speaker 3 (01:44:00):
Know, kudos to him. Turns out he was okay at
that job.

Speaker 4 (01:44:07):
But yes, I don't know what I was saying, but
I'm sure it was really important and well thought through
about not abandoning people who maybe don't have the same
resources that you do.

Speaker 3 (01:44:20):
Yeah, to your point about like coming back to the US,
understand that like one of the things that migrants to
deal with, even if they get to a place and
they have some degree permanents and they feel safe there,
is that they will never be able to go back
to where they're from in most cases, right that means
when someone in their family passes away, they can't be
there for the funeral. That means that when they have

(01:44:43):
a grandchild, they have a niece or a nephew, something
happens in their community and they want to be there
to help. It's a natural disaster. They had just stuck.
And that's not something to like to discount as something
that's not important, Like that is really hard. And if
you have a community now, especially for trans folks, right,

(01:45:04):
Like I just think that like there are so many
places where, like like you say, Garrison, where bigotry against
transfolks is being more and more normalized. Like if you
have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every
day with the people you're around, like leaving that should
be something that you really think hard about, because that
can be hard to find. Yeah, yeah, especially in Edinburgh

(01:45:24):
because they're all turfs with the in the cafes. That's
not true.

Speaker 4 (01:45:32):
Just to be clear, Yeah, I mean, this is kind
of the discussion I wanted to have. I'm sure we
all have more thoughts on this that we will we
will express very eloquently as soon as we close this
recording session.

Speaker 3 (01:45:42):
That's how we do it.

Speaker 4 (01:45:44):
But but I know this is this is the type
of stuff that we've been thinking about. I know, I
know listeners have been too, because you're asking us these questions.
So it's certainly annoying that we don't have a concise
yes or no answer. But there isn't a concise yes
or no answer. I think the most concise what I
have is that you should be giving yourself as many
options as you can. If that includes applying for Irish

(01:46:06):
citizenship because your grandfather is Irish, then hey, why not
go for it?

Speaker 2 (01:46:11):
Right, Ireland's great, nice country. You'll like it.

Speaker 4 (01:46:15):
But I am I am trepidacious. I guess about about
you know, public calls to flee the country at this
point and kind of the underlying politics and ideology of that,
let alone the kind of the logistical aspects of trying
to relocate to a different country where you are not
a citizen. And frankly, I think there will be a

(01:46:36):
lot of countries that are not super eager to take
American immigrants. I think Canada is typically kind of, kind
of low key been one of these places. Especially if
we're going to go to war with Canada to make
it the fifty first state, then it might also uh
create create some some some tricky aspects.

Speaker 3 (01:46:54):
You could make it hot.

Speaker 4 (01:46:56):
But I know, if anyone else has any any other thoughts,
air them now or forever. Be beholden to angry reddit comments.

Speaker 3 (01:47:04):
Yeah, please don't burn each other down on Reddit, Like
now is the time to give people a little grace
and be kind to other people.

Speaker 2 (01:47:12):
Don't flee to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs.

Speaker 3 (01:47:15):
I had a nice time in Belgium.

Speaker 5 (01:47:16):
What do you gets Belgium. I have a friend in Belgium.

Speaker 2 (01:47:19):
As an Italian. I think we need to go with
a war with them again. You know, it's what made
Caesar great. It could make us great again. That's that's
my stance on Belgium. It's Italian territory.

Speaker 3 (01:47:29):
I stand with the Belgian people.

Speaker 5 (01:47:52):
Welcome to you can happen hear a podcast trying to
figure out why some of the most powerful people in
the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It
is it is host me along with me as Garrison Davis.

Speaker 4 (01:48:02):
Hi, I've I've played a video game before. I'm not
very powerful, but I.

Speaker 5 (01:48:07):
Too have played many several video games.

Speaker 4 (01:48:10):
See I wouldn't. I wouldn't say several. I've I've played
like a few many. I have played too many, simply
too many video games. So okay, this is this is.

Speaker 5 (01:48:22):
In some ways kind of a lighter episode, because Jesus
fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there,
It's all really bad, And one of the people who's
been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who
has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers. The
PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of X I've
I've been I've been locked in my uh in my

(01:48:44):
gamer cave for the past like five months.

Speaker 4 (01:48:46):
I'm not left. I'm just hearing about this now.

Speaker 5 (01:48:49):
Yeah you might. You might. You might know of him
as the guy who paid another guy to play Path
of Exile two for him. We will get to that.

Speaker 4 (01:48:55):
See, I don't play those games. Those games are gay.
I only play Nintendo Mecca games and Hell Divers too,
like a loser.

Speaker 5 (01:49:05):
That's that's reasonable, that's reasonable. Those are those are Those
are fine games. Oh and Sonic, Oh god, okay, pushing
aside the subject the Sonic, So okay, I want to
take a look a bit about why this sort of
matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes
are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers. And

(01:49:28):
I think the place to start here is with the
fact that gaming is in one hundred and eighty four
point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an
extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that
this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined.
So this is the largest entertainment market in the world
by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value. Right,

(01:49:53):
something like three billion people play video games. It's mostly
mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell
very weird because the actual people who play these games again,
it's it's a lot of mobile games, and it's also
mostly people who are women, and non white. And yet, however, Comma,
when people think about like the gamer TM, you are

(01:50:14):
not thinking about.

Speaker 4 (01:50:15):
That, yeah, like as a political class.

Speaker 5 (01:50:19):
Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
a political identity. And obviously this is you know, this

(01:50:39):
is a fascist movement. Now. Part of the reason this works,
and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort
of works later, but part of the reason this works
is that this is an extremely large group of people
because it's new. No one has sort of defined it
as a political identity before, and it's also filled with
people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a
gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is

(01:51:00):
why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like
treated like movies or some shit, or they want it
to be sports because those are sort of cultural things
with enormous amounts of money, and then that are taken
like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah, And so the
effect of this is that the cultural affect of being

(01:51:20):
a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this
is true actually really both on the left as much
as it is on their right. There are a lot
of like sort of political figures. I don't know, you're
sort of like online people who come out of gaming,
like like h Bomber guy. I guess this is an
example like Hassan. To some extent, there's just like a

(01:51:40):
lot of people who are like gamers and then by
sort of like become political. But on the other hand,
gaming has always been like a not always but has
traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison,
I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit
this is. Have I told you this story about Kabab
the German now? Oh boy? Okay, so back in the

(01:52:02):
dawn of Time I played a lot of Heartstone as
a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.

Speaker 4 (01:52:07):
Is that like a resource management type game for like
gay autistic people?

Speaker 5 (01:52:11):
No, this is this is the world of Warcraft card game.

Speaker 4 (01:52:14):
Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing.

Speaker 5 (01:52:17):
Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think I think I
peaked at like two k Legend North America, which like
technically speaking is like top like half a percent of
players in the world's digital collectible card video game. Come on,
oh yeah yeah, but two k legend DNA is like
fucking shitter ranks. It's bad. I was never like good,

(01:52:38):
good at it. I was just like okay, kind of.
But you know, this is like a thing that I
did growing up, and something I remember is like all
of the fucking Heardstone streamers and these are like really
big streamers would play music from this guy they called
Kobob the German and it turns out that his actual
name was removed Kobob because he was a fucking German

(01:52:58):
neo Nazi. Well many such cases, yeah, for people who
like are not aware of of like mid twenty tens
German fascism. Remove Kebab is like a slogan calling for
the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany.
So great stuff, great stuff. This is just was just
sort of like the water you were swimming in if
you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now,

(01:53:23):
this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed
kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these
tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.
And so the two examples we're gonna look at are
Sam bank and Freed's And this is really technically on
both sides of the political spectrum, Right, We're gonna look
at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon

(01:53:45):
musk are new Overlord. I guess. So we're gonna start
with Sam bankin Freed, and you know, as we go
through what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why
it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.
And I, I guess it is important to know like
Sam Bakman Fried like is I guess like he is
a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted

(01:54:06):
to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah,
he looks the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah, before
before he was put in prison for twenty five years
for fraud.

Speaker 4 (01:54:16):
Well probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.

Speaker 5 (01:54:19):
Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:54:21):
Crypto vote, it's the most valuable voting block. Now, all
young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts, so
they put all their money in crypto. So now they're
gonna vote for whoever makes line go up.

Speaker 5 (01:54:33):
I'm gonna become the joker. So okay, then think about
Sam Megan Frieda for people who have forgotten who SBF is.
He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
a giant scam where he took everyone's money and betted
on the stock market and lost it. And you know,
Robert did a behind the bassards on him. And one

(01:54:54):
of the things that happens constantly is he's just like
always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit
game called Story Big or Algy Meetings. He is a
League of Legends addict, which is like as as any
gamer will know a person who plays the League of
Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories
people who's ever existed. And one of the things that
that SBF did as as a sort of pr thing

(01:55:15):
right was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big Shorts,
We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.

Speaker 4 (01:55:27):
Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.

Speaker 5 (01:55:31):
But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along
and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him.
But this is something that like ICBF was like you know,
was like projecting right in order for this to be
the image of him, was him as like the gamer.
And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right,

(01:55:52):
because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has
ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't
give a shit. So he plays meetings like no one
has ever been like this. I have no idea what
you mean. I actually don't play video game stream meetings
because it is too obvious. But I play.

Speaker 4 (01:56:10):
I play video games a once a week. That's that's
that's kind of my Oh.

Speaker 5 (01:56:14):
God, this is the one part about sam Bakmon Free
that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
It is my like antidepression strategy, basically, like when I
need to not think for a while, there's just MEO playing.
Actually Path of Faxyle too, one of the games that
we're gonna be talking about today, something that I play
a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming, Like god,
I used to play this game called Smite, which is
like a it's like a mob but like League of

(01:56:35):
Legends but like third person and I played so much
Smite that they were pro showing my casual games. When
when the Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers
and they execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know,
that's reasonable. Like I can't argue with that.

Speaker 4 (01:56:46):
I'll inform the council't our next folks council meeting. I'll
bring it to the table.

Speaker 5 (01:56:52):
That's reasonable. But you know, so so what what what
what happens with this sort of thing is that is
that Michael Lewis's image of SF becomes as this gamer
who's doing these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be
so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally, because he's just like playing
fucking video games all the time. And and this gets
to one of the aspects of why these people do this,

(01:57:14):
this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing
and and like and like SBF like is a gamer, right,
but like why why they make us part of their
cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional
media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry. It's
it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't
have the same kind of critical culture around. It doesn't

(01:57:36):
exist that you would see or something like movies or like.

Speaker 4 (01:57:39):
Respectability in some way, except in like the reversed Sam
Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of what
makes him like an extential genius, right, like like like
that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, that's like
he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's he's not
like put together, and this like shows how he's like
a new and innovative thing. So it's kind of like

(01:58:01):
it's kind of like a double edged sword in like
that specific way.

Speaker 5 (01:58:04):
Yeah, well, this is all a feedback loop, right, because
like part of it not being respectable is that someone
like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of
a journalist as there's ever been. These people don't play
video games. They're one of the figures people who just
like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of
access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit
and they have no fucking idea what the hell is

(01:58:24):
going on, And it's just really really easily just sort
of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any
gamer like, you know you, like, you show a gamer
like a League of Legends addicts, and they will instantly
be able to just like read this person like a
fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is
like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here,
but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person.

(01:58:46):
It simply does. You just get mad all the time.
I've known too many League Legis players of my goddamn life.
Holy shit, terrible game.

Speaker 4 (01:58:52):
Yeah, but arcane though, right, all right, didn't Oh god, Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:58:58):
We're gonna take an ad break, and then when I
come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked,
which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis.

Speaker 4 (01:59:04):
Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about
unique incompetence.

Speaker 5 (01:59:17):
So we are back now, Okay, Obviously, part of the
reason this works too is, you know, as I've been
talking about, right, like these these really out of touch
sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an
enormous market. Right, But Lewis is in some sense kind
of a special case because he is really truly an
unbelievably global dumbass. And to get an understanding of this,

(01:59:40):
I'm going to go into something that Lewis in theory
understands a lot better, which is sports.

Speaker 2 (01:59:44):
So Lewis has.

Speaker 5 (01:59:46):
Written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right.
He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're gonna
be talking about, which I'll get to you in a second.
And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that
they talk about on Behind the Bassarge and go listen
to that, But I want to go going on money Bomb.
Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this
underdog an athletics team invented like baseball metrics and they

(02:00:07):
use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of
nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well.
And like I'm not going to get into the extent
to which this was kind of a mirage about that
Oakland A's team, Like whatever, I'm not gonna argue about
baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one
of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one
of the sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael

(02:00:29):
Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta?
Can he is? He is like one of the main
figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like
an assistant coach. Basically, what baseball team is this? Oh?
This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas
Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved
to Vegas.

Speaker 4 (02:00:45):
I don't know what they're called the athletics now.

Speaker 5 (02:00:47):
No, No, they are originally called the Athletics. I don't
know what they're called now. They've always been the except
just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been the A's forever.
But yeah, they've they've they've also been stolen. Las Vegas
has now stolen both the football team and the baseball
team oft.

Speaker 4 (02:01:00):
Oh see, I was thinking of the football team, yeah,
because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las
Vegasts go there too?

Speaker 5 (02:01:07):
Yes, yes, they stole both of them.

Speaker 4 (02:01:09):
That's what I was thinking. And I am more of
a baseball head than a football head.

Speaker 5 (02:01:13):
But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about
football here. So this guy, right, Paul Padesta's like one
of these sort of geniuses. She later goes on to
be It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing
in the organization, but he is hired by the just
absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now to
get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are.

(02:01:35):
My opening savment for him on the Browns is it
is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the
Browns over the course of two seasons, going one in
thirty one, which is a feat of like just absolutely
sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports.
I think until the fucking moon crashes into the Earth,
no one is going to fucking go one in thirty

(02:01:58):
one into cruss two seasons football again. So again that
is a one in fifteen season, followed by an owen
sixteen season. It's the second oh to sixteen season. Ever,
unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he
is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's
like mea, why the fuck you're talking about?

Speaker 1 (02:02:15):
This?

Speaker 5 (02:02:15):
Part of this is also like these people are just evil.
Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get
an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists
mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like
one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which
is a league of a lot of people who absolutely
fucking suck shit. So so that that's the first thing
you have to understand about Watson's that he is just

(02:02:38):
really fucking like morally reprehensible, right. He is like a
bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended
him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is
the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting,
is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is
going to set up this deal for his team to
trade for Deshaun Watson, who've been on the Texans, And again,

(02:02:59):
like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be
for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.

Speaker 4 (02:03:07):
Nia, do you expect me to know anything about the
Houston Texans.

Speaker 5 (02:03:10):
It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's all you
need to know about this. And they traded this guy.

Speaker 4 (02:03:17):
Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our
Austin listeners.

Speaker 5 (02:03:21):
They fucking traded this guy, right, and Popadesa orchestrates this
trade that is three is it is the worst trade
in the history of football. It is three first round picks,
two thirds, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick.
And they hand this guy who, again I kind of
emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right, they
hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars, the

(02:03:43):
largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So,
how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being
held up by the guy who like is now laundering
being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort
of like cultural like being a rogue outsider. Right, how
does Deshaun Watson his like greatest fucking project to do
on the field. So in his first season, he basically
got injured immediately. It is second season in weeks one

(02:04:06):
through five out of out of seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks
one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out
of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven
hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.

(02:04:27):
They traded three first round picks for this guy. He
has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three,
which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back
to make a pass, they are expected to get point
three less points than an average team would.

Speaker 4 (02:04:43):
How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
I only agreed to this because I thought it was
video game.

Speaker 5 (02:04:50):
Don't worry. We're we're we're we're almost We're almost done
with the sports part of it. But there, I promise
there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which
is which is the argument, that's that that sports and
the sport and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural
roles for the right. Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that.
I can I can see that. Yes. Also, I've always
wanted to fuck you complained about this on area and

(02:05:10):
this is this is the best fucky chance I've ever
gonna get, So Jesus fucking because it's like what I
talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, yes,
this is what it feels like. Is this what they
sound like? Yes? It is it is absolutely what you
sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback,
they sign away basically the entire future of this team
hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator two

(02:05:30):
hundred and thirty million dollars. And this is the guy
that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like
a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like,
you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of
the nerd is that they're like picked on, like by
the jock or whatever. Right, That's like that's like the
fundamental base of their mythology that there's are like oppressed
by this. But like it's just like the same masculinity

(02:05:53):
bullshit all the way down. And you can watch like
just like the worst people in fucking history just trick
literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking
geniuses by using both of these fucking affects. So I
want to read something, you know, in looking at the
way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions,

(02:06:13):
like specifically in the culture, and you know why these
people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as
as this sort of affect they're trying to project into
the world. I want to read something by a friend
of the show Vicky Osterweil, and a piece called game Boys.
Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates
an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel

(02:06:37):
like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a
form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety
to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that
one was master to live under current economic conditions. Games
rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of
producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups,

(02:07:01):
but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point
towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different
compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.
They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions fantasies that modulate
their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them,

(02:07:21):
but they are also capable of giving everyone else the
fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This
has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and
fans have found space in and around games despite the
organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread
critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by

(02:07:42):
CIS men. So I think the important thing here, and
this is something important to remember both for Samba Been
Freed and also for the construction of right wing gaming
movements in general, and for what we're going to talk
about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is contested ground. Right.
As much as we think of as like right wingers, right,
there are a lot of what you would call it

(02:08:04):
to like traditionally sort of leftlooming demographics that play video
games and have made spaces here because as much as
they are in some ways like this force of discipline
that like is something that you learn, the kinds of
like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like
that that you know you use for fucking work, they're
also a thing that people use to like escape the

(02:08:26):
fucking hell world totally. And like, I mean I know
this right, Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese
chance of better, he's better at video games, and both
the people have been to be fucking talking about in
this story, right, Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path.

Speaker 4 (02:08:39):
Of Exile character was actually quite advanced.

Speaker 5 (02:08:41):
But we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path of
Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I mean,
it's it's worth mentioning, like speed running, right, which is
a very very trans genre.

Speaker 4 (02:08:50):
Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games.

Speaker 5 (02:08:54):
Yeah, it depends. It depends a lot on the genre.
But again, like competitive fighting games like yeah, Melee, I mean,
I'm gonna brief mentioned Sonic Fox, who is a black,
non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting
game players of all time, incredibly beloved, the only person
in history ever to beat someone thirteen to zero in
a first to eleven absolute legends, right, But you know,
these are the people that these sort of like fascist

(02:09:16):
adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can
use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force.
And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it
in real life. Right now that these people are in power,
and you know who else is in power, it's a
product and services to support this podcast, All Hail, we

(02:09:43):
are back now. Obviously, the other part of this. You know,
we've talked about we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics,
but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.
And you know, the thing about gaming, right is that
it is to some extent a tool that people use
to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the
violence of the gender system. And like I am also

(02:10:04):
doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy
nazi like gamer dip shit.

Speaker 4 (02:10:09):
Right, Yeah, that's why I ooed up f F seven
remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
feeling sad.

Speaker 5 (02:10:18):
But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right,
is that, like the right, like that we're experiencing violence
in different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from
the gender system that is the same system, but these
people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
And this is you know, I had a conversation with
Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
sort of drawn from and like I would compare it

(02:10:38):
to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal
with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence.
But like you know, on the other hand, most of
us don't become mass shooters most most Yeah, I would
say that's that's true. Yeah, right, and so and so
we can look at the structural forces that produces people
and also just go like fuck them, like eat shit,
like I'm sorry, you've you've become Nazis, like fuck off.

Speaker 4 (02:10:59):
Skillish you in some ways among other environmental factors.

Speaker 5 (02:11:03):
But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times
these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit
at all, mostly, right, I mean like yeah, like okay,
like Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because
of the gender system, right, but like, also he is
the richest man in the world, He's the most powerful
man live, He's one of the most powerful people who
has ever lived. And he still has the same sense

(02:11:24):
of like aggrievement that powers all these people. And this
is like one of the key things of like the
gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that
they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now
it's it's been shifted into this not anymore. Yeah, Now
now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by
like fucking women in minorities, right.

Speaker 4 (02:11:43):
And and it's actually the people who actually doing the
oppression is now all of the doge nerds at.

Speaker 5 (02:11:48):
The top of the system.

Speaker 4 (02:11:49):
Now it's it's been we have we've had we've had
a we've had a full Uno reverso.

Speaker 5 (02:11:54):
But the thing is, these people have always been at
the top of the fucking system, right and like, But
but it's this a fetny whis it's this it's this
feeling they have of them being the ones who are
oppressed that like you know, made them into the shock
troopers that we saw with Gamergate. If you're gonna read
one viciosc wral thing, and I'm signing her a lot
because I think she's done a lot of the best
critical reporting on video games, which is a field that
I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like,

(02:12:15):
I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions
in the games industry which are fucking terrible, and it's good,
but like, as a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near
as much critical engagement with it as there's been with
like film or music. But if you're gonna read one
thing from her, read a piece called goon Squad, which
is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the
really broken state of Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it

(02:12:36):
came out. And one of the arguments that she makes
is that these gamers are being i mean literally being
used is like scabs and pinkertons against people who make
video games, and you know, and this expands out to
like workers more broadly, they're literally being used to silence
anyone who talks about the problems with like this game
that like when Cyberpink twenty seventy seven came out, it
was literally giving people seizures because it was it had

(02:12:57):
just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit anthe they didn't
want any one about because it was a broken, shitty game.
And you know, they're also used for just like anti
queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's
how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And
and that gives you an insight into why these people
sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're
also like signaling to their base that like I am

(02:13:19):
one of you, et cetera, et cetera, Like you should
fucking support me for this shit now. Pivoting a little bit.
So when I was first talking about this episode, I
kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of Sam
Bankman freed because like man.

Speaker 4 (02:13:30):
They said, yeah, many such cases.

Speaker 5 (02:13:32):
Yeah, like the last the last fucking white boy scammer
named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white
boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though I
looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing
this like gamer stick thing, like specifically in interviews with
Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 (02:13:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:13:49):
Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And
this brings us to the man who has spent the
most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which
is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is like not really a gamer.
I would say, like he sort of plays video games.

Speaker 4 (02:14:08):
He's a Kenemine user. He's a Twitter power user. He
is the shadow President.

Speaker 5 (02:14:15):
Yeah, the regis man of the World's ridges man who
has ever lived.

Speaker 3 (02:14:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:14:18):
Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
is like a he's an elite video game player in
like multiple games. He's obsessed with this.

Speaker 4 (02:14:25):
He's also I believe the term is a meme. Lord
h if I'm reading this right.

Speaker 5 (02:14:30):
Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two
characters I didn't put in the script because it's actually
not the one we're gonna talk about, but one of
his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus, So like,
this is the level of mind.

Speaker 4 (02:14:40):
That uh, that is one of his favorite names. In
his White House office, he has a he has a
Kechius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI
generated image of like pet bite the Frog and like
and like Roman, like like Caesar at higher I hate everything. So, yeah,
this is the guy who reads the country now.

Speaker 5 (02:14:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:15:00):
Oops.

Speaker 5 (02:15:00):
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
get to you is that he has. Actually he's like
for a long time been doing a like I'm a
gamer thing. So his his kind of problems, and I
think really the origin of the weird paying people to
make him look like he's good at video games thing
that we're gonna get you in a second. This is

(02:15:21):
something that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me
of because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals
i'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at
one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring,
which is very difficult game, and he had two different
shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered,

(02:15:41):
Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to
I figured out for Like how bad at this game
he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is
the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at
my fucking sports car. It's stepping into like the shittiest
call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator
with the working break on.

Speaker 4 (02:16:01):
Hey, I love the masdamiata.

Speaker 5 (02:16:03):
Like that's that's like the gaming of criminals. And everyone
who looked at it immediately was like, this is the
dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no
idea what the fuck he's doing. He is just like
like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game,
like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit. And this was like kind

(02:16:23):
of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one,
but like especially like this is one that sort of
broke on to the left a lot, and people were
giving him shit about it. So the next time he
wanted to brag about having been good at video games,
he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish
some stuff in this game called Yelbo four. I'm not
gonna talk about Dielbow stuff much because I'm a Path
of Exile player and not diebol player. The dialbum and

(02:16:45):
Path of x ale like Fairy much the same kind
of game, basically, like you click somewhere and your character
goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.
But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one
of like the best Path of Exile two players in
the world, and he was doing this on his alt account,
which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but

(02:17:07):
the all the e's are threes, So with's CYB three
r g A M three R four twenty.

Speaker 4 (02:17:15):
Wait wait wait, wait, say say that again.

Speaker 5 (02:17:19):
It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.

Speaker 4 (02:17:26):
So I think I found something. I think the four
to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Hitler's birthday April twenty God damn it.

Speaker 5 (02:17:40):
So okay, he like claims to have one of the
like the best characters in hardcore, which is in mode
of Path of Exile where if he die once you
get kicked out of it. So it's very hard to
like prove that he actually did this. He like does
a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile,
like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately

(02:18:01):
obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing.
Like it's not just obviously people who play the game.
I hadn't played Path of XL to at this point, right,
I had only played the original one like a decade ago,
like a little bit of it, and I took one
look at what he was doing and immediately was like,
this guy has never played this game before, like has
no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so
unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those

(02:18:21):
valuable currencies in the game, just like walk past it,
didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays
video games, This guy has no idea what the fuck
he's doing. And this actually explodes on him and eventually
he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level
of his Path of Exil to account, and then he
claims that he never claims that it was his path
of xel to account, and this Jenny Weinley has been

(02:18:45):
a real problem for him because it pissed off like
the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like
millions of views from guys like Asthmagold, who was like
a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like
sucks ass, like is like a turbo right winger, like
spends his time screaming about how like black people in

(02:19:07):
video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying
the video game industry and fucking asthma Goold is watching
this video and being like this guy is a lying
piece of shit, what the fuck? And like everyone fucking
reacts like this. It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen
people like react to this, to like to elon like

(02:19:28):
this and like like again, like this is his allies
on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait,
this guy's just like lying. Now. What's interesting about about
this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole
thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's
like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is
still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that

(02:19:48):
like there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it
is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he
believed that he could just pretend to be a top
of Little Pets of Path of Exile player on a
stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no way
anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And
and a lot of people he talks to about the stuff,
for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people, right,

(02:20:10):
it's like a lot of it's a lot of people
who aren't gamers. And he's like sort of hyping up
his reputation with and so he's weirdly on the one hand, yeah,
he is signaling to his sort of fascist bass, but
on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort
of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like the
sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation.
Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all

(02:20:31):
of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer.
But the thing about gamers is that like there is
literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that
is very, very popular. That is just like people exposing
people who cheat in video games and cheated records of
video games. And Elon has walked just like directly into
this bear trap, right.

Speaker 4 (02:20:51):
And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
it up, We beat Elon him.

Speaker 5 (02:20:57):
It's over.

Speaker 4 (02:20:58):
He's he's been cast out of civil society for the
high crime of pretending to play a video game. He's
lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.

Speaker 5 (02:21:12):
So what's next? We have what he has? He has
one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.

Speaker 4 (02:21:17):
Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Which is the funniest Elon musk gamer story in my opinion.

Speaker 5 (02:21:23):
Which which are you?

Speaker 8 (02:21:24):
Which?

Speaker 5 (02:21:24):
What are you talking about?

Speaker 4 (02:21:25):
That's the one that that that he he had to
publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five.

Speaker 5 (02:21:33):
Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that.

Speaker 4 (02:21:34):
Because he doesn't like quote unquote doing crime and g
t A five quote require shooting police officers in the
opening scene. Just couldn't do it unquote.

Speaker 5 (02:21:46):
Oh, I really forgot about that.

Speaker 4 (02:21:47):
So that proofs that at least he has some integrity God. Now,
some some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,
violence power fantasies, but at least Musk has someone in
tegrity to not harm police officers in GDA five. That
really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all
of this, you know, at times strange behavior.

Speaker 5 (02:22:12):
Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like
a different like the weird Christian part of the bass.
That's like, oh, violence and video games is bad because
he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously,
and all of them are like, this guy is a
fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.

Speaker 4 (02:22:30):
It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy
because again he is the most powerful man in the world. No,
but it is mildly amusing.

Speaker 5 (02:22:38):
Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious
note to this, which is that like the pushback he
is getting here is like I think actually kind of
is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
about it is him pretending to have been like a
quake pro which the thing that he did, and there's
a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs,
who is like his thing is like people who fake

(02:22:59):
who like fake things in video games basically, and he
is like not a leftist. He's like like a center
right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how
far right he is. But he did a video about
about Elon claiming to be a quack player and what
he found so is Elon like apparently did actually play
in an early quake tournament, but none of the good
players were there, and he he came his team came

(02:23:21):
in second, but they came in second because they had
better WiFi than everyone else and so they had less latency,
which made them invincible until they ran into a team
that also had good WiFi, and then he got destroyed,
which I just I just think it's funny, right. That's
like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he he
has this theme claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend,
but it's actually because he had more money than everyone
else until he ran some much who had the same

(02:23:42):
amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.
But the reason I bring this up is that, like
at the end of this video, Jobst is like goes
on this whole thing about how and this is this
is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin I have
seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally
goes on a thing where he says, Yeah, every single
thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie.

(02:24:02):
And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass,
but literally everything in a field that I know, this
means that I literally can't trust him when he says
anything about any other fucking field that I don't know.
And this is a real shift, right, I have never
seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just
clearly a liar about this, and so you should not
be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This

(02:24:25):
is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever
fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon
Musk is doing, and like just the willingness to just
be like, this guy is a fucking just just a
serial liar, Like everything says is a lie. He literally
calls him a con like, says that his activity is
like a con man. He says the things that he's
saying are like either liars or delusional. There is a
kind of like shift happening right now where people like

(02:24:47):
really are turning on him. There's a day to happen
literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft is a
famously like not a leftist company, right, Like they've done
a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff. So
Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games as
a black guy as like a character in it, and

(02:25:07):
literally the official Assassin's Create accounts replied to one of
his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your
Path of Axile two account told you? And like replied
and replied to a thing about Hassan, Like, we are
genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right this thing
that had been like a really really consistent base of
support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against

(02:25:30):
him and is sort of being polarized against him by
just like the fact that he's just is so obviously
cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably transparent it is,
and like obviously, like I don't think like the gamers
are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But
the actual serious point to all of this, other than
like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these
people do this and like gamers is like a demographic

(02:25:51):
that's important to these people is that, like, the way
that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by
flipping everyone over to your side, right, that doesn't happen
that often. But one of the ways you can do this,
and this is this is, you know, to take a
really really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won
the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to

(02:26:13):
stay home and that was enough enough people just staying
on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for
Cureanzi's government was enough for them to take power. And
I think like the actual, like the actual serious points
of this is that the only way that we get
out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away
these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these

(02:26:33):
people comes, there are enough people who would be their
supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they
can be stopped.

Speaker 4 (02:26:41):
So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
start of gamer Gate two.

Speaker 5 (02:26:47):
Gamer Gate two is already happening, damn it. This is
gamer Gate three.

Speaker 4 (02:26:50):
This is an open call to begin gamer Gate two
point five right now on behalf of me along. Make
sure you at Mia oh no, and then hopefully and
I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik revolution after we
get enough gamers just to stay home or even better

(02:27:14):
rise up right, we can we can make some kind
of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or
a keyboard.

Speaker 5 (02:27:20):
If you're a nerd about it. Gamers are the cosacks.
We've got to get them to knock back the regime.
That's actually the February Revolution where theytood down. But you know,
same point, same point. Come on ya, geez fuck I
am one of the biggest things of Like, people need
to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar.
He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist e
guy who was run the provisional government in between the

(02:27:42):
first Okay, we're done, we're done here, we're done here,
we're working out, we're leaving.

Speaker 4 (02:27:46):
What games are you playing?

Speaker 5 (02:27:47):
What games am I playing? Pathaxtyle to don't play Rotato
it will consume your life. Okay, play robo quest. Robo
Quest is great. Roboquest dares to ask the question what if,
Like the art style of Borderland was used for a
game about rehabilitative Justice. But also you're doing the roguelike
with like Doom's combat.

Speaker 4 (02:28:07):
That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Then I do Hell Divers too, nearly every Monday. Armored
Corps six.

Speaker 5 (02:28:16):
Course six Rules. Love that game. Love that game.

Speaker 4 (02:28:18):
Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy, Sevin, and I'm waiting
for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character
selection is very gooner.

Speaker 5 (02:28:31):
Coded, many many such cases, so I made sure to.

Speaker 4 (02:28:34):
Make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my
on my model. But the gameplay is fun.

Speaker 5 (02:28:44):
This has been it could happen here. I good lords,
they pay me for this. I had to. I had
to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking
clips of of of Elon Musk playing video games for this.

(02:29:24):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our weekly.

Speaker 4 (02:29:27):
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 and Robert Evans. You are
This week, we are covering the week of March twenty
to March twenty six.

Speaker 3 (02:29:42):
Short week because we did a late recording last week.

Speaker 4 (02:29:45):
Yep, we did, so it's minus one day if my
math is correct. It's been a hard week for many
of us because we all really care about group chats,
and group chat security is super important. Oh yeah, to
kind of have anyone involved in politics, and whenever we
see a breach of this magnitude, it's really a warning
and like a threat to all of us. So it

(02:30:06):
has it has been. It has been a tough week.

Speaker 2 (02:30:09):
Yeah, Like a threat to one is a threat to all. So,
like the way I see it, any group chat that
gets compromised, first.

Speaker 5 (02:30:15):
They came for hoothypc's ball group. Yeah, that's xt. Next
they're gonna come.

Speaker 2 (02:30:20):
Be any of us could be any of us. Jeffrey
Goldberg could be lurking in your small group. That's you
and your girlfriend talking about what kind of pizza to order.
He could be there reporting for The Atlantic. You wouldn't
know unless you like looked at who was in there
and saw his name, then you would know, which is
true of all of the people in the hoothy PC
small group.

Speaker 5 (02:30:40):
I guess it is actually pretty easy.

Speaker 3 (02:30:43):
You don't know, maybe maybe different Goldbudge signal name is
like like CIA Superspy or something, and everyone's assumed along there.

Speaker 2 (02:30:50):
I'm gonna start at the beginning, because I do assume
that actually, like as impossible as it sounds to those
of us who like wake up and imbibe fucking social
media morning, like an addict takes their first hit of
crack cocaine, but in a way that's less healthy for
both our hearts and our brains. A decent number of
people who listen to this podcast have just kind of
like heard vaguely like some bits about this.

Speaker 5 (02:31:12):
Yeah, they're wondering, what the fuck we're talking about?

Speaker 2 (02:31:14):
What are you doing? What are you guys doing this?
So we're gonna talk about this group chat. So first off,
couple of basics. So, Signal is an app that is
end to end encrypted. That means that if you have
Signal and your buddy has Signal and you're messaging each other,
it's encrypted, and it is very hard at this point
unless one of your phones is directly compromised by a

(02:31:35):
non state actor or an X who's really good with
the computers, no one else can see what you're messaging
each other. So if you and a friend are like
planning what to order on fucking grub Hub tonight when
you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can
keep that secret. Or if you and a friend are
planning what substances to buy that the government might not
want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if

(02:31:58):
you and your friend simply don't want various media companies
taking every detail and phone carriers taking every detail of
your life's conversations and turning that into analytics data, you
can stop them from doing that. And if maybe one
day you might be engaged in speech that the government
might not like, you can continue to engage in that
speech privately without danger.

Speaker 5 (02:32:18):
Or with less danger.

Speaker 2 (02:32:20):
Yeah, or with with as little danger as it is
possible to do.

Speaker 4 (02:32:23):
Especially if your messages automatically explode after anywhere between five
seconds to a week, right, which is a feature Signal has.

Speaker 2 (02:32:31):
Yes, you can automatically set it to delete stuff over
a period of time you want to. If you're going
to use it, turn off the thing where it like
pushes messages so that you can like see visible notifications.
So yeah, not if you turn them off, because that's
a that'll function.

Speaker 4 (02:32:44):
Up because then your operating system can read the messages
without the encryption. Similarly, never open a QR code. This
is the yes, really the only way that signal can
can get compromised on like scale right now beyond like
physical infiltration, right like what accidentally happened with who the
PC smell Group.

Speaker 5 (02:33:02):
But the main other way.

Speaker 4 (02:33:04):
That signal kanka compromised is through malicious QR codes and
unknown links. So really be careful about links as always
on the Internet, and especially be skeptical of QR codes.

Speaker 2 (02:33:15):
Yeah, there's a there's a quote from Herman Garring. I
think it was from Herman Gehring. When I hear the
word culture, I reach for my revolver, and I have
adapted that gearing quote to the modern era. When I
hear QR code, I reach for Mike clock nineteen.

Speaker 3 (02:33:29):
That's right, do not do not use koorotes. Yeah, the
work of Satan. Let's explain what who the PC small
Group is for the people. I'm getting to it.

Speaker 2 (02:33:38):
So you've got you've got this app which is normally
used by and has been used for a long time
by like protesters and dissidents and journalists to communicate with sources.
Because it's very secure the Trump administration takes office. One
thing that they are annoyed about is that when you
are government employees, even if you're doing top secret shit,
especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of
meetings about national security planning for like military actions that

(02:34:02):
you are supposed to only have in something called a skiff,
and a skiff is basically a room in you know,
the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right, I'm
not one hundred percent sure where all the skiffs are,
but it's like a room that is incredibly secure, and
it is the only place that you are supposed to
have certain kinds of conversations. And in fact, if you
are having one of those kinds of conversations in a skiff,

(02:34:25):
no one, not even the president or the vice president,
is allowed to have a phone in there. It is
a very strict rule. You don't take phones into the
skiff because none of them are fucking secure. Now, the
problem is all these communications, all of this stuff is
documented and potentially foilable. Maybe not immediately because there's always
security concerns. They have the ability to redact.

Speaker 5 (02:34:47):
Stuff, but in twenty years perhaps, but at some.

Speaker 3 (02:34:50):
Point, yeah, it might be archived. Even if it's not flable.

Speaker 2 (02:34:53):
People who are in charge of our military now didn't
like that and were like, hey, what if we all
just did it through a single group, And they did
to plan for an attack that started March fifteenth against
the Hoothies. Now you will remember the Hoothies from the
episode James and I did, I mean from other stuff too,
because they're all over the.

Speaker 5 (02:35:10):
News, you know, the the hoothy stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:35:14):
James and I did an episode recently about a regular
naval warfare, and you check it out. That's all still
pretty relevant.

Speaker 5 (02:35:20):
Better known for their other work, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:35:21):
Better known for their other work. The Biden administration was like,
we can probably take care of these guys with air strikes,
and it didn't really work. And the Trump administration was like,
we can do a better job of taking these guys
out with air strikes. And at this point it's too
early to say if it worked or not, but I'm
gonna guess probably didn't.

Speaker 5 (02:35:39):
Probably not, just generally given the history.

Speaker 2 (02:35:41):
Maybe they say they killed a lot more high value
targets and top missile guys.

Speaker 3 (02:35:45):
The main missile guy quote, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:35:49):
I don't know. I'm not privy to the information. They're
working off of or how much it matters at this point. Right,
So we'll see you in that signal chat. Rob, I'm
not in that signal chat. They have not accidental.

Speaker 4 (02:36:00):
I I'm in too many signal chats, frankly.

Speaker 3 (02:36:02):
Yeah, Yeah, I could be, and I might not know.

Speaker 5 (02:36:05):
Yeah, we all are in too many.

Speaker 3 (02:36:07):
I might be in several government ones would be totally
unaware of it because there's too many notifications on that.

Speaker 5 (02:36:11):
Shit's mute and I'm not seeing that.

Speaker 2 (02:36:13):
Yeah. So they decide we're gonna plan an attack on
some hoothies. We're gonna be hitting them with stuff, and
we should probably all get We need to get all
of these different kind of people from different chunks of
the uh, you know, the government together. So we got
to have JD. Vance and his representative because usually Vance
is too busy to respond. And we got to have
the Defense Secretary Pete he Zeth and his representative. We've

(02:36:34):
got to have the d n I Toulci Gabbard her representative.
We've got to have the head of the CIA his
represent you know that kind of thing. There's a few
more people in there. Mark Rubio, Mark Rubio, right Sex State,
you know, and his representative, Raevin Miller, Stephen Miller. I
don't know that Miller had a representative. He feels like
he handles a lot of this stuff on his own.
But yeah, on his phone too much, Steven Miller.

Speaker 4 (02:36:57):
Yeah, chronically online Steven Miller.

Speaker 2 (02:36:59):
Yeah, and you have the head of I think Syncom
was in there. Anyway. You got all these people in there,
and while they're setting this up, all the invites are
going out. Because the way you do it with Signal
is you click a button that says, like start a
new group. You name the new group. In this case,
they named the group hoo, the PC small group, right,
and uh shit, what does PC stand for?

Speaker 4 (02:37:19):
In this politically correct? Which, honestly I thought that we
were over.

Speaker 3 (02:37:23):
Yeah, you'd think so, huh don't Sandy slur's in the
group chat? That says what it's just a reminder.

Speaker 2 (02:37:28):
Yeah, yeah, no slurs in the small group chat.

Speaker 3 (02:37:31):
Planning committee, I'm guessing, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:37:33):
Planning committee. Who they planning committee? Small group? Sorry, I
had that written down somewhere. So they make this group
chat and they invite a bunch of people. And here's
the way. One of the ways Signal works is that like,
if you're just importing your contacts in the signal, it'll
find the guys who have signal, and it'll just like
show you, based on whatever your name you have for
them in their phone right that they're on signal, and

(02:37:53):
you can just invite them. Otherwise, you can set what
your signal name is going to be, and so when
people type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that,
or if you send them an invite, that's the name
they'll see. And this brings us. I got to take
an aside to talk about a guy who is not
a member of the Trump administration and who is not
a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg born
in nineteen sixty five. He is currently the co editor

(02:38:16):
of the Atlantic. Prior to this, he had what some
people would call an illustrious career. He grew up in
Malvern and Long Eye and I'm Maulvin. Yeah, what I'm
looking at his wiki here, which just has the line
that his neighborhood was mainly Catholic and he described it
as a wasteland of Irish pagramists.

Speaker 3 (02:38:35):
Oh I, he had a fun childhood, So okay, interesting,
interesting Jeffrey.

Speaker 2 (02:38:42):
Fascinating stuff there.

Speaker 3 (02:38:43):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:38:45):
So after college or kind of while he's in college,
he leaves and he goes to Israel because he wants
to serve in the IDF during the Intifada, the first
one as a prison guard Jesus Christ, which is where
Palestinian participants in the Intefhub were being held. And yeah,
he he had like an interesting conversation with this PLO

(02:39:05):
leader who is also like a math teacher, who I
guess they were able to like discuss their Zionism or
whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy,
not a I bring this up to be like, not
a left wing radical.

Speaker 4 (02:39:19):
Like not one of quote unquote to our guys.

Speaker 2 (02:39:21):
Not one of our guys. Not a guy who's probably
broadly opposed to most of and in fact to most
of what the Trump administration is.

Speaker 5 (02:39:29):
Doing, especially the air strikes.

Speaker 2 (02:39:31):
Frankly, yes, now he has pissed off It's fair to
say he has really pissed off Trump a number of times,
right because he wrote some articles. He wrote that twenty
twenty article in the Atlantic about when Trump said got
caught saying that Americans who died in wars are losers
and suckers. Yes, which is you know based on sourcing
that he had, so he's also attracted their ire. But

(02:39:51):
he's again generally I would say, like more on the
bootleoker east side of things, Like he's just kind of
like a NATSEK cheerleader, Right, that would be a fair
way to describe Jeffrey totally. I don't know that he
would entirely disagree with that description of himself.

Speaker 5 (02:40:04):
Yeah, like a neobe guy.

Speaker 2 (02:40:06):
That said, he's not so much of one that he's
unwilling to report critical stuff, which is what happens here.
So he gets an invite on his phone that it
just takes him into this PC houthy small group and
people have done the work. There's another guy in the
Trump administration whose initials are.

Speaker 5 (02:40:21):
JC John Greenbrier I believe.

Speaker 2 (02:40:24):
Yeah, I think it was John Greenbrier and the person
who because there was some debate initially about like who
invited him, because after this came out, there were allegations
that he snuck his way in or whatever. We now
know based on the evidence that he was inadvertently invited
by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, right.

Speaker 4 (02:40:43):
As evidenced by the signal screen shot.

Speaker 2 (02:40:45):
Yes, yes, yes, there's lots of screenshots. Jeffrey did his
you know, the job of document eventually, yes, well he
documented it right away.

Speaker 1 (02:40:52):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (02:40:53):
So now here's the thing. From the beginning here, Jeffrey
is having the natural reaction. I will say this role, Mike,
you're of him. He has the reaction I think any
minimally competent journalists would have. Someone's fucking with me.

Speaker 4 (02:41:04):
Yeah, yeah, this is like something to get me.

Speaker 2 (02:41:06):
Yeah, you don't get invited into a chat with the
sect deaf and the head of the CIA planning a
military strike.

Speaker 4 (02:41:12):
Right like this.

Speaker 3 (02:41:13):
That doesn't happen. I had a bit of journalist for
a while. That's not occurred to me.

Speaker 2 (02:41:16):
Yeah, it's not does not really go down. So he's
like trying to figure out what the fuck's going on.
I'm like, what's happening, And he's like he's making a note,
he's documenting stuff is there, and they're talking about like
weapons packages, like these are the kind of weapons. This
is where they're striking. And then as the strike's going
they're being like this guy headed into his girlfriend's house,
we're hitting it. The house blew up, he's dead.

Speaker 5 (02:41:36):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:41:36):
Particular exchange was very funny because the way he phrased,
it was like it completely baffled jd Vance. Yes, let
me pull this up because it was it was pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (02:41:45):
No please please?

Speaker 3 (02:41:47):
Uh. Michael Waltz VP full Stop building collapsed, full Stop
had multiple positive id full Stop, Pete Carilla the ic
amazing job. Jd Vance replies, what Michael Waltz typing too fast?
Full stop? The first target, M Dash that top missile guy,
M Dash. We have positive idea of him walking into

(02:42:09):
his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed. And then jad
Ebbonds replies, excellent. At this point, Michael Waltz responds with
the fifth emoji American flag emoji, flame emoji.

Speaker 2 (02:42:21):
Yeah, so it's great. And once it becomes very clear
what's happening number one, rather than stay in the group,
see if maybe he could get invited to other groups,
just kind of like keep track of what was going
on again being a guy who's like primary concern and
I really do think Goldberg's primary concern here was the
security of US soldiers, like.

Speaker 5 (02:42:40):
The national security of the United States.

Speaker 2 (02:42:43):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, as opposed to like is any
of this legal? Are they like what like his is
just like these people are not being secure like with
I mean like this this could if the wrong person
got invited in to a group like this, it could
potentially endanger the lives of airmen and stuff. That's on
my point concerned with all this, right, but that is
his you know. And so he hops out of the group.

(02:43:05):
He leaves, and he puts out this article and he
redacts most other than the what's happened, which is a
story in and of itself. He like goes out of
his way, like there's people who are like in intelligence
that are in this that he has their names, and
he's like, I am not naming them because they're serving
intelligence officers, and that's a no no. He doesn't like

(02:43:26):
specifically give up other than that this is happening anything
that's like particularly dangerous, right, But this is the kind
of thing as soon as it comes out, obviously it's
it's a fewer and it's unlike most of the time
when everybody gets like pissed, it seems to like it
might have some legs because it's just such a what
the bach moment, right.

Speaker 4 (02:43:45):
And it's so contrary to like so much of the
messaging coming from from the Trump administration regarding you know,
like digital security. Hillary's emails prosecuting individual soldiers for any
like like you know, losing a night vision goggle, right,
and it's kind of a leaking information. How this administration
is gonna going to crack down and all informations, you

(02:44:06):
know that sort of stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:44:07):
At one point, Excess says we are clear for op SEC,
which I thought was pretty funny.

Speaker 4 (02:44:11):
The funniest message in this signal group is that we're
all good on OPSEC. Yeah, that he says in a
group chat with Internal Life.

Speaker 5 (02:44:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:44:19):
Yeah, it's super funny. Everything that's happening here is very funny.
I basically want to move on to, like what's what's
going to happen next, which is they are going to
try to nuke Jeffrey Goldberg, Like they're going to try
to send him to a prison, if not a literal
like El Salvadorian work camp, right, like that that is
going to be their next goal here.

Speaker 3 (02:44:40):
He embarrassed these people, like yes to an extent that
it's I mean, anyone in uniform would have been cult
martialed for this kind of security fuck up.

Speaker 2 (02:44:46):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean in times of war in
the past, if like the version of this had happened
in World War Two. They would have just executed whatever
soldier did this, Like.

Speaker 3 (02:44:56):
Yeah, you don't have to be a spy if you're
incompetent enough to just bumble into shiit, it's the same result.
I did want to address really quickly, like a couple
of things. One, I saw this USA Today article that
was like, oh, it's so relatable that they made this
mistake of adding someone to the group chat. That was
not the mistake. The mistake was coordinating things that should
be classified. Things it should be quote unquote high side

(02:45:17):
on personal devices using signal as opposed to a state
department or government issued device which doesn't have your personal
contacts to avoid all this, like a device which is
not hackable advice which has not been exposed to QR codes,
for example.

Speaker 4 (02:45:31):
Yeah, to make sure that in your context, there's not
two guys named JG.

Speaker 3 (02:45:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:45:36):
Yeah, so you might add the wrong JG to your
Yemen bombing chat.

Speaker 2 (02:45:40):
Haven't we all added the wrong person to a group chat?
And it's like, I mean, yeah, but I've never like
bombed Yemen.

Speaker 3 (02:45:47):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's not the same thing. It's
not the same thing as a birthday party.

Speaker 2 (02:45:53):
Yeah, like I have two friends named John and I
added the wrong one to a group about like planning
a mutual friend birthday party. But like again minimal damage.
Yeah yeah, no no service. People's lives are put at risk.
I did also want to point out this.

Speaker 3 (02:46:08):
At one point, Waltz says on Michael Walls, who's a
national security advisor. Yeah not not not the other one. Yeah,
that would be pretty funny. They had him as well.

Speaker 2 (02:46:17):
He was just in there.

Speaker 4 (02:46:18):
Yeah, it seems the ground you'd like to shoot parent
friends with JD Vans wouldn't be so.

Speaker 3 (02:46:27):
One of the things Wolf says which is bizarre is
that like European navies are incapable of defeating Hoothy weapons systems.

Speaker 5 (02:46:33):
It just isn't true.

Speaker 3 (02:46:34):
Like there was a coalition of twenty different states running
operations in the rest he last year.

Speaker 2 (02:46:40):
And against like France has a navy, like they've gotten
a nuclear submarines they could in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:46:47):
Just like one example, HMS Diamond, which is a British ship,
shot down a Hoothy missile last year. The UK also
struck Houthy targets last year. Yeah, I've watched the UK
carry out air strike. I've like they're very capable. Look
what the rane what the Houthies have is Iranian three
fifty eight to just get really nerdy for a second, right,

(02:47:08):
which are not really a threat to mode fighter aircraft.
It is like a loitering munition. Maybe a drone, yeah,
but no no aircraft, not a manned or personed aircraft.

Speaker 2 (02:47:20):
The primary point of like how the Hoothies are conducting
their strikes is not We're going to knock all of
these ships out of the sea. It's it will It
will create an unsustainable insurance situation for a lot of merchants.
If there's just always kind of missiles. Even if we
never really or almost never hit anybody, that doesn't really matter.
You got to deal with the insurance thing.

Speaker 3 (02:47:39):
Yeah, they're going to make that much more expensive and
that that particular part of global trade much more difficult
to conduct. So far, the Trump administration has doubled down
in its response. This is pretty funny. Karen Levitt on
Twitter X, I guess called Goldberg.

Speaker 5 (02:47:56):
She's the White House Press secretary. I believe press. That's correct?

Speaker 3 (02:47:59):
Yeah, what has press? Sex actually called Goldberg a quote
Trump hater and also claimed the story was a quote
hoax and a quote sensationalist spin. They are also right
now claiming that quote war plans and quote attack plans
are different things. The information they leaked to was too
specific to constitute a war plan. Both of these things

(02:48:19):
are kind of ludicrous claims, right, Very clearly, this is
stuff that should be classified, very clearly. It's stuff that
put those people's lives at risk in the event that
the whoth He's had any means to respond to like
F eighteen's, which I don't think they do really now.
But you know, Iran, who absolutely is a state backer
of the who he's, does have the ability, at least

(02:48:39):
in theory. They they kind of haven't. They've kind of
shown their ass a bit in the last year or
two with Israeli strikes in a run.

Speaker 2 (02:48:46):
Yeah, it's not the ability to like easily interdict these
kinds of strikes, but certainly the ability to and more
importantly kind of the ability to survive them, to like
mitigate the damage that they can do.

Speaker 3 (02:48:56):
Sure, sure to go underground or go somewhere else, and
like those planes are vulnerable when at like certain points
in their trajectory, I think, so, you know, Yeah, it's
Germany very poor to broad to broadcast exactly what you're doing, when,
where and how.

Speaker 2 (02:49:07):
It's kind of just a basic of like military stuff
that you really don't want people to know exactly when
you're sending dudes in to do what.

Speaker 5 (02:49:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:49:16):
Yeah, there was a very funny meme going around which
basically had like imagined if the same discussion had been
had about D Day in nineteen forty four, and yeah,
that wouldn't have gone so well.

Speaker 2 (02:49:28):
They had brought a lot of great posts. I'm looking
at one by Katie and Autopolis on Twitter right now.
Having read through the full hoothy PC small group logs,
I've come to the sad realization that I'm the Jdvans
of my group chats, overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by
what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up,
continually derails plans with later rejections.

Speaker 5 (02:49:48):
So good, it's still good.

Speaker 2 (02:49:51):
It is that is really funny.

Speaker 5 (02:49:54):
That is brutal.

Speaker 3 (02:49:55):
Yeah, it is interesting to see their dynamics. It's interesting
to see of Stephen Miller seemed to have the decisive
word on like let's go ahead with Alice Miller. Oh yeah,
speaking directly for the president.

Speaker 2 (02:50:07):
That's what's interesting because no one ever says the president
has approved this, the president has said do this, Like
Miller says something along the lines of like, we're going
forward with this, or I've been told we're going forward
with this, which is again not in terms of like
it's a very Hitler way of doing things, right, yea, right,
Like there's this I talk about this in the show.
There's this decades long debate about like Hitler literally order

(02:50:27):
the Holocaust or did he just kind of like keep
making it clear to people that if they kept moving
in a more holocausty direction that would.

Speaker 3 (02:50:34):
Like endear them to him.

Speaker 2 (02:50:36):
Aspects of both are true, but like, yeah, this is
definitely kind of example of that ladder thing where Trump
is probably like, yeah, somebody should probably fuck up those hoothies,
and then Steven Miller goes like, yeah, Trump said, you know,
we're good, keep moving forward. But he's also Miller's not dumb.
He's not going to say Trump he's been doing this.
He's gonna say he's.

Speaker 4 (02:50:55):
Been delegating so much more than his first term, to
the point where his presidency is just rejecting a certain
vibe that then other people have to carry out all
of the details for it.

Speaker 3 (02:51:05):
Yeah, this is very similar to the hit the regimes.

Speaker 5 (02:51:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:51:08):
Yeah, there is a term for this at the time,
in the third Reck, it's called working towards the fuery Okay, right,
where you're not going to get direct guidelines, you're supposed
to figure out what he wants and move closer to it.

Speaker 4 (02:51:19):
Yeah, no exactly. Yeah, No, that's kind of been his
new governing style. It's a lot smarter in terms of
like just like you know, getting documents to sign and
then projects certain certain like slogans or vibes that then
everyone who works under him, which is at this point
it's maybe like roughly twoted people tops have to all
like figure out to like how to enact this thing

(02:51:40):
that they think he wants.

Speaker 3 (02:51:42):
Yeah, like gave it to the extent that he himself
was saying he didn't sign the evocation of the Alien
Enemies at that Rubio did. Yeah, his signatures on it
in the federal record. But clearly it's kind of a
Rubio or it seems from that that it's a Rubio
concoction that he just greenlit. Just a quote from Miller
in case you know, it's want of exactly what he said,
as I heard it. The presume was clear colon green light,

(02:52:03):
but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what
we expect in return. So yeah, it's he never he
never specifically says the President has okayed this. But yeah,
that's obviously people in Europe really pissed. I've seen some
statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom like the
sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers is

(02:52:24):
obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing
people off, should we pivot to advertisements?

Speaker 4 (02:52:29):
We should, which does not piss me off. It makes
me really happy to consume.

Speaker 3 (02:52:34):
Garrison personally consumes all the products and services that support
this show.

Speaker 4 (02:52:38):
Yeah, that's definitely not true.

Speaker 2 (02:52:39):
It's the only thing that Garrison concerns, which is why
they have poleegra.

Speaker 4 (02:52:44):
I don't know what that is, but sure, here's here's
the ads, all right, we are so that.

Speaker 2 (02:53:01):
H Yeah, what's rending my additions?

Speaker 3 (02:53:04):
James, Yeah, okay, I'll just start so very amusingly is
that's probably concerningly for him. Judge Boseberg, the same person
who issued attentive restraining order against the Trump administration for
the rendition of people to Venezuela has also been assigned
signal lawsuit American Obsit versus HeiG Seth. So that guy

(02:53:27):
that the one who Trump already called for his impeachment
right has another crucial case in front of him. What
the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining
to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoked
the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic or very
very ironic. They're talking about state secrets now, having just
added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what

(02:53:48):
they have done. You can go back last week to
understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from.
If you didn't listen to last week.

Speaker 5 (02:53:55):
Yeah we did.

Speaker 4 (02:53:55):
We did a whole episode on it last week.

Speaker 3 (02:53:58):
It's also continuing to claim that it didn't quote unquote
remove migrants after the tentative restraining order was issued because
they'd already been removed. The removal happened when they were
loaded onto the plane. Is this argument concurrectly with this
as a panel hearing? So that's a panel of three
judges right which the government is appealing the attentive restraining order.
During this hearing, quote Judge Patricia Millet said, quote the

(02:54:21):
Nazis received better treatment under their Alien Enemies Act than
these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings
in the nineteen thirties and they didn't just get loaded
onto plane in the central work camp. Not a great reflection.
And where we're at. The Trump administration is trying to
challenge the jurisdiction of Bosberg, saying that they should have
filed the same claim in Texas. Meanwhile, then, as whalen

(02:54:44):
governments are filing a colegal claim in El Salvador to
deliberate their citizens from SECOD. It's worth noting, of course,
that these people, some of them, have been tortured by
the Venezuelan government right and chose to flee at no
small risk to their lives. Like if people have an
listen to some of our older stuff, like I've been
to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the

(02:55:04):
vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to
my episodes about that if you will know more about
why people are leaving Venezuela. We have a little more
information on some of the people detained. One of them
is a makeup artist. He's a gay man who was
beaten by guards as a US photojournalist. Watch another one
that Miami Herald is reporting had been granted legal refugee status,

(02:55:27):
So it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed Venezuelan's.
Some of these people have been through background checks already,
right at which they will have disclosed their tattoos. That's
one of the things that they'll be asked about, and
they would have disclosed those. So whether they control eft
IT or quite how they came across these people, it's
still a little bit unclear. A couple of other things

(02:55:47):
regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across
my radar but probably don't marrit a whole episode. It's
been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement
to hand over the tax records of undocumented people it's
claimed for decades. If it won't do this, this is
why most undocumented people pay taxes, right.

Speaker 4 (02:56:05):
Yeah, which is something that the conservatives just like you
don't believe, Yes, the like all these undocumented immigrants are
aren't paying taxes like the rest of us, Like, no,
actually they are.

Speaker 3 (02:56:13):
What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes.

Speaker 4 (02:56:16):
Yeah, and yes, and this is a great way to
have people want to pay less taxes if they're gonna
get their information sent over to like the Gestapo, Like.

Speaker 3 (02:56:26):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 (02:56:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:56:28):
The whole point was to not provide a distance. This
is similar to why California gives driver's licenses to undocumented
people and allows it to ensure vehicles, right, because you
don't want to provide a disincentive to have a driver's license,
you don't want to provide a disincentive to have insurance.
We have now provided a disincentive to pay your taxes
for undocumented people. So yeah, that will have consequences, and
it will have consequences, especially in industries right like agriculture

(02:56:51):
and construction and my large numbers of people tend to
be undocumented. Talking of undocumented migration, the COMMA secretary Howard
Lutnik reports it. He said it on the All In podcast.
He has claimed to have already sold one thousand gold cards.
So gold cards. If you didn't listen to our previous
appoint that is Oh.

Speaker 5 (02:57:09):
I feel like I thought I'm getting dizzy.

Speaker 4 (02:57:11):
I'm just like, yeah, I am a ill.

Speaker 1 (02:57:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:57:15):
Yeah. There is no process for applying for receiving a
gold card yet, so it's extremely unclear what this means
in immigration law terms.

Speaker 4 (02:57:22):
So he just got like a thousand texts from millionaires
being like, yeah, I'll buy one maybe, Like yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:57:29):
Well multimillionaires five million each, right, Like so yeah, apparently
not quite clear, Like and like he claims he sold them,
Like is he going around shopping these around? Is this
how they're going to replace a tax revenue from undocumented people? Like,
oh my god, no one knows, no, no one knows
what this means. Who do you pay? Like very unclear.
So yeah, that's great. Uh, that that is that it's

(02:57:52):
the current situation with immigration. I also wanted to add
at least three people who were aware of died in
San Diego count on the fourteenth of March in a
storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived
was found next to the remains of her father, who
died of exposure in a winter storm out here. So yeah,

(02:58:13):
the border continues to be doing violence to some of
the most marginalized people alive, which is great.

Speaker 2 (02:58:19):
We should pop in here. A story just dropped Michael Waltz,
the National Security advisor who invited Jeffrey to that group
chat journalists have found his public Venmo.

Speaker 5 (02:58:32):
Every time with the away Venmo.

Speaker 2 (02:58:35):
Quote unquote, it's full of journalists. I'm just gonna read
a quote from an article on Prospect dot org.

Speaker 5 (02:58:44):
Yeah please.

Speaker 2 (02:58:45):
Unsurprisingly, Fox News holds the highest headcount for reporters in
Mike Waltz's phone. Griff Jenkins, who's Fox dot com bio
listen as a Washington based national correspondent for Fox, is
joined on the list by Brian Kilmead, co host of
Fox and Friends. Porter Berry, president and editor of Fox Digital,
also made the gut But what right wing reporters are
not the only ones represented in Waltz's Benmo list, which
appears to be less than clean on obsec as Secretary

(02:59:08):
of Defense. Hegseth roat Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for
News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as
is Breonna Keeler, an American journalist who currently serves as
co anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central.
Lauren Pikeoff, an executive producer at MSNBC, is also in
Walls's contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network Wow.
Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon.

(02:59:31):
But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name
stands out from the crowd. Judith Miller, who was summarily
fired from The New York Times after it was revealed
that her reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false
and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her
dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close
to an administration set on war. It's just like, Okay,

(02:59:52):
we don't check any of this, we haven't locked anything down.

Speaker 4 (02:59:55):
Good having your public venmo itself is crazy.

Speaker 5 (02:59:58):
The fact that.

Speaker 4 (02:59:59):
He's like the fact that he's like getting like dinner
with journalists to be like I'll send you, I'll send
you a venmo requests for this, for this sushi.

Speaker 3 (03:00:07):
Oh man, they've downloaded his entire friends list and you
can just scroll.

Speaker 2 (03:00:11):
Yeah, I know you can see everybody.

Speaker 4 (03:00:13):
Oh my god, He's had to get like a fifteen
dollars venmo requests from Bryan killmead for getting drinks in
a bar, like what are we doing?

Speaker 3 (03:00:21):
Oh? What are we doing?

Speaker 5 (03:00:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:00:24):
Also, yeah, how well these people make.

Speaker 3 (03:00:26):
Hundreds of thousands if not millions two dollars.

Speaker 5 (03:00:28):
You make so much money bucks.

Speaker 2 (03:00:30):
Yeah, yeah, the bat it's just one drink.

Speaker 4 (03:00:32):
In DC's so funny. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (03:00:36):
Now I think it's time, folks, that we take a
little bit of a detour and talk about tariffs.

Speaker 5 (03:00:50):
Rocky Jaspar.

Speaker 3 (03:00:53):
Lock Locking.

Speaker 2 (03:00:58):
Cking Jasp, Oh my god, I love playing that song.
I love playing that song. We don't actually have anything
to say about tariffs. MIA's not here. I will note
there's a graph going around about the potential cost of
Guinness under Trump's tax plan, which is usually around seven
dollars per pint in the US and will now be
twenty two to twenty seven dollars after Trump's you know,

(03:01:20):
new tariffs for imported alcohol.

Speaker 3 (03:01:23):
That reflects its true value because it's also.

Speaker 2 (03:01:25):
Yes, yes, absolutely, anyway, We're done. That's all I have
to say on tariffs.

Speaker 4 (03:01:29):
As long as the twisted tea pricing doesn't get affected,
I'll be fine. Then that's good.

Speaker 3 (03:01:35):
Good huh I comment.

Speaker 5 (03:01:39):
Now.

Speaker 4 (03:01:39):
In some more upsetting news, another student at Columbia has
been forced into hiding as Ice targets her for deportation.
Unsouchung is a twenty one year old permanent resident who
immigrated to the United States from Korea with her family
when she was seven. On March ninth, she'd received a
text message from Homeland Security Investigations, reading, Hyensau, this is

(03:02:02):
Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out
to you and see if you have any questions about
your recent arrest and the process going forward.

Speaker 5 (03:02:11):
What are you available for a phone call?

Speaker 4 (03:02:14):
So this message was allegedly in reference to being arrested,
among others at a recent sit in protest at Bernard
College at Columbia. She was charged and then released with
misdemeanor obstruction. So after receiving that like sketchy text, right,
something that you should never never respond to, You should
immediately send your lawyer. But after receiving this text, Chung

(03:02:34):
got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading quote, the
US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation
agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection
with an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with university's practice,
we wanted to share this information and their request with you.

(03:02:55):
If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense
for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS now. That
same day, ICE agents showed up at the home of
Chunk's parents, and Chung's lawyer called quote unquote Audrey from
the police, who revealed she was actually an ICE agent
and stated that there was an administrative warrant for her
arrest and that the State Department can revoke Miss Chung's

(03:03:15):
residency status. We're going to talk more about what's happened
with miss Chung after this at break.

Speaker 5 (03:03:34):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (03:03:36):
So when ICE failed to locate this Columbia University student,
they started to enlist the help of federal prosecutors. I'm
going to quote from the New York Times who broke
this story.

Speaker 5 (03:03:47):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (03:03:47):
On March tenth, Perry Carbone, a high ranking lawyer in
the Federal Prosecutor's office, told miss Ahmad, miss Chung's attorney,
that the Secretary of State Mark Rubio had revoked Miss
Chung's visa. Miss Ahmad responded that Miss Chung was not
in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident,
according to the lawsuit. Miss car Bone responded that mister

(03:04:09):
Rubio had quote revoked that as well unquote. So this
similar to like a mamou Khali like demonstrats that like
they have no idea of the of the actual residency
status of the people that they are going after. They
are just going after non citizens and may eventually start
going after citizens too. Like they're just going after people

(03:04:29):
that they assume have like the least amount of protections,
whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on
a student visa or a work visa. They don't really
know going in. They're they're they're just going after people. Then,
on March thirteenth, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants,
citing a statute for harboring non citizens. The Trump administration

(03:04:50):
is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders
the administration's foreign policy agenda. One twenty one year old
student who was the Vale Victorian at her eigh school
is hindering their foreign policy agenda for attending a sit
in protest. Her lawyers note that Chung was not, by
any means like a movement leader. She was simply one

(03:05:12):
of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests
against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyer's right quote, Miss
Chung has not made any public statements to the press
or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests.
She was rather one of a large group of college
students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns. Chung herself had

(03:05:33):
previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung
was not in violation of any university policy. So in
response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to
try to locate and deport her, Chung went into hiding.
Her whereabouts are still unknown as the time of recording,
and her lawyers fouled a lawsuit to prevent her deportation,
claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.

(03:05:56):
The lawsuit reads, quote officials that the highest echalons the
government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon
to suppress speech that they dislike, including Miss Chung's speech.
ICE's shocking actions against Miss Chung form part of a
larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected
protest activity and other forms of speech.

Speaker 5 (03:06:16):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (03:06:17):
Now, this past Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary
restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung.
The judge said that there is quote nothing in the
record indicating that Chung is a danger to the community
or a quote unquote foreign policy risk, or that she
is communicated with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there

(03:06:38):
would be quote no trips to Louisiana here, referring to
the movement of Khalil to ICE attention in Louisiana. A
DHS statement said that ICE is going to quote investigate
individuals engage in activities in support of hamas a foreign
terrorist organization unquote. The statement also claimed that Chung would

(03:06:59):
have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge,
which is like contrary to incidence of ICE just deporting
people before they're legally required hearings, even like in defiance
of like extra court orders mandating those hearings. Like ICE
is just lying here, and I think it's worth pointing out,
like what types of people they are going after right now.

(03:07:21):
One type of person that ICE is going after is
like non citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of
what they actually did. Right This can be anything from
from standing in the street to doing a sit in
protest to just like being arrested on campus and removed
by campus police or NYPD. Right, just just any arrest
like on record that shows you at one of these

(03:07:41):
protests the other in the cases like Khalil, like he
was never arrested. He was the subject of a mass
doxing campaign by other students at Columbia, professors and other
you know, quote unquote anti Semitism organizations which target high
profile activists to create like public pressure against them, and
those same lists are now being used by the Trump

(03:08:02):
administration to target students.

Speaker 3 (03:08:05):
Yeah, Gita had one, right, Beta. They ultra Zionist people
who are going around like attempting to fucking present people
with pages. I think they were one of the groups
that had created like a quote unquote deportation list. So
we should just mention that a tough student, Romesa oz Tuk,
was essentially abducted on her way to university.

Speaker 1 (03:08:24):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:08:24):
There's video which will link in the show notes here.

Speaker 4 (03:08:27):
Very very frightening video of her just standing on the
sidewalk as first one man approaches her in like a
in like a like a navy hoodie, put mask on
his face, approaches her, stops her, and then as soon
as they start engaging in conversation, she gets surrounded by
like five other people, all wearing like what I would
describe as like a gray man block essentially that they
then like pull out badges and they like detain her.

(03:08:50):
And it's interesting like as they approach, most of these
people are unmasked, and then as soon as people realize
what's happening, like like people in the neighborhood it realize
what's happening, they all start pulling up like a like
half faced mask like gaters gators.

Speaker 2 (03:09:03):
Yeah, yeah, they looked to me more like than anything
the way prowd boys dressed a lot, and like Jorany
in nineteen twenty twenty. Yeah, it's yeah, like.

Speaker 3 (03:09:12):
Like it's extremely concerning, like yes, when you start seeing
at these people mass people snatching people off the street, right,
She asks if she asked if she can call the cops,
and they say, we are the police. It looks like
her phone falls out of her hand at some point
they take her bag. We know this because it seems
like somebody was filming from a building just above and

(03:09:33):
you can hear that people say like why are you
covering your person?

Speaker 5 (03:09:36):
Saying why are you wearing masks?

Speaker 3 (03:09:37):
Why are you covering your faces.

Speaker 2 (03:09:39):
Yeah. Yeah, the guy, the guy filming is like doing
about what he can, given the fact that you have
to assume he had no real idea what was happening
initially other than like something visibly fucked up. Like I'm
glad he said the things that he said.

Speaker 4 (03:09:52):
But yeah, yeah, she's a Turkish citizen who is in
the States on a student visa in Boston, Massachusetts or
outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Speaker 3 (03:10:03):
Yeah, she's on a F one visa. So just a
couple of dates. A few days before she was seized,
she was like her name was published by Canary Mission right.
Canary Mission is a Zionist group that has been doxing
for Palestine or anti genocide people for several years now.
She had co edited an op ed in the Tought

(03:10:24):
Daily last year. It seems to be how they were
able to identify her. But as Garrison said, right like,
in terms of how they're picking their targets right now,
it seems to be heavily tied to these vigilanti zionists,
far right groups. I did see that a judge has
already ruled that she shouldn't be left, she shouldn't be
removed from Massachusetts without further consultation with that judge.

Speaker 2 (03:10:44):
And we don't know if she has been or not already.

Speaker 4 (03:10:47):
But this is this is continuing to happen, right, we
talked about it this last week. I'm going to do
a whole episode next week about this, about this issue.

Speaker 3 (03:10:54):
She is in Louisiana. Sorry, update, she has already been
moved to Louisiana. Yeah, so I'm just reading a truth
out piece here. Officials initially did not specify wells have
been taken and Canabi it's her lawyer was unable to
reach her. Later on Wednesday, Hanabe's said in a motion
that she was informed by a senator's office that the
student was already transferred to Louisiana.

Speaker 4 (03:11:13):
It's like in a matter of hours they worked to
get her like outside of her home state, or she
probably has more legal protections.

Speaker 3 (03:11:21):
Yeah, it's not something that's super uncommon. I've seen them
do this with what they called lateral transfers under Title
forty two, where they would move people. Under Title forty two,
they can immediately return people to Mexico, right, And what
they would do is is laterally transfer them along the
border and return them to another location in Mexico, which
obviously led to them being completely dislocated when they were

(03:11:41):
dropped in Mexico.

Speaker 4 (03:11:42):
Something else that I want to note is the use
of this harboring non citizens warrant. Like, one problem that
ICE can run into often is that people can choose
just to not answer the door. I usually likes to
rely on people that have already been arrested or already
detained by like police, Right, that makes it much easier
for immigration officials to find people without that locating people
can be a little bit harder with the use of

(03:12:03):
this like harboring non citizens warrant, that shows like there's
trying to create this precedent for being able to actually
break into more people's homes even though you know she
had a permanent resident status. This is just like in
terms of the tactics being used, similar to like you
know this all these like gray man block people approaching
you on the street one by one. That's like a
tactic to take note of. The use of this type

(03:12:26):
of warrant is also something to take note of. We
are already at that point where people are like are
like going into hiding, right, This is like very very
like dystopian ya coded stuff where you're like, you are
literally as like as a twenty one year old like
junior being forced to go into hiding because federal agents

(03:12:47):
are after you because you sat down. Yeah, you sat
down in front of a building in protest of a genocide.
You're not even a movement leader, and this this type
of thing shouldn't even happen to quote unquote movement leaders.

Speaker 3 (03:12:59):
Right, Yeah, if the very First Amendment protects your right
to do that exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:13:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:13:03):
But like, regardless of whether or not you're involved in
the planning the organization, whether or not you're making statements depressed,
whether or not you're you're you're giving speeches, if you
just attend these sorts of things, you are you are
a target by what is like very obviously a modern
version of like gestopo like actions.

Speaker 2 (03:13:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:13:23):
I think it's also quite revealing that she's somewhat successfully
gone into hiding, right, Like it suggests that, yeah, their
intelligent operation is not so advioleance that they were able
to immediately find her.

Speaker 2 (03:13:32):
Well, no, because again, the resources to do stuff like
trace somebody down by their shoes from like surveillance camera
footage exists. We saw it used on those lawyers who
let a police vehicle fire at twenty twenty. But like,
there's not really much in the way a crime's going
on here, and there also had there's so many of
these people, Like the idea that you would you would

(03:13:54):
pull all of the footage that you would need to
track every one of these, it's just it's just not feasible.

Speaker 3 (03:13:58):
Yeah, and I think they're just go after someone else,
right to get the headline. But I'll be following this
one with interest because it's sort of it's sort of
an alternative outcome to the other ones that we've seen
so far, So it'll just be revelatory to see how
it goes. Yeah, So if you want to contact us
about any of this, maybe if you're seeing things happening

(03:14:19):
on your campus, if you have anything you'd like to share,
or the things that you think we've missed, you can
do so. The email address is cool Zone tips at
proton dot me. Proton Mail is an encrypted email service.
It's only end to end encrypted like signal. If you
send it from a proton mail address, don't copy any
Atlantic journalists on your email, and you should be good

(03:14:43):
to go.

Speaker 4 (03:14:45):
Thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages. It
does take time for us to go through all of them.
Not all of them will have a response, but we
are reading them.

Speaker 2 (03:14:52):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (03:14:53):
I am still working on a piece in the Lavender scare.
There's a lot of stuff happening regarding you know, suppres
and going after trans people in the military. This takes time,
but we are working on that, slowly but surely, as
well as stuff regarding ice, targeting students and what's going
on in Colombia. So we appreciate that. The last thing

(03:15:15):
I want to talk about is this past Monday, the
IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate air strikes.
Mohammed Mansour, who works for Palestine Today, was killed quote
in his house in southern Gaza, alongside his wife and
his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeira.
Later that day, the IDF killed a twenty three year
old a Palestinian journalist, Hassam Shabbat, in a targeted airstrike

(03:15:40):
while he was driving his car in northern Gaza. I
want to read this statement from Hassam quote. If you're
reading this, it means I have been killed, most likely
targeted by the Israeli occupation forces. When all this began,
I was only twenty one years old, a college student
with dreams like anyone else. For the past eighteen months,
I've dedicated every moment of my life to my peak.

(03:16:00):
I documented the horrors in northern Gaza, minute by minute,
determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.
I slept on pavements, in schools, intense anywhere I could.
Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger
for months, yet I never left my people's side. By God,
I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything
to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest,

(03:16:22):
something I haven't known in the past eighteen months. I
did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause.
I believe this land is ours, and it has been
the highest honor of my life to die defending it
and serving its people. I ask you now, do not
stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away,
keep fighting, keep telling our stories until Palestine is free.

Speaker 2 (03:16:48):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 5 (03:16:54):
It could happen.

Speaker 9 (03:16:54):
Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website zon media
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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Behind the Bastards News

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