It Could Happen Here Weekly 196

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:49):
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Speaker 4 (01:08):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. One
place that it is happening right now is Washington, d C,
where Trump has undergone a quasi military takeover of the city.
And to discuss this, I'm joined by bridget Todd, DC
resident gare So.

Speaker 5 (01:28):
I was on the podcast a few months ago talking
about Trump's history of threats to DC and that has
really all come to a head. So I'm really happy
to be sitting down with you to talk about it.

Speaker 6 (01:40):
It has been a rough few days here in DC.

Speaker 5 (01:43):
I mean if I am coming off like I sound
tired or weird or stressed, it's because I do feel
those things.

Speaker 6 (01:49):
That's been a lot of feelings. Most of it.

Speaker 5 (01:51):
I just hate watching Donald Trump get up in front
of America and straight lie about my city and my home.
A place like DC that you know where I'm from,
It's where it's met most of my life. It's pretty
difficult to have the national conversation be about what a
bombed out shithole my home is. So I sort of

(02:12):
wanted to get into the basics of what's going on
and what I think it all means for everyone, not
just people in DC. So by now you've probably seen that.
On Monday, the Trump administration announced that they were federalizing
DC's police force, the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD. They
also announced that they'd be sending national Guard to DC.
Because DC is not a state, Trump actually and any

(02:35):
president would actually have authority over DC's National Guard. So
despite not being a state, DC does have a national Guard.
The authority over it is just in the hands of
the president, so with a stroke of a pen, he
can just deploy DC's National Guard whenever he wants.

Speaker 6 (02:49):
He's also sending in national guard from other states.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
To do this.

Speaker 5 (02:53):
Trump evoked what's called Section seven forty of DC's Home
Rule Act, which allows for the president to take over
MPD for forty eight hours with possible extensions up to
thirty days in times of emergencies. I'm kind of putting
emergency in quotes because the emergency that he is saying
is crime. But we'll get into why that doesn't really
hold water in a moment. So I really can't overstate, like,

(03:16):
how on precedented this is. No president has ever done
this before.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Yeah, no, I somewhat relate to your pain here of
your city suddenly being thrust into national spotlight as Trump
sends in you know, military style police, and I guess
a version although with very different methods justifications happened to
my density Portland, Oregon in twenty twenty, which I'm sure

(03:43):
most people listening are familiar with. It's very similar reporting
on how it's burned to the ground. It is only
a husk remains. There's just one massive bonfire where downtown
used to be, and of course it's fine, but the
actual presence of the you know, groups like BORTAC actually
create situations where there's massive amounts of violence being done

(04:07):
by men in army fatigues. What's in DC is is
I think notably different and like a semi extension of
how he was testing out this type of thing in
LA earlier this year, but with less of like an
endpoint like at LA's stuff was more about trying to
push forward these deportations and renditions as quickly as possible.

(04:29):
So he's just like taking control of the whole city,
like indefinitely, it seems now for DC.

Speaker 5 (04:35):
In some ways, yes, to be clear, because DC is
not a state, it is unique from any other place
in the country, and that the president kind of does
have more authority over DC than he would have other places.
And so yeah, he definitely this is definitely a federalization
of our police department. In terms of it being a
larger takeover of DC, We're not there yet. This is

(04:57):
something that he has definitely threatened. This is something that
he loves to talk about. That would include the president
taking over pretty much every aspect of life in DC,
so our public schools, our roads, our social services, all
of that, provoking home rule, that's what that would be.
He definitely that is definitely a threat. We should all
be very aware of that. And like it really makes

(05:19):
clear why DC needs full statehood yesterday, right, Like this
is an issue that should have been solved forever ago,
but right now we're talking about you know, specifically law
enforcement and the police, which on its own is is
like pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (05:34):
No, that's always the first step. Like, as soon as
you take control of the enforcement mechanism, then no one
really is able to stop you from doing other things.
And that's why the first steps in all of these
like you know, weird weird like far right Silicon Valley
like plans for how they can fix quote unquote fix
the government being able to take total control over the

(05:56):
law enforcement apparatus is always the first step because then
you can kind of do what you want from there
and no one's going to stop you.

Speaker 5 (06:03):
Yeah, in order to revoke home rule, it would take
an Act of Congress, which this Congress seems more than
willing to do whatever Trump wants.

Speaker 6 (06:09):
So that's something to keep in mind. Yeah, I think that.

Speaker 5 (06:12):
For residents of DC, I think the changes have been
so stark in the last just couple of forty eight
hours that I think it's very important to keep in
mind what could be coming down the pike and definitely
be aware of it. But you know, residents need to
know what this means for them and US today. And
I think that, like it's is really important to like

(06:33):
highlight that. I think that because of the nature of
DC being the nation's capital but also where more than
half a million people live, I think it's really easy
for people to forget that like the experience of like
people who live here, like me, you know, And I
think it's in this moment the people that I'm talking
to on the ground really are like focused on making
sure that folks know what's going on, have resources, you know,

(06:56):
understand their rights, understand that their rights have not changed
just because of this act this week. And so, I mean,
the thing that I am emotionally and personally struggling with
is this smear of my city being this like dangerous
hell whole. How did you manage that? What was the
experience of going through that, like like the dissonance of
like your experience every day navigating the streets of this

(07:18):
place where you live, and then hearing the national conversation
about it be so different from how you were experiencing it.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
I think eventually it is kind of became like a
point of pride and more like an absurd aspect which
keeps like unwanted tourism down. I don't think it really
in the end bothered people in the long run. And
the reason why people had a big problem with it
specifically was because of federal law enforcement who were taking

(07:47):
over blocks in the city like that that was the
actual like like crux, Like Republicans constantly talked about, how,
you know, insert any city here is like falling apart,
is overridden by crime, is you know, a fallen state?
You can't go out, and like they just kind of
pick a new one to put all the attention on,
like once a week so we're kind of like used

(08:09):
to this, to this rhetoric. It's more so the actual
like physical presence of law enforcement and how that changes
we're able to go throughout the city and the presence
of like militarized federal law enforcement. That yeah, affects like
just regular people. It's not just rhetoric. It actually changes
how you get to interact with your city. And I
guess that's the thing that actually caused people in Portland

(08:31):
to be much more upset, which results in tens of
thousands of people going out into the streets and saying no,
we don't want you here. So I think more so
than just like the rhetoric of how x y city
is burned to the ground, it's more so they like
the actual physical daily life that produces the actual tension

(08:53):
within within the city and how they gets changed and
altered with federal law enforcement exactly.

Speaker 5 (08:58):
I mean, that's pretty much what's happening on my streets
in DC. So about eight hundred and fifty officers and
agents took part in this what they called massive law
enforcement surge across DC, where they had between one hundred
and two hundred soldiers out patrolling the streets like beat
coops at any given time. And so you know, some
of the things that we've seen in the last couple

(09:19):
of days just simply as a longtime resident, like just
simply do not make sense, right, having federal agents patrol
places like Georgetown, which is very safe at ten o'clock
at night.

Speaker 6 (09:29):
That happened last night.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
Well, Georgetown actually might be the most dangerous place in
the city well in some ways, right if you thinking.

Speaker 5 (09:37):
About like the kind of crime they're talking tough about, yes,
or like the National Mall at qpm a weekday, places
where it's like it don't even make sense for y'all
to be posted up there. You know, there was a
big display of force and arrests on my block just
last night in the middle of the night, where we
looked out the window and it was.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
Car after car after car, order patrol.

Speaker 5 (10:00):
They set up the lights, they made arrests, and my
block is residential. So it's like places where it's like
it doesn't even seem to be making sense. And that's
why we know it's really not about crime. All of
the stuff that Trump said about crime and his pressor,
I mean, it was all just lies.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
Like I guess I don't you tell anybody listening to this.

Speaker 5 (10:20):
But like in case you are curious whether or not
there's any credence to the fact, we're like, oh, well,
is crime going up in DC?

Speaker 6 (10:27):
That is not true, right.

Speaker 4 (10:28):
So violent crebs have been going down the past two
years in DC consistently.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Absolutely, So, it is true that DC did have a
spike in crime in twenty twenty three, but since then
crime is going down. If you watched that press conference,
he threw out a lot of stats about how crime
is going in the wrong direction by every measure, that's
simply not true. He said that in twenty twenty three,
the murder rate in DC reached the highest rate. This
is him, He said, probably ever going back twenty five years,

(10:54):
but that they don't know what that means because the
data just only goes back twenty five years, saying basically
that they didn't collect crime statistics way back then. Think
about that for a second. Twenty five years ago was
the year two thousand. Do you really think that crime
data was not being collected in the year two thousand?

Speaker 6 (11:10):
It absolutely was.

Speaker 5 (11:11):
We absolutely know what crime in DC looked like in
the year two thousand and beyond. And so if There's
one thing people might know about DC is that in
the eighties and the nineties we were hit hard, but
the crack epidemic crime was genuinely very high.

Speaker 6 (11:23):
The city's own crime statistics, which.

Speaker 5 (11:25):
We did collect from the seventies, eighties and nineties when
the population in DC was smaller, show that there was
much more higher numbers of homicides and murders.

Speaker 6 (11:33):
So that's not just a lie.

Speaker 5 (11:34):
It's also a weird, obvious lie, and one that when
I watched the press or I almost didn't catch.

Speaker 7 (11:40):
It.

Speaker 5 (11:40):
Wasn't until I sat that and went through the notes
and I was like, oh, this is not just a lie.
This is like a weird, glaring lie. I can't believe.
I like, I guess I said that to say, there
are so many lies being thrown out in a short
amount of time. When they're all washing over you, it's
kind of hard to catch them one by one. But
then when you actually sit down, you're like, wow, oh,

(12:00):
this was just bullshit.

Speaker 4 (12:01):
Yeah, that's the intention. That's the what Steve Bennen calls
like muzzle velocity. You have to shoot out these things constantly,
one after another, so that it's impossible to actually hone
in and quote unquote debunk each and every one, because
by the time you're doing that, they've already moved on
to fifteen new things. You can never keep up with it.
And that's like the whole intention. That's like how they

(12:21):
craft literally like their sentences so that you can't just
like debunk everything they say because they just throw it
all out there and it creates this massive structure that
even if you tried chipping away at the sides, it
doesn't actually make any effect and it doesn't matter at all.
And like's what's the real effect they're trying to do
here with sending in National Guard, federalizing the police. It's

(12:43):
to like scare black people, and it's to scare homeless people.
And that's really what they actually mean when they say
there's high crime. And I think DC is what like
the has like the third third largest black population in
the country.

Speaker 6 (12:54):
That's right. We formally called chocolate City.

Speaker 5 (12:57):
We're more like a latte city today, but yeah, we
we have a heavily black and brown population here.

Speaker 4 (13:02):
Yeah, that's that's what Trump's actually like focusing on. That's
actually what he's doing. I feel like that's that should
be pretty clear to anyone who's like familiar with like
crime panic narratives and how they've been strategically deployed throughout
the past twenty five years and you know, thirty forty
years of the country.

Speaker 5 (13:18):
Yeah, I mean, I don't see how somebody could see
what's happening and see the way that he is clearly like,
like even at that press or the list of cities
he was planning on going to next, Chicago, Baltimore, It's like, okay,
heavily black cities with black political leadership and black mayor.

Speaker 4 (13:33):
Oh, Oakland, this is very clear what's going on? Yeah? Interesting,
interesting choice, buddy, Yeah, Like what do all these places
have in common?

Speaker 6 (13:40):
Right?

Speaker 5 (13:50):
One of the things I've seen people say is that
this whole thing is about the attack on the former
DOGE staffer known as big Balls.

Speaker 4 (13:59):
Big Ball I think it's that's his technical term. Yes,
possibly to receive the Presidential Medal of I think freedom.

Speaker 6 (14:07):
I think he got a medal. I think it happened.

Speaker 4 (14:09):
It's quite possible, So we should show big Balls some
respect for his.

Speaker 8 (14:16):
Struggles, I guess.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (14:18):
I mean it's I never thought I would see the
day where I'd be like reporting on a story happening
in the city and talking about somebody named Big Balls.

Speaker 4 (14:25):
But here we go. Really, you didn't see this coming.

Speaker 6 (14:27):
You didn't see.

Speaker 5 (14:27):
Someone of my being go cardcare. For a podcast that
I host about local DC news and issues called City
Cast DC, I interviewed Mark C. Graves, who was like
a long time DC reporter, and I said, Oh, is
there any truth to the idea that this attack on
Big Balls is?

Speaker 6 (14:43):
Like?

Speaker 4 (14:44):
What was the impetus to all this?

Speaker 5 (14:45):
That Elon Musk was like, Trump, you need to federalize
DC's police department because of what happened to my former staffer.
And I understand why people where that narrative was coming from.
But he really pointed out something, which is that you know,
Trump has been talking about taking over d police department
for a very long time. He referenced it during his
first administration a little bit a lot less than he

(15:05):
did it the second time around. He really dialed it
up in his second campaign. He began talking about it
even in his first few months in office by threatening
to take control over MPD if our Mayor Muriel Bowser
did not make certain concessions like clearing homeless encampments near
the White House and removing Black Lives Matter Plaza from
outside the White House. He also threatened to take over
MPD and DC in general when a former Trump administration staffer,

(15:29):
Mike gil was shot and killed during a carjacking in
DC back in February. So when that happened again, he
was like, I'm taking over MPD, I'm taking over EMPT.

Speaker 4 (15:37):
So well, the Big Balls thing alleged carjacking of Big Balls,
I will say this.

Speaker 5 (15:43):
You know those stories where you're like, we're gonna get
more information about this, so it's best to just wait.
A I don't know anything. I don't have any special details,
but like my senses, this is one of those situations
where it's like, you know, first the story was I
was with a girlfriend in her car.

Speaker 6 (16:00):
We were carjacked by two unarmed teens.

Speaker 5 (16:02):
Then Elon Musk, super spreader of misinformation that he is,
was like, oh, he was attacked while trying to rescue
an elderly woman.

Speaker 6 (16:10):
Like I just have seen enough about crime and DC.
I am.

Speaker 5 (16:15):
I'm looking forward to hearing more information about what actually
went down there.

Speaker 6 (16:18):
I'll just put it that.

Speaker 4 (16:19):
Way if that makes sense with mister big Balls. With
mister big Balls, I guess mister Balls. I guess big
is the first Mister Balls. Please, mister Balls is my father.
So yeah, Like, I think.

Speaker 5 (16:31):
The Big Balls thing might have been very convenient timing
or like a good excuse to actually move forward. But
I think narratives that Big Balls got attacked and now
Trump is taking over MPDE, I think that like doesn't
really tell the whole story, which is that this has
been a long time coming. This has been something that
Trump has been like obsessed with for quite some time,
even going back from before his second administration.

Speaker 4 (16:51):
And there's there's been like a media campaign in the
past few months of specifically taking like public trendsit robbery
videos and making them super vi role of like teens
who will like steal like designer clothes on public transit, Yeah,
and turning turning this into like a national epidemic. And
again you can look at look at look at the
like the shoplifting videos from a few years ago, that

(17:14):
even though crime was going down, there was videos that
very visible videos of shoplifting that went super viral to
help form this this crime wave narrative that the statistics
don't necessarily support, to the point where you have Republicans
actually like denying the FBI's own crime statistics. F the
FBI famously soft on crime institution the FBI, but Republicans

(17:37):
saying that these debts have to be wrong because we
all know that there's crime everywhere, and like, how do
we know that? Because you're seeing like a TikTok video
about it, and that's your proof as you've seen, you
saw one or two videos of like people robbing an
apple store, and now you think that crime must be
statistically higher everywhere, Okay, Yeah, And I think.

Speaker 5 (17:58):
That's why the big narrative continues to really be so sticky.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
Ooh, I don't like that. Yeah, I don't mean it
how it sounds.

Speaker 5 (18:06):
But like, it doesn't matter if you have statistics from
the FBI saying that crime is going down whatever, whatever,
when you if you have a visceral image of like
a bloodied big balls.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
Beaten on the street, right like and so I think
that it's it's really.

Speaker 5 (18:20):
Interesting how and I guess I'll just say it, how
easily manipulated people are, yeah, and how they're able to
go against the facts when they are confronted with an
image of like teens robbing a CVS or like oh,
like yeah, like eluted out CBS totally because that is
so visceral. And so that's something I've really struggled with,
is like I don't know how to counter these emotionally charged,

(18:42):
visceral TikTok videos and images that present one thing with facts,
Like it's like very difficult to be like, well the
data says this when people are being motivated by a
different thing.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
No, and that's why it's almost kind of fruitless to
go about that strategy at this point. And like, I
don't know how to approach this, And I think it's
also worth mentioning, like you're we are not immune to
this either. We might get targeted with like different narratives
may maybe a CVUS robbery doesn't do it for us,
but no, like everyone's motivated by like emotional reactions to
things that we see as like bad or often horrific,

(19:13):
and that that does change the way that we understand
like the physical aspects, like the statistical patterns of the
world very clearly. Like we're emotional creatures. That's what drives us.
The fact that the emotional plight of big Balls is
driving the ruling party in the country right now is
just a little bit more notable because it's one white

(19:34):
guy named Big Balls.

Speaker 5 (19:36):
Yeah, it's true, and it almost doesn't even make sense
to like come back the idea that this is about crime.
But I know it's not about crime because one, the
Trump administration recently made very drastic cuts to DC security funding,
and so if he was really very invested in crime
and DC seems like something that his administration would not
have done.

Speaker 6 (19:56):
Also, something that our mayor, who I do want.

Speaker 5 (19:59):
To talk about, has said is that, as you were
sort of alluding to earlier, federal agents and military personnel
are not the people who are going to be useful
when it comes to DC like street crime. These are
people who probably aren't even informed about DC's local ordinances
and laws. Why would they be right, And so these
are not people whose jobs it is to be out

(20:21):
engaging with civilians about quality of life crimes like open
containers or drinking on sidewalks.

Speaker 6 (20:27):
I saw a.

Speaker 5 (20:27):
Pretty viral video of the police going up and stopping
somebody for he says, smoking a joint on his porch.

Speaker 6 (20:33):
In DC, you are allowed to possess marijuana.

Speaker 5 (20:37):
But he also was like, just so you know, Trump
is cracking down on all of these quality of life crimes.
So you can't drink a beer on your portion anymore,
that's incorrect in the District of columb But you absolutely
can drink alcohol on your private property outside.

Speaker 6 (20:51):
And it's like, well, how would he know. He's not
even from here.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
He's a federal agent, So like, yeah, these are not
people who are trained or skilled in combating the kind
of civilian level street crime that we're seeing them do.

Speaker 6 (21:02):
This is just not an appropriate use of these people.

Speaker 5 (21:05):
And so the thing that kind of gets me is
that for the amount of money that we are spending
on having federal agents deal with low level street crime
like per MPD and per the DOJ's own statistics, the
kind of crimes that they have been combating this week
are things like open container fair evasions. It was like, yeah,
you need you need an FBI agent to deal with this.

(21:26):
What are you talking about? But the money that we're spending,
we probably could house every single unhoused person in the
District of Columbia with the money that we are spending
on this nonsense. It's like, that's the thing that makes
me so angry. I don't want to live in a
city that's full of crime. Luckily, I don't because crime
is going down. But if you genuinely wanted to combat crime,
there is a reasonable way to do this, and this

(21:48):
is just a big show of force to freak everybody
out and basically demonstrate that Trump can go into cities.

Speaker 6 (21:54):
And do this.

Speaker 4 (21:55):
It's not actually about lowering crime. The reason why they
would never want to house people's because they don't actually
want to. They don't want homeless people to live good lives.
They want to exercise power. That's the primary motivator. And
not only can bringing an out of state police be
like inconvenient, it can have lethal consequences, right because they
do not know the areas that they're policing, They do
not know the people in those areas. They don't understand

(22:18):
what it's actually like. When I was at the Republican
National Conference Committee, I don't know. How do how do
I not know what the RNC is? I think convention.

Speaker 5 (22:28):
It depends on if you're talking about the event or
the like entity the entity.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
When I was at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin last year, I responded to the scene of a
police shooting where police from out of state who were
brought in for the convention. We're policing outside of the
area the convention and shot and killed a homeless black
man because they did not understand where the homeless people

(22:56):
have their encampments, how they solve disputes, how people can
get in two fights. But that does not mean like
you have to kill people who are having a fight.
So no, this has drastic consequences. Something that the police
in Milwaukee would have been aware of this encampment, would
have possibly been aware of the normal way that homeless
people can get into fights with each other but are

(23:17):
not going to kill each other. Instead, you have an
out of state cop from like Ohio or something get
freaked out that two people are fighting and then shoot
one of them and stuff like this is why like
out of state police are so dangerous when they're being
brought into communities that they really just don't understand exactly that.

Speaker 5 (23:38):
I did an interview with a local community organizer in
DC and they told me pretty much the same thing,
that there is an aspect of trust and relationship building
that goes into not just like solving crimes, but combating
crimes before they start, right, Like, there is a level
of deep relationship building and trust building that has to
be in effect there, and that is what actually can

(23:59):
some time times make communities safer. But it comes to
unhoused people and immigrants. These are not people who are
committing crimes. These are people who are statistically more likely
to be the victims of crimes. And so when you
bring in outside forces who do not have trust, who
do not who have not built that relationship, and they're
terrorizing the communities that are statistically more likely to be
the victims of crime, that's going to be the thing

(24:20):
that results in the opposite of crime going down, right,
because you are damaging whatever trust and whatever relationship and
whatever understandings have been built with this community and law
enforcement going forward.

Speaker 4 (24:32):
Right.

Speaker 5 (24:32):
And so if we're genuinely interested in buildings are for communities,
bringing in all of these outside military and federal personnel
is simply not how you do it.

Speaker 6 (24:41):
That's how I know it's bullshit. They don't actually care about.

Speaker 5 (24:43):
Any of this, and like it is, it is sort
of crazy making because I feel like they want us
spinning out about all of this stuff, all of this
bullshit that they're spinning, which fucking guilty is charged for
me this week is all I've been doing. But you know,
it's just it's this. They're so effective at the spin
and the manipulation.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
No, I'm one of the for Fox News hosts who
somehow has a position in government Heath. No, it was
another one. No, No, there is another.

Speaker 6 (25:08):
This is which one?

Speaker 4 (25:12):
It was one of the ones who looks like you're evil?
Aunt oh, Gnian Pierro, Yes, Oh my god, I'm glad
that we could figure that out based on that description.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
That's all you had to say.

Speaker 4 (25:25):
But she was specifically asked like, what are you gonna
do to address the root cause of crime? And she says,
we don't want to. We're not going to. That's not
what we're actually focusing on. We're focusing on just like
eliminating crime through like force, through intimidation, and not even
actually eliminating crime, just just just exercising power, which is
what they're actually trying to say. And that's that's the

(25:47):
whole point of this.

Speaker 5 (25:48):
Yes, and it's not just crime written large through force.
It is crime in cities that are run by democrats
and how are heavily black and brown populations, because you
don't see them going into white commun unities.

Speaker 6 (26:00):
That have crime, which white communities do have crime.

Speaker 5 (26:02):
You don't see them going into like cities where they
have Republican mayors where crime is also quite bad. No,
that's not even that's not even like part of the conversation.
It is very clear what they are saying. This is
an attack.

Speaker 4 (26:15):
It's about power.

Speaker 5 (26:15):
Yeah, this is a show of power to communities that
we don't like. And I have to say something about this,
which is that you know, when on this first happened,
when I was interviewing that longtime reporter Mark Seagraves, something
that he told me that really scared me was that
the administration is doing this entirely legally and by the book.

Speaker 4 (26:33):
He was like, Oh, it's clear that they are following
every letter of the law, to the.

Speaker 5 (26:37):
Point where the first statement out of our mayor's office
was that they were not challenging this takeover of MPD
because they did not feel like they had any kind
of legal grounds to do so, which is grim That
really tells me that they have got their act together.
There was a time where people were like, Oh, they're
just gonna do things and see what sticks and see what,
you know, see what gets challenged in court, see what
they can get away with. It really tells me a

(26:58):
lot that in this instance, they're like, we're doing this
by the book so that there is no legal challenge
to what we are doing.

Speaker 4 (27:15):
What has the reaction been like from Lake City government?

Speaker 9 (27:18):
Ugh?

Speaker 5 (27:19):
I mean, I will say I came on this podcast
a while ago, and I would say, like, I don't
want to say I defended our mayor Muriel Bowser, but
I did want to say, like, she is in a
position that no other election official in the country is in,
where she has to sort of play nice with a madman.
I plame on the show and I said that she

(27:39):
had this strategy of appeasement and making concessions, which, you know,
say what you would look at it, I believe was
grounded in an attempt to like work with Trump to
avoid worse outcomes.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
To avoid this from happening, to avoid this from happening.

Speaker 5 (27:55):
So my point is now, I mean, it really shows
you the futality of trying to make concession with a fascist.

Speaker 4 (28:01):
Right. What's the point.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
Yeah, because the thing that we were trying to avoid,
the thing that all of these little appeasements and concessions.

Speaker 4 (28:07):
Were meant to avoid, has happened.

Speaker 5 (28:09):
To be clear, Trump has not taken over DC entirely,
and home rules still stands, and so the very worst
outcome has not happened yet. But this is pretty damn bad,
and so part of me is like, what did all
those concessions get you? And today, just this morning, she
has totally flipped her tune on this. She actually flew
to mar A Lago to see Trump yesterday and she

(28:30):
came back saying, well, maybe having more law enforcement in
communities in DC will make people safer. And I just
cannot express to you how much it feels like I
was speak for myself. It feels like we have been
abandoned by leadership when we need it most. Right in DC,
we have the mayor Muriel Bowser, who I just told
you about. We have a congressional Representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton,

(28:51):
who has a long time a history of being a
fighter and protector of DC's autonomy. However, she can't vote,
so she doesn't really have a lot of power, and
a big conversation in DC has been the fact that
she is really aging. She is, like, I think, the
second oldest member of Congress in the United States, and
it just we don't feel like we have anybody who

(29:12):
can fight for us, who can speak up for us?
And I will say this, like, I'm very disappointed in
our mayor. I'm very disappointed in the fact that she
has seems to have really been behind Trump on this.
She does have a not terrible relationship with Trump, which
in some ways can be good or bad depending on
how you look at it. But I went into this
having a sense that, oh, well, I think our mayor

(29:32):
is going to fight for us, Our mayor is going
to fight for DC's autonomy.

Speaker 6 (29:35):
And I'm coming out of it thinking I don't think that.

Speaker 5 (29:38):
She is fighting for us like the way that I
would want her to be positioning herself in this moment, I'm.

Speaker 6 (29:42):
Not seeing her do.

Speaker 5 (29:44):
And the reality is, unfortunately the mayor of DC doesn't
really have a lot of power and protection. She does
when you when you compare that to somebody like Gavin Newsom,
who when Trump sent the National Guard into LA knows
that he has like the power of two senators behind him,
right like our mayor doesn't have that. And it just
really made clear when it comes to protecting DC.

Speaker 6 (30:05):
We're really on our own. We're really all we have.

Speaker 4 (30:08):
We don't really have a lot of power.

Speaker 6 (30:10):
We are really depending on folks like you.

Speaker 5 (30:13):
Care to get the word out to people who do
have elected officials that they can call and advocate, because like.

Speaker 6 (30:19):
There's really nobody to call.

Speaker 5 (30:21):
And I will say I will say this, if the
worst thing happens and DC's home Rule is overturned, which
would be a disaster, Like I should come back on
the show and talk about what that would look like.

Speaker 6 (30:33):
If that happens, DC will have no one.

Speaker 5 (30:36):
The only people who will be in charge of how
DC is run is Trump and a small handful of
people that he would personally appoint to be the commissioner
of DC. So the last time that DC did not
have home Rule, it was the only people who were
in charge were the President and I think it was
three commissioners that he personally appointed. None of these people
lived in DC other than the President who lived in

(30:57):
the White House. And so down to the smallest aspect
of city life, I'm talking about social services, DC health,
like unemployment, the streets, the schools, all of that would
be run by President Trump. I cannot express to you
what a disaster this would be. And the smallest thing
getting done in DC, down to a pothole being be

(31:17):
paved would take congressional oversight.

Speaker 6 (31:20):
So anybody who thinks that.

Speaker 5 (31:21):
That is a reasonable way to run a city, oh
my god, wake up.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
Well I am not thrilled about the idea of commissioner
big balls because that would happen. You know that, I know.
And it's funny you mentioned Newsome, and Newsom was another
guy who was trying to make concessions with Trump, specifically
around like trans sports.

Speaker 6 (31:41):
Oh my god, don't even get me started.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
And he tried to, you know, make make those sort
of like concessions and like roll back some aspects of
supporting trans people in schools and trans kids. And then
Trump's Department of Education still went after California schools, so like, yeah,
no matter what concessions you give, they will still go
after you. Earlier, you mentioned there was like a rest
in your on your block last night, Like how how
is this affected daily life for you and other are

(32:05):
the residents of like DC?

Speaker 6 (32:06):
So far it has been grim.

Speaker 5 (32:09):
You know, we've seen border patrol, DA, FBI, National Guard
just walking the streets. And again, like something about DC
is that in August pretty much everybody leaves towns.

Speaker 6 (32:20):
What's a bit of a ghost town.

Speaker 5 (32:21):
There is nothing that justifies the massive disruption in city
services that has happened.

Speaker 6 (32:29):
On my street last.

Speaker 5 (32:30):
Night they had a row of Border Patrol SUVs blocking
traffic for genuinely no reason. Like The level to which
to say are they are purposely disrupting the flow of
city life cannot be overstated. And you know, I want
to make it clear also, this is, as you said,
a real attack on the unhoused community in DC. We

(32:51):
have already seen very disturbing images of unhoused people being
taken away by police yesterday in the White House at
that they were going to be forcibly removing unhoused people,
forcing them into show helter's, hospitals or jails, and if
they didn't go, they would face five I mean, finding
somebody who was living on the street, Like what are
you doing?

Speaker 4 (33:08):
Yeah, finding someone who has no money?

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (33:10):
And DC has a long history of having an issue
with the unhoused community. We do not have enough shelters
to accommodate people, and even if we did not, everybody's
gonna want to go to a shelter. And so this
has been an issue long before Trump was ever in DC.
And it does take some complexity and thoughtfulness to solve it,
not just going in and removing people by brute force,

(33:33):
Like that is the absolute worst thing that you can
be doing for this.

Speaker 4 (33:36):
No, I mean that that relates to Trump's like anti
vagrancy executive order from a few weeks ago, where he
wants to lock homeless people up in like mental hospitals
and jails and like like like forcibly so and change
change the rules for how how shelters work, how shelters
can get funding mandatory like drug treatments, and yeah, really

(33:58):
actually just trying to like involuntarily commit people into civil
institutions exactly. I see parts of what he's doing in
DC is trying to demonstrate his plan for that and
how he wants that to spread across the country and
just yeah, taking people off the street but then locking
them either in a jail or onto like a hospital bed.

Speaker 5 (34:21):
Yes, and there was also an ice raid at the
home Depot out in Northeast this week. Basically, I do
think that first and foremost this is an attack on
DC's black, brown, immigrant, and unhoused community. But you know,
I've seen images of empty bars and empty restaurants where
Ice and border patrol are inside the place.

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Yeah, why would you want to go out? So if
there's a fucking like the military parading around.

Speaker 6 (34:48):
Yes, it's fucking up the vibes right, Like that's I
will say.

Speaker 5 (34:51):
Like so in addition to the attacks on these vulnerable communities,
like if you want to have a community where people
feel safe to go out, they want to spend money,
they want to like in joy of the.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
City, the vibes are terrible.

Speaker 5 (35:02):
This is this is just everything that makes DC great
and a good place to live in a place that
people want to come and spend time and and start
their families. This kind of show of force goes against
that and threatens that. It really does threat like DC
is a particular place. It's like why this is my home.
This kind of stuff really threatens our way of life
in ways that are just.

Speaker 6 (35:22):
It really is just sad.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
I'm not sure if you have like examples like what
people are trying to do to cope with this or
try to like like stand their ground in their community.
I guess, But like how are people like channeling their
frustration right now?

Speaker 5 (35:38):
Well, there was a very viral video of somebody throwing
a sub sandwich at a military personnel on us to eat.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
So well, that's a start. As long as we if
we can get fifty thousand people with sub sandwiches, we
might be onto something.

Speaker 6 (35:51):
Hero DC needs.

Speaker 4 (35:52):
So that's one literally the hero DC needs. Yeah, I
see what you did there.

Speaker 5 (35:58):
Yeah, I would say, so there are I feel grateful
that there are organizations in DC, like local organizations that
were preparing for this, and so organizations like Free DC.
I spoke to one of their representatives earlier this week
about what they're doing, and they're really focused on giving
residents resources and so they're running cop watching trainings.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
That's good. That's good.

Speaker 6 (36:18):
They're making sure that.

Speaker 5 (36:19):
Folks know that their rights have not changed, know their
rights if an agent comes up to you to talk
to you. They're making sure people know what they do
and don't have to say in those situations, which I
think is important. People should definitely check out Free DC.
They've been around since the sixties or they have been
protecting DC's autonomy for a very long time. One of
the things that they were telling folks to do was

(36:40):
do you remember how in twenty twenty people would go
outside and bang pots and pans to thank essential workers
and medical personnel. They were telling folks because the streets
feel so militarized. Not everybody's gonna feel like going out
to a protest or going out to a march at
eight o'clock at night. Make as much noise as you can,
whether it's from your open window or from your block
or from your do as a way to like demonstrate

(37:02):
opposition to this. And so if you want more information
about the kinds of that kind of organizing that they're
trying to provide for folks, definitely check out Free DC.
But I do think, I mean, the vibes are rage,
and I hate that that rage feels so impotent that
we that like this is just another a million examples

(37:24):
of why we need full state that we've needed it
for so long, because we are being disenfranchised. We have
the possibility that people in power in DC could be
people that nobody elected. Trump could appoint anybody as Commissioner
of DC, and yeah, it could be big balls, right,
And so we are in a situation that is so grim,
and I think that shows, you know, people, people are

(37:45):
really feeling that. And I guess one thing I want
to I want to add is that I was talking
earlier about how it's frustrating that I find that I'm
often in this conversation like trying to combat Trump, and
I feel I feel like I'm in a a stance
that I hate, which is this reactive stance where he
used bullshit, and I feel like it's my job to
debunk it, and it's like, well, it's a bullshit I

(38:06):
could be doing other things.

Speaker 6 (38:07):
I hate that.

Speaker 5 (38:09):
We have gotten this narrative that cities are bad, and
that goes against our shared understanding of this country where
cities are good. If you live in a city, don't
let Trump turn you against city life. Don't let Trump
turn you against cities. People want to be in cities.
Cities are good, cities are safe, cities are cool to live,
and people want to be in the city. If people

(38:30):
didn't want to live in DC, my rent wouldn't be
so goddamn high. Right, people want to be here for
a reason. When Trump got up on that presser and
talked about how tourists come to DC this and that
he's right. If DC were truly a bombed out hell hole,
Taurus wouldn't want to bring their families here. Cities are good,
and I don't think that we should let Trump rewrite
the narrative that our cities are bad. Cities are good,

(38:51):
they are good places to be. We don't have to
get caught up in his fake bullshit narrative of demonizing cities.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
So that's why I think everyone should travel to Let's
all go to the capitol, put on some put on
some masks, wave some flags, and just get in there
to show could we could take it over, we can
take the city back. Joe Biden, twenty twenty eight. Let's go.

Speaker 5 (39:14):
Yeah. I mean, I did see this interview on News
Nation where I think it was Mehdi Hassan was talking
to some shithead and he was like, oh, if Trump
cares about crime so much, why did he pardon a
bunch of January sixth attackers who threatened and attacked law enforcement?

Speaker 6 (39:29):
And it's like, oh, he would be.

Speaker 5 (39:30):
The interviewer was just like, oh, come on, come on,
you want to talk about that, come on.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
And it's like, okay, I.

Speaker 6 (39:34):
Thought tough on crime. Huh, tough on crime?

Speaker 4 (39:36):
Okay, No, it's it's it's crime with three ellipses, not
the actual category of crime exactly crime wink wink.

Speaker 10 (39:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (39:46):
It's like we know what they're what they're trying to say,
but Honestly, just talking to you about this has made
me feel a lot better.

Speaker 4 (39:52):
I've been raging all week.

Speaker 5 (39:54):
So this is the first time that I feel like
I've actually like gotten it all out.

Speaker 6 (39:58):
So thank you for talking to me about it.

Speaker 4 (40:01):
Yeah, no, we will. We will certainly keep up with
what's happening in d C with you know how long
National Guard's going to be there, how long this this
federalization lasts. Maybe they'll eliminate all crime within thirty days
and things will go back to normal. Who knows.

Speaker 6 (40:16):
I mean the day that he took over there was over.

Speaker 5 (40:19):
There was a shooting like an hour or two later,
So I was like, oh, at job, we're going.

Speaker 4 (40:22):
To handle this well, I guess not, but no, we will.
We will keep up with this as well as Trump's
promise is to go further and expand to five other cities.
So thank you for sharing your your thoughts and experiences
as a resident of d C.

Speaker 6 (40:38):
Bridget, Thank you for having me, and yeah, like, if
you're out there in d C, stay safe, keep hope alive.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
We're all we got. Where else can people find you
on the internet, Bridget? Besides, you know, on the on
the steps of the Capitol waving an American flag.

Speaker 6 (40:56):
Yeah in a mask.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (40:58):
You can find me at my podcast.

Speaker 5 (41:00):
I have a podcast on iHeartRadio called There Are No
Girls on the Internet. I have a podcast about local
DC news and issues called Citycast DC. You can also
find me on Instagram at bridget rain d C, on
TikTok at bridget rain DC, or on YouTube.

Speaker 6 (41:12):
And there Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 8 (41:14):
Cheers.

Speaker 11 (41:33):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
co author of a recently published book about the eugenics
movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

Speaker 12 (41:45):
And I'm Stephen Monicelli. I'm an investigator reporter in Dallas,
where I contribute to a variety of publications as well
as Cool Zone Media. I cover political extremism in Texas
and beyond. Elon Musk has dominated the news since the
twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and for a lot of reasons.
There's a billionaire's flirtation with neo Nazi politics. There's his

(42:09):
gutting of the social safety net through Doge. His soap
opera estrangement from President Trump also grabbed much of the Spotlight.
In the past two years, Musk has resuscitated in two
Texas communities, one of the worst ideas from the robber
baron age. In an effort to control his workers' lives
on and off the clock, Musk is bringing the company

(42:31):
town back to life.

Speaker 11 (42:33):
On May third of this year, on the South Texas
coast of the Gulf of Mexico, people went to the
voting booth on a peninsula called Boca Chica. They voted
to turn their one and a half square mile patch
of unincorporated land into a city called Starbase. Almost all
of the voters were employees of musk SpaceX Rocket Company.

(42:55):
So are the candidates elected to govern Texas newest city.
But Musk is clearly the power behind the throne.

Speaker 12 (43:02):
Meanwhile, in Bastrup County near Austin in central Texas, Musk
gobbled up local real estate in loosely governed unincorporated lands.
That's where, in addition to Starbase, he's working to create
another company town he calls Snailbrook. Many Bascht rep presidents
say Musk's businesses are poisoning the water, air, and soil

(43:24):
in their community. On this episode of It could Happen
Here we'll discuss the unfortunate history of company towns in
the United States, how company towns have always undermined democracy
and workers' rights, and what these elon musk company towns
may mean for the future of United States capitalism.

Speaker 11 (43:43):
Speaking of capitalism will be back after a few words
from our sponsors. Roughly between eighteen eighty in the mid
nineteen thirties, an astounding twenty five hundred company towns dotted

(44:05):
the American landscape.

Speaker 4 (44:07):
A product of Gilded Age greed.

Speaker 11 (44:09):
At best, these corporate planned communities represented paternalistic experiments of
mind control. At their worst, they became miniature police states.
In Steinway Village in New York, where not surprisingly, workers
manufactured Steinway pianos, Paulman, Illinois, where employees made train cars,
and Hershey's Pennsylvania, which was, of course, a chocolate manufacturing center.

(44:33):
Employers built the houses that the workers lived in, the
stores where they shopped, the saloons where they drank, and
the schools where their children learned.

Speaker 12 (44:43):
Chad Pearson is an historian of American labor at the
University of North Texas, and he's the author of a
noted book called Capitalism's Terrorists. Klansmen, lawmen, and employers in
the long nineteenth century. We talked to him about the
rise and fall of company towns in the mid eighteen
hundreds to the early twentieth century. Could you explain how

(45:04):
company towns got started in the United States and the
motives of the businessmen who started them.

Speaker 13 (45:09):
Certainly, so, really, I think we can identify three periods,
three phases. So the first phase would be we might
associate with the so called Lowell Girls in Lowell, Massachusetts,
which began in the eighteen twenties and continued into the
subsequent decades. These were young women girls and basically, you know,

(45:30):
they lived on the campus the town. The boss would
decide when they would work and when they would eat,
and that sort of thing. After that, we have another
phase which we could identify with George Pullman and the
Pullman Company just outside of Chicago in the late nineteenth century,
really in the eighteen eighties. Again, these were very controlling
environments in which you know, the employer had all to say,

(45:53):
workers would live in company housing. Again, they'd go to
the company church, and you know, we're really control both
during and after the workday. And then we have a
whole bunch of them, mostly in mining and textile lumber communities.
By nineteen thirty nine, there were seventy planned industrial settlements
built after nineteen hundred.

Speaker 10 (46:13):
So quite a few.

Speaker 13 (46:14):
So whatever period we're talking about, these places where infamous
for management's use of surveillance and power. This is designed
really to fundamentally control folks, which round expression again in homes, workplaces,
and churches.

Speaker 6 (46:27):
You would have to sign contracts.

Speaker 13 (46:29):
So in a place like mining towns in West Virginia,
you'd have to sign a contract that gave the boss
the authority to evict labor activists or people, you know,
workers who might be involved in trying to improve their
conditions by fighting back, or they would be evicted for
so called undesirable behavior, again that generally involved things like

(46:49):
union organizing.

Speaker 12 (46:51):
Pearson described these company towns as many dictatorships in which
fighting for better conditions could result in harsh retaliation, and
in which ministers that were hired by the company and
a church built by the company bosses fed workers a
steady stream of propaganda.

Speaker 13 (47:08):
This happened in places like New England textile mills to
coal mining areas in Alabama and West Virginia.

Speaker 10 (47:14):
Well might happened.

Speaker 13 (47:15):
You'll say you're you're active in a union, or you're
resisting your boss. Right, the boss or his underlings might
send in mind guards and say you and your family
get out, throw the stuff, their furniture on the street,
and there would be no no accountability, no way to
you know, address that that problem. You'd also have company towns.

(47:37):
You'd have a religious you'd have preachers who would preach
the company line as well. Right, So that kind of
pro business, pro capitalist and doctrination was expressed both in
the workplace and from the pulpit.

Speaker 11 (47:53):
A key way that company towns control workers was by
not paying them an actual American dollars paper certificates called script.
They could only be spent at company owned stores. This
gave the company monopoly power over what their workforce bought.

Speaker 13 (48:10):
A twenty five pounds sack of flower costs two fifty
at the company's store. It costs only one ninety elsewhere. Right,
So this was a way for companies to sort of
corner the market, if you will, right, they could jack
up prices.

Speaker 10 (48:25):
You were basically a slave to the system.

Speaker 12 (48:29):
George Pullman, who established the company that made luxury railroad cars,
created a company town in Illinois in eighteen eighty one,
Pullman presented his experiment to the world as a utopia.
The workers' houses there had natural gas and running water,
which was not the norm at the time. Some even
had indoor plumbing. The town had retail shops and well

(48:52):
supplied markets, and tourists visited it as a supposed ideal
community of the future.

Speaker 11 (48:57):
In spite of the apparent shininess of Pullman Illinois, the
relationship between Pullman and his employees turned violent in eighteen
ninety four. A is doctor Pearson explains.

Speaker 13 (49:08):
So Pullman, George Pullman, began creating this utopian community in
eighteen eighty Okay, that's shortly after this massive nationwide strike
in eighteen seventy seven of railroad workers. So a lot
of bosses in the aftermath of these massive confrontations were like, Okay,
we've got to do something. We've got to do something
to solve what they called the labor problem, the labor question.

(49:30):
And one way they did that was through welfare work,
trying to be more benevolent right parents as opposed to
only six and so Pullman was established in eighteen eighty
four just outside of Chicago, had about twelve thousand residents
and it was at the time the largest, most famous.

Speaker 10 (49:49):
Company town in the nation.

Speaker 13 (49:50):
And he did, I mean, let's give credit where credit
is due some things that did improve the conditions for employees.
So he had a company doctor. He oversaw good school
system funded athletic programs a company banned and he modeled
this on a company town outside of Bradford, England. So
what we see is, you know, the company towns do

(50:11):
not originate in the United States. They are sort of
a phenomenon that we see across the industrialized world. But
of course there was also a darker side. He banned alcohol,
he restricted tobacco use, He imposed a curfew, right, so
you want to go out, you know, it's five o'clock somewhere.

Speaker 8 (50:25):
No, it's not right.

Speaker 13 (50:27):
And so it was also pretty expensive to live there.
Residents had to spend something like thirty percent of their
money on rent, and when they saved enough money an
impossible thing to do. Often when they did save that money,
they would they would get out.

Speaker 12 (50:42):
Pullman's experiment in welfare capitalism came crashing down when the
United States sank into an economic depression that lasted from
eighteen ninety three to eighteen ninety seven, at one point
three million people, or about twenty percent of the country's workforce,
could not find jobs. Hunger and suicide became rampant as

(51:02):
hard times dragged on, and Pullman laid off hundreds of
workers and slashed wages by thirty three percent.

Speaker 11 (51:09):
During this time, residents of the company town in Illinois
struggled to pay rent at the Pullman owned housing, where
management refused the lower prices. Eugene Debs, who would soon
emerge as the leader of the Socialist Party of America
and would served five times as that party's presidential nominee,
led one hundred and fifty thousand member American Railway Union

(51:32):
the ARU, stage a strike calling for a rollback in
pay cuts in a reduction rents at the company housing.
The strike spread nationwide, with railroad workers refusing to handle
trains carrying Pullman cars.

Speaker 12 (51:46):
President Grover Cleveland dispatched twelve thousand troops to crush the
uprising and reopen the rail lines. Federal marshalls shot two
strikers to death in Kensington, Illinois, not far from Chicago,
while authorities arrested Dabbs and put him in prison for
defying the court order by continuing the strike in a
stop to workers, the House and Senate unanimously passed a

(52:08):
bill creating what we now know today as Labor Day.

Speaker 13 (52:13):
Later on, in jail, using depths becomes radicalized, reading marks
runs for president. A few times after that, bottom line
workers lost a strike, but Pullman's experiments soon ended. The
Illinois Supreme Court rule that George Pullman's ownership of the
community was in violation of its charter and dismantled the
town in eighteen ninety eight. So a dramatic period in

(52:37):
US history, one of the most important struggles in US
labor history, and it really showed the way in which
bosses the state came together to really fight labor.

Speaker 12 (52:50):
By around the end of the eighteen hundreds, about three
percent of the American population lived under the almost complete
control of their corporate masters. Meanwhile, an extensive network of
spies filled company towns. These corporate agents posed as fellow workers, bartenders, mailmen,
or just another customer at the store. They reported to

(53:11):
management any e mail content who complained about working hours
or wages. Fired workers were often placed on a blacklist
that was widely distributed among corporations and made landing a
new job even more difficult, Some mining towns resembled prison camps.
Arm guards surrounded the towns to keep out union organizers

(53:32):
in the corporate overlords in company towns use violent means
to maintain tyrannical control. We asked doctor Pearson to explain this. Now,
Doctor Pearson, you titled one of your books Capitalism's Terrorists.
Then you were referring basically to the fact that corporations,
including the ones that owned company towns, often used private armies,

(53:54):
armed militias, or they basically hired outside violent groups to
control labor. Did you go into that a little bit more?

Speaker 13 (54:01):
Let me read you an anecdote from Vandergriff, Pennsylvania. Vandergrift,
Pennsylvania is a company pound not far from Pittsburgh. It's
a steel town. And in July nineteen oh nine, during
a strike against the American Sheet and Tinplay Company, the
company's superintendent was a guy named Oscar Lindquist. He led
a mob of hundreds to a hotel in the nearby

(54:22):
town of Apollo, where the union organizers were staying. So
there's an effort to build union membership in this company town.
And Linquist was so pissed about their presence, so he
informed the organizers that they had an hour to leave
town and that he would burn the building down if
they refused to comply. When they protested, insisting that they

(54:43):
had free speech and assembly rights, Linquist claimed that quote
his word was the law. A local town official, reinforcing
linquist demand, gave the men until the next morning to leave.
So we have threats of like burning places down, killing
people right, and ultimately no accountability. I think it's fair

(55:04):
to call these people terrorists.

Speaker 12 (55:06):
The harshness of company towns inspired worker resistance, including what
came to be known as the Colorado Coalfield War. We'll
hear more about that, and a tragedy that came to
be known as the Ludlow Massacre. After this break sponsored
by some companies, one of the bloodiest confrontations between a

(55:37):
company militia and striking workers in American history took place
in Ludlow, Colorado, in the early twentieth century. The Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company controlled several coal mines, and it
was owned by the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller,
who also owned the Standard Oil Company. The coal workers
were unhappy with several things there were king twelve hour days,

(56:01):
six days a week, sometimes seven. Through their union, the
United Mine Workers, they asked for rays and for their
workday to be no more than eight hours. They also
demanded the right to live in housing that wasn't part
of the company town controlled by Rockefeller, and to spend
their hard earned money in stores that he didn't control.
The relationship between the United Mineworkers and Rockefeller broke down

(56:24):
when he refused to negotiate with them. Between September nineteen
thirteen and December nineteen fourteen, the coal miners and Ludlow
stage strikes against the richest man on the planet at
the time.

Speaker 11 (56:37):
Instead of negotiating, Rockefeller assembled a private army of local sheriffs, deputies,
and private detectives. The militia armed itself with a motorized
gatling gun that Rockefeller's goons named the Death Special. The
nation recoiled in horror when on April twentieth, nineteen fourteen,
militia troops attacked a company miner's tent colony. They were

(57:00):
living in the tent colony because that had been kicked
out of company housing. During the armed assault, Rockefeller's troops
killed sixty six men, women, and children. They doused the
tents with kerosene, incinerating eleven hiding in a pit, including
a pregnant woman.

Speaker 12 (57:17):
The folk singer Woody Guthrie immortalized the horrific scene at
Ludlow in his ballad the Ludlow Massacre.

Speaker 4 (57:25):
You struck a man in the blaze it started.

Speaker 14 (57:29):
You pulled the triggers of your gabling guns.

Speaker 12 (57:32):
I made around for the children, for the farwells of me.

Speaker 9 (57:38):
Thirteen children died from your guns.

Speaker 12 (57:43):
About two hundred people in all died in what came
to be called the Colorado Coalfield War. So we asked
doctor Pearson about the long term impact of the Ludlow
massacre and what happened to company towns in the subsequent years.

Speaker 13 (57:56):
So basically, on the morning of April twenty at nineteen fourteen,
guardsmen who were aligned with the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company,
which is owned by John D. Rockefeller, attacked this camp
of strikers, mineworkers strikers, ultimately killing twenty one people, including
eleven children. This brutality, this brutality lasted for fourteen hours.

(58:18):
The guards torched the colony, and this came in the
midst of a strike that had been going on for months,
which started in September nineteen thirteen, and so this was
a real struggle. It was a terrible public relations disaster.
From the vantage point of Rockefeller in the company, the

(58:38):
pressure to do something was great. And so what we
see as we see government officials meeting and discussing this event,
there are these various gatherings of business people and labor
unions trying to resolve it. And in the aftermath of this,
Rockefeller worked closely with what we might call industrial relations specialists,

(58:59):
and he became a champion of welfare capitalism. Welfare capitalism,
like company unions, they sort of top down initiatives designed
to win, as I pointed out, factory solidarity instead of
class solidarity. And so how successful that was probably not.
These bosses continued to exploit, but they did so with

(59:21):
smiley faces.

Speaker 12 (59:22):
As you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, company
towns never completely died, and they're making a bit of
a disturbing comeback via Rockefeller's successor as the world's richest man.
South African native and Texas transplant Elon Musk. Texas Governor
Greg Abbott has been a big ally of Musk at
least until his nasty split with Trump over the president's

(59:44):
tax and spending policies. But nonetheless, Musk is still popular
in Texas, and the state and local governments, for instance,
have given Musk sixty four million dollars worth of tax
breaks to establish his Tesla factory called Giga Texas in
Travis County, not far from the state capitol.

Speaker 11 (01:00:02):
COVID nineteen restrictions in California during the pandemic and rage,
Musk for a time defied state law. He derided California
as defined by quote overregulation, over litigation, and over taxation,
poop on the sidewalk, and scorn. In contrast, Texas stood
out for its lax environmental and labor standards. As Abbot

(01:00:24):
bragged to the Fox Business Channel.

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):
A need that Elon had with speed.

Speaker 15 (01:00:29):
He does everything fast, and this would have taken five,
maybe ten years to accomplish in California. I told him
that Texas moves at the speed of business. He was
able to complete a mal long gigafactory in a year
and a half. That is unheard of, probably not replicable
in any other state.

Speaker 12 (01:00:49):
Whether Bastor residents liked Musk or not, it soon became
clear that he was making a very large local footprint.
Bastrip County has always been as for its beauty. This
is how Bastro sold itself to tourists, businesses, and potential
residents in the early two thousands.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Next time you're on the way between Houston and Austin
or points in between, you want to stop here in Bastrov.
We've got a pretty little place here along the Colorado River,
a place with charm and great natural beauty. We're the
home of the lost times. So cross the bridge into
the old town and have a look. We've been growing

(01:01:29):
here since eighteen thirty two, and growing in a good way,
a way that looks to the future and that preserves
the landmarks of the past. Bastrop has more than one
hundred and twenty homes and other commercial and public buildings
on the National Register of Historic Places. Some people come

(01:01:51):
here just to drive around town and see the pretty houses.

Speaker 11 (01:01:57):
There's a heavy price for moving at Greg Abbott's beat
a business. However, chap Ambrose, a landowner in Bashtrop County,
thirty three miles southeast of Austin, said that he admired
Musk for being a high tech titan. He was excited
when the billionaire announced he was going to move part
of his business empire to the small, mostly agricultural county.

(01:02:19):
Ambrose describes his feelings about musk arrival in his YouTube
series Keep Bashstrop Boring.

Speaker 7 (01:02:30):
The weird part here is I'm actually an Elon Musk fan.
I have my Tesla cybertruck reservation here from November of
twenty nineteen, and SpaceX's Starlink, their satellite service. I've also
signed up for last year.

Speaker 11 (01:02:49):
All of Bashtrop's natural and architectural splendor, however, is in
danger since Musk came to town. In Texas counties have
even less ability to protect the environment than these cities,
and Musk, hat strategically places operation on land will face
lax local oversight. He used his fortune to buy about

(01:03:09):
thirty five thousand acres of what was once farmland in
Bastrop County, which is now headquarters for the Boring Company.
The Boring Company plans to build tunnels Musk hoops one
day will provide high speed underground alternatives to our current
web of interstates. Musk has secured permits to dig six

(01:03:30):
test tunnels in Baschtup County, which is now also officially
the headquarters of his social media platform X formerly known
as Twitter. The Musk Industrial complex also includes a five
hundred thousand square foot warehouse where the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation,
more commonly known as SpaceX, builds terminals for another Musk

(01:03:51):
business venture, the satellite company Starlink. Neuralink, which manufactures computer
chips that have been experimentally implanted in test subjects brains
and resulted in the deaths of many chimpanzees, is also nearby.
The Tesla Gigafactory, which produces electronic cars, is just thirteen
miles west on an unincorporated land neighboring Travis County. I've

(01:04:14):
seen it driving down the highway. It's an abomination. Construction
has also begun on a company town Musk has named Snailbrook.
Plans for Snailbook eventually include one hundred and ten single
family rental homes actually owned by Musk. So far, fewer
than twenty modular homes have been completed. According to teen Vogue,

(01:04:36):
plans are that rent for these houses will start at
about eight hundred a month for two or three bedroom dwelling,
which is well below the nineteen hundred and twenty five
dollars median rent. In bashtrop County, a Montessori school called
ad Astra, which from the Latin which means too the Stars,
is open, along with the boring bodega, which the Austin

(01:04:58):
American Statesman notes offers snacks, soda, coffee, beer, wine, a
children's playground, lounge space complete with video games and beanbag toss,
a pickleball court that can be rented for a dollar
an hour, and of course, a variety of boring company merchandise,
such as a T shirt that says tunnel Mars.

Speaker 12 (01:05:19):
This purported worker utopia already has a Gilded Age style catch.
If workers get fired by Musk Long, famous for his
volatility and mass layoffs at his companies, they will only
have a month to vacate their homes. And, as with
the Gilded Age, much under the Snailbrook glitter is not gold.
The town's playground, for instance, lack shade from the broiling

(01:05:41):
summertime Central Texas heat, and much of the equipment is
broken and made of inferior materials. The Monastery school initially
admitted fifty students, but the campus wasn't big enough. Only
sixteen actually attended when classes first opened. Because the facilities
were too small.

Speaker 11 (01:05:57):
Musk once marketed himself as an environmental savior. His electric
cars would supposedly save the planet from climate change. However,
in Bashstrop County, he's a major polluter. The Boring company
petitioned Texas for the right to pour one hundred and
forty three thousand gallons of treated wastewater into the Colorado
River every single day. Meanwhile, the Texts Commission on Environmental

(01:06:21):
Quality to date has cited SpaceX and the Boring Company
thirteen times because the unauthorized discharge of water used to
clean concrete trucks. The company also failed to meet state
standards regarding erosion control and the release of toxic chemicals
in the soil, As teen Vogue reported. However, the resulting

(01:06:42):
fines represent mere pocket change for a man who earns
an estimated one thousand dollars a second. The self professed
Musk fan Chap Ambrose, who he heard from earlier, said
he's disappointed about all this.

Speaker 7 (01:06:55):
There's a culture of secrecy and it seems they're actively
trying to obscure the truth, not just from neighbors, but
also are county officials. If you're going to prototype the
world's fastest tunneling machine in minderborhood. Then I expect the
most innovative and transparent safety systems to go alongside it.
Why do they refuse to give direct answers? And why

(01:07:17):
won't they put their promises in writing? Why do they
refuse to follow the very minimal restrictions we have in
Texas for development? And why do I have to go
to Commissioner Court so that they put in a legal
septic system. It seems to me that they only follow
the rules and behave when they're being watched.

Speaker 11 (01:07:35):
Transparency may have disappeared forever for residents. Amost other company town,
one of most most lucrative companies, SpaceX, launches its rockets
about twenty miles outside of Brownsville on the Texas Gulf
Coast near the Mexican border. Most of the residents near
the launch site, known as Boka Chica Village or Tehano's

(01:07:57):
and many struggle economically. Lands and beaches are considered sacred
by members of the Carazou called Mekrudo tribe of Texas.
The area residents were clearly invisible to us during a
twenty eighteen press conference when he spoke of how test
flights such as those as he planned at the Book
at Chica site, were a necessary first step for exploration

(01:08:18):
in the Moon and Mars. The subsequent controversy was reported
by a local TV station KRGV.

Speaker 16 (01:08:25):
When asked how soon flights would be going to the
Moon or Mars, must talked about the necessary test flights
that would need to take place first.

Speaker 7 (01:08:33):
Most likely it's going to cover having at a Brownsvie location,
because we've got a lot of land with nobody around,
and so if it was.

Speaker 10 (01:08:40):
Up, it's cool.

Speaker 11 (01:08:41):
The people at Brownsville didn't agree that if a rocket
ship blew up in their neighborhood it would be quote cool.

Speaker 16 (01:08:48):
His comment is not sitting well with Gail McConaughey.

Speaker 17 (01:08:51):
He's been out here before. He damn sure. I ought
to know that he's seen the village. You gotta know
that it's not a ghost home.

Speaker 16 (01:08:58):
McConaughey and his wife have been living at Bukachka Village
every winter for the past eleven years. He says he's
offended that he and the other residents are considered nobody.
It also raises questions, he adds, about how safe the
launches will be in.

Speaker 17 (01:09:13):
A rocket that size or any size that would go up,
and who knows what might happen. It might start tipping
the wrong direction. Who knows if something happened to the
engines and explodes, that's cool when you're talking about there's
lives here, that's a mile and a half away.

Speaker 12 (01:09:27):
Kane's words were prophetic. In subsequent years, Musk's rockets did
blow up, such as in April twenty twenty three, when
a SpaceX special obliterated the concrete launch pad, leaving behind
a massive crater. As Scientific American reported, quote, particular debris
as well as concrete and steel shrapnel from the bosched
launch scattered far and wide across the surrounding landscape, igniting

(01:09:51):
fires and slamming into protected habitats and public beaches. Ash,
dust and sand grains hurled aloft by this first star
ship test rained down as far as Port Isabelle, about
five miles from the launch site end quote. Another Musk
rocket launch, this time from Bokachika, exploded again this past
June nineteenth, as reported by WTCHR, whoa in.

Speaker 14 (01:10:15):
The skies over South Texas overnight, A massive fireball after
a SpaceX rocket exploded during a static rocket test.

Speaker 8 (01:10:23):
A ground test for an upcoming launch, the.

Speaker 4 (01:10:26):
Ship thirty sixers blew up.

Speaker 10 (01:10:27):
Ship thirty six ers blue up.

Speaker 14 (01:10:29):
SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, said the Starship Rocket experienced
a major anomaly while preparing for its tenth flight test,
adding that all personnel are safe and there are no
hazards to residents in surrounding communities. The explosion rattled nearby
residents who posted videos on social media, one telling my

(01:10:50):
San Antonio News quote, our whole neighborhood felt it. It
shook all of our houses.

Speaker 11 (01:10:56):
In spite of this record at Mayhem. On Saturday, May third,
the Chika Village held an election on whether to incorporate
as a city of Starbase. The proposal to create the
state's newest city carried by a vote of two hundred
and twelve to six. Nearly two thirds of the electorate
lived near SpaceX's launch site. Overwhelmingly the voters were Musk employees.

(01:11:18):
All three candidates elected to Starbas's New City Commission ran unopposed,
and one without putting up a single campaign sign or
hosting a single candidate forum. All three were employees of
Musk and SpaceX.

Speaker 12 (01:11:33):
As The Texas Tribune has reported, the new city government
increased control over the nearby public beach, revered by local
indigenous people. Some local residents feel the creation of the
company town gives them even less power to protect what's
seen as a local treasure.

Speaker 18 (01:11:48):
Starbase is only about one and a half square miles. It's,
of course, the home of SpaceX, and the main goal
is sending humans to Mars. According to the FAA, Starbas
is aiming for twenty five rocket launches a year. But
this is all coming with a bit of controversy, especially
over access to the popular.

Speaker 6 (01:12:06):
Boca Chica Beach.

Speaker 18 (01:12:08):
Any SpaceX rocket launcher engine test requires closing a local
highway to the beach, and some say Starbase is giving
Musk too much control. People gathered at the beach Saturday
night to protest.

Speaker 7 (01:12:20):
They're just tearing it up and doing whatever they want
because they want to gentrify. They want to be a
city by themselves. When you gentify the land, you're gentrifying
the soul of the people.

Speaker 11 (01:12:30):
Juan Massias, the protester you just heard, is the chair
of the Carazau called the Crudeo tribe of Texas. He
told the Texas Tribune quote, these hills are sacred to us.
They don't know the history of the land, and they're
trying to erase that. Of course, Musk has a history
as well, is one characterized by labor abuses.

Speaker 12 (01:12:51):
Like the Robert Barons who ruled as emperors over their
Gilded Age company towns. Musk has been accused of firing
union organizers at his Austin gigafactory. Workers claim Musk either
didn't pay them for overtime or shortchange them. Those same
workers charged that records were faked to document their safety training,
and according to the Texas Observer of Publication I'm glad

(01:13:14):
to contribute to, one worker said he was forced to
work in a flooded part of the factory and had
to work on a metal roof at night without lights.
These are clear POSHA violations.

Speaker 11 (01:13:26):
Is highly unlikely that the state of Texas will require Musk
to provide any transparency about his business practices. Governor Abbott
recently refused the request of a media outlet, the Texas Newsroom,
to release emails between him and Musk, claiming the extensive
communication between the pair was quote intimate and potentially quote
embarrassing and therefore not a public interest. With so much

(01:13:50):
a Musk enterprise in the state, operating in company towns
he politically controls on county land with little oversight. Musk
has become the lone star state. It's modern, unchecked robber
baron extraordinaire, and with the aid of his on again
off again allied Donald Trump, he has blazed a trail
for other tech billionaires. When Trump ran for president last year,

(01:14:12):
he floated a proposal to build what he called quote
freedom cities across the country, pushed by oligarchs like Peter Thiel,
Mark Andresen and Sam Altman, who ironically now has a
bit of a fit and a fight with Elon Musk.
They hate each other and it's really funny. These proposed
fiefdoms would function as libertarian oasis. Coal miners were once

(01:14:35):
paid in scrip, and the federal government banned script in
nineteen thirty eight. But nevertheless, Jeff Bezos already uses something
he calls quote swag bucks that are redeemable at Amazon
to reward those in the company he deems his most
productive workers. Workers in the freedom cities under discussion would
not earn us legal tender, but would get cryptocurrency instead,

(01:14:58):
the historically stay store of value that has never ripped
off thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
people in the municipal monstrosities imagined in the scheme. Workers
would be paid not in US currency, but, as I
just said, this insane highly volatile cryptocurrency. These corporate havens
would operate with the barest nods to workplace safety, environmental protections,

(01:15:22):
and job security, and god forbid, might even scam their
workers by trading in that same highly volatile cryptocurrency that
they're paying them in back in bash Stop. Chap Ambrose
thinks we can still embrace the future with that surrendering
a more old fashioned concept of community. He helps them

(01:15:43):
must one day sees the light.

Speaker 7 (01:15:47):
I truly hope the borrowing company succeeds in its efforts.
I think tunneling makes sense, and if they can improve
traffic into Austin and around it, that'd be great. But
you have to be better neighbors. Texas has strongly and
owner rights and you can do pretty much what you
want on your land. However, Texas law also says that
we share the air and you share the groundwater with

(01:16:09):
me and my one year old son. So if you're
going to come to my neighborhood and build the fastest
and most efficient tunneling operation, then I expect the most
innovative and transparent safety systems to go alongside it.

Speaker 11 (01:16:24):
The struggle against the absolute power wielded by the rulers
of the Gilded Age's company towns led to actual battles
with literal casualties on American soil. Doctor Pearson reminded us
that the hard life and the Gilded Era, the era
of company towns, represented an American norm rather than an exception,

(01:16:44):
and because of Musk Teal and other modern robber barons,
the battles fought in Pullman, Illinois and Ludlow, Colorado might
have to be fought once again.

Speaker 13 (01:16:54):
Some of you folks may be aware of Jefferson Cowie
and Nick Salvatory's book, which he calls The Great Exception,
and they argue that, you know, most of American history
is like the guilded. Yeah, we had a forty to
fifty year period from I don't know, the thirties the
seventies when things were kind of better, right, you know
what Blue Magas and Red magas alike like to celebrate,
But the fact is, you know, there's things were pretty

(01:17:16):
exploitative then as well. And so what kind of lessons
can we learn from resistance to capitalism in its various forms?
And I think the key one is to trust one another.
There's no substitute for working class solidarity. Stop having illusions
in the Democratic Party. They're not going to save you.
And so to see, you know, where where there are

(01:17:36):
victories when when workers are are united, and we see
a little bit of that, you know, kicking ice agents
out of towns, right, I mean, that's politicians aren't helping
us there, that's you know, collective action of working class people.
It's not formal unions, but it's something, you know, I
see hope. I see hope in the mass mobilization of
working class people irrespective of race, gender, class, and any

(01:17:59):
other identity.

Speaker 11 (01:18:00):
I'm Michael Phillips, So you can find me on substack
at doctor m Phillips two thousand and one, on Blue
Sky and Facebook. Google my name and quote White Metropolis.

Speaker 12 (01:18:11):
And I'm Stephen Wana Charlie. You can find me on
Blue Sky, and I've got a Patreon and all those
other things. Thank you for listening, and we hope that
you found this delightful topic about Elon Musk's desire to
bring back company towns informative. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 10 (01:18:44):
Hello, hell helloo, and welcome to get up and here.
I'm Andrew Siege otherwise doing this andresm on YouTube and
I'm here.

Speaker 8 (01:18:53):
With James, just James, and have a YouTube.

Speaker 10 (01:18:57):
Well than just James, I mean, I love talking to you,
so in more than just James to me.

Speaker 8 (01:19:02):
Oh, thank you, Andrew. It's very sweet. I enjoyed these two.
It's the phone for me.

Speaker 10 (01:19:06):
Yeah, So I really I'd like to get into one
of the hotter topics as of late. Not the heat,
so that is a hot topic. But yeah, YEAHI Artificial intelligence.

Speaker 8 (01:19:18):
Oh good, Yeah, my favorite thing.

Speaker 10 (01:19:20):
Yeah, and more specifically the ways in which AI has
contributed to and accentuated alienation and the capitalism and the
state in the twenty first century. So that's a mouthful,
but it's obviously very important.

Speaker 8 (01:19:33):
Okay, Yeah, I like you so lot.

Speaker 10 (01:19:34):
In my opinion, alienation with all its meaning is really
is one of those words that you could really use
to describe the current side guys, the experience of separation
from yourself, from your work, from the products of your work,
from your community, all these things both philosophical and material
get wrapped up into this concept of alienation because it's

(01:19:58):
both an experience, it's something that people feel internally, it
describes the way that they see their lives, and it's
also just a fact of how people work into society.
You're dispossessed of the products of a labor and you're
disconnected from the process of aliable and the outcomes of ilabor.
And this is of course all thanks to development of

(01:20:20):
capitalism and industrialization and this development of a mass society
quote unquote with all the apathy and loss of agency
and weaken social fabric that generates.

Speaker 8 (01:20:35):
Yeah, it's I think alienation is like something we don't
talk about enough. It's like the thing that ties together
that despare the loneliness. The loneliness is is maybe like
it's a way that capitalism has come to talk about
alienation without acknowledging the capitalism is creating alienation. Every sort

(01:20:55):
of developed state in the colonial core have a knowledge
loneliness is a problem. Right, I saw Gavin Newsome was
with launching a loneliness campaign. But like the system is
a problem. The alienation is created by the way that
things are and like we can't fixate without changing the
way those things.

Speaker 10 (01:21:15):
Are exactly exactly. It comes down to conditions. I mean,
in particular, I think we see alienation manifest in most
in our relationships, of course, and in our works. And
it's been an issue for some decades now. And what
I'm really intrigued by is, you know, this has been

(01:21:36):
an issue for a while, but how is AI interacting
with these issues? How is EI impacting the alienation that
we already experience under the system.

Speaker 8 (01:21:47):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm currently teaching a class at the
community college to class about pre sixteen hundred history, and like,
I teach a little bit every year, right, and every
year I've seen what AI use. But this year this
is fully blackpilled me, Like, I don't quite know how

(01:22:08):
to describe the feelings I'm experiencing, I guess, but it's
class I assigned like David Graeber, I assigned Jim Scott.
I assigned Charles Tilly on state making and war making, right,
like very basic left libertarian kind of text, right, which
for many people will be the first time they encounter
the concept of like what if no state? What if

(01:22:31):
state bad? And I think they're all writing in a
way that's very approachable to people who don't, you know,
like dense academic writing is annoying and pretentious and I
don't like it. Every time I do this, Couse, it
used to be the case of like thirty to forty ten,
the students would be like, holy fuck. Whether they like
it or not, it's a new concept and it's cool,

(01:22:51):
and they engage with it in like a passionate way,
a human way. Every year it's got worse, and now,
like I can think of two students out of one
hundred who are like engaging with it in any human way,
and I'm sure most of them, I would imagine they
buy the AI, summarized the text, or in many cases
they certainly have used AI to just respond. I let

(01:23:14):
my students respond in ways that they feel appropriate, right,
so that they could do videos or different things if
they wanted to do like a they wanted to make
a video about instead of doing an essay, That's fine
with me. I don't care. I just want them to
read the shit and think about it. But like, there's
been no human reaction, and that's so sad to me.
Like the reason they teach is to get young people

(01:23:35):
to see the world differently. It certainly isn't for the
fucking money, And that's just i'man capable of doing that now,
or like I can't get through that alienation that like
I can't get people to engage, and like, think about it. Obviously,
I got to work that shit out, right, Like this
generation of people who went through high school when AI

(01:23:56):
with a thing and detecting AI, use in long form
writing was not very well developed, so they were able
to use it instead of doing long form writing and
maybe even reading long form, And like, I have to
work out how to get those people to engage, not
to be so sort of alienated from the concept of
reading and absorbing big ideas. But I haven't fuckly worked

(01:24:19):
it out yet.

Speaker 10 (01:24:20):
Yeah, it's a it's a really big issue, and it's
only cruent, you know, as EI expands, I mean, it's
not so much the focus of this episode, but it
is something that I wanted to touch on. You know,
people used to be doing fine without it, used to
be able to function without it three years ago, and
now you talk to them and they can't live without it.

(01:24:40):
They have to run everything through AI. You know, people
have offloaded most of their cognitive processes the yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, and yeah, you know, we talk about the
environmental impact of that, the way the data centers are
damage in the environment, taking fresh water and taking vast
amounts of any from the system. So we all rely

(01:25:02):
upon to live and you know, we could, as we
touched on, talk about called schools and the education systems
pretty much falling apart. Yeah, I mean, I know you're
one of those, you know, genuinely passionate professors. But I've
noticed is this this whole fast now in many sections

(01:25:23):
of the education system where you have students he I
summarize in material if even doing that, you know, submit
an EI generated essays or AI generated material, and the
professors just heah, I created.

Speaker 8 (01:25:38):
Yeah, I've heard of this.

Speaker 10 (01:25:40):
So it's just one one big puppet schew, you know,
one one big fast god.

Speaker 8 (01:25:47):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, one big charade, which you know, to
an extent, education has always just been that, right, one
big fast. But there are things that are redeemable about it.
And I'm just talking about teaching now, and I'll stop
in a minute. There's very little demand for in person
classes compared to online classes anymore, so like that makes
it harder for us to break through that alienation, right,

(01:26:10):
Like there's something special about sitting in a room and
talking just just find it's just like being like we're
going to be here for ninety minutes, none of us.

Speaker 10 (01:26:20):
That's a dynamic, yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:26:21):
And it's an important dynamic. Like the function of the
university is to fucking turn out people with stem degrees
who can go on and make shitty apps we don't need.
It's to prepare us to be citizens in the community, exactly,
and we are failing at that. And yes, intead, I'm
just great and chet GPT all day know.

Speaker 10 (01:26:40):
Yeah, And that's that's a big piece of the puzzle
that we end up missing. Because the way in which
the sort of dynamics and the connections that you would
get from the university class or I'm beyond just sort
of connections in general is lacking in an alienated rule
and it's worsened by you know, the instruction of the eye.

(01:27:00):
I managed to complete most of my education, most of
my bachelor's degree, that is, prior to the pandemic. Right,
I was nearing the end of my third year when lockdown,
you know, came into fourth and then it just I
did my entire fourth year online And honestly, I'm so
glad that I was able to do my classes in person,

(01:27:23):
you know, And I'm so glad that I did my classes,
you know, entirely on my own in a time where
you know, yeah, I was not a thing. You know,
there were times where you know, it probably feels like,
oh my god, it's so stressful, like, but he just
had a buckle alone. You had to buckle down and
figure out a way to get it done. And because

(01:27:44):
we could talk about the perverse incentives of breeding systems
and schools and how that sort of pushes some students
who you know, may have learning difficulties or time matgement
difficulties or whatever to actually do their stuff, they end
up going down the air route. But yeah, I mean,
even just looking back at my experience, because lockdown hits

(01:28:04):
during the semester, I had a writing class that I
was a part of, and every time we went into class,
it was so dynamic, was so lively, it was so engaging.
All the ideas were just bouncing off for each other.
After the lockdown, that class completely feels a lout. Everything
that we were getting from it was just absent because
we were entirely online and yeah, it's really a struggle.

(01:28:28):
And I think social life, not just coming out of
the education conversation, social life, community and connection all ends
up lacking because of the aliineas and nature of the system,
the way that things have been set up. But also
AI is playing a major role too. AI in a
sense as a category is you know, you can have

(01:28:48):
a whole discussion about that quibbolo for definitions. But in
a sense AI has already been playing a major role
into how people socialize even before these large language models
came to be in because you have a sort of
official intelligence in the algorithms that people interact with on
social media. You know, people have the content they consume

(01:29:08):
being curated by algorithms. They end up in these sort
of echo chambers, these reinforcement loops and outrage bait and
then dopamine loops, and all those things have lended to
people spending more and more time online because you know,

(01:29:28):
it's hitting that part of the brain, and everybody is
hyper connected and always online, and more and more of
life takes place on the Internet, and that has left
people feeling isolated. I think loneliness is obviously not entirely
the result of social media and now AI. But the

(01:29:51):
sort of irony is that loneliness has been a side
effect of this digital hyper connection. They may look at
some of the fact that are contributing to this, this
already isolated nature of our world. Right, you know, people
won't have as much free time. You know, there's in
as much public space as there used to be. Some
people have no public space available to them. Public spaces

(01:30:14):
that do exist are not open in the times when
people are available to go to them. Libraries are a
famous example. A lot of them are you know, not
open for working people pretty much. And then people who
do want to go out and socialize and stuff. You know,
you're dealing with the higher cost of living, so there's
little resources that you can use to you know, go
and put yourself out there because you have to spend

(01:30:34):
money to go to places. And then it also just
burnt out energy wise because of you know, the long
work week, long work hours, just trying to make against
meet psychological to all of that. Yeah, and so part
of what AI has been doing is pushing these AI
companions on people. And you know, I don't mean to

(01:30:55):
fare Mongo anything because I know there are a lot
of people who reject AI and who stand against AI.
And of course that could just be the bubble that
I'm in, but yeah, I also know somebody in person,
or rather I knew somebody in person who spoke to
chachipt like their partner and therapists. Yeah, they listen like, yeah,

(01:31:19):
that's it's I mean, it's sad. Yeah, it's as you said,
almost kind of black pillin you know, because these chat
bots they listen in a simulated sense, they respond in
a simulated sense, and they affume what the person is

(01:31:40):
dealing with, is going through, is venting about. They're almost
like a hug box because you don't really see chat
bots disagree and with the people they're speaking to. Chat
Bots are very much like you know, faming, you know,
they try their best to affume everything that a person
is telling them. So you have this kind of cuddle

(01:32:01):
box for people's egos, which in two makes it even
more difficult for them to connect to real people because
you know, real people are going to call you out,
you know they're going to disagree with you, You're going
to have friction and conflict, but there's also a lot
of joy that comes from interact with real people and
Unfortunately a lot of people because they're not getting that,
they're turned into this on demand affection, this on demand flirtation,

(01:32:26):
this pseudo therapy, and it's it's brutal, you know, Lonliness
is a brutal experience. Relationships are very hard and therapy
is extremely expensive for a lot of people. So I
understand that, you know, you can only put so much

(01:32:51):
blame on individuals because the will is not really set
up to support those kind of lasting connections. People live
very spread out, They have few and fewer opportunities to
interact with each other. In fact, a lot of times
the last time a policon had extended exposure with other
people was in school or in college. And outside of

(01:33:12):
that you're just kind of on your own. Yeah, and
places are increasingly not walkable, the more coccentric, the sourt
of spontaneity and friction and interaction that would have made
relationships blossom naturally and my religious possible, as messy and
inconvenience as they can be, sometimes those things are lacking

(01:33:35):
now and unfortunately some for action of people, And I
don't know what the actual number will be because I
could imagine a lot of people will not admit that
they turned to a chat pot for companionship. But it
is a frightening oman of what direction we're going in.
And I also worry about the potential outcomes of you know,

(01:33:58):
egoic behavior that my results from that sort of continue
us interaction with something that is affirming in every belief
and thought and conclusion. What kind of google are we
going to be there for?

Speaker 4 (01:34:12):
You know?

Speaker 8 (01:34:13):
Yeah, it's the world that super rich people already live in.
One of the reasons that the gulf between the rest
of us and the super rich, like the really you know,
incredibly wealthy people. Part of that is that no one
says no to a lot of those people, and that's
why they exclusively end up socializing with each other. Right,

(01:34:34):
Like they're they're they're surrounded by nothing but affirmation.

Speaker 4 (01:34:39):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:34:39):
One of the things we see was Trump, right, is
that like, if there is a reality that he doesn't like,
he manifests his own reality. He just speaks things and
expects them to be accepted as truths.

Speaker 4 (01:34:49):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:34:51):
Growing up, my dad worked for a lot of extremely
wealthy people, and so I've interacted with them, and like,
there's a lot of people who just aren't used to hearing, know,
or why, but not a lot that there is a
number of them, And like I think when you see
I was just thinking about it. The behavior that you
know Trump now asserting with the Epstein thing is like
it is made up, right, and it's a hoax, and

(01:35:13):
it just when we were talking about AI. It sort
of reminds me of that, right that like constant affirmation,
because what a I want you to do is to
please you so that you spend more time on it,
I assume, And it's some way that it attempts to
monetize that, I'm sure, and it just wants you to
keep interacting with it so it can get more information
to take into its model. I guess.

Speaker 10 (01:35:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:35:30):
The dates are called rush yeah, right, And people are
doing the same with with wealthy people, right, They just
want to interact with them so so they can siphon
off some of the resources that those people have accumulated.
Like it's not maybe it's not the same. I think
that still humans interacting with wealthy people is distinct from
an AI interacting with humans, but it sort of gives
us a window into what the impact of that being

(01:35:53):
most of your human interaction over time.

Speaker 7 (01:35:55):
And.

Speaker 10 (01:35:57):
As we speak of wealthy people. I suppose we should
look at the other way in which AI is intersecting
with alienation, right, because you know, for the current narrative
has been about you know, AI is taking jobs, and
before then it's about automation was taking jobs. AI is
you know, a form of automation, and before that it

(01:36:19):
was just innovations in general, just steps in some technological
direction would be eliminating jobs. But always marvel at stepping
back and looking at the whole conversation about this has
taken jobs, that has taken jobs is at the root
of it is this dependence on employment, on jobs for
people to have, you know, life, to be able to live,

(01:36:42):
to have a quality of life. We have gotten more
and more productive, and I mean that productivity has helped
people in some ways, and it's harmed to the environment
in a lot of ways. But we have a certain
level of productivity now and we've produced so much now
that in some sectors we have more of the enough
for several decades to come. I think fashion is one

(01:37:04):
of them where we have like quite the excess of
clothing everybody. And of course you could talk about how
that level of productivity is done damage to our creativity
or craftsmanship. But it's all the worse when you think
about how even with all our productivity, the work has
hardly benefited. You know, more productivity doesn't necessarily mean more pay.

(01:37:26):
And so even before AI came around, we were having
issues with labor and alienation, right, people disconnected from their
work from whether it be a service job, a factory job,
or delivery job, whatever, any of these jobs that you
look at, it's structured at the end of the day,
not around providing a product or providing a service, but
around profit, around the power dynamic between the owner, the

(01:37:50):
capitalist and the worker. The worker who is not in
control is alienated from their labor and from the products
of their labor. And it's just what Famously spoke about,
but he wasn't the only one to speak about it.
The sort of alienated label that is compelled rather than creative,
that has no control for work, and where workers are

(01:38:13):
treated as commodities on a labor market. Samefully, I haven't
had to look for a job in a while, but
I've had to see my friends seeking jobs and it's
not a nice experience. And you have to spend weeks
months sometimes looking for a job. But you will most
likely heed, but you need to survive, you know. And

(01:38:35):
a lot of these jobs you end up looking for
end up getting into and not even necessary jobs. There
are a lot of bullshit jobs. And I don't contribute
to a person's you know, development and fulfillment or they
could have humanity in any way. Yeah, And then a
lot of the benefits that people have fought for, even
for these jobs have either been eroded you know, rolled

(01:38:57):
back over time, or they've been loophole doubt. So you know,
for example, you don't even get enough hours to qualify
for benefits when you work at certain places, or you
are an independent contractor instead of an employee, so they
can get away from you know, giving me your due.

(01:39:17):
And so then in this environment you have EI coming
in now and taking certain rules varying levels of quality
and writing and in art and coding and administrative work.
And I don't know, I think for one, EI does
a lot of these jobs very poorly. But then there's
also cases where I don't like copyrighting, which is something

(01:39:41):
I used to do. The EI copyrighting and the sort
of copyrighting that I had to write is back in
the days almost indistinguishable in terms of it feels you
know generic, quite less, you know slop, like it's just
you're pumping this out to pollute the waves in a sense.

Speaker 8 (01:40:01):
Yeah, it's very like it has a very formulaic nature
when a human does it. It's funny when I think
about copywriting, right, Like you can see that people have
identified the completely generic nature of it, because occasionally you'll
have like brands who do it in a non formulaic
way and briefly see success from it, like just by

(01:40:22):
having some element of humanity in it.

Speaker 10 (01:40:25):
Yeah, like Wendy is when they did that for a
little while. Then yeah, then every brand to copy that
method and then it became steel and yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:40:33):
Someone wist sometimes like puncture it for a minute and
then ye, like you say, everyone will run after it
like a pit viper. Sunglasses, this one, I guess they're
very popular with like right wing bigots. Every time like
biggots are pictured in their sunglasses, they'll like donate money
to LGBTQ affirming causes or like gender affirming care stuff
or whatever depends what the people are being bigoted about.

(01:40:54):
And like briefly I saw them have success with that
just because like people are so accustomed to brands being
a political rather just being like no, fuck you. So
by doing the kind of basics of being a good person,
it appears human and therefore not so generic, and people
you know, briefly fall in love with it or.

Speaker 10 (01:41:13):
Well yeah, but I mean, at the end of the day,
of the corporations are our persons. There are people behind corporations. Yeah,
And I guess I sort of sort of wonder with
these kinds of jobs that are all being build in
at least in part by AI, what is the impact
on a person self worse? Oh yeah, but their their

(01:41:36):
skilled to be just sort of swapped out for a machine.
You know, a lot of people have already felt that
their work is non essential, and then you have a
sense of being replaceable and unneeded. And in some cases
the difference is negligible because, like I said, the work
they was already being put out was the sort of

(01:41:58):
generic stuff that it sort of fills people, yeah, and
fill screens. But then you also have more necessary, the
more creative work. It is also just being sort of
funneled out. You know, I'm seeing billboards all over the
place that just have like this nasty, smooth looking like

(01:42:19):
AI generated pictures. Yeah, just a lot of slop you know,
slop content, slop ad, slop emails, you know, even on
YouTube now Like I like to listen to these sort
of music mixes while I work sometimes, and most of
the channels being recommended with music mixes on YouTube nowadays,

(01:42:39):
at least to the genres that I would listen to,
it's just like, yeah, I generated jazz chill. The thing
is they were't title it that way. Yeah, you know,
the titlet some some word and they probably haven't somewhat
AI generated thumbnail and whatever. And then you just, you know,
if you're unaware of the pattern of how those channels operate.
My click on it, thinking oh, it's just like a

(01:43:00):
music mix, like every other music mix, and then you
listened to it for a while and listen to a
few of them, when you realize, oh, this is just
like a machine made this. It has no flavor, yeah,
like no soul. There's also a lot of articles that
just fill in the Internet. It's just like slow yeah, yeah,
you know, just AI generated articles that feed into the

(01:43:21):
AI pool of references, and it's the AI almost eats itself. Yeah,
and it's sad, but I think it was like we
always going in this direction in a sense, not to
say it was entirely inevitable, but this was the trajectory
that we appointed that this actually could have been changed.
But now it hasn't been. So it's how we kind
of got here. I don't know if it's just me,

(01:43:51):
but I feel like there was a time when boy,
it may it may still be true that still flus
is not always a good thing. There's something to be
said about the value that we impue to things when
they are a bit rarer, you know, when it's you
have to be more attentive and engaging with it.

Speaker 7 (01:44:11):
You know.

Speaker 10 (01:44:11):
I was actually thinking about it earlier today when I
was a child and I was watching TV. You know,
if they didn't have anything on the TV that I
wanted to watch, and I have to go and do
something else, right, Yeah, And nowadays TV is pretty much
unlimited because at any point in time, you couldn't have
access to anything that an algorithm could see. If you're
update is perfectly curated to your interests. Yeah, and it's

(01:44:33):
auto play and everything. It's just one hits after the next.
In that excess, I just feel like we've lost the
sort of attentive curation of your tease, curation of and
evaluation of things. Of the effort and energy and craft
goes into making things. We just end up sort of
taking things for granted, and.

Speaker 8 (01:44:53):
Like I think we kind of lower the standard that
we will accept because it's just so much of it,
so much volume of it. Yeah, Like, and you're not
so attentive to it because it's always there that like
slop becomes okay, it just kind of fills the gaps
in this non stop stream of content.

Speaker 10 (01:45:11):
Yes, just filling feeling the noise. I have to catch
myself sometimes, yeah, because I mean just like sometimes I
just put something on because it was there, you know,
and just feeling noise, Like sometimes I have to remind myself,
you know, palls, just be with your thoughts for a bit,
you know.

Speaker 15 (01:45:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:45:28):
Yeah, and I try not to put too much blame
on myself even as I try to work on it,
because all of this, once again is high design.

Speaker 4 (01:45:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:45:39):
You know, these platforms and these algorithms have been set
up to perfectly. They're perfectly hone into their abilities exploit
the little shortcuts and weaknesses in the human mind to
endy just for as long as possible. Yeah. Like so
even if you feel like, oh my gosh, I want
to get off those media, I want to quit this,

(01:46:00):
that and the other, it's hard. Yeah, you know, even
on you when you know in your mind that it's detrimental,
that it's affecting your negatively, you still end up going
back because again it's it's hacked into your brain in
a sense.

Speaker 4 (01:46:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:46:17):
But so I'd just really frustrated by the way that
AI has contributed to this sort of disconnect because I
also think it makes the whole breath of human creativity
a lot less valued, practiced and supported, you know, instead
of people actually respecting and you know, supporting the craft

(01:46:40):
and the effort that goes into into things, it's just like, oh,
scroll toed the next thing, scrollted the next thing, or
for some people who seem to love HI, it's just oh, yeah,
you're you're you're obsolete. Now you could be replaced by
this you know junk.

Speaker 8 (01:46:56):
Yeah, of just thinking about like like I see it
so often in like like given in revolutionary spaces, I'll
see it right like there, I guess sometimes is what
it is actually is AI accounts that have no idea
what a revolution is. There incapable of doing so because
they're not human. But like I'm just designed to monetize clicks.
You know, you'll see there's a bunch of fucking Israel

(01:47:17):
stands with Kurtistan ads, which you'll just like AI generate
pictures of yep as women like the women who fight
for their anes, right, and like it's just I don't
think these are not again, people are actually part of
the revolution, right, there are people who just who want
to in a sense objectify the revolution and the women
who fought in it and continue to fight in it

(01:47:40):
for financial benefit. But like it's the antithesis of the
beautiful life that people are trying to build there, right,
Like it is the opposite of everything that that revolution
stands for.

Speaker 10 (01:47:53):
So you're seeing people are like AI generates and these
human fighters.

Speaker 8 (01:47:57):
Yeah, yes, exactly, and then using that for some either
just straight because you get paid per click on X
now right, or for some nefarious propaganda bullshit, But like
it's and then by contrast, right by friends in Memma,
there's a group called Art Strike Collective who do these

(01:48:19):
cul drawings of various individuals who have fought in the revolution,
and like one is a beautiful thing that shows your
respect for these people, many of whom have given their
life for this revolution. And another is just complete fucking
slop that is actively harming the thing it's supposed to
be supporting.

Speaker 10 (01:48:38):
Yeah, unfortunately, and it's a cliche at this point, but
many such cases.

Speaker 3 (01:48:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:48:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:48:45):
I saw this short lecture on YouTube by a professor
professor name as jam This just a short clip from
I'm assuming a longer lecture, he said. The title of
the video is really what captured me. It was something
along the lines of consumerism is the perfection of slavery,
and it was really speaking about how we are able

(01:49:07):
to be so perfectly locked into our role as workers,
as cogs in this machine to become, you know, so
docile because of just how good the consumeristic system has
gotten at keeping us chasing that next you know, dopamine,

(01:49:27):
hit that next purchase, that next thing to consume.

Speaker 7 (01:49:30):
You know.

Speaker 10 (01:49:30):
So we're still being exploited, We are still wage slaves
in a sense, but we are either unaware of it
or we accept that role just to chase after, you know,
the next tie of consumption.

Speaker 8 (01:49:46):
H Yeah, Like when you think about a brave new
world in nineteen eighty four, right, these two dystopian novels roughly,
I mean briefly work came up before eight if nineteen
eighty four.

Speaker 10 (01:49:56):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:49:57):
The difference is one is like a boot jamping on
the human face forever, which is like nearly four in
hux Leaves, Dystopia is based on people being essentially bought
off through pleasure.

Speaker 10 (01:50:08):
Right. Yeah, it's like unlimited cookie in for every wine.

Speaker 8 (01:50:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they call it. It's called sohmer. I think, right,
we're in the unlimited Cane for everyone world, right, like
it's it's stuf.

Speaker 10 (01:50:18):
I mean, I think we're in both. You know, it's
a simultaneously a hux LEYA and all. Well, yeah, yeah dystopia.
You know what's the fourth worlds?

Speaker 8 (01:50:26):
Yeah, you're right. I'm starting to read Jack London's Dystopia
the Iron Heel. Now I've I've decided I want to
work out who was best calling the dystopia. But yeah,
we we have a little bit of both. Now we
have the they'll get you at both ends, right, Like
they'll try and give you things to keep you placid
and then also things to keep you afraid. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:50:47):
So, I mean there's there's a lot of reasons to
the spare. You know, people just blankly embracing eie and
they don't see the problem with you was in the
eye and all these different things. There's also, as I'd
like to end things on reason to right, there are
people who are willing to voycott it. Who are you know,
maintaining a stigma around it? You know, people are not

(01:51:09):
taking it lined down? Artists, why are not taking it
lined down? Writers are taking it line doown? Designers? We're
not taking it lined down. People are still craving the authenticity,
connection and craft that comes from human people. And although
there's little any individual can do to resist the alienation

(01:51:31):
of this society, whether be at work or relationships by themselves,
you know, it's very hard, there are things we can
do together in tandem to make things a little bit
easier as we sort of try and strive toward social revolution.
You know, there's the classic you know, touch graphs, you know,

(01:51:51):
log off and try and find where people are. There's
also the individualist solution of reclaiming your agency by finding
some version of digital minimalism that works for you, you know,
taking a break, so now limiting your screen time here
and there. But really it's gonna take system change. It's

(01:52:13):
gonna take collective action. It's gonna take us boycotton both.
You know, of course the AI products, there's a boycott
already taking place with those. But then also just yeah,
striking add the pressure points of the system and prefiguring
about the world for everyone. Yeah, and you know, I

(01:52:33):
hope that everybody is able to do what they can
to take steps in that direction. And yeah, so please
don't use the I.

Speaker 8 (01:52:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I always like that Supermandante
Marcos quote where he says, like, it's not necessary to
conquer the world, it's sufficient to build a new one.
I like that approach to this AI stuff. The way
we make it so people in our community don't turn
to AI to talk about things they want to talk
about is to be there for them to talk to, right,
to build community, to build real human interactions with each other,

(01:53:07):
so people don't have real human conversations with the computer.

Speaker 10 (01:53:11):
Absolutely agreed. Yeah, and that's all they have for today.
So all thought, it's all the people. This has been,
It could happen here. I've been Andrew, this has been
James and Lasst Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:53:25):
Thanks. We had a very funny introduction.

Speaker 10 (01:53:45):
It was really good.

Speaker 2 (01:53:46):
Yeah, it referenced our company sexual harassment protocols. It was hilarious.
You're never going to hear it. We weren't recording.

Speaker 4 (01:53:53):
I was recording, so you can hear my seesh. Okay.

Speaker 8 (01:53:56):
Yeah, if you can just accept what Garrison said without
contract and we'll open with that, that'll be great. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:54:06):
That is a classic Robert Evans intro. You just did it.
I feel like it always comes from insight.

Speaker 2 (01:54:13):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about journalistic objectivity.
That's right, a thing that we've just demonstrated perfectly.

Speaker 8 (01:54:22):
Yeah, yeah, that's the professional media class. So let's have
a little talk about media objectivity. Right. It's been a
major tenor of traditional legacy media that they must remain unbiased.
This hasn't always been the case in the United States.
Right used to have explicitly partisan news sources, which we
have now with Fox News, I guess. But that's why

(01:54:45):
you have newspapers like I think Saint Louis has a
Saint Louis Democrat or the SO and so Republican like
that they would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's
only really when journalism sort of took on this strong
professional and I mean professional here in terms of like
the professions, right, like law, accounting, jobs that are associated
with university education, and a class identity that it started

(01:55:09):
to assert this kind of it's an attempt to appear
rational and scientific in its methodologies, right. And one of
the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity.
I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be
a means of verifying information. I like that we should
objectively check that what we have written is correct.

Speaker 2 (01:55:30):
The example I always give is that if I'm in
a protest scene where there's a clash between crowd boys
and you know, a group of leftists, and you know,
someone on the left pulls out a can of mace
and sprays it first, that's objectively what happened. Now, that
doesn't mean that that's the only thing I report. For example,
if the person they maye is somebody who has been

(01:55:51):
like harassing those individuals online for weeks, or has been
doxing them, or that as salted them at previous like,
all of that is like relevant context, but it doesn't
change objectively happened in that instant, right, Like, it's not
on me to pretend that I think these sides are equal,
but it is on me to accurately report like what happens. Yes,

(01:56:11):
And I think one of the one of the areas
in which a lot of people, especially when we were
talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot
of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong.
Is they think that all that matters and what is
what happens in that moment, right, and what happened previously,
what's happened in other engagements, what's happened like over you know,
the last two or three years of however long the

(01:56:32):
conflict has been going on that city is immaterial. Well,
all that matters is what happened in that second when
that reporter was Onseene. And if you're thinking that way,
you're going to miss more than someone who comes in
with just an outright bias, you know.

Speaker 8 (01:56:46):
Yeah, And like I think very often it's seen as
kind of instead of being like a value of the
outlet and the way it verifies information, it seems being
a personal kind of like quality that journalists should have
in every aspect their lives. Yeah, Like, I'm aware that
some of the big legacy broadsheets in the us, like,
you can't attend to protest unless you are covering the protest, right.

Speaker 2 (01:57:10):
And there's even that famous case of the journalists being like,
I don't vote because I think that that would be
a violation of my objectivity.

Speaker 8 (01:57:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I got have forgotten
about that one.

Speaker 2 (01:57:19):
Like you're allowed to have opinions, that's just not supposed
to be the entire basis of your reporting, you know exactly.

Speaker 8 (01:57:25):
Yeah, Like, and I think sometimes because people always do
have opinions, right, but the opinions that are conceived of
as neutral and the ones that are conceived of as
being subjective are very telling, right, Like, the media for
a long time has been the domain of educated, older
white men, like people like me. I guess I'm not old,

(01:57:48):
but getting that way. And it also has been the
domain of like capital in the state, right, like Jeffrey
Bezos owned several newspapers pro market biases, pro capitalism, biases,
pro state by those are not really investigated much in
the media in the way that other biases might be. Right,
It's also created this idea that the media always needs

(01:58:12):
to shoot for the middle in any given discussion, which
I kind of want to investigate a bit when Donald
Trump says something which is overt, like Donald Trump has
said things which are nativists, right, Nativism is a form
of racism. Donald Trump, therefore has said racist shit. The
way that this is far too often treated in the
legacy media is it's the racist shit that Donald Trump said, correct,

(01:58:35):
or like, maybe we should consider this racist thing that
so and so has said, right, rather than this shit
is racist Donald Trump has said some shit that it's racist,
or other members of the Republican Party. All this serves
to do is when we have a topic and the
people in Congress anchor themselves on very far right, what

(01:58:57):
is acceptable discourse, The media then moves discourse to to
write such so that position is in the center right,
it serves to ratchet the Overton window to the right.
I'm demonstrating this for my colleagues with hand signals, which,
of course only two of the hundreds of thousands of
people listening to me will be able to see the
right way to our podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:59:16):
Yeah, it was a very compelling mime of a ratchet
like it looked like you basically were doing it. I
could not tell.

Speaker 2 (01:59:25):
I couldn't tell the difference. No, that's why we call
you ratchet straps out, got.

Speaker 8 (01:59:31):
Me a ratchet, Jimmy, Yeah, it's This podcast is sponsored
by Invisible Ratchet. Now it's time to pivot to add.
It's not time to pivot to add yet. I think
we should talk about the way other professions concerned with
the truths deal with this topic, right, because journalism is
pretty much unique and considering objectivity something that we as

(01:59:52):
individuals have to embody in every action that we take,
and I guess the most relevant one will be academia,
which is something else I am unfortunate enough to have
participated in for far too much of my adult life.
So academia still not great, But we have accepted that
everyone is biased in academia.

Speaker 10 (02:00:11):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:00:12):
We rely on, among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right,
which is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. Most of
you will be aware of it, even if you're not
aware of it. Basically, it holds that we see the
world differently based on where we see it from. Our gender, sexuality, raise, ethnicity, experience, age,
and a million other things impact the truth we know
in the world we experience, and standpoint theory posits that

(02:00:35):
perhaps people not from a certain thretting may have valuable
insights into it. Right, So sometimes the outsider perspective is
a valuable one. But also people from that setting may
see things outsiders may not see, and we have to
acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth.
How do we tell the truth in academia we do

(02:00:55):
something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review
strongly reinforces the status quote right. I will give one example.
I once had a journal article, right for a history journal,
killed in peer review. The piece was about the nineteen
oh nine tour of Catalonia that was a bicycle competition

(02:01:16):
for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed
because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television
was kind of crudely invented in the nineteen twenties, and
did it become widely available until the nineteen forties, Right, Like,
this is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able
to kill my piece because of it. Because that's how
peer review works, right. The people who are established, the

(02:01:37):
people who are in positions of power, can kill your
shit if they want to, and they can give the
most ludicrous region. That is how peer review. Among other
things reinforces status quo. Right. The other thing that we
do in academias we declare our conflicts of interest, and
this is something we don't do in journalism, right, Like
outlets may have a conflict of interest policy, but again,

(02:01:59):
like conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece
like you wouldn't see sometimes NPR does its.

Speaker 2 (02:02:06):
Actually, yeah, I mean a number of outlets do declare like,
for example, this outlet is owned by someone who has
a financial interest in the company we're reporting on, or
something like that.

Speaker 4 (02:02:16):
Yeah, if the Washington Post is doing a story about
Jeff Bezos or Amazon, Yeah, usually they will say in
the bottom or the top that the paper is owned
by said said figure.

Speaker 8 (02:02:29):
Yeah. Where it becomes more murky is like sometimes people
have a financial interest or if something is your beat, right,
you may have other financial interest within that beat.

Speaker 2 (02:02:38):
Well, and there's there's the very common case of people,
especially now within kind of the sub stack journalism, being
like friends and social with people that they are reporting
on and not disclosing to their wider audience.

Speaker 8 (02:02:51):
Yeah, like access journalism more generally, right, Yeah, Like the
way I got this piece was by being invited to
the drinks party, and if I say anything, I'm kind
about this person, I went invited to a drinks party. Yeah,
or simply the conflict of interest and is presented by
the more ludicrous my headline, the more people will click
on this website, and the more time they will spend
on the page, and the more addative you they might generate.

Speaker 2 (02:03:13):
Yeah, And that's really the largest issue with modern journalism
is that that kind of determines almost everything for an outlet.
Is like, what's what's going to get clicks, what's going
to rile people up as much as possible, And that
doesn't count as financial interest, right, Like the fact that
the outlet has a vested financial interest in keeping you
on the page as often and as long as possible

(02:03:34):
doesn't count as like a conflict of interest in any way.
And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues, whereas,
like a lot of times, a lot of outlets won't let,
for example, a black journalist report on a black man
being murdered by the police, right because they see that
as like an inherent conflict of interest. And the gap
between those two things is where a lot of the

(02:03:55):
real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern
journalism arise.

Speaker 8 (02:03:59):
Yeah, problems we need to pay to adds. Sure, all right,
we are back. Part of this also manifests in like
journalists being supposed to not have any individual opinions about anything,

(02:04:22):
even if it's irrelevant to their beat. This has been
the case for a lot of people regarding the genocide
of Palestinian people. Right, Like you could be the weekend editor,
you could write about brunch, and if you work at
certain outlets, you are like under pain of losing your job,
not allowed to post to what is happening in Gaza

(02:04:43):
is a genocide to take a stance on these issues, right,
and that is bad. Like journalists are human beings too,
and it's ridiculous to suggest that that we shouldn't or
can't have opinions on these things and still do good reporting,
right we can. We just have to make sure that
they're reporting itself is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to

(02:05:07):
is like like what I guess another like Rubbie, you
spoke about it that like the inherent conflict of interests
that like traffic on a website presents for journalism. Another
like inherent issue is that like every source is seen
as biased, right, Like you said, like black folks might
not be allowed to report on black men being shown
by the cops accept state sources, which are far too

(02:05:28):
often seen as speaking the verbatim truth.

Speaker 2 (02:05:30):
Right, Well, this is what the police said.

Speaker 8 (02:05:32):
Yes, yeah, that is how we get I guess. A
pretty good example of this, I'll link to it in
the show notes is a piece I wrote five years
ago I think about police officers overdosing on fentanyl. Some
of you will be familiar with this, some of you
will not, but it is not possible to overdose on
fentanyl just from being in its presence, like in an

(02:05:56):
outdoor area, next to a thing that has fental in it.
The piece I wrote dealt with the San Diego Union Tribune,
who this was a spectacular instance, I guess, of journalists
like serving as police scenographers. What happened here is that
the police had produced an edited video with like music
and shit of this supposed overdose right of a of

(02:06:17):
a young cop who was like, I don't know what
they call it. He's like apprentice with an older cop,
like with a more experienced cop. And they were going
around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff. They tested
it for fen andil, and this guy collapses the younger cop.
The older cop gives him several knark Hans. He's not
just wisteo. Yeah no, just like I think there was

(02:06:39):
one instant where someone received seven Knarkans, which like that's
a threat to your fucking nasal integrity of nothing else.

Speaker 2 (02:06:49):
Yeah, if Knarkan doesn't work the first time, like I mean,
people do sometimes often it's not especially like with serious ods.
They'll often put people like in the hospital on drips,
but you would have to take a mess of dose,
not just be near fucking yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:07:04):
Yeah, like be like I think this instance, I get
they were outside testing it in like they're the boot
of a car. Like it's ludicrist to think that you
and like it would be good if they familiarize themselves
with some of the what an overdose looks like, right, yeah,
and I'm mixed.

Speaker 2 (02:07:20):
If they weren't cops, I'd respect the desire to like
time theft from work, because I think that's what a
lot of this is. It's like, oh shit, if I
have an overdose, like I get to stay out of
work a couple of days.

Speaker 8 (02:07:32):
With day that's a that's a that's a framing. I'm
a medabal to you. Unfortunately they archives for if you're
a reporter though, like it is absolutely on you to, oh,
this person having an overdose, What are the symptoms of
an overdose? What does an overdose look like? Should I
talk to a medical professional or you could just ask

(02:07:53):
the perlice information officer who shared this with you, how
did you verify this as an overdose? With whom did
you discuss the toxicology report in this case? That information
wasn't available right the way I was able to obtain
that just to do I guess clarity is, first of all,
I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact
checking that they'd done. You can also pra the emails

(02:08:16):
to the police as well as from the police, right,
so you can see if other reporters have done fact
checking that way or have asked any follow up questions
that way I done, that they would have found out
that you say that you can't overness in fentanyl this way,
they didn't even try. And like both sides this, I
guess like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now, like
this cop over dose from fentanyl, but doctors say they can't,

(02:08:38):
Like it's a which I still think is an absolute
ludicrous practice. Right. That's like saying this person tried to fly,
but you know that people say gravity will make them
fall to the ground. Like, what are these things we
know to be true? So I guess what I would
propose we do instead of this ludicrous practice of tending

(02:09:00):
to be objective about everything all the time, is that
we are honest about our biases, honest about our conflict
of interest, We're honest about like our standpoint, and then
we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right, And that means,
like you'll see that at the end of these episodes, right,
we share our sources that we used after we're try
and communicate where we got information from and how we

(02:09:23):
got it. And I think we should strive for moral
clarity in the way we say things instead of striving
to this middle ground. So, like, what do I mean
by moral clarity? I mean saying the cops killed someone,
not officer involved shooting. Right. If you work with fucking
words and you find yourself writing something as convoluted as
officer involved shooting, then you have strayed from the foundational

(02:09:48):
reason for journalism existing.

Speaker 2 (02:09:50):
Yeah, you have gone beyond God's light.

Speaker 8 (02:09:52):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you live in the darkness. There is
I think a place for fact checkers. I think people
got to a bit carried away with fact checking. I
don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I had
an experience once where I'd written a piece. The fact
checking of that piece centered on the fact that I
had used the noun beach chair to refer to this chair. Yes,

(02:10:18):
the fact checker believed that it was a lawn chair.
To me, did not impact the overall thrust of the piece,
right like the nature of the chair. Unfortunately, that ended
up killing the story. We ran out of time to
go over to court documents because of the nature of
the chair discussion. And I'm not sure that's what we

(02:10:38):
need to do.

Speaker 2 (02:10:40):
No, I mean, and I think the other and probably
the larger problem with fact checking is fact checking is
an in in and of itself is ha ha.

Speaker 8 (02:10:48):
I showed that they were wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:10:49):
I checked the fact where it's like, yeah, but what
they wrote got out to thirty million people and your
fact check got out to like sixty So what you
did didn't really matter. And what we should probably be
doing is looking at an intervention higher up on the
line to stop the bullshit from getting out rather than
being obsessed with well, I've actchecked it, like, well but
that didn't really help you know, yeah, right, Just at

(02:11:10):
what point do we give that up as pointless?

Speaker 8 (02:11:13):
Yeah, like you are like not even a footnote to
this other thing that this person.

Speaker 2 (02:11:19):
No, we need to the intervention needs to be happening
earlier because the bullshit is still getting out.

Speaker 8 (02:11:25):
Yeah, absolutely, And this happens like we're in this bizarre
situation where like writing outlets can say what the fuck
they want, right like, like we have whole massive media
empires going in on this idea that the twenty twenty
election was stolen. Then we have like centrist outlets instead
of being like, no, the election wasn't stolen. That that's bullshit,

(02:11:48):
constantly trying to like investigate those claims as if they
were credible and useful, rather than illustrating why they should
be dismissed and then moving on, right like, instead of
investigating this conspiracy is so important. We see that a
lot with immigration right now, But we saw a ton
in the presidential debates, right Like, It's a good example

(02:12:09):
of what you were saying. Jd Vance can just lie
and even Donald Trump actually can lie about people eating
dogs and cats, and it doesn't hugely matter if an
hour later and use outlet tweets, oh we fact check him,
and it's not okay. Right, You're still broadcast to millions
of people that Haitian migrants eat dogs and cats and
that's not true. And I think we need to strive

(02:12:32):
for something that it's closer to the truth, and it's
closer to fairness, and it gives us moral clarity because
what we're all doing right now, what the legacy media
doing is doing right now, is like woefully inadequate to
meet the moment.

Speaker 2 (02:12:46):
Yeah, I mean I agree, Like I think, where I
don't actually know how to solve things is the incentive structure, Yeah,
is so broken. And to an extent, all of us
talk about objectivity. And when I say that, I'm like,
the talk that outlets and editors have about objectivity, is
there more than anything to obscure the fact that the

(02:13:08):
economics of journalism make it almost impossible for it to
be anything but a willing agent of disinformation. That's the
real issue is you can have the Washington Post and
you can have the New York Times host good reporting,
but a huge amount of their income will always come
from having columnists whose entire job is to piss people

(02:13:32):
off or to stoke the egos of people in power.
And I don't know that the good work those outlets
does outweighs the crap that they spill into the public discourse,
because that's what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent,
there's almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity

(02:13:57):
debate with the people who are pushing it, because they're
not push it honestly, They're pushing it as a way
to obscure the fact that they make their money the
same way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by
spreading fear, anger, and doubt.

Speaker 8 (02:14:11):
Yeah. Yeah, that's the bad op ed industrial complex. Like
I've been guilty of that. Right, you see a fucking
headline on social media and you're like, that's bullshit, and
then you click and read.

Speaker 10 (02:14:22):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:14:23):
I used to, like when I was a little baby,
journalist's engage with this and be like that's bullshit because
and either try and write about it somewhere or post
you on social media. But I have come to realize
and in doing that, I'm doing exactly what they want
me to do, which is continue sending people to their
website to click on adverts and to make the money.
So I think it's better that we do not do that.
But yeah, that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now.

(02:14:47):
How it pays the bills is keeping you on that page,
and a way it keeps you on that page is
making you angry. There is like a model, I think,
And you see this like in community small community newspapers
right now, like I guess outlets like Left Coast Right
Watching in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely buy

(02:15:08):
building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of
their communities and financed by them. But I mean the
orders of magnitude and income difference are like they're not
making Washington Post money over at Left Coast Right Watch.
I know this should be true. So yeah, pretty fucked,
and it will only get worse. I think like as

(02:15:30):
we as far as we continue to slide into like
the post truth fascism world, I can't really see our
legacy outlets doing much about it. If all they are
ever going to do is strive for the middle ground
on this.

Speaker 2 (02:15:45):
Well, all right, okay, everybody, all right, they got off
a good day in that world.

Speaker 4 (02:16:10):
This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
news gaest covering what's happening in the White House, the
crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis
this episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and
Sophie Lichterman. Maybe maybe Sophie will decide to comment on
some of this important important news we have today.

Speaker 2 (02:16:30):
To bless us, and maybe Robert will decide to forgive
you for jumping into giving the title of this show
and not letting me say electile dysfunction or something like that.
We know I have not gotten over living. Let's talk
about a pedophile. It's time for your Friday pedophile Update. Yeah,
we call it the FREEO file minute. I don't like

(02:16:52):
that it is free to callos SO. On August fifteenth,
twenty twenty five, at eight thirty six Annoan that means
in the morning, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Office
of Public Information put up a press release with the
title eight child sex predators arrested during undercover operation.

Speaker 4 (02:17:12):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:17:12):
This was a report on a multi agency operation going
after child sex predators that was headed by the Nevada
Internet Crimes Against Children or ICAC organization, which is a
joint operation that involves a mix of There's some detectives
from the Las Vegas Metropolitan to Police, there's some folks
from the FBI Child Exploitation Task Force, and then I

(02:17:33):
guess the ICAC has its own task force. I've never
heard of this group before, but there's a number of
other law enforcement agents involved, including North Las Vegas Police,
Henderson Police who actually posted declaration of arrest for the
person that we'll be talking about. That's the Henderson Nevada Police,
Homeland Security Investigations, and the Nevada Attorney General's Office. This
was your standard sting to try and catch people who

(02:17:56):
are attempting to have sex with kids, where you have
undercover agents who are online. In this case, they were
using an app called Pure and on WhatsApp. It looks like,
as a general rule, these guys met the person that
they thought was a minor on Pure and then took
the conversation to WhatsApp to plan for an in person
meeting where they then they you know the whole what's

(02:18:20):
that guy who used to do the TV show where
he would bust pedophiles And there were some ethical problems
with Chris Hansen. They'd have their Chris Hansen moment, right,
I'm familiar with this. Oh man, it didn't go well.
So the story that people have been hearing and that
kind of went viral out of this is that one
of these eight people arrested was tom Ardiam Alexandrovitch, who

(02:18:41):
was a high ranking cybersecurity official. He was the director
of one of the divisions of Israel's top cybersecurity agency.
So you know in Israeli government official working in cybersecurity
is one of the guys arrested. He was in town
in Las Vegas for the black Hat convention, which is
like a hacking convention, and like a lot of hacking conventions,

(02:19:01):
over time it has turned from a bunch of guys
who do not like the Feds to just Feds, right,
Like I think that's why the guy guy from Israel
cybersecurity agency is at this thing, hitten on so fed
allegedly fifteen year olds. So this guy is arrested and
then he posts bail at ten grand and he flies
back to Israel, which gets a lot of people in

(02:19:23):
an uproar. Obviously, anything involving officials of the Israeli government
is receiving heightened scrutiny right now, what with the genocide,
and also for a long time, there's a lot of
evidence of special treatment being given to agents of the
government of Israel by the United States government, and so
people are like, is that what's going on here, because
this seems pretty fucked up. And I guess the first

(02:19:44):
thing I should say is that it doesn't seem like
he's being treated differently from anyone else in this sting.
This is per statements made by the local government and
by the Attorney General's office. This is the standard bail
amount for this crime. And when people post bail for
this crime, which is the standard amount of ten grand,

(02:20:05):
there aren't conditions usually on the bail, which means it
would not be standard to stop him from traveling or
returning home. He's due to return to the United States
in several weeks for the court proceedings to go on.
So the short answer to this seems to be that, like, no,
this is just kind of how the system works, and
that might not be great, But he doesn't seem to

(02:20:25):
have been given special treatment because he was an official
of the Israeli government. Now, does that mean that that's
going to prove to be what happens in the long run, No, Because,
among other things, he might just not come back to
the US. And if the Israeli government is a party
to that, and like there isn't any kind of like
action taken to force him to return to go through
the legal process, then I'd say, yeah, there's something to

(02:20:47):
be particularly upset about here. But I think the broader
thing to maybe be upset about here is that guys
can get caught for this and then have a no
condition bail that allows them to flee the country, which
might be a flaw in the system.

Speaker 13 (02:20:59):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:20:59):
I'm a big innocent until proven guilty guy. I'm a
big reasonable bail guy. But I'm also a big I
don't know man. Maybe if the agent of a foreign
government gets caught trying to fuck a child, they shouldn't
be able to fly back home immediately.

Speaker 6 (02:21:11):
Do they bail out? I don't know.

Speaker 8 (02:21:13):
To seems that it's a reasonable objection.

Speaker 1 (02:21:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:21:16):
So you know, this is a classic case.

Speaker 2 (02:21:18):
If you've got the story what actually happened here, then
you've got how it's interpreted online, and then you've got
how it's being interpreted online by the stupidest person on
the world, on the planet, in the planet, and in
that planet that didn't work.

Speaker 8 (02:21:33):
Oh, it'd be good if he was, wouldn't it in
the molten cools? Yeah, that would be nice.

Speaker 2 (02:21:39):
You've got how this story is being interpreted by particularly
bad journalists. Let's say that that's the nice way to
put it. And I'm talking about Michael Tracy. If you're
not familiar with Michael Tracy, he is ostensibly a leftist
and anti authoritarian. He's the kind of guy who just
sort of reflexibly if the US is involved, whatever is
the worst case scenario for the US doing something is

(02:22:01):
what's happening. During the invasion of Ukraine, he alleged that
the US was sending troops into Ukraine. I think because
he saw some guys outside of an embassy in Poland,
some American soldier for.

Speaker 8 (02:22:10):
The marine details and some of the marine detail.

Speaker 6 (02:22:12):
It was like, we're getting ready to invade.

Speaker 8 (02:22:15):
That did not happen.

Speaker 2 (02:22:17):
Now, Michael Tracy has a sub stack, of course, many
such cases. And he published an article titled was an
Israeli pedophile really allowed to flee the United States? And
I can't tell He starts with like a whole paragraph
about Jeffrey Epstein, and I can't actually tell what his
stance is on this, and I don't really want he's
talking about how people are eager to prove him wrong

(02:22:38):
about Jeffrey Epstein. I have no desire to know what
this guy thinks about Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 4 (02:22:43):
This is probably a Jeffrey Epstein was a secret massad
agent type thing.

Speaker 2 (02:22:47):
Well, except for his whole argument here is that there's
people are being incredibly unreasonable to think that this guy
is guilty or to think that he probably did anything wrong.
And the reason Michael Tracy suggests that Alexandrovitch probably didn't
do anything wrong is that the terms of the app pure,
which is where the authorities say he first got in

(02:23:08):
contact with the officer pretending to be a child, requires
you to be eighteen years or older. And in this
substack he posts post the terms of service to be
like ce. There is even what appears to be a
rigorous age verification process to ensure that no minor gains
access to the app. Government issued documents must be submitted
to ensure that only persons at least eighteen years of

(02:23:30):
older allowed on the app. And he's like does this
mean the government was faking documents, was pretending.

Speaker 8 (02:23:35):
To be a child to this app.

Speaker 2 (02:23:37):
Yet that's what they were doing, Well, they were pretending
to be a child, Jeremary, Yeah, that's probably what they
were doing. And the other thing what's really funny about
this is like that's his whole point is that the
app requires them to be eighteen, So it's you know,
the authorities must have been doing something fucked up and
lying to the app for this to have happened at all.
And this is just an example of Michael Tracy not
reading the declaration of arrest, which he links in his article,

(02:24:01):
because the declaration of arrest does say that, yes, this
person got in contact with the undercover agent bearing the
peer up and then the same sentence says and later
WhatsApp with phone number dot dot dot and says that
on WhatsApp, this is where they talked about the person
in this case being a minor, and this is where
they set up like to arrange a meeting. This Israeli

(02:24:22):
cybersecurity official was going to take them to circ the
slat and had them bring a condom.

Speaker 8 (02:24:26):
Like that's all in the declaration of arrest.

Speaker 2 (02:24:29):
Now, obviously Alexandrovitch maintains his innocence, maintains he thought this
person was eighteen all the entire time. All I've got
here is the declaration of arrest. I don't have hard evidence,
but per the source that Michael Tracy cites, like this
is not just happening on pure This is as is
often the case, by the way, when pedophiles go after kids,
they meet them on whatever app and then take them

(02:24:51):
to a second digital location, right, Like That's just the
way these things work. And that's really all I have
to say about this. You know this, This is the
kind of I keep an eye on this in case
this guy doesn't go back and the Israeli government does
hide him. But it's entirely possible that this will go
the way court cases and this sort of thing are
supposed to go. There's one other funny thing, considering this
guy is a high ranking Israeli cybersecurity official, there's just

(02:25:15):
like a list of, you know, statements about like what
Alexandrovitch said to detectives when he was being interrogated, you know,
the stuff like Alexander Alexandrovitch stated he did not know
the numbers for the Israeli government. Alexandrovitch stated his family
was an Israel Alexandrovitch stated it was important he get
numbers for his flight, and then Alexandrovitch stated his phone
does not have a password but uses his right thumb print.

Speaker 9 (02:25:36):
No, a biometric user, cybersecurity expert for the histor government
and not sending the best people. Oh my god, your
fucking thumb print, dude, your fucking thumb print.

Speaker 8 (02:25:49):
Okay, yeah, it's just famous, most secure possible access code.

Speaker 2 (02:25:55):
Anyway, That's all I've got for peta Friday tune in
next week we'll have another pedophile.

Speaker 8 (02:26:00):
I'm sure of it. Oh yeah, here's ads. All right,
we're back, and it is a pedophile free will. We
can't guarantee that, I suppose, but we're hoping Peter free

(02:26:20):
zone from here on it. Talking of things which are
incontrovertibly crimes, Israel has deliberately murdered for Al Jazeera journalists
in Gaza. Among them was an us Our Sharif, a
prominent correspondent for the network in Gaza. The IDF also
killed correspondent Mohammed Karka, cameraman Ibrahim Zaiah and driver in cameeronman.

(02:26:45):
Mohammed Nofal Al Jazeera has named all of these people.
The strike also killed two freelancers. One of them was
mom And Aliwa and al Shariff's nephew, who was a
student studying journalism for weeks before the written pre meditated
war crime to war crime under a Rome statue and
also a violation of the Geneva Conventions because journalists are

(02:27:07):
also civilians. The idea of engaged in manufacturing consent for
the strike. They did this through unit that nine to
seven two magazine has reported on called the quote legitimization cell.
You're always doing great way when you have a unit
called the legitimization cell. Yeah, that's yeah. It's pretty fucked
to quote from the piece which are link below. It

(02:27:29):
has been a signed to identify Gaza based journalist it
could betray as undercover her mass operatives in an effort
to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters.
You should read this article like it goes through instances
whether they have a very clear confirmation bias right, and
the case of Alcherifhys is a pretty good example of

(02:27:51):
how ridiculous this can be. They released this document. They
tweeted it actually claiming he was in her masks from
twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen. The document clearly wasn't original document,
Like it was a PDF done up with like a
navy blue background and stuff. It's laughable to think that
they like captured this pdf somehow. It just doesn't line
up even if we take that to be true, right,

(02:28:13):
that he had been a member of her mass till
twenty seventeen, that was eight years ago. Like, isn't the
whole point of the thing that they're saying that they
want people to stop being in her mass, like killing
them because they wanted that, And I don't believe them.
It still doesn't make sense, right. They've done this in
other cases with other Juras, specifically other Al Jazeera journalists.

(02:28:35):
In July this year, the CPJA that's a committee to
protect journalists if you're not familiar, warned that they were
worried about an attack on al Sharif due to the
increasingly detached from reality smear campaign being pursued against him
by IDs spokesman of Vich Adray. For example, on the
twenties July Adray accused him of being quote part of
a quote false her Mask campaign on Starvation as he

(02:28:59):
played footage of Alcherif crying after seeing a woman collapse
from hunger on camera. Speaking about the campaign, al Chherif
said it is not only a media threat or an
image destruction, it is a real life threat. He said
it's in his interview with CPJ. He also said, I
live with the feeling that I could be bombed and
martyred at any moment. My family is also in danger,

(02:29:22):
and his nephew was killed with him right in the
earth strike. When I think about like, I have colleagues
I've worked with through a Palestinian who work in Gaza.
I remember twenty twenty three October tenth, twenty twenty three,
I was in Syria and Rajaba specifically, and I was
sitting in a t shop because the Wi Fi and

(02:29:42):
my hotel was non existent, and I wanted to check
in on my friends, right who worked there, And I
remember this guy helping me translate one of these videos
in which you see a dead person in the blue
press vest, right, and I was concerned that it might
be someone I've worked with before, so I was trying
to work out it with them, and he saying in
this video at the funeral, people were saying that another

(02:30:03):
journalist would take up the dead journalist camera and the
flag jacket and keep reporting, which is very touching for me.
But journalists in Gaza have been targeted by the IDF
for a very long time, and this is one of
many examples, and it's disgusting and reprehensible. That's about all
I have to say on it. Should we turn to
immigration for something equally despondent and sad? Yeah, all right.

(02:30:26):
USCIS US Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued a new
guidance material to instruct offices in cases where they can
use their discretion to look at whether the person has
quote endorsed, promoted, or supported, or otherwise espouse the views
of a terrorist organization or group, including those who support
or promote anti American ideologies and activities, anti Semitic terrorism

(02:30:50):
from skipping a bit here, and anti Semitic ideologies. This
discretion can be used in extension of staycases, change of
status cases, reinstatement or f or non immigrant status, and
certain employment authorization requests, they say in the moment. The
USCIS policy Manual also lists other instances where discretion could
be used These include TPS, temporary protected status, humanitarian parole,

(02:31:14):
partition to classify an alien as a fiancee of a
US citizen, asylum and refugee status. So I looked up
what the quote anti American activities were. There's a footnote right.
The footnote links to IA three one three, a Immigration
Naturalization Act. Most of the anti American activities are things
which already had a bar to naturalization, and most of

(02:31:37):
those pertain directly to being a member of the Communist Party,
like a literal card carrying member of the literal Communist Party,
right capital C, Capital P. The US who had a
bar on naturalization for people who are members of the
Communist Party for some time. I believe they still have
a bar on naturalization for people who were members of

(02:31:58):
the Nazi Party. Preview a waiver, I should say, not
actually a visa. When people from Europe coming to United States,
you'd have to answer a short questionnaire. One of the
questions was about whether you or anyone related to you
had been a member of the Nazi Party. I remember,
like once being some German people in Europe and they
were telling me they'd had to answer this question entering
the United States. So the anti American activities is the

(02:32:21):
one that's been getting the most attention, But it does
specifically footnote to the communist stuff, which is again something
that that has been US policy for a while. What
I'm more worried about is stuff about anti Semitic terrorism.

Speaker 4 (02:32:36):
Yeah, because that means one, you've shared a pro Palestine
post on social media.

Speaker 8 (02:32:42):
Yeah you said genocide bad.

Speaker 4 (02:32:44):
Yeah, that can mean so many things that as we've
already seen, like we've seen some of this stuff already
be enforced. This is new guidance material, but we've seen
reports coming from people trying to enter the country or
trying to get visas that show that this is happening
for like months ever since, like you know, like March,
I started to see a lot of stuff regarding either
pro Palestinian statements or like posts or campus protests that

(02:33:08):
sort of stuff.

Speaker 8 (02:33:09):
Yeah. The f visa I mentioned there is it's a
non immigrant student visa right for full time students. So
like that is the one where we've seen students having
to turn over their social media handles or social media
can't be locked. It's very easy to see how these
two things lind up. Yeah, and as a guy said,
like people. They have always been able to use their discretion.
This is just guidance on how they should use it,
but they have been using it for some time. The

(02:33:31):
administration has also moved the goalpost for naturalization, so naturalization
is becoming a citizen of the United States. Right, there
is a requirement that people who naturalize as citizens have
quote good moral character. Previously, the way they did this
was there were bars for certain crimes, right murdered genocide,
something called aggravated felony, which is something that only exists

(02:33:53):
in immigration law. Going forward, their changing to I guess
a more holistic idea of what a good moral character
might be. I'm going to quote again. Going forward, USCIS
officers must account for an alien's positive attributes and not
simply the absence of misconduct in evaluating whether or not
an alien has met the requirement for establishing GMC. That's

(02:34:13):
a good moral character. The officer must take a holistic
approach in evaluating whether or not an alien seeking naturalization
has affirmatively established that he or she has met their
burden of establishing that they are worthy of assuming the
rights and responsibilities of United States citizenship.

Speaker 4 (02:34:31):
The worthy what does that mean? You have to prove
to an officer that you're a good person.

Speaker 8 (02:34:37):
Yeah, how so.

Speaker 2 (02:34:39):
Yes, by the officer's definition, I'm assuming.

Speaker 4 (02:34:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is guys for like discretionary enforcement.
So I don't like the word holistic here.

Speaker 8 (02:34:51):
I don't. Yeah, there is literally asking him to take
into account everything they know about this person and then
just make a call. Is this someway you want to
have as your neighbor, you know? Like, I don't know
what the oh, I mean, I can guess how this
might manifested. It's worth noting that as DHS goes, USCIS
officers tend to be the least right wing right CBP
and I so the much higher proportion of people who like,

(02:35:14):
for instance, they had some issues with getting people vaccinated
and CBP that kind of stuff right, indicators that people
might be sort of down this conspiracy pipeline. We also
learned this week that Todd Blanche directed federal cops to
arrest Mayor rasp Baraka outside of a detention center in
New Jersey in May. We noticed because of body cam footage,

(02:35:35):
we don't have the footage, but the footage is reported
on in court documents, and the footage a DHS official says, quote,
we are resting the mayor right now, per the Deputy
Attorney General of the United States. Anyone that gets in
our way, I need you guys, give me a perimeter
so I can cuff him. So that the agent talked
on the phone and then gave this statement.

Speaker 4 (02:35:53):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:35:53):
So it seems that the deputy ag there with the
one who gave the order to arrest rasp Baraka right,
ice has also arrested a cop. This is our little
moment of.

Speaker 4 (02:36:03):
Like harp pond cut violence, top pond cut violence.

Speaker 13 (02:36:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:36:07):
John Luke Evans was a reserve officer for the Old
Orchard Beach Police Department in Maine. The police chief of
Orchard Beach, who's called at least charred, said that the
department had used Everify to check if you could work legally, right,
which is the thing that you are supposed to do.
E Verify. It's a database run by the Department of

(02:36:29):
Homeland Security. I think it's also in combination with another
department that allows you to verify if somebody can work
legally in the United States.

Speaker 7 (02:36:38):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:36:39):
Tritian McLachlin characterized it as reckless, which is weird because
dhs who she's speaking on behalf of the other ones
who put that information into the database. It's possible that
someone entered at something in wrong at some point right,
someone put in a wrong number, they switched an O
for a zero, or something like that. This came to

(02:37:01):
light because Evans attempted to make a firearm purchase and
he filled out his forty four to seventy three and
the eighty f then notified ICE that a non citizen
who wasn't eligible for firearms ownership had attempted to purchase
a firearm, and that was how ICE came to detain him.
He is being allowed to leave the USA voluntarily. He's

(02:37:22):
not being deported. He's not being charged with attempting to
make the firearm purchase, which he could be charged with,
and the city of Orchard Beach is going pretty hard
in his defense. They've released some elements of a personnel file,
but none of them that pertained to his immigration status.
They're sticking by their claim that they believe he was
eligible to work in the USA. ICE are claiming, I

(02:37:44):
guess DHS now are claiming that his visa expired in
twenty twenty three, which was years before he began working
at the police Department. He was a seasonal reserve officer
and he had been working since earlier this year.

Speaker 4 (02:38:00):
Before we go on break, I want to do a
quick update on the Texas Democrats who fled the state
to delay or prevent the gerrymandering. And after their two
week walkout, the Texas House has now reached quorum once
again and a vote on the new redistricting map, which
would add five Republican congressional seats, is slated for Wednesday,

(02:38:24):
August twentieth, which is the day that we are recording.
After Democrats returned to the Capitol from their walkout, they
were subjected to twenty four to seven surveillance by the
Texas Department of Public Safety, and in order to leave
the House chamber, they had to sign what the Democrats
are calling quote unquote permission slips, agreeing to surveillance in
their just everyday life.

Speaker 3 (02:38:45):
Is that why I think it was a collier slept
at her.

Speaker 4 (02:38:49):
Desk one person's I think a state senator refused to
sign the slip and stayed in the Capitol overnight. There enough,
the Texas House Minority Leader Jeen Wu made a statement saying, quote,
we killed the corrupt special session was stood unprecedented surveillance
and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this extential

(02:39:11):
fight for fair representation, reshaping the entire twenty twenty sixth landscape. Unquote.
There's a very celebratory tone here, which is slightly odd
to me because this vote is still probably going through.

Speaker 8 (02:39:23):
Yeah, they kind of lose.

Speaker 4 (02:39:25):
This is going to get voted in.

Speaker 10 (02:39:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:39:26):
Now, Wu has said that the Democrats are going to
challenge the redistricting maps in court even if they are
able to pass through this House vote, and as we know,
the courts are the last bastion for democracy and will
save us all. We suspected that this whole walkout is
more performative than anything else and would not actually lead

(02:39:48):
to than killing this map, and instead of remaining out
of the state longer for an undeterminate amount of time,
possibly until November, they have ret turned and quorum is
in the chamber.

Speaker 2 (02:40:01):
So yeah, it's it's like it's not nothing, but it's
like the next just it's one step up from nothing.

Speaker 4 (02:40:08):
It's the most democrat thing to do.

Speaker 3 (02:40:10):
Yes, yeah, but why why only do half of what
was necessary?

Speaker 2 (02:40:15):
Yeah, Sophie, you you're asking this question because you didn't
grow up in Texas.

Speaker 3 (02:40:21):
I went to the Democratic National Convention. I understand the
half effort.

Speaker 8 (02:40:26):
Here's the reality.

Speaker 2 (02:40:27):
Texas Democratic Party exists to disappoint you. That's why, that's
why all this is happening.

Speaker 3 (02:40:34):
I just feel like the entire Texas Democratic Party is
just like a Beto O'Rourke, like the not not literally,
but the concept of Beto o'rour.

Speaker 8 (02:40:45):
Yeah, not wrong, Yeah, it's all.

Speaker 10 (02:40:47):
It's all there.

Speaker 2 (02:40:48):
Never never put your faith in Texas and any part
of Texas, and you you'll be disappointed less. I've been
telling people this for a long time.

Speaker 4 (02:40:56):
Yeah, it's like the second thing you told me.

Speaker 11 (02:40:59):
Every year.

Speaker 2 (02:41:00):
Democrats in other parts of the country every couple of
years get like excited. It's the Charlie Brown system where
they're like, oh my god, Texas might be about to
flip or something otherwise, good Ted Ted Cruz is going
to get forced out. We're finally going to have something
good happen in Texas politics. And every time, every time
that football gets pulled away.

Speaker 6 (02:41:19):
Yeah, so it.

Speaker 4 (02:41:21):
Feels not great that the minority leaders kind of patting
themselves on the back for taking basically a two week
vacation to Illinoising California and then returning and having this
go through. So I don't know, we'll see this develops.
The California is promising to do their own redistricting to

(02:41:42):
equal out the amount of like map changes, both adding
five more seats for the respective parties.

Speaker 3 (02:41:50):
It's annoying.

Speaker 4 (02:41:52):
It's just annoying.

Speaker 8 (02:41:53):
It's just annoying, like a nice piece of performance. So
I guess you know what else is annoying things?

Speaker 4 (02:42:01):
I don't think they're annoying at all. I value each
and every advertiser.

Speaker 8 (02:42:04):
Garrison actually personally vets all of our advertisers so you
can reach out to them.

Speaker 2 (02:42:14):
No, no, no, I I agree this is canon. Now,
if you're ever unhappy with an advertiser, find Garrison's personal
phone number and hit him up.

Speaker 4 (02:42:24):
No no, no, no, oh God, time to go into
blocking spree.

Speaker 6 (02:42:41):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 4 (02:42:43):
Putin, I guess is a guy.

Speaker 3 (02:42:47):
That's actually how I would describe the meeting between a
Trump and Putin and Alaska Putin.

Speaker 4 (02:42:52):
I guess, yeah, that's pretty much how it went. They had,
they had a little meeting.

Speaker 3 (02:42:58):
There are some insane, cannspiracy theories that he sent a
body double.

Speaker 4 (02:43:02):
Oh wow, yeah, yeah, it's one of my favorite things.
There's always insane conspiracy theories supported from BBC News actually,
which I find funny. Yeah, I'm glad that BBC's is
on the is on the pulse of theories spreading online.

Speaker 8 (02:43:17):
Yeah, yeah, no.

Speaker 2 (02:43:18):
And and people are just now figuring out again that
whenever world leaders travel to foreign countries for summits at
this level, they take their poop back with them. And yeah,
I saw an article being like, is it true, did
Putin really take his poop back? And yes, they all
do because they don't want it to get analyzed to
find evidence of health issues. Like the President has his
poop taken home every time he goes overseas. This is

(02:43:41):
just the way things are.

Speaker 4 (02:43:43):
Frankly. I think if we're able to get the Putin poop,
you can make a clone of Putin and then that
could be the body show we use. Yeah yeah, stuff
that like the fifties of CIA still existed.

Speaker 8 (02:43:59):
As they still use. It'd be a lot more fun. Yeah,
we would be doing would hoover.

Speaker 4 (02:44:06):
Really unethical human cloning project where you had this like
shambling like undead corpse of that we can problem Christ.
But that's basically how the meeting went. Sorry for derailing
my bad, no, because the meeting is kind of a
nothing burger. At this point. There was reports that Putin
basically ranted to Trump about how Ukraine's always has been

(02:44:28):
a part of Russia, and the meeting didn't really go anywhere.
Putin ignored a question on if he would quote stop
killing civilians. So yeah, that's basically how the whole how
the whole debacle went. And I think it's really indicative
that like a day or two after this happened, Trump
had the Zelensky meeting two point zero in the White House,

(02:44:49):
which went much better than the previous Zelinsky meeting, and
Trump was a lot more friendly with Silinskily this time around.

Speaker 2 (02:44:57):
Apparently Zelensky has been going around other European leaders getting
advice on how to like talk with it Trump.

Speaker 4 (02:45:02):
Yeah, he gave him, gave him a letter which which
Trump Trump really appreciates and likes. S he uh started
by thanking, uh, thanking the first Lady for a letter
as well. So there's always like little polite gestures that
Trump really enjoys.

Speaker 8 (02:45:17):
Yeah, he likes to be like honored and venerated.

Speaker 4 (02:45:20):
Yeah, so Zelenski indulged in that war of of a
fairly a fairly spiffy all black suits. I liked it.
It's a good it was a good suit. So it's
but it is. It is very indicative if you look
at like how the last Selenski meeting went, and then
after Trump was around Putin for like a few hours.
How how how Trump's mood was noticeably different around Zelensky

(02:45:42):
this time around. So we'll see. I don't think we're
gonna have any conclusion to the conflict in Ukraine anytime
soon based on how these two meetings went. There was
there was reporting that they were trying to set up
a meeting between Putin and Selensky, though that has since
been denied. It sits this like back and forth like
it has been the past, like two four years.

Speaker 2 (02:46:04):
But Trump is going to bring an end to the war.
He's the peace president, kind of get a Nobel prize.

Speaker 4 (02:46:08):
Yeah, did you know that Trump's ended six wars? Six seven,
six or seven? Wow?

Speaker 17 (02:46:13):
Wow?

Speaker 6 (02:46:16):
It's I love it.

Speaker 2 (02:46:17):
I love it when you can't keep track of how
many wars you ended.

Speaker 4 (02:46:22):
I got one other story I would like to discuss.
I'm sure James will have some comments sense as well
on a series of unfortunate ICE actions, including the first
instant that I'm aware of, where federal agents have shot
their firearms during an enforcement operation, at least as of
like the Trump administration two point zero. On Saturday morning,

(02:46:45):
August sixteenth, in San Bernardino, a family is pulled over
by massed federal agents in what DHS has since claimed
was a quote unquote targeted enforcement operation. As Customs and
Border Protection approached the vehicle, the family inside stread of
recording on their cell phones and asked for identification. When
the family refused to roll down the windows of the car,

(02:47:06):
federal agents smashed windows on both sides of the vehicle
and reached inside. At this point, the driver pulled the
car forward, and federal agents shot at the vehicle three
times before the car sped away. I'll play the video
here for posterity.

Speaker 8 (02:47:22):
Yeah, do you want what do you want?

Speaker 4 (02:47:25):
Identification? So those three pops at the end were the

(02:47:48):
three gunshots. Yeah, this is a wild one, the driver
told NBC Los Angeles, quote I had to protect my
life and my family en quote.

Speaker 8 (02:47:58):
Yeah, it's worth and guess these agents like them more
uniformed than some.

Speaker 4 (02:48:04):
Yeah, they have badges visible on plate carriers.

Speaker 10 (02:48:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:48:08):
They did not establish much communication between themselves and the
family as they approached the vehicle. There's a lot of
like yelling back and forth.

Speaker 8 (02:48:17):
Yeah. You can hear the man telling his son they
don't open it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:48:20):
The father's telling his kids in the car not to
roll down the windows, not open the doors as the
federal agents asked for the car to be opened, and
then they initiate force.

Speaker 10 (02:48:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:48:29):
The man here has lived in the US for twenty
three years and does not have legal status as to
adult sons who are in the vehicle are both US citizens,
according to Javier or Hernandez, the executive director of the
Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, who has spoken about this
incident on behalf of the family to local press. DHS

(02:48:51):
gave a statement to NBC Los Angeles. Quote, in the
course of the incident, the suspect drove his car at
the officers and struck two Customs of Voter Protection officers
with his vehicle on quote, saying that because the driver
tried to quote unquote run down the agent's a CPB
officer was forced to quote discharge his firearm in self defense.

(02:49:14):
Unquote Yeah, So that is the justification that they are using,
is that this vehicle was moving in the direction of
officers and officers acted in self defense by shooting at
the car.

Speaker 8 (02:49:26):
That doesn't seem to line up with the video that
we just saw.

Speaker 4 (02:49:29):
No, the cell phone footage from inside does not show
officers being hit by the vehicle. It could be the
case that you can see that one of the officers
reaching into the car. You can see if the car
was pulling away, his arm may have the door. Like
the officers are standing next to the car in the video,
it's not clear that there's any officers placed in front

(02:49:51):
of the vehicle.

Speaker 8 (02:49:52):
So yeah, his foot could have got run over. Maybe
if he's like leaning standing there close to the car.

Speaker 4 (02:49:58):
The car may have bumped office. It does not appear
like this man I was trying to quote unquote run
over the police.

Speaker 8 (02:50:05):
In fact, he was driving away from them. Yes.

Speaker 4 (02:50:08):
The family says that federal agents refused to identify themselves
and did not provide a judicial warrant, that DHS has
refused to answer whether agents had warrants, and after the shooting,
the driver called the San Bernardino Police Department to report
that massman pulled his car over, broke windows, and shot
at him and his family. Police came to his house
and spoke with the driver, but did not arrest the

(02:50:28):
man because California police cannot legally assist federal agents with
immigration enforcement. According to a statement from the police department,
DHS made a statement criticizing the police for not taking
the driver into custody. Quote. This reckless decision came despite
the subjects outright refusal to comply, and his wounding of
two federal officers has yet another tragic example of California's

(02:50:52):
pro sanctuary policies that shield criminals instead of protecting communities. Unquote,
this is what we're calling wounding. Yeah, The severity of
the two officers alleged woundings has not been specified. Police
later returned to the home along with ice and Homeland
security investigations, but the family did not let them enter

(02:51:13):
as they did not have a warrant, though police made
one non immigration related arrest outside of the home as
community members rallied together in support of the family. As
of two days ago, the DHS has said that quote
the suspect remains at large.

Speaker 8 (02:51:30):
JESU Christ, this is a needless escalation that put people
in danger, Like, yeah, what.

Speaker 2 (02:51:37):
Else is there to say though, Like, it's bullshit. This
is not an excuse to discharge a weapon. This isn't
count as wounding. These people should never been pulled over
in the first place. But you know what we are
where we are, this is the way ice works.

Speaker 8 (02:51:54):
Yeah, then this will probably happen again. I guess, like,
I'm mildly surprised if sam Benadina police did not detain
the man on suspicion of assaulting a federal agent, which
is something that they could detain him for. Right it's
not immigration crime, Yeah, and that is an extremely broad
defense and one doesn't have to know the person's a

(02:52:14):
federal agent, for example.

Speaker 4 (02:52:16):
So I guess like, raere, We'll see how this develops. Yeah,
it's still unclear what's going to happen to this man. Yeah,
I'll check for an update next week. A few days before,
on Thursday, August fourteenth, a man fleeing an ice rate
at a home depot in Monrovia, California, was hit and
killed while attempting to cross the two to ten freeway

(02:52:38):
on foot. Local activists say that during the same raid,
ice hit someone in the leg with one of their vehicles,
and that person was taken into custody.

Speaker 8 (02:52:49):
This is tragic, right, Yeah, the reckless use of vehicles
in LA was remarkable, and I've covered a good deal
of protests and a good deal of places. The use
of vehicles in an extremely dangerous way by police was notable.
When I was up there covering the protests, I think

(02:53:11):
it was in June. It was something that in certainly
was very concerning to me. So it would not shock
me if people had been hit by anic vehicle. But yeah,
this is a tragedy. And again, like because the stakes
are taking everything in someone's life away from them, we're
going to see this happen more often.

Speaker 4 (02:53:29):
Right, No, it can cause people to do brash, run
safe things. They attempt to cross the busy freeway. Yeah,
the two town is a very busy freeway always. Now
it's extremely tragic.

Speaker 8 (02:53:39):
Yeah, this is yeah, really sad. So Ed Sauce reporting
that a student out of California, Benjamin Guerrero Kruth, who
had just turned eighteen to begin a senior year of
high school, was detained by immigration authorities from walking his dog.
One of his former teachers visited him and mentioned that

(02:54:00):
he had overheard. He had told her that he had
overheard ICE agent talking about receiving a fifteen hundred dollar
bounty for making his arrest.

Speaker 4 (02:54:09):
Yeah. Well, like in some promotional videos from DHS and ICE,
they've been boasting about bonuses not only for signing on
for this recruitment dry that they're doing, but also like
cash bonuses for immigrants getting arrested and deported. And there's
been multiple clips of agents like talking about this or like,
you know, talking about, I wonder how much of a
bonus we're going to get for these batchel of arrests.

(02:54:31):
So this is this has been something noticed in multiple states.
I've heard of this in Florida, and this sounds like
it's in California. You said, yeah, California. Yeah, yeah, So
this is this is a pattern, and it's not even
very glorified bounty hunting, because it's not really glorified, but
it's essentially essentially bounty hunting.

Speaker 8 (02:54:49):
Yeah, that might be why we're seeing some of these
like insane arrests right of people who would never normally
expect to see.

Speaker 3 (02:54:57):
We reported the news here, We.

Speaker 4 (02:54:59):
Reported the new news.

Speaker 10 (02:55:01):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:55:08):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 3 (02:55:14):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 4 (02:55:25):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 3 (02:55:27):
You can now find sources where it Could Happen Here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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