It Could Happen Here Weekly 200

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it

(00:28):
could happen here, a podcast about it happening here, it
in this case being an incredibly political shooting, and the
thing that's happening Garrison and I wading through a river
of disinformation and fever dreams to try and pull out
some degree of truth. And what is a very truth

(00:50):
light environment right now? Garrison, how are you doing?

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Truth fluid? Certainly truth fluid.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, that's a better way to phrase it.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
I have a growing headache that I think grows larger
by the second.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, will not cease.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
I guess you should first discuss how the shooter has
been identified and arrested. Yes, we are recording this Friday
evening for context.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yes, early evening there will be more information on the
shooter and on the shooting. By the time you listen
to this, we may include an update at the end,
but we will be talking about stuff that is timeless,
as in things that we know are false or true
at the moment, and just generally our ethics on when
do we feel confident saying a shooting or other kind

(01:37):
of attack was left wing or right wing or something else,
like when do we feel confident in making those judgments
and why? Because those are really relevant topics and a
lot of people just kind of go with what seems
right based on the flow of info there hearing, which
is how disinformation spreads. So the last time we would
have talked about this would be the ed episode that

(01:58):
came out. What was that Friday, Yeah, Thursday night, Friday morning,
And basically right after we covered that early in the
morning on Friday, President Trump was doing a media appearance
on Fox News and he was the person who announced
that they had a suspect in custody. Who were pretty
sure was it Obviously, since the FBI had given the
wrong accused the wrong person at least twice of doing this,

(02:21):
people weren't sure if that meant anything. But it did
come out very soon after that that a young man
had essentially confessed to his father, who negotiated him turning
himself into the authorities. This young man is Tyler Robinson.
He was born and raised in Utah. I think, as
far as we know, I woke up in the middle
of the night, right as his name came out. I

(02:42):
don't know why. It was weird, and so I just
immediately started looking at the social media for his family,
because I was able to find his mom and his
dad's Facebook.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
So I can tell you, and this is something you'll
find in the reporting. He came from a pretty normal
Utah family, politically conservative. That's based on articles I've seen,
we interviewing people who know the family, and just based
on publicly available information.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Grunt style T shirt wearing father right.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
He dressed as Donald Trump. It's seemingly in a positive
fashion for Halloween one year. His family were pretty a
very normal Utah family. I found posts where they took
pictures of them camping with their RVs, going out hunting.
He was hunting from a young age. He had access
to firearms from a young age, including assault style weapons
from a young age. Again, very common for Utah, and yeah,

(03:29):
his family hunted and fished, and he seems to have
been a very normal kid in that regard. Kind of
the thing that I found when I was doing my
first dive into this that I thought was worthwhile, and
the one thing that I really pulled out of that
to share with people was in twenty eighteen, he dressed
as a meme for Halloween, and the specific meme was

(03:51):
this meme that is not inherently political, but is one
that this group of far right people who follow a
guy named Nick Fuint has called the groupers like, which
doesn't mean that he was signaling to that, because again,
like all of this stuff, it's not just the gropers
who like this squatting slav guy meme. That's what he
dressed as. If you've seen this meme of like the
squatting Slavic guy in a tracksuit with a cigarette and

(04:13):
a beer, he dressed like that for Halloween. There's a
groper version of that squatting slav guy.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Well, no, there's a Pepe version.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
You're right, You're right, I need to be precise. There's
a Pepe version, and it is a meme that you
can find shared in groper spaces, which again does not
mean it's a groper meme, and I've seen that mistakenly
and really tried to push back on This does not
mean he definitely was, but it doesn't mean that he was.
He was a very online kid, and he traveled in
spaces where he would have had access and would have

(04:43):
been aware of grouper's and that would have been one
chunk of the online fever swamps that he would have
been connected to and he would have had access to.
We don't yet know at the time we're recording this
what he believed or what his motivation was. The rething
I thought was relevant to publisher this is that, like, okay,
we are dealing with an extremely online weirdo.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
And immediately after that it came out exactly what was
carved onto the bullets that he had shot. And this
was relevant in part because yesterday, the first day of
news that we had about the bullets, the immediate claim
that was leaked to Stephen Crowder through a source of
his in the ATF was that transgender symbols had been

(05:22):
carved onto the bullets. That was not accurate. If you
want some levity from this whole scene, listening to the sheriff,
Oh God giving the press conference, read the things he
carved onto these bullets.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
We should just include some of those clips here.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
We'll put it in here.

Speaker 4 (05:40):
Inscriptions on a fired casing read notices bulge's capital owo,
what's this question mark. Inscriptions on the three unfired casings
read hey fascist, exclamation point, catch exclamation point, up arrow symbol,
right arrow and symbol, and three down arrow symbols. A

(06:03):
second unfired casing red, oh belichow, belichow, belichow chow chow.
And a third on fired casing red. If you read this,
you are gay, lmao.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Just absolutely outstanding stuff. I mean, hearing a law enforcement
officer say that is beautiful. It reminds me of having
to explain bitcoin to all of the elderly detectives in
West LA when I got a death threat against me.
But this is like extremely online gamer nonsense, gay right.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, average white male over the online gamer at this point,
that's what it looks like. It could have developed in
a far right direction, could be developed in a far
left direction. Could be an ironic centrist. It could be
any number of things. There's no single clear indication.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Could be someone who doesn't map easily onto any of
these traditional political compasses, Like, we don't know at this point.
And what's kind of important that and the reason what
I thought was really important to get out to people
is that there will always be terrorist attacks from a
wh It's never even if you want it to just
be right wingers. It's never just right wingers who do
domestic terrorism. That's never been the case, and it never

(07:08):
will be the case. And one of the things that
we're seeing and we will increasingly see, is that even
while there will be varying political motivations behind different attacks,
the language that people who are carrying out attacks like
this use is all kind of coming to a point together. Right,
They all have more in common with the way they message.

(07:30):
The christ Church shooter and this kid both found the
need to put memes onto the weapons they were using.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Inscribe the internet exactly onto tools of killing, mechanisms of death.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
But literally inscribing the Internet onto tools of death. That
is a thing both of them did. Yeah, maybe for
wildly different reasons. Maybe this guy was coming from a
left wing perspective, right, we just don't know.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
But this is where it's all coalescing around.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
And I think that is really important to note, right,
the way that that happens. Now again, we wanted to
talk about the thing that we can definitely say is disinformation.
And one of the first counters to the whole transgender
symbols carved onto bullets that came out was people putting
up pictures of there's a Turkish manufacturer called Turan and
they make bullets and their logo on the back of

(08:17):
a bullet. If you're not a gun person, every bullet
has the logo of the manufacturer and the name of
the caliber stamped onto the back, right, I mean, just
for basic safety reasons, right, or nearly every bullet twenty
two is a little too small. But like if you've
got like a round a nine millimeter or around a
five five six or around a thirty at six, which
was the caliber he used, apparently on the back of it,
you'll see the name of the manufacturer and then the

(08:38):
caliber stamped in there, right, and so on. The back
of Turan bullets is stamped tr in. And so people
started posting online this must be why they thought what
they thought was transgender, that like they saw a Turan
bullet and assumed it was trans and We know that
wasn't the case because this was a thirty out six
and Taran does not make thirty out six ammunition. We
also know this was the case because they have now

(08:58):
come out and said what was written on the bullet
and what was mistaken for transgender air routs and the
thing that was mistaken for transgender arrows was a reference
to the video game hell Divers.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
A fucking hell Divers meme. Yes again, very gamer online kid.
Side note, it's not completely clear which bullet casing was
attributed to transgender ideology. It could be an interpretation of
the arrows, or it could be the notices bulge oh
woe casing and on that note, notices bulge oh Woe

(09:32):
is not a groper meme. It's a meme making fun
of furry sex role playing, which predates the existence of
gropers by years, and as a meme has since been
reclaimed by furries and trans shit posters online or trans
only fans creators, or just trans people in general on
the Internet, many of which are also furries. But now

(09:55):
we have various types of opposing or overlapping groups of
people who use this meme online. It's not a right
wing meme just making fun of furries. It is also
a meme used by people on the left and furries
on the left, and probably furries on the right too,
and non furries. It's just a general internet meme. It's
a Reddit tiar joke. Now, I will say the hell

(10:17):
Diver's meme also gives us kind of our not a
clear look, but a look at a possible political motivation. Now,
it could be ironic in use, it could be just
referential in use. But the full hell Diver's referenced bullet
reads hey fascist catch, followed by the hell Diver's dpad
input for the five hundred kilogram bomb right, which is

(10:41):
the arrows.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's the down arrows.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
I think up arrow side arrow, down down down arrow,
which some ADS agent or someone initially thought could have
been a reference to the transgender symbol or the three
arrows symbol. Coupled with the hey fascist section of that reference.
The hell Diver's video game does used fascist as a term,
but this also could be a more general political reference,

(11:06):
either ironic or sincere. By referring to Charlie Kirk as
a fascist. We do not know the actual and intentionality
behind this reference. Yet One thing that's possibly tied it
to anti fascism is that another bullet reads bella Chow,
bella Chow, Chow Chow, misspelling bella Chow, which is a
popular anti fascist anthem, though the song has more recently
also been used by groipers and fans of Hearts of

(11:30):
Iron four, a diverse political budge. One could say we
have talked about bella Chow on this show before. In fact,
we've used bella Chow on multiple cool Zone media shows.
It was originally an Italian anti fascist song that has
since been adopted by anarchists and anti fascists all around
the globe. I've heard Bellachow get played on loudspeakers countless

(11:52):
times at anti fascist events on the West Coast as
well as anarchist events on the East Coast. Though the
song has since gained a whole other life through pop
culture popularization, with EDM and like dubstep style remixes going viral.
Most normi's probably first heard it on the Netflix show

(12:13):
Money Heist and has been adopted into gamer culture via
its use in Far Cry six and Hearts of Iron four. Again.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Could be an anti fascist reference, could be video game shit,
could be graper shit. There's just not enough to say
at this point.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Or it could be could be a centrist, a political
hodgepodge of that has resulted in this nihilistic outburst of violence,
similar to some of these like TCC school shootings. Yeah,
we don't know, but there's currently a lot of people
on the right who thinks it's an ANTIFA super soldier leftist,
a lot of people on the left who think this

(12:51):
is a Nick Fuentes piled groper. And either of those
could be true, but neither could be true. It could
be a much weirder third. We don't have direct evidence
to support a full reading of either of those things yet.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
And this is when I have seen people get kind
of heated about being corrected on particularly the bullet thing.
And I think the reason why is that it seems
it seems like such a smoking gotcha. Of course they'd
be this stupid you really want it to be true.
And it's when you feel like that about a case
like this, about an attack like this, that like, oh,

(13:27):
I really want this to be true. It would be
really satisfying if this was the thing that had happened.
That you need to be most hesitant to embrace that,
right I think that's that's what I'd say.

Speaker 3 (13:40):
Absolutely, if it's too good to be true or it
feels too convenient, you should introspect greatly.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, Robert and Garrison will be right back. But first
here's some ads and we're back.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
There's been other things that is kind of influencing this
political uncertainty. A reporter for the Young Turks only the
most reparatable news outlet, has claimed on Twitter on Friday afternoon. Quote,
according to Utah officials and police interviews with his family,
Tyler Robinson hated Charlie Kirk because Kirk wasn't conservative enough.

(14:25):
Robinson reportedly admired Nick Fuentes. G O piers are now
scrubbing ex posts about DEM's faster than doj eRASS Trump's
name from in Epstein files. Unquote. Yeah, this claim from
David Schuster the report of the Young Turks unsubstantiated. Yes,
but it's being spread as as exact fact, and it

(14:46):
seems like this claim is most likely misquoting and editorializing
from a statement a family member gave to police, which
has been described by the governor as a family member
and the shooter discussing Charlie Kirk's upcoming visit to UVU campus.
They talked about why they didn't like him and viewpoints

(15:07):
he held. The family member also stated Kirk was full
of hate and spreading hate unquote, So that has been
altered and shifted and interpreted in a lot of different
ways to say that the shooter stated Kirk was full
of hate and spreading hate, even though that's not what
this interview segment necessarily means. Just that quote unquote, they

(15:29):
meaning the family member and the shooter didn't like Kirk,
And that's really all you can extrapolate from that piece
of this police statement. But it's been spreading editorialized to
me in a wild collection of different things. Yeah, including
by people on the right who are interpreting this statement
as evidence that the shooter has said that Kirk was

(15:49):
spreading hate, even though that's not actually clear from this
interview either. No, it says the family member stated Charlie
Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, not the shooter.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
And likewise, one of the things I'm seeing spread a
lot is a claimed voter registration for Robinson.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
A Tyler Robinson in Utah.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Yeah, again, there's a lot of them, a.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Lot of Tyler Robinsonson in Utah.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
The one that is spreading the most, has a voter
registration date of one to one two thousand and one,
which he just simply couldn't have. Now that said, people
pointed out that Utah's voter registration shit is bad, and
this does seem like a placeholder that someone put in.
But also the county's not right because he didn't live
in Lehigh, Utah, and that's where this is listed for.
I'm not saying this guy definitely wasn't. He may have

(16:32):
been a registered Republican, but it looks like we don't
have the information to say that yet. Likewise, there's an
article that was published recently in The Guardian where they
talked to someone who was a friend of his in
high school who said that he was like the only
leftist in a family of Republicans and was angry about it.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
The exact quote was that Robinson was quote pretty left
on everything, the only member of his family that was
really leftist. The rest of his family was very hard
Republican yep. And that Robinson would quote always just be
renting and arguing about them.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
And it does look CNN is saying that they have
found Tyler Robbinson's actual voter registration data, and CNN says
he's registered as unaffiliated with a political party and is
listed as an active, which means he has not voted
in either of the two last general elections. Sure, so again,
there's just nothing clear we can.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Say, right, Yeah, it's hard to take both this young
Turks reporter and a high school friend from four years ago.
Not great sources for someone's current political outlook, absolutely not
and contradictory. So it's really really unclear. Also, this is
just one friend. You would want more than one source
to substantiate this claim. And perhaps by Sunday night, when

(17:46):
this airs, there will will be more information. Quick update
on this. Literally minutes after Robert and I recorded, the
Guardian retracted those quotes from the shooter's alleged high school estimate,
which described the shooter as a leftist. The source contacted
the Guardian again and said that they could not accurately

(18:08):
remember the details of their relationship in high school. So
the Guardian has pulled those quotes. But certainly right now,
the way people have latched on to narratives to satisfy
the current emotional turmoil that people are in because of
the hyper reality around this shooting and the possible consequences
it could mean for the fate of this whole country.

(18:30):
I understand why people are quick to really hook their
version of reality onto these claims. Yes, but currently there
is no clear version of reality.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, And I just want to caution people if you
care about knowing reality yourself. And there's two different questions here, right,
what is useful, what is valuable, what like protects people?
And then what gets us closer to the truth. Right.
Part of why as soon as I found that photo
of him dressed as a meme for Halloween and recognize
the implications of it, I put it up there is
because I thought it was relevant that it said something

(19:01):
about his background, but also it got discussion and just
people bringing up how complicated this guy's background. Is it
a positive thing? Which was a got discussion away from
absolutely baseless allegations that this was a transgender terrorist attack
and all sorts, all the kind of shit that had
been spreading on the right, right, and that was valuable. However,
I've been really careful about not saying this guy is

(19:22):
a groy Berth, even though that sure would be convenient,
because again, at the time we're recording this. There's just
not that evidence. Every new fact that comes out about
this guy right now is wavering in this gray area
where you know, like I one of the other things
when I posted correcting the voter registration card, somebody posted like, okay,

(19:44):
but he donated to Trump's campaign. No, he did.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
Not.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
A different guy with his name donated to Donald Trump,
the Tyler Robinson, who is currently in custody for shooting
Charlie Kirk, has no record of federal election donations, per CNN. Right,
these are very convincing when you see them just sort
of sliding across your feed, and if you're not checking
up on every new thing you see, it feels like, obviously,
this guy's a right winger. Obviously he's a groper. I've

(20:08):
seen so many pieces of evidence when you actually haven't
seen any evidence at.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
All, and even those two things can get compleated. Right,
Saying he's a groper is different than saying a right winger.
Right Like a groper is a very specific branch of
alt right slash far right community slash ideology revolving around
the America First streamer Nick Fuentes and a collection of
memes associated with this movement, which have historically beef with

(20:34):
Charlie Kirk for not being sufficiently to the right as
some more openly white premisest neo Nazis have been. This
beef between Fuentes and Kirk was largely dissolved after Kirk
started adopting more and more far I believes, and adopted
the great Replacement theory, which settled down the quote unquote
Groper war, which many people are assuming that this shooting
is a part of, with some groper Nick Fuentes fan

(20:56):
killing Charlie Kirk, possibly as a legitimate part of the
quote unquote Graper war, but also maybe just has like
an ironic mimetic act. So when you say Graper, that
should refer to a very specific thing, not necessarily just
this guy used right wing memes or these memes aren't
even right wing, but.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Like, no, it could be, but they're not inherently This.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Man could be, but they're not inherently nor are they
really the main use of this saying Haha, if you
read this, you are gay, could just be an average
overly online male right or on the internet. A lot
of people talk like that. A lot of gay people
talk like that. A lot of fashions people talk about
that is.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
This homophobia or a twenty year old Right, it could
be either or Yeah, And we don't need to just
jump to one specific thing to build a singular narrative
when a fluid situation is still rapidly unfolding.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Not if again, you want to feel like and you
want to really be better than the other side, who
don't give a shit about the truth, who just care
about what's convenient and how many people they can get
to believe a convenient fact. Right, If you don't want
to be that kind of person, if you think that's bad,
and I do, and you do, and we all do
here at cool Zone, then you do kind of it

(22:12):
to yourself to care about stuff like this, even if
it's less convenient. By the way, if you're not an investigator,
you don't have to be delving into all this. It's
enough to just know the fact that I saw something
that looked like evidence this guy donated to a campaign.
Do I know that that's him? Do I absolutely know
that's him? Because it's possible multiple people have the same
name and some of them may have made a donation

(22:34):
or not. Right, don't just pash your eyes over stuff
like this and be like, all right, I've done all
I need to do, but do purchase from these advertisers

(22:55):
and we're back.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
One other aspects that people's reaction to the shooting is demonstrating,
and we've seen this with other major events, major political events,
violent political events, past few years, is how this shows
a new fracturing of reality, because what eventually gets proven
about the shooter will probably be insignificant to the narratives
that people have already latched onto and have baked into
reality so far. And this conceptual splitting of reality is

(23:22):
going to fall squarely along some partisan in political lines.
Right conservatives will have a conception of the shooting which
differs heavily from the conception of the shooting held by
people on the left. Many people on the left are
going to believe that this shooter was a groper forever,
no matter what comes out in the next few weeks
to months, they will have in their version of reality

(23:43):
the idea that this guy was a groper. Similarly, people
on the right are going to believe, to the fullest
and truest except of their hearts, that this guy was Antifa.
The actual reality is going to matter very little compared
to these two beliefs, and the killing of Charlie Kirk
has mimetic potential for several large, discreete and overlapping online groups.

(24:06):
Many different online communities or groups could have encouraged or
influenced this killing. Anti fascists certainly could have Leftists, the
Groper right could have the four Chan right could have
terror Graham could have Yeah. All different and possibly overlapping
communities in cell culture, Yeah, irony, poisoned centrists, j ragg, nihilists, accelerationists.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
A normal garden variety Trumpist Republican who got angry over
Epstein stuff could have done this. There's no evidence of that.
I'm not saying, but I'm just saying, like there we
literally like it could be so many things at this point.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
And as satisfying as it is to just collapse this
guy down to Antifa or Graper, it's very likely it
could just be of third, weirder option, be the weirder option, right,
especially if you look at the nihilist trend of violence
that we've covered on this show, from TCC with ties
to other extremist groups, the multiple school shootings that have

(25:01):
used nostalgia and online references and references to previous shootings.
This could also line up with that framework. As Robert said,
the inscription of memes onto tools of death is a
commonality across many of these gruesome acts of violence, from
christ Church to the Minneapolis school shooting just a month

(25:22):
ago to this assassination in September. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Now, I think it is worth talking about how gropers
and how Nick Quintees himself has responded to this, because
that is telling, right totally, whether or not this guy
is a grower. A lot of gropers have publicly speculated
that he is their guy.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Or people on four Chan have speculated that he is
a graper, not your average four Chan user necessarily he's
a groper. I think this distinction is also important.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
That is valid.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yes, but yeah, you have seen a lot of people
on the right suspected this guy could be a groper. Certainly,
some gropers have themselves as well as four Chan users.
And Nick Fuintes does see a little bit nervous, but
he could be nervous for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
But he put out a video.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
I watched the entire Nick Fuentez stream last night.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Oh good, thank god, he was.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
Acting a little bizarre, talking very philosophical, almost as if
he was like doing ketamine beforehand. Like he was talking
about how the structure of society, and like a spiritual
structure as well, will influence society to cause events to
happen which kind of stress test and demonstrate the direction
of society going. And he basically talked about the assassination

(26:33):
as one of these events of society unfolding itself to
determine what path is going to get taken. Our thing
is going to get more violent and more divisive, or
will this event alter reality's course in a more positive direction.
It was very interesting. He was talking about how he
feels some responsibility for the arc that this country has

(26:55):
gone on, how he's made a lot of mistakes when
he's younger. You could interpret this as trying to pick
up new supporters and try to fill in the Charlie
Kirk sized hole in the American right, but it's unclear.
He was talking quite emotionally about what the past few
years of his life have been.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
And again making that comment that I want all of
my fans to stand down, etc. It's noteworthy of where Fuintes'
head is right yeah, and of the media environment. He
must exist in terms of like personally what comes to him.
And I'm very curious if I could, if I could
somehow know everything Nick Fuintees has been texted and been

(27:35):
texting over the last seventy two hours. God, that would
be fascinating.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
He said. The people on the left were telling him
it's his responsibility to try to turn things down, and
he was kind of upset about that. And during the stream,
Fuintes was not discussing the shooter as if the shooter
was a groper, or even suspecting the shooter was a groper.
Nick telling his audience or whoever listening, to put down
your arms and not jump to quick emotional violence was

(28:01):
in reference to retaliatory violence against the left for their
killing of Charlie Kirk. That was the way Tuentes was
talking about the shooting through the course of this hour
long stream. It did not seem to me that he
was trying to cover his bases in case the shooter
was a groper. That wasn't how he was discussing it.

(28:22):
He certainly laid a lot of blame on the left,
and he seemed very scared about the direction of the country.
Someone showed up with a weapon to his house less
than a year ago, and I think some of his
fear is absolutely genuine. It's not just trying to cover
his ass in case this guy turns out to be
a groper.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
No, he's in danger because of the things he did.
He invited the danger into his life by being Nick Quintes,
but he is in danger.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it was. It was a very
odd stream. I tuned into nck Quentez every once in
a while just to keep track of what he was doing.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Like a healthy person.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
It's my job. I know.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
I woke up at four am to stock a murderer's
family on Facebook. Gearson.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
So it was in the first fifteen minutes of the
stream where Nick discussed these more theoretical elements, how spiritual
or societal forces kind of use people as puppets, not
in a like fully NPC way, but as an evolutionary
method of charting the path of society. Nick then wents
to go on to discuss Charlie Kirk, how he's beefed

(29:30):
with Charlie in the past, how they've disagreed on nearly everything,
but goes on to say some nice things about Charlie
for the first time and then calls for everyone to
lay down their arms and now is not the time
to jump to quick action, We should reflect, et cetera,
et cetera. But in those first fifteen minutes, he talks
about like what this shooting means for American culture. And

(29:51):
I've been watching some of his other recent streams where
he's kind of been going after some of his fans
for just being completely like brain dead, just repeating racist
tropes with no real thought, just talking about Hitler in
this memified way, and it feels like he's sort of
reflecting on both what he's done with his life ever
since he's been a teenager and the world that he

(30:14):
has helped bring into being. He talks about never having
much of a actual sincere or participation in politics, how
it's always been so bombastic and mimetic, and it appears
as if he's kind of stuck doing this bit forever,
like he decided that this is what his life was
going to be as a teenager, and now he's in
his mid twenties, and from these other recent streams, it

(30:38):
feels like he's kind of fed up with how his
audience is just appearing completely mindless, very Larpee, endlessly repeating
Hitler references reflectionive racism, and how he's trapped himself in
this political game. And a quote he said is that
this is not a game. This is life and death.
And as we've just seen, like this is literally life
and death. This is not just online memes anymore. We

(31:01):
can't treat politics as an online meme game anymore because
these real life characters are getting killed. They framed a
lot of this in very spiritual warfare language, like they
killed Charlie for being Christian or talking about Jesus though
stressing to his listeners like Jesus not actually pick up
arms and fight. Yeah, and people should calm down and

(31:24):
reflect because how the country handles this event will be
heavily deterministic, yes, in what the country looks like going forwards.
And that's what he was expressing.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Right, Yeah, And I think that that's that's a really
important point for people to get across that, like there's
there's the immediate battle in front of us, right, which
is why it's so tempting sometimes to take the easy
Oh that's this guy was one of theirs. That that
means we don't have to keep thinking about it, or
it means that we can kind of just like move

(31:54):
forward with this as another right wing attack. And there's
a degree to which you know, it's good just for
the right's narrative machine to get upset by the fact
that even if it turns out this guy at left
wing motivation, he's weirder and more confusing than they want
him to be, and he's not you know, the transgender
terrorists they were hoping he would.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Be certainly not trans right to give.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Them permission to do all the fucked up shit they
wanted to do. You know, if they need permission, I mean,
they seem to feel like they need an excuse.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I do think, hey, Trump creates permission. Some of his
followers might appreciate permission.

Speaker 6 (32:26):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (32:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
One thing that is undeniable is there was an extreme
desire from a lot of these guys for this to
be tied in with their ongoing attacks on trans people
in the left totally right, and so I understand even
the argument that, like anything that disrupts their narrative train, there,
even if it winds up not being accurate, there's a
value in it. I do understand that argument, But on
a larger thing if we just care about terrorism and

(32:50):
like why people get radicalized to do things and how
and understanding these phenomenons.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Like actually understanding how our country is unfolding.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Right, that influenced all of our lives, right, And usually
usually what happens is not a single guy getting shot
for a specific reason, usually a bunch of people who
had nothing to do with the grievances expressed getting shot.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
That's usually when somebody decides to pick up a gun
and go into public because the inner they they got radicalized.
Usually a bunch of random, innocent people die, which is
again why it's just really important to try to understand
the underlying dynamics, even in a specific case like this,
and why I actually do care about the truth here,
even though that that's not as convenient maybe as we'd

(33:34):
like it to be. I don't know what else? What
else do we want to talk about here?

Speaker 3 (33:39):
No, I mean, like, I think this event will be
extremely important. Yeah, something that that fwene has talked about
is how even if you've never met Kirk, you, whether
you hate Kirk or whether you love Kirk, Kirk has
been a parasocial force in probably everyone who's listening to this. Yeah,
their lives for years, and watching him bleed out gruesomely

(34:04):
is massively affecting. I think the reason why people are
reacting to this so much more strongly than the murder
of a state senator and her husband is that we
did not have a personal relationship with that state senator,
nor was there a video of them gruesomely bleeding out.
And people's emotions affect how they understand reality, and the
Charlie Kirk murder has been emotionally affecting for a lot

(34:26):
of people, both positively and negatively. And it was very graphic,
and it's spread around like watching someone who you know,
whether personally or parasocially, die on video through the medium
in which they gained their fame, is going to be
a very large, to use a really bad pun, a
turning point for the USA. And I think that's part

(34:48):
of why everyone's so volatile around this issue, because I
think everyone realizes how important this moment will be. Despite
the deaths of Palestinian children vastly, vastly outnumbered the deaths
of one conservative commentator.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, and you know, like logically we could all say
that that's wrong and fucked up, but like you just
you know, that's how people work, right, how people work.
We all know that's how people work. I'm not saying
that's okay, I just you know.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
No, but it's it's it's the way, it's the way
things work.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, And I don't know, like because again we again
still cannot say at this point that there was just
a Vanity Fair article came out that's kind of repeating
some of the Groper stuff. But I looked in my
post is their source on that? So they don't have
anything new on the Groper front.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
So no, they're just thinking that the squatting slav meme
is evidence, yeah, tied to the Pepe version of the meme,
which is then linked to Groyper, which is a specific
type of pepe, not the skinny pepe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
I'm so tired, Robert, I'm really tired. I don't know
if this guy liked Nick Flintes. I will say he
probably had an opinion about Nick Flintes. He was aware
of them, the dude right, like he was that level
of online for sure.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah, I mean, which twenty two year old gamer mail doesn't.
And that's the thing, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Again, It's like I was talking about when before we
knew who it was when we just had the video,
because I did accurately anticipate that it was someone who
learned how to shoot through hunting with a bolt action rifle.
That's just what the shot looked like to me when
I saw it, Yeah, which wound up being accurate. And
there were a lot of people who were like questioning
that on the grounds of like, well, though, this had

(36:20):
to be like a trained sniper or something like that,
and it's like.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
This looks like a professional hit to me, Robert, or no,
a massad agent either.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Or yeah, like no, Literally, all we knew is that
it was somebody who was able to like competent with
a firearm.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
That's all you could say.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
And probably it was not a semi automatic because people
in stressful situations, if they can usually keep shooting right.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
They would have hired more than one shot.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
And was like, yeah, yeah, that's all that's all we
could say, which narrowed it down to everyone in Utah,
Like like that's when I try to emphasize this that
like what I can say from this is that anyone
in Utah could have shot Charlie Kirk at that point,
and sure enough, it turned out being almost.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
Like average twenty two year old Utonian.

Speaker 7 (37:00):
Yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Positive, normal Utah kid, that's what this guy looks like
so far.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, and yeah, there's a lot of like semi racist
or semi misogynist gamers out there. They're not necessarily gropers, right,
And we don't even know how racist this guy was.
There's no indication one way or another. He certainly had
an awareness of online culture. But everyone who makes a
hell Diver's two reference is going to have a pretty

(37:27):
large awareness of online culture. And that does not indicate
what his quote unquote beliefs are, just an awareness and
an existence within that culture.

Speaker 7 (37:37):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
Well, I can't think of anything else to say at
the moment about this. It's unclear to me the degree
to which this has shifted the national discourse on it.
I have seen it looks like the way in which
the conservatives are talking about this guy in the shooting,
it looks like they have changed sae, at least some
of them, because it's less clear at least the number
of people right we're seeing.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
The groper counter narrative has introduced doubt, which will influence
some conservatives understanding of the shooting. Others will keep keep
hitting that that, that, and that leftist Antifa line. I
have seen certain people claim that the Groper narrative is
even changing the way Trump talks about the shooting because
Trump is not referencing Charlie Kirk as much or is

(38:20):
avoiding questions about how he's feeling in regards to to
Kirk's death. Yea, Trump has never cared about Charlie Kirk. Okay,
Vance certainly has. He's like closer to like Vance's orbit.
But Donald Trump doesn't give a single fuck about Charlie Kirk.
Absolutely not this little, this little puny man, Like, no,
Trump does not care. It makes sense that one asked

(38:42):
how Trump feels about about about Charlie Kirk's and and
and if he's feeling okay, He's like, yeah, I feel fine.
What I'm really excited about is that we're constructing the
new White House ball right. Yeah, Like that's not indication
that Trump's been told that this guy's actually a rightist
and now has to not talk about how the left
is ruining the country. Now, it's that Trump does not

(39:04):
care about target Tark that much. And it's been a
few days, so yeah, he's gonna move on.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah, And that's you know, if you're wanting to game
theory this out of the ethics of just muddying the
waters to disrupt their momentum, Well, there's an argument to
be made there.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
I can see the utility in that. Yeah, My utility is,
I would say, at the very least equal to that, right,
And that's having an accurate understanding. I want to know
what happens to the world to predict future trends and
like understand the trajectory of political violence in the United States.
And that's what my interest in stressing evidentiary standards for
understanding the motivations behind this attack and the online communities

(39:43):
and cultures that this attack has emerged from.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Right, And I would say, if you're looking in your
own life, how can I tell which side of things
I'm on? Just imagine everything was reversed in the case
where like you think, this is really clear evidence that
this person was motivated by whoever you hate the most,
and that whatever ideology you hate is why they did it.
If it were the opposite and this same level of

(40:07):
evidence was being used to accuse someone who was on
your side of things, would you consider the evidence presented enough, right,
And That's where what I'm looking at is, I have
not seen enough evidence to buy into either side fully yet.
I can make a case in my head that he's
a groper, and there's some pieces of evidence that fit
with that. And I can make a case in my

(40:28):
head that he's a guy who hates Charlie Kirk, and
there's quotes from some interviews that would back that up,
but neither of them is a solid at the moment
that we're recording. This is a solid hypothesis to me.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Or just a vaguely right wing board gamer right or
just a right wing word who has zoomer angst and
it manifested this way as many other people have manifested
there are zoomer anks through an act of political violence. Yeah,
like groper, a very specific term means a specific thing.
It doesn't just mean a gen z conservative.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yep, No, it does not. And I think that's where
we're going to have to and leave you for the day.
We may have appenned an update to this, depending on
what else is out. I do think that most of
what we're talking about is pretty even though there will
be more information at the time you listen to it,
pretty timeless. In terms of how you should think about
shit like this.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
How you react to whatever the next assassination is going
to be, because this is an increasing trend in American politics.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Look, if you care, and if your stance, if your
principled stance with all the evidence is I don't care.
All that matters is defeating the right. So all I
care about is what's convenient in terms of disrupting their narratives,
Then go on and live your life. But that's not
the way we're going to do things here. When we
look at these tacks, we are going to try to
figure out what happened, even if it's inconvenient, and it

(41:41):
may be, you know, we don't know what this guy yet.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
Touch some fucking grass before you touch grass, I'm recording
one more update Sunday morning. Yesterday, right wing out let's
and then Axios and now even more mainstream out let's
started reporting that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, had a transgender
room mate, and that investigators believe the two had some

(42:04):
sort of romantic relationship. Some information from law enforcement officials
about this investigation has been shown to be dubious at best,
but it is true that the shooter had a roommate
who does appear to be transgender. The roommate's TikTok can
be traced to a Reddit account where they post about
being trans and post on r slash trans r slash

(42:26):
trans Diy, as well as r slash four Tran, and
also posts on our slash Green Text and r slash
four Chan. Also active in a variety of video games subreddits,
magic the Gathering Memes subreddits, r slash Distressing Memes, r
slash Reddit Moment, r slash Unpopular Opinion, r slash Lord

(42:49):
of the Rings Memes, r slash Prehistoric Memes, r slash
dank Meme, r slash nothing Ever Happens. Also post on
our slash by Irl, r slash Anarcho Capitalism, r slash
Jordan Peterson, as well as the four Chan themed subreddits.

(43:10):
I should also note that scrolling these subredits is not
necessarily indicative of someone's political orientation. I myself scroll many
of these subredits, as do largely a political friends of
mine who check out these subreddits regularly just for shits
and giggles. This is politics as meme subredits like Political

(43:31):
Compass and TPUSA are popular political subredits with explicitly comedic purpose,
including making fun of Charlie Kirk in a memified fashion.
And I don't know if the roommate visited those two
specific subreddits, but I'm just using them as an example.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox says that the roommate did not
have any knowledge of Tyler Robinson's planned attack and has

(43:54):
been incredibly cooperative throughout the course of the investigation. Sources
have told Axios that investigators initially wanted information about the
roommates gender identity to not be publicly reported. The right
is certainly eager to make any sort of transgender connection
to this shooting. The New York Post has referred to
this shooting as another shooting by trans people and their advocates.

(44:18):
The actual motivation of the shooter is still currently unknown.
Governor Cox has described his ideology as leftist, while also
noting quote there was a lot of gaming going on.
Friends have confirmed that there was that deep dark internet
Reddit culture and other dark places of the Internet where

(44:39):
this person was going deep. You saw that on the casings.
I didn't have any idea what those inscriptions meant, but
they are certainly the memification that is happening in our society.
Today unquote, that's pretty much all we know so far.

Speaker 8 (44:55):
Now go touch some grass.

Speaker 9 (45:14):
Here. The last time that you and I spoke was
about twelve hours after Trump announced the takeover of DC's
police force. It had really just happened, so I didn't
really have a ton of clarity about how things were
going to be taking shape and what resistance or pushback
would look like. Now today that we're speaking Friday, September twelfth,
it's been a little over about thirty days since all

(45:36):
of this went down, and I feel like we're due
for an update from my hometown, the District of Columbia.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
What do you say? Absolutely, we're at the deadline. So
now Trump can no longer do anything. The city's back. God,
I wish you're free once again. Oh my God, from
your lips to God's ears. So I did want to
set the stage a little bit up top. You know,
I'm a journalist, but I am also an advocate for

(46:03):
DC statehood first and foremost. I feel like I need
to make sure something is super clear, which is that
how entwined all of this.

Speaker 10 (46:12):
Is to DC's lack of statehood.

Speaker 9 (46:14):
After the last time that you and I spoke, there
a listener said, oh, why is she making this whole
thing about statehood? How would DC being a state change anything?
How would two more democratic senators change anything? Why are
you making it about that? And I thought, oop, I
did not do a good enough job of making clear
why the takeover in DC could happen at all, and
the ways that DC's lack of statehood is at the

(46:37):
heart of that issue. This is just sort of the
soup that I swim in all day, every day, So
I forget. That's not true for everybody. For some of you,
this might be a refresher, and you might know this already,
But the reason why Trump started all of this in
DC is because DC is not a state. You know,
as president, Trump has a lot more authority over DC
than he has over any other place in the country.

(47:00):
While Trump talking about sending the National Guard into other
cities is awful.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
He wants to do it to Chicago's so bad, so bad,
but he doesn't have the ability to. And he's really
upset about that, so much so that he's probably going
to cancel a degree of the plans for National Guard
diploma to Chicago instead going to cooperate with Louisiana because
the governor is okay with working with Trump on that
in Louisiana.

Speaker 9 (47:23):
Yes, exactly exactly did you see this is like a
non secorder. But the tweet that he put out, like
the AI generated tweet that's they're gonna find out why
we call it's the Department of War. Then it was like, oh,
we were just just kidding and just.

Speaker 10 (47:36):
Yes, delete that tweet now the most just that was
just a.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Joke, which is into like downplay, like the amount of
federal resources currently in Chicago. ICE in DHS have been
very busy in Chicago, and I believe Friday morning, the
day that we recorded this, ICE killed somebody in Chicago
during an enforcement action. So this isn't to say, you know,
Chicago's freed from Trump's federal force. His ICE is still

(48:01):
operating in Chicago as they have been, but at least
the National Guard deployment like mass military style occupation is
unlikely in the near future.

Speaker 9 (48:10):
Yes, that is great context, and I think it also
illustrates why what's happening in DC is so unique and
could not happen anywhere else in the country. So while
Trump is talking about wanting to send the National Guard
to other cities, he does not have the broad authority
to take over local police forces in those cities the
way that he did in DC. And even if he did,

(48:32):
let's say, exercise what authority he could have over local
police and other cities, say like in an emergency situation,
it still wouldn't be the attempt to take over the
police force like we saw in DC. Like when this
first happened, Pam Bondi was literally trying to replace DC's
chief of police briefly successfully until DC's Attorney General, Brian
Schwab sued. Right, And so yeah, Trump does not have

(48:55):
the authority to oust local leaders and other cities and states.
Even if sent the National Guard to Memphis, Memphis still
has a mayor, Tennessee has a governor, there's senators, this
congressional representation. Because DC is not a state, Trump working
with Congress could take over our city, elset, our mayor,
and our city council. He has been talking about doing

(49:15):
that as recently as this morning. I want to play
a quick clip. He does lie in this clip because
technically he doesn't have the authority. It has to go
through Congress. But you know, I don't see our Congress
really standing up to whatever Trump wants anytime soon, and
so if Congress were to provoke DC's home rule, then
Trump would be able to appoint whoever he wanted to

(49:37):
run d C. So I want to play a clip
of him talking about this, weirdly in Oppressor about that
Charlie Kirk murder. Here's what he had to say.

Speaker 11 (49:46):
Well, the mayor's asked us to say, you know, we
have a Democrat mayor. He was asked us today, and
DC's a little bit different because I could federalize it
if I want. You know, DC's a little bit different.
So we have a lot of a lot.

Speaker 7 (49:56):
We have actually more.

Speaker 11 (49:58):
Power in DC because it's you know, I can change
the mayor if I want, I can do whatever I want.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
I haven't had to.

Speaker 11 (50:03):
We've had a great relationship with the mayor. We've had
a great relationship. Everybody's happy, and the mayor was not
in favor of it at first. We forced and then
she saw the results and everyone's going up the thank
you her.

Speaker 7 (50:16):
We have no crime anymore.

Speaker 9 (50:17):
Ugh, Okay, I gotta stop it because I can't even
I can't even listen to him bloviate on that.

Speaker 10 (50:23):
But again he's kind of lying here.

Speaker 9 (50:25):
But there is a reality where Trump single handedly is
in control of DC. So it would have to take
Congress overturning DC's home rule. But I don't think that
would be terribly difficult for him to achieve. And if
that does happen, he is right that he could appoint
whoever he wanted to be in control of DC. And

(50:45):
so the GOP has already introduced legislation that would revoke
DC's home rule entirely, something that Trump says that he
wants to do. To be super clear, this would mean
that all of the little things that you rely on
and probably take for granted about your day to day
local life, your social services, your trash pickup, how your
streets are run, your public transport, Trump would be in

(51:08):
charge of literally all of that. For me, it's important
to me that people understand how bad of a situation
that would be.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
Yeah, that would be unprecedented.

Speaker 10 (51:18):
So just to put a pin in that.

Speaker 9 (51:20):
Even though Trump is talking about setting the National Guard
to other cities, DC's lack of statehood really makes what's
happening here unlike any other place in the country, DC
is uniquely vulnerable. In addition to all of the racial
equity and democracy implications for statehood. The reality is everyday
lives of more than a half a million people who
live here like me are made more vulnerable by DC's

(51:42):
lack of statehood. So when I am on my statehood soapbox,
that is why, because the lack of statehood in DC
just makes us very vulnerable to having somebody like Trump
really exercise an unprecedented amount of control that we will
not see anywhere else in the United States. So just
wanted to make that clear. Okay, So now I have

(52:03):
some updates about the situation. As you said, Garrison, the
crime emergency in DC, which sort of kicked all of
this off, has come to an end.

Speaker 10 (52:14):
Free that's over. Mission accomplished.

Speaker 9 (52:17):
We did its accomplished, so it lasted thirty days and
it's come to an end. However, there is no guarantee
that Trump couldn't just declare another one. The optics of
that would be a little weird because he's been talking,
as we just heard in that clip, he's been talking
about how crime is down to zero in DC except
for domestic violence, which everybody knows isn't really a crime, right, Like,

(52:37):
he made it very clear that he feels like crime
has gone to zero, so will be pretty weird to
then institute another crime emergency in DC.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
He kind of got what he wanted to with the
mayor agreeing to cooperate with him.

Speaker 10 (52:50):
Someone m hmmm exactly.

Speaker 9 (52:53):
So to be super clear, even with the crime emergency
in DC, ending that in no way means an end
to things like the National Guard in our streets or
checkpoints which have just been horrifying, and the surge that
we're seeing in federal law enforcement, because those are two
distinct things. And in the last few weeks of this,
what's really become just abundantly clear is that this whole

(53:15):
thing was about immigration. Even after all the talk of
crime and DC, it became very clear that this is
less about crime and more about enforcing Trump's immigration agenda.
As you sort of alluded to early on, before she
really changed her tune about Tukes into the takeover, our
mayor Muriel Bowser held a press conference where she said, well,

(53:37):
if Trump's goal was to deport migrants and bring an ice,
you know, he didn't have to take over MPD to
do that. He should have just outright said that's what
he wanted to do, instead of making it this whole
thing about crime. Don't ask her to repeat that sentiment now,
because I don't think that she would. She's really really
changed her tune, which we'll talk about.

Speaker 10 (53:52):
In a moment.

Speaker 9 (53:53):
And so one of the things that makes it complicated
is that when you're talking about immigration detention versus other
kinds of arrests, it just becomes a lot harder to
have transparency into what's going on. But the Associated Press
reported that dated from the federal operation, analyzed by the
AP shows that more than forty percent of the arrests
made over the month long operation were related to immigration.

(54:16):
They spoke to Austin Rose, a managing attorney for the
AMICA Center for Immigrant Rights, who said the federal takeover
has been a cover to do federal immigration enforcement. It
became pretty clear early on that this was a major
campaign of immigration enforcement, and that's just it's really hard
to deny that this was just another increasing plank of
the president's agenda on immigration.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Yeah, and I think you can certainly look at the
anti crime narratives getting a lot of traction on the
right with that pretty gruesome murder in North Carolina last
week as well, and like, absolutely the crime angle is
part of the rhetorical strategy Trump is using. And yeah,
a right wing populast president doing a crime crackdown. Oh,
this is unheard of, This is unprecedented. No, like, of

(54:57):
course they're going to use that angle. But yeah, the
under discussed element of this is how much this has
just been a cover to do a rapid increase in
the number of immigration actions around DC. Will like you said,
that was like forty percent, so still another sixty percent
of arrests is just affecting the other DC residents, and
a lot of that is tying to this national crime

(55:17):
wave narratives that these people are also pushing. I think
these things work together. They're not necessarily like oppositional analyzes
of what's going on. But the immigration angle has been
very underdiscussed in the DC occupation.

Speaker 9 (55:32):
I agree it's hard to discuss because I think we
have to really have some honest conversations. It is true
that DC experienced a surge in violent crime in twenty
twenty three. That surge thankfully went down, But I think
that crime is just one of those issues where people
who other rise are invested in telling nuanced, thoughtful stories

(55:55):
about complex issues. I see a lot of that nuance
and thoughtfulness go right out out the window when we're
talking about crime. And I think that we really let
the right dominate the conversation about crime in our cities
and in some ways hijack that conversation. And I do
think that dynamic is part and parcel to how we

(56:16):
got here. Now, I have a b in my bonnet
about some of the sloppy journalism, like local journalism, people
who really should know better about crime.

Speaker 10 (56:25):
You know, we had a wave.

Speaker 9 (56:27):
Of businesses shut and they would say, oh, we're shutting
because of crime, and it's like, yeah, look you actually
look and you're thinking, oh, well, this is a cash
less business.

Speaker 10 (56:34):
What kind of crime were you experiencing?

Speaker 3 (56:37):
Yeah, there's no way. Using crime as this excuse in
post COVID economic decline has been extremely convenient for a
lot of corporations. And yeah, I guess like the degree
to which we've seeded territory on that same way, you know,
we see a territory on like the border and immigration,
but specifically sitting territory on discussion of crime allowed operating

(56:58):
space for Trump to deploy this narrative, which then was
used to hurt a lot of.

Speaker 9 (57:04):
Immigrants exactly, and in DC, we saw much tighter coordination
with immigration officials with our local police force, especially at
checkpoints where police would work with ICE even if someone
was not otherwise detained or in custody. I did an
interview with the Washington Posts Tayu Armis, who covers immigrant
communities here in DC, and he told me that this

(57:25):
whole thing was essentially an attack on the policies that
make a city like DC what is commonly thought of
as a sanctuary city. I don't love the phrase sanctuary city,
but you know what I mean, you know laws that
do not require police departments to coordinate with immigration officials.
Really that it was an attack.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
On those Yeah, totally.

Speaker 9 (57:44):
Yeah, I mean, and I think that it's important that
we call that out for what it is. And this
is difficult for me personally, but not get lost in
debating what Trump is laying out about crime, because when
you understand that it's not really about crime, then you
don't have to do that debating, right, And it's like, well,
the it's not really about crime, so let's not waste
time debating what we both can plainly see this is
not really about.

Speaker 3 (58:05):
Yeah, yeah, because DC is just faking all crime stats anyway,
right bridget.

Speaker 10 (58:09):
Oh gosh, don't even get me started, gare.

Speaker 9 (58:23):
And so, something that Tayu told me in our interview
that I found very troubling is that, again, when someone
is detained because of a suspected immigration related issue, we
just have a lot less information and transparency than if
they were being arrested for another kind of crime. He
described it as a black box that is difficult to penetrate,
which is obviously heightened when you have masked agents pulling

(58:45):
people out of cars at checkpoints and doing things like
literally hitting delivery drivers with vehicles right like, it becomes
very difficult to really even understand what's going on, and
that's by design.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
It's hard to find them in the system because these
people often aren't even charged with their crime. Remaining in
the country past. The expression of a visa isn't a
crime exactly. So though these people are brained as quote
unquote criminal migrants, that that often is factually incorrect, if
factually incorrect even matters anymore, which it increasingly does not,
it seems.

Speaker 9 (59:16):
Yeah, And I mean, as you said, we know that
immigrant communities are not committing more crime than the rest
of the population, and.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
So estimates would show less actually exactly because they don't
want to get deported.

Speaker 9 (59:27):
And you know, again, I feel myself getting pulled back
into Trump's he he gets me go like circling the
drain with this, where it's like, well, if you really
cared about crime, you would want immigrant communities to feel
comfortable talking to believes with the understanding that they weren't
going to be deported if they reported a crime, or
if they witnessed a crime, or if they saw crime.

Speaker 10 (59:43):
But again, it's.

Speaker 9 (59:44):
Not really about crime, so I don't have to I
don't have to get myself pulled into.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
That, no, because it's entirely racialized. That's like the big
common denominator here, even with the anti crime narrative and
the immigration stuff, is that it's all racialized violence.

Speaker 9 (59:56):
Yes, And I mean, I'm glad that you brought that up,
just as a personal I live in Columbia Heights, which
is a heavily black and brown neighborhood, a very thriving
Latino population, and it really just has been awful.

Speaker 10 (01:00:11):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:00:11):
I live on a very busy street that runs right
through the city, and like checkpoints on either side of
my street, and I was listening to. I think it
was a Kara Swisher podcast, and she also lives in DC,
and she was saying, oh, well, I haven't really noticed
any big changes, and I'm thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
Kara, Yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet you aren't noticing
many changes.

Speaker 10 (01:00:32):
Yeah, I bet you haven't noticed any changes. And yeah.
I mean I've lived in DC most of my whole life.

Speaker 9 (01:00:37):
I've never seen checkpoints where people are physically dragged out
of cars and in this way. So I mean, if
you don't live in a neighborhood like this, you might
be able to get away with saying, oh, I haven't
seen any big changes, or nothing's really changed, or maybe
I just see the National Guard when I leave my house.
But in neighborhoods like mine, the change is very real,

(01:00:59):
I'll put it that way.

Speaker 10 (01:01:00):
So you brought up.

Speaker 9 (01:01:01):
The mayor, which I did want to briefly touch on.
I have been called out on this very podcast for
being too sympathetic to our mayor, which is actually funny
to me because on my other podcast, all we do
is call her out. But the point that I have
tried to make, and I think this is the nature
of that critique, is that I do think it is
important that people understand that our lack of statehood in

(01:01:24):
DC does put our mayor in a position where her
authority is just realistically a lot more limited than other
elected officials. But even in that situation with realistically limited authority,
her play here has been cozying up to Trump. And
that is one hundred percent a choice. Yeah, that is
not something that other elected officials in DC have done.

(01:01:44):
That is one hundred percent a choice.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
And it's a choice in an attempt in some ways
to diffuse the situation to not have Trump escalate, to
not go into a even more like legally uncharted territory,
right to accelerate the conflict. And I think a lot
of people who are critiquing this move actually would be
very interested in this point, in accelerating this conflict, seeing

(01:02:09):
what Trump will actually do stress tests even more of
our democracy, and a lot of people are interested in
watching the results of that happen. And I can see
how someone like Bowser doesn't want to do that, but
that opens her up for a lot of critique. And
I'm interested in what you said about like other city officials,
That's not something I've heard as much about, is her

(01:02:31):
kind of cooperating with Trump compared to the stance of
other city officials.

Speaker 9 (01:02:37):
Yeah, I mean, look at DC's Attorney General Brian Schwab,
who has been out here suing the Trump administration somewhat
successfully and has been a much more obvious fighter for DC. Right, So, like,
he is certainly not playing nice. He's like, Oh, we're
gonna fight this in the courts. If you want to
try to take over our city, we will see you
in court. I'm so curious what the conversations are like

(01:02:58):
between Bowser and Schwab, But it just reveals to me
that capitulating and cozying up. I'm not gonna say it's
not a strategy, but it's certainly a choice. And to
your point earlier, there are definitely people who say, hey,
she's playing nice with Trump. D C still has home rule,
DC still has a mayor, and the crime emergency has ended.

(01:03:18):
Those are all good things, And being a resident of DC,
I will happily say I don't want to see how
far Trump will go on this. I want this to end.
I want you know, I'm not someone who was like, yeah, like,
let the chips fall.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Where they may.

Speaker 9 (01:03:33):
I want my trash picked up, I want my you know,
my neighbors' kids to be able to go to school.
All of that, I'm not that's understandable. Yeah, yeah, it's
the complex thing. I do think that, you know, early
on in this, Bowser was talking about how crime in
DC was down, and then Trump said on social media, oh,

(01:03:54):
Bowser better get her story straight on the crime numbers
or things are gonna get worse. And days later she
was taking in a very different tune. She did a
press conference where she thanked the federal government. She did
stop short of thanking Trump specifically, but thanking the federal
government for helping DC.

Speaker 10 (01:04:10):
With the crime issue.

Speaker 9 (01:04:11):
And I guess to somebody who's been following Bowser for
as long as I have, it wasn't terribly surprising in
an episode I did of it could happen here. I
think back in January we talked about how her stance
with Trump this time around was like concession after concession
after concession, So it wasn't surprising.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
This falls in line with that, I guess.

Speaker 9 (01:04:30):
Correct, And I do think that people need to understand
that in a lot of ways Bowser and I don't
mean this in the way that it's going to sound,
but like I do think that there is alignment between
Bowser and Trump on a lot of issues, crime potentially
being one of them. Right, when we were talking about
how Trump wanted Bowser to dismantle encampments in DC, it

(01:04:53):
wasn't like Bowser as some friend to the homeless.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
No no, no, no.

Speaker 10 (01:04:57):
Yeah, like the.

Speaker 9 (01:04:58):
Specific encampment in question already had plans to demolish, just
later on on a slower timeline.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
There is a class alignment among people in the political
quote unquote elite.

Speaker 12 (01:05:09):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
You can look at Gavin Newsom's extreme anti homeless policies
and compare that to Trump's extreme anti homeless policies, and yeah,
they have class alignment on that issue, even if Gavin
might be against Trump on some other issues, though he
has his own fair share of concessions to Trump.

Speaker 10 (01:05:28):
Oh you said it, friend.

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
Also, I like that I'm on a first name basis
with Gavin.

Speaker 10 (01:05:33):
I know, gab.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):
Podcaster solidarity and as we've seen the past week, podcaster
solidarity most important thing.

Speaker 9 (01:05:39):
Ooh yes, oh yes, Also, fellow, iHeart podcaster.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
I believe for Gavin. Yeah, yeah, I hope he joins
the union.

Speaker 13 (01:05:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:05:49):
Same.

Speaker 9 (01:05:50):
And I guess I should say to your point about
the complexities about you know, the way that Bowser, our
mayor is playing this. It's true that it's good that
the crime emergency has ended, that DC still has home rule,
we still have a mayor, we saw the city council
as of today. And even if you will say, like,
well that's you know, the mayor CosIng up with Trump,

(01:06:11):
like you have that to thank that's why that's happening.
Our mayor is really making no friends with other black
mayors in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

Speaker 6 (01:06:20):
I have to assume.

Speaker 9 (01:06:20):
Yeah, when she does press conferences where she talks about
how having federal troops in DC has been good for
the city, how crime has gone down, when you have
these other cities that are currently trying to fend off
federal takeovers from Trump. So even if her CosIng up
with Trump has led to d C specifically being able
to enjoy home rule for another day, at what cost
if it enables Trump's actions in other cities.

Speaker 3 (01:06:42):
You know, me putting on my skull mask as I
bring out my chess spoarding the accelerationist collapse of DC
and how that affects a larger political situation in the
United States. Yes, how much how much of DC am
I willing to sacrifice to see how far Trump will go.

Speaker 10 (01:07:00):
Yeah, it's tough.

Speaker 9 (01:07:01):
It's complicated because obviously, as a DC resident, I want
to have a safe and peaceful existence for myself here
in DC. But it's not happening in a vacuum, and
so I also have to think about, you know, the
national implications for other cities.

Speaker 10 (01:07:15):
And you know, I don't envy our mayor.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
I guess I don't envy many mayors. Oh.

Speaker 9 (01:07:21):
I am firmly believe if you want to become the
mayor of a city like DC, Baltimore, Chicago, something has
to be wrong with you.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
And Bridget Todd has come out against Zorn Mamdani officially
could happen here podcast?

Speaker 9 (01:07:33):
No, no, no, I'm just saying I mean, yeah, I'll say it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Who wants a job like that though? It sounds like
a nightmare. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:07:41):
I and a friend who was like vying to be
the head of comms for the Baltimore Police Department, and
I was like, wow, you are a massacre.

Speaker 3 (01:07:49):
That's even weirder, that's even weirder.

Speaker 10 (01:07:51):
Yeah, that's like the I.

Speaker 9 (01:07:52):
Can't imagine to never know peace and not get into heaven.

Speaker 10 (01:08:00):
Listening and thinking, oh, why she's talking shit about me?

Speaker 9 (01:08:02):
And so it is complicated, and I do think it's
important as important as much as I want DC to
be a safe place where I can walk outside and
not see people getting dragged out of cars and federal
checkpoints and all of that, we do need to think
about the larger picture here. And people that I've talked
to with regards to the mayor, they tell me that, oh,

(01:08:23):
it seems like she is just not interested in the
like the polling of these decisions, because the conversations that
I am having, people are not happy with her. In
the spaces I am in. The conversation is like, how
do we recall this mayor? Like, even though we might
have these sort of things that you consider victories, DC
enjoying home rule, still having a mayor, a city council,
all of that, people are really really really not happy

(01:08:47):
with our mayor. Yeah, so looking head at what's coming
up next. Even though the crime emergency is ending, this
whole thing is very far from over. The fight for

(01:09:08):
the self determination of DC is far from over in
ways that have in a lot of ways nothing to
do with Trump. There are thirteen bills in the House
aimed at directly taking action at DC. Many of them
are direct assaults on DC's home rules. There are provisions
that would make it easier for Congress to overturn DC

(01:09:28):
home rule. There are provisions that lower the age of
when you can be tried as an adult for crimes
from sixteen to fourteen. There is a provision that would
give Congress longer time to review DC's laws. Right now,
it's thirty days. They would change it to sixty days.
All of DC's laws have to go through Congress. It
is a nightmare, Like it is a whole thing. The
biggest of these bills in the House right now is

(01:09:50):
of course, wanting to overturn DC's ability for district residents
to elect our own attorney general instead of having an
attorney general appointed by Trump. If that bill were to
become law, it would mean that our current attorney general,
the person who I would argue, has sort of emerged
as the If there was a single person that you
could look at and be like, oh, this person is

(01:10:12):
trying to fight for DC's home rule and authority, Brian Schwab,
he would be fired immediately and Trump would be able
to replace him with whoever he chose, not somebody that
district residents elected or voted for or campaigned for, just
whoever Trump wanted, and that term would run concurrent with
the president of the United States.

Speaker 10 (01:10:30):
So obviously, you know, some of these pieces.

Speaker 9 (01:10:33):
Are not overturning home rule entirely, but they are clearly
attacks on DC's ability to govern itself and the self
determination of folks here in the district.

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
Are you going to discuss what's going to happen with
the Safe and Beautiful Task Force? Oh no, but I
can has passed the expiration of the order, Bowser's establishment
of the task force to continue federal cooperation. Yes, I
guess it's like one of the most immediate, like continuing
aspects of this story. And it's like unclear how much
this heightened fedral presence will last past the expiration of

(01:11:07):
the order.

Speaker 10 (01:11:08):
So in a.

Speaker 9 (01:11:08):
Press conference, I have to say, Bowser was pretty tight
lipped when asked directly about all of that, and so
a lot of it sounds like wade and see, like
she really did not give clear answers, and so yeah,
I walked away from that presser being just disconfused, as
you probably are, just disconfused as listeners are. I do
think in part that speaks to the unprecedented nature of

(01:11:30):
the way that Trump is dealing with DC right now.
Of like they might genuinely not know, but the fact
that the way that she has been so tight lipped.
I hate giving this answer, but I think it's a
wad and see kind of situation. Yeah, fair, Hi, this
is Future Bridget coming in on Monday night to say
that we actually got more clarity on the question of
whether or not police in DC would continue working with

(01:11:52):
federal immigration officials after DC's crime emergency ended. DC's Mayor
Muriel Bowser was still being pretty tight lipped about this
when Gary and I were speaking about it on Friday,
but on Monday, September fifteenth, it was reported that Bowser
had announced that d C's Police Department MPD would no
longer be assisting immigration officials with immigration enforcement the way

(01:12:14):
they had been during the crime emergency. Bowser said immigration
enforcement is not what MPD does, and with the end
of the emergency, it won't be what MPD does. Trump
did not like this, and on Monday, Trump renewed threats
to federalize DC's police again if the Department does not
cooperate with ICE, saying, quote under pressure from the radical

(01:12:37):
left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent,
criminal takeover of our capital for years, has informed the
federal government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer
cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens.
If I allowed this to happen, all Caps crime would
come roaring back to the people and businesses of Washington

(01:13:00):
d All caps.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Don't worry.

Speaker 10 (01:13:02):
I am with you and won't allow this to happen.

Speaker 9 (01:13:05):
I'll call a national emergency and federalize if necessary.

Speaker 10 (01:13:09):
Three exclamation points.

Speaker 9 (01:13:12):
And so I guess one of the big questions that
I've been wrestling with is what does all of this
mean for the future of DC. There was a time
where it felt like lawmakers had DC's back, but it's
really become clear that the days of DC being able
to count on the Senate and Congress are over. I
did an interview with a long time journalist here in DC,

(01:13:34):
Marxy Graves, and he reminded me that DC has really
been the most reliable jurisdiction in the country there is
for Democrats. There's no other place that has given more
electoral votes for president to Democrats every single election.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
It's extremely consistent extreme.

Speaker 10 (01:13:51):
I mean, have you seen that map where it's the
election for.

Speaker 9 (01:13:55):
Reagan and it's a whole big splotch of red and
only I think Minnesota and DC are the only splotch
of blue. Like nobody backs Democrats like DC backs Democrats
every single time. California can't say that, Massachusetts can't say that.
And in return, the party has essentially abandoned us. They

(01:14:16):
circulated messaging nationally telling Democrats to tread carefully about how
to talk about what is clearly an attempt at a
fascist takeover of our city. DC has given Democrats this
unwavering support since we had the ability to vote in
presidential elections, which it hasn't been that long since, only
since the sixties, but still right like, and this is

(01:14:36):
how they do us. And we have known for years
that Republicans like Mike Lee and others have had their
eye on DC. They want to overturn DC rules, overturn
DC laws, even things that have nothing to do with
crime and public safety, things like abortion.

Speaker 10 (01:14:52):
It is so clearly about control.

Speaker 9 (01:14:54):
They have been eyeing control of DC for many many many,
many years, and now we have this big, wide, open,
breezy window allowing them to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
Is DC spiritually Midwestern? Because like it's sorry, that's an
insane question.

Speaker 10 (01:15:11):
Tell me more about what you mean by.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
This, because like, in some ways, you know, it is
like a coastal, elite place and it's like the you know,
the heart of political power. But DC to be always
has kind of had Midwest vibes. I don't I don't
know how to express it any other way. Maybe to
because so many people from the Midwest move to d
C to do politics work. But I'm sure people from
all over move to DC to do politics work. But

(01:15:34):
like DC and like Minneapolis feel like very similar cities
to me in some ways.

Speaker 10 (01:15:38):
I have said this before.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
See that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 10 (01:15:40):
Yeah, I have.

Speaker 9 (01:15:41):
Said this before, Like I think there is something to
this where And in that interview I did with Mark C.

Speaker 10 (01:15:47):
Graves, he kind of he kind of gets at it
a little bit.

Speaker 9 (01:15:48):
But I do think that DC is the kind of
place where you can just sort of take for granted
that I will always live in this sort of progressive city.

Speaker 10 (01:15:58):
I will always sort of live in this.

Speaker 9 (01:16:00):
Like I think it's easy to take things like home
rule in DC, for granted, And I think DC the
nature of DC is a little bit weird that, as
you kind of alluded to, it's a very transient city.
And so there are people living in DC who have
only known one Mayor Bowser because she's been mayor for
like ten years.

Speaker 5 (01:16:18):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:16:18):
They don't know Mayor Gray, they don't know Mayor Fenti,
they don't know how kind of tenuous a lot of
what holds DC together actually is. And it can be
really easy when you're living in a city the historically
has enjoyed low unemployment, has been pretty moneyed, is pretty progressive.
The kinds of fights that we were having in DC

(01:16:40):
before all this started, they seem so quaint now, bike
lanes tipped minimum wage, like all of these you know,
it is it is sort of like Minneapolis in a
kind of way.

Speaker 10 (01:16:49):
You're not You're not wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
Well, I'm glad, I'm glad my vibes meter is still
accurately attute.

Speaker 9 (01:16:56):
Yes, And I did want to spend a little bit
of time talking about to protests and pushback that we've
seen because DC has not taken this quietly. There was
a massive protest in March that I will say, I'm
a little sad that it didn't get.

Speaker 10 (01:17:09):
More national coverage.

Speaker 9 (01:17:10):
Weirdly, it got a lot of international coverage, but not
a ton of national coverage, which is sort of part
and parcel for DC. So many national outlets only think
about DC when it comes to federal implications, and when
it comes to what's happening locally in our streets and
at Malcolm X Park and all of that, they're like DC,
who we don't know her? So like that protest was

(01:17:32):
quite moving. We also have local groups like Harriet's Wildest
Dreams and Free DC who are great resources. Free DC
a lot of their work has been at the community level,
leading things like cop watching trainings, like training residents to
film enforcement stops, which when you consider what Kayu Armis
told me from the Washington Post about how these immigration

(01:17:54):
detensions and arrests are often just a black box. We've
seen video where a resident is being detail by immigration
officials and they are speaking to the person recording like
please record this, please record this, you know, And so
I do think like things like that are super important
when you're dealing with, you know, this black box dynamic
of immigration detensions and arrests.

Speaker 10 (01:18:15):
We also have things like educating residents on their legal rights.
And this is like a weird saying in DC.

Speaker 9 (01:18:22):
DC has a ton of parks, actually more parks than
any other part of the country. We're consistently voted the
number one city in the country for parks, and so
because DC is just a wonky place, sometimes you don't
know if you're on federal versus city property. So you
can find yourself in a park that's just a tiny

(01:18:42):
little triangle of grass. Oh no, you're actually on federal property.
So if you get arrested there, you're actually in a
federal jurisdiction, even though you're miles from the White House
and you thought like, oh, I'm just hanging on in
a public park. So we have seen local activist groups
and organized in groups really try to educate folks on
their rights and some of those distinctions of like, hey,

(01:19:03):
if you commit a crime here, you're technically on federal
property and you should understand that. And I wanted to
mention this because I do think it's easier to think
of resistance as this big, loud, visible thing happening in
the streets and as moving and powerful as that big
protest was so far. I think a lot of the
powerful resistance has been community oriented.

Speaker 7 (01:19:25):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:19:26):
It's not as exciting as you know, being out on
the streets necessarily, but it is no less important.

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
Yeah, The non flashy stuff often goes under recognized.

Speaker 9 (01:19:37):
Yeah. And I will also say that folks might know
DC has its own style of music called go go,
which is sort of a fitty local artistic expression of
music here. And I've even seen groups like Harriots and
Wildest Dreams trying to organize joyful go go jams in
public spaces just to remind folks that joy is also

(01:19:59):
part of brasils, Just so that the only thing that
we're talking about is not defending our cities and being
on the defense, but also reconnecting to the things that
make our cities joyful and exciting and and and lovely
places to be. And I think it has been important
to me, when you're sick to death of reporting about
all of this, also getting to remember that.

Speaker 10 (01:20:22):
Joy is part of it.

Speaker 9 (01:20:23):
That's like why we're doing this, so that we can
experience joy in our cities.

Speaker 3 (01:20:27):
Yes, I agree, we will allow a little bit of joy,
I suppose in this stace. Yeah, semi joyful time.

Speaker 10 (01:20:36):
Yeah, a tiny bit.

Speaker 9 (01:20:37):
I will speaking of joy I wanted to end on
one last teeny tiny little tidbit about resistance, which is
that when I when we were talking last time, Gare,
I told you I think this was like the day
that the takeover was announced, there was that guy who
threw a sandwich at the Yes, yes, well they popped
this dude on felony charges, but DC's grand jury failed

(01:21:00):
to indict, and now he's down to a misdemeanor, so
he pled not guilty I think, just a couple of
days ago to just a misdemeanor.

Speaker 10 (01:21:06):
So yeah, I mean grand jury's they used to say.

Speaker 9 (01:21:10):
Like, oh, you could get a grand jury ton byte
a ham sandwich, I guess not if it's thrown at
a federal office, or you can't not in DC.

Speaker 3 (01:21:18):
It's just like the only good piece of grand jury
news I have kind of ever heard in my life.
Whenever I hear news of it a grand jury, it's
always like terrible, like, oh no, that sounds awful. Yeah,
this is uh the first, the first based grand jury
I've ever seen.

Speaker 10 (01:21:34):
Yes, yes, I.

Speaker 9 (01:21:35):
Mean if you're listening in if you're listening in DC
and you're on a grand jury, you know what to
do well?

Speaker 10 (01:21:39):
Does Souths put it that way? But yeah, that's all
I have really.

Speaker 9 (01:21:45):
I would just say, you know, if you happen to
be listening in a place that is not the district,
we really need your voice. You know, when stuff happens,
there's not really anybody I can call. We have a
congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Speaker 7 (01:21:58):
Uh.

Speaker 10 (01:22:00):
She has been a.

Speaker 9 (01:22:01):
Lifelong fighter for d C and d c's self determination
and civil rights. She is also i think the second
oldest person in Congress, And I'll just say it's showing
I think, you know, we don't really have a lot
of people who are fighting for us and being a

(01:22:22):
voice for us. And so yeah, stay checked in to
d C. Even if Trump moves to you know, deploy
national guards in other places, other kinds of takeovers. What's
happening in DC is unique. It cannot happen in any
other place in the country. And we're so often overlooked
and ignored. And so if there are bills moving through Congress,

(01:22:44):
call your Congress people and please advocate for the self
determination of DC residents because we have no one to
advocate for on our behalf, so please be our voice.

Speaker 3 (01:22:54):
Thank you for talking about DC once again. Bridget. Where
can people find you online and your other shows?

Speaker 9 (01:23:01):
You can check me out on my podcast. There are
no girls on the internet. On iHeartRadio, a co host
a podcast called Citycast DC about local happenings and politics
and news and DC. You can check that out. I'm
on Instagram at Bridget Marie DC. I'm on TikTok at
Bridget Marie DC, and I'm on YouTube. There are no
girls on the internet.

Speaker 3 (01:23:19):
Yeah, that's right, Okay, cool, I'm glad we figured that out,
all right.

Speaker 9 (01:23:22):
No, I just YouTube is is like a sesspool. I'm
bringing my best out there.

Speaker 14 (01:23:26):
So true?

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):
What up?

Speaker 15 (01:23:45):
It could happen here? It's your favorite cousin prop. Y'all
already know what it is. I'm about to black this
mug up because y'all don't be blacking it up enough anyway.
All over our country there's this sort of nar around crime,
which is verifiably false. We also understand that a lot

(01:24:05):
of times the feeling of crime and safety is a
lot of times it's a vibe like it's kind of
how it feels. You could tell me the crime rates
is down across America, but in my city, if I
still feel like you know I'm saying not safe or safe,
you know your perception of that. Anyway, what I'm trying
to make is there are truly verifiable, data driven ways

(01:24:28):
to actually create safety and reduce harm in a city,
and a lot of that is around trust and services.
So what I decided to do, y'all is to bring
y'all who I lovingly called the nipsey hustle of Saint Louis,
Ladies and gentleman. Can I introduce you to the homeboy
thistle with the red shirt on? Well, look, man, you

(01:24:49):
already flamed up.

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
I wasn't going to bring up the flame of it all.

Speaker 7 (01:24:56):
I'm like, gotta throw the red shirt off of problem.
Oh man, happy to.

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):
Be here, Man, We happy to have you.

Speaker 8 (01:25:04):
Bro.

Speaker 15 (01:25:04):
That was the one that's funny because that's the one
asterisk next to your name with me?

Speaker 7 (01:25:08):
Is all that red you beware?

Speaker 3 (01:25:10):
Hey man?

Speaker 15 (01:25:11):
He'd be like, Yeah, I know, you gotta be who
you're I would not respect you were you to not
be flying your whoop.

Speaker 3 (01:25:19):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (01:25:20):
So I appreciate retired.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
He said, Look, that's what I love it. We're gonna
get into it. So we're gonna get into it. So
this is like I said, the nipsey Elsa was Saint Louis.

Speaker 15 (01:25:32):
When we first met, I had no idea people out
there really actually said yes.

Speaker 3 (01:25:38):
I thought that was a joke. I thought y'all was
doing too much.

Speaker 15 (01:25:41):
And then I met this and he was like, oh,
it's over there right thor her. I was like, wait,
y'all really say.

Speaker 7 (01:25:44):
That, no joke at all, that's really y'all.

Speaker 5 (01:25:47):
That's really how we talked. We really talk. And the
crazy thing is I slowed down talking.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 5 (01:25:54):
Sometimes it'd be like here in there. But if I
get to go away and be like her, I heard
heard yo.

Speaker 3 (01:26:02):
Yup, yup?

Speaker 7 (01:26:03):
Call switch? All right? Perfect.

Speaker 15 (01:26:05):
So first of all, let's tell them what you do now,
so kind of give them the brief introduction who you are,
what you're doing, and then we'll go to the origin story.

Speaker 5 (01:26:13):
So, like you said, my name this Travis Tyler. That's
what my mama named me from Saint Louis, Missouri. And man,
I'll be trying to figure out what am I sometimes
like for real, even when I was doing music, I
never felt like I was a rapper.

Speaker 7 (01:26:31):
Yeah, I felt like I was an artist, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:26:34):
And I still feel like I'm an artist in the
sense of the word now because I create things, yeah,
from inspiration, you know, alchemy, I create from the mind.

Speaker 3 (01:26:44):
Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:45):
But I'm not what you would consider an activist. I'm
not a politician, but like I'm always in the middle
of something that's happening. Yeah, And that's how I've always been.
And I have a passion for the youth of urban community,
especially black youth. I have a passion for black men,

(01:27:06):
especially black men that are either trying to escape the
reality of street life or black men that are being
re entered into society from prison. I have a passion
for the rebuilding of the black community. So my whole life,
that's pretty much been my thing, no matter what space
I've landed in, it's always been my thing when it

(01:27:27):
comes to community.

Speaker 7 (01:27:29):
And so that's it, man, Like I'm wearing.

Speaker 5 (01:27:32):
The shirt is actually like one hundred from my mentoring program,
my mentor inner city youth ages teen to seventeen, not
just setting up some of the mentor them, but creating
the rights of passage, creating a pathway intentional pathway. I
think a lot of time with inner city youth, well,
I ain't even gonna say inner city youth, especially with

(01:27:54):
fatherless yes young men, whether wherever they're in the world,
whether it's the suburban nameghborhood or the inner city or
rural or third world country. With fatherless young men, they
tend to lack, some of us, a passage way of oh,
this is who you can become, this is what you

(01:28:16):
need to do to become it, because there's no one
to really guide them. So with our mentor program, that's
my goal, not just the mentor young men and send
them home and try to keep them out of trouble,
but help them identify who they are and who they
were born to be and help them get to that place.

Speaker 3 (01:28:32):
Yeah, and you still got that group home joint, right.

Speaker 5 (01:28:36):
Yeah, so the group home. It's funny we're going to
interview now. I just stepped down from their Friday Okay.
But it was a good thing. It wasn't a negative.
So I ran it for like a year and a half,
helped rebuild the program, brought it up to the modern age, staffed,
creating new things for the boys. Learned a lot myself
in the process and now I'm going full throttle into

(01:28:59):
shape out my Flight one hundred program. Yeah, because the
end goal, like one of my end goals is to
build a school. Yeah, Flight one hundred Academy all boys,
keep the same voys from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Wow,
that's my mission.

Speaker 3 (01:29:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:29:15):
What I truly enjoyed about what you're doing is at
least with the group form and the mentoring thing is
the trust factor in the sense that you know, when
you get involved, especially in the juvenile system, like they
tell you that your record sealed, they say.

Speaker 3 (01:29:32):
That, Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm saying, But like
in practice, it's not the thing.

Speaker 15 (01:29:38):
So like I think oftentimes if there's a step between
getting into juvie or into central, you know what I'm saying,
if there's an in between step, if somebody could come
in the middle of that and stay look, let little
homie stay with us, you know what I'm saying. Or
you know, let's say you caught a case and then
every once in a while, like obviously both of us

(01:29:59):
can say this from like per and experience, every once
in a while you might score a judge on a
good day, you know, you score a judge on a
good day and they say, I'll tell you what I
heard of this program over on the other side of town.
You could either do this, you have said, or you
could go to Camp Rocket, you know out here, that's.

Speaker 3 (01:30:15):
What it was like.

Speaker 15 (01:30:15):
You can go to Rocky or you can go to
this program, and like ten out of ten, I'm gonna
be like, let's go to this program. But yeah, sometimes
that program be just as bad, you know what I'm saying.
But if it's ran by somebody who has been through
the system, who understands it and knows that, like, here
are the traps, Here's are the ways for which I

(01:30:37):
know I was taking advantage of I was abused, And
this is what we're not gonna do here.

Speaker 3 (01:30:42):
You know what I'm saying. The goal is for you
to never come back to this.

Speaker 7 (01:30:45):
You make a valid point.

Speaker 5 (01:30:47):
One of the reasons I believe God allowed me to
go back into the space with the group home was
bro Honestly, you will be surprised how I'm trying to
word this in a good way, but I don't think it.

Speaker 16 (01:30:59):
Is one you say however you want, you will be
surprised how messed up the foster curs system is yeah, yeah,
a lot of these.

Speaker 7 (01:31:10):
Kids get pulled out of their homes.

Speaker 5 (01:31:13):
So the group home that I was at mostly all
of our boys they came from environments where they have
been taken from their parents, and so I was run
of the transition to living group home.

Speaker 7 (01:31:23):
So my objective, my daily task.

Speaker 5 (01:31:25):
Was to teach a group of young men how to
transition into manhood, how to go out.

Speaker 3 (01:31:30):
On their own, pay their bills, live on their own.
All this.

Speaker 7 (01:31:34):
You'll be surprised though.

Speaker 5 (01:31:36):
These kids get pulled from their homes and their parents
and they're saying to them, oh, we're going to send
you somewhere better, better, yeah, yeah, yeah, and the places
that they send them to do more harm to them
than their home.

Speaker 7 (01:31:51):
Like they're sitting in there with people that are worse than.

Speaker 5 (01:31:53):
Their parents and one day don't have a voice to
advocate for them.

Speaker 7 (01:31:58):
So here I am right now. It's crazy.

Speaker 5 (01:32:01):
A few months back, I was like, I'm gonna talk
about this at every chance I get, which is crazy.
They don't have nobody to advocate for them, because I'm
sure there are people that have been through the foster
care system, but for some reason, people see that stigma.
They're probably celebrities that have been through foster curve, but
they see it as a stigma, like, oh, they didn't
want to talk about that part all my parent gave
me up. I don't know who my parent is. I

(01:32:21):
was in you know, whatever the case is. They don't
have nobody to advocate. Yeah, these kids, a lot of
these kids are treated so poorly in these places that
the loss should step in. People tend to not understand
why they act the way they act.

Speaker 7 (01:32:38):
But you got to.

Speaker 5 (01:32:39):
Think, ultimately, you are walking into a child's hole and
you're kidnapping them.

Speaker 7 (01:32:43):
That's what you're doing. Really.

Speaker 5 (01:32:45):
Yeah, Yeah, So if I come to your house at
eight nine o'clock at night. When I was fourteen, me,
my cousins, my brother, a bunch of my siblings were
taken from my mom and my aunt right from across
the street because I was over my friend's house. Holye

(01:33:05):
swooped up. Social workers swooped up. It's nighttime. You go
into somebody's house, you take their child. They don't know
where you're taking their child to. The child doesn't know
where they're going, and then they get to the residential
or the group home and they acting a fool, and
you got a bunch of unqualified, untrained staff members there.

(01:33:26):
They don't know how to deal with them neither. That's
just looking for a job. And when they get there,
they talking about why they acting like this. Come on, man,
if somebody just came to your house and took you
from your parent, you would be acting the same way.
And if you weren't, you saw it. Basically, let's just
be rial. Yeah, yeah, you just saw. You're gonna sit
there and fall like these kids. They acting out because
they've been abducted basically in their mind, and even.

Speaker 3 (01:33:49):
Pat way beyond that point.

Speaker 5 (01:33:51):
I know most people have seen if you hadn't the
movie Don't Sit where they talk about the Shackling family
and how they basically met dough fans out of the
whole West Virginia with oxy coote you know oxy code
ain't how do you want to pronounce it? And they
showing the movie how these doctors were getting these kickbacks
for introducing the drugs to the patients in West Virginia.

Speaker 7 (01:34:15):
Bro, who better to prack.

Speaker 3 (01:34:17):
Them on with drugs than children?

Speaker 7 (01:34:21):
We ain't got no parents that nobody cares them out.

Speaker 17 (01:34:25):
Yeah, bro, they take these kids and they put them
into the system three four, five years old, and they
start doping them from day one man.

Speaker 5 (01:34:36):
Five dose dough over and over and over. Switch them out,
put them on something else. Well, let me see how
they don't work. Switch them out, put them on something else.
By the time they got to me at eighteen years old,
they like bro frime, yeah, fried, and then you got
you got case workers. They don't care about the kids.
They don't call, they don't come see them, they don't
pick them up, they don't do none of these things.

Speaker 7 (01:34:58):
And the kids sitting there feeling like they don't got
nobody in nowhere.

Speaker 5 (01:35:01):
So my main space that I function in right now,
especially for them, is to be an advocate. Every chance
that I get, I'm gonna talk about it so people
could put eyes on it. But also that's one of
the reasons that I'm building the things that I'm building,
so that we can have a space where it's like now,
you don't have to go to because there are a
lot of people I already have the good ideas they have.
There are some good programs. Yeah, like there are good programs.

(01:35:24):
Program that I was at it's been around four hundred
and sixty eight years. It's a decent program So there
are good programs that are out here, but the whole
system as a hall, it needs an overhall. So when
I had an opportunity to peep behind the veil, I
was like, you know, you know me, I go and
get the talking.

Speaker 15 (01:35:41):
Yeah, I think obviously you talking that talk. But like
one of the things that you know, in the humanitarian
space that I like I serve in, they have a
saying that says peace works at the speed of trust,
you know. So like, even with all these good programs
in different places, it's like, if these kids don't trust you, Yeah,

(01:36:10):
you brought up being removed from your family's house when
you was real young. I love to talk a little
bit about about the origin story because obviously you wasn't
always talking like this, you know what I'm saying, Yeah,
And I think that that legitimacy, you know, or that
realness that I'm sure no matter how doped up or
how painful them kids are like they can look behind

(01:36:30):
your eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:36:31):
And say, okay, but he knows.

Speaker 15 (01:36:33):
Yeah, So give me a little bit of that, get
a little bit of the retired whooping all that.

Speaker 5 (01:36:38):
Oh it's funny. I got this video on my page
that I posted. I started off saying, ain't nobody coming
to save you? Yeah, And at the end of it,
I go through this story about being in the group
home and all of that, and I say, have y'all
ever seen the Marvel movies where they like, it's your
origin story.

Speaker 3 (01:36:57):
I'm like, that's my origin story. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:36:59):
So for me, that part of the group home was
significant in my life, real, real significant. So before I
went to the group home, I was already outside, like
there are a lot of things that I've experienced in
this world that when I look back, I just be like, Man,
that's crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:37:16):
Bro.

Speaker 5 (01:37:16):
When I was fourteen years old, me and my girlfriend
were living together.

Speaker 7 (01:37:19):
Crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:37:20):
Yeah. No, I slept in the beg fourteen every night.

Speaker 5 (01:37:25):
Yeah, with my girlfriend at fourteen, Like we basically lived together,
me and her in a room, her mom in the
next room. And so I was because of my mom's issues,
like I've been at this point, I've been my sole provider,
you know, minus a short period of time her and
her Whether it's like I went to live with my

(01:37:47):
daddy and he sent me back off with my grandma
for a short period time. My grandfather, all of those
were short periods of time. But since I was like twelve,
I've been taking care of myself. So I was outside early,
like hustling making money so I can professional myself. Yeah, fourteen,
Like I said, I was living with my girlfriend. We
were sleeping in the same bed. When I went to

(01:38:08):
the group home, my mom, the caseworker and the police
came and got me from her house and put me
in a car. Drove me two hours out of Saint
Louis to a wrench little house out in the woods.

Speaker 7 (01:38:22):
Yeah, town full of white people, Like I was a
hoodie kid.

Speaker 5 (01:38:27):
Like when they got me, true story, I had on
Dickey overalls like the zip of the brown boy, yeah,
and some boots like a bey Yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:38:35):
The Saint Louis like I don't know, like the influence
of like West Coast culture, and it was very big
out there. So when he was like, yo, I'm zipped
up and the beanie and the dickies, it's like you
would think you was in South Central Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:38:48):
Yeah. So I had on a beie, the zip up
Dickey boy like yeah boot. So they took me out
to the woods and man, I got there and when
I got there, it was the first time in my life,
I think I feel that level of desperation and hopelessness
because I was supposed to stay there until I was
eighteen or twenty one. Those were their words based off

(01:39:09):
my behavior. I'm fourteen, so I'm in my head like
I'm frona beer six years Like. So I'm meeting all
these kids. They like, I'm been here since I was
this age, and I've been in the system since I
was this and they moved me here and they so
I'm hearing all these different stories from different people.

Speaker 7 (01:39:26):
And I'm just like, dang, it's crazy, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:39:29):
And then one day, it was right after Christmas, I'm
sitting in her hindsight, I got a different perspective of it. Now.

Speaker 7 (01:39:35):
It's this kid I never forget him. His name was Roger.

Speaker 5 (01:39:38):
When I first met him the very first day that
I came, he sat down beside me and he said, Man,
if my granddaddy was hurt, he wouldn't want me talking
to you. And I was like why, He said, because
he didn't like black people. So I turned right to
him and said, why did you feel the need to
tell me that?

Speaker 8 (01:39:51):
Right?

Speaker 7 (01:39:51):
Why you tell me that? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:39:53):
Like I was like, you could have kept that to yourself.
He like I don't got nothing against black people. I'm
just saying my grandfather don't like black people. So I'm
like whatever, I'm okay, cool.

Speaker 3 (01:40:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:40:01):
It's like right after Christmas, Christmas Day, I was sitting
in the group home. Nobody called, Like, I was watching
all the other kids. They getting gifts, they opening their
presents and yeah, depending on their program, some of them
they get to go home. Like so I'm sitting there,
ain't nobody called me on, got no gifts, I don't
got nothing, and I'm just sitting in the chart like

(01:40:22):
just pissed all day basically.

Speaker 7 (01:40:24):
Yeah, and uh, one of my workers came in later
that day.

Speaker 3 (01:40:27):
I seen her.

Speaker 7 (01:40:28):
She was talking to the lady. The other lady was
about to get off.

Speaker 5 (01:40:31):
They was behind me and I heard her talk and
she said, he just sitting there all day. She was
like yeah, she like, did anybody call them or anything?
She was like no, She's like nobody. So I'm and
it's crazy now that I've been back in that space
more than once. Yeah, I've experienced that with kids, seeing
them nothing and I know what to do, like I

(01:40:51):
got you know what I'm saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And.

Speaker 7 (01:40:53):
So I'm sitting there.

Speaker 5 (01:40:54):
At that point, she like, nah, he's just sitting there
all day, and so she went came out. She's like, hell,
what you doing. This lady played a significant role in
my life. I wish I could remember her name.

Speaker 3 (01:41:04):
Bro Like.

Speaker 5 (01:41:06):
So she was like, what you're doing. I'm like nothing.
She was like, you want to go to the store.
I'm like to do what She like her, I got
something for you. So the state gave each kid one
hundred dollars Walmart gift card.

Speaker 13 (01:41:19):
Wow.

Speaker 7 (01:41:20):
So she like, you got a gift card the Walmart
for one hundred dollars.

Speaker 3 (01:41:23):
Bore.

Speaker 5 (01:41:23):
I had never been to Walmart before. I ain't know
what Walmart was. So I'm like, all right, man, let's go.
We go to Walmart. I'm walking around.

Speaker 7 (01:41:29):
He ain't never been to Walmart.

Speaker 5 (01:41:31):
I had never been to Walmart. Broke walking around. I'm
looking around the store. I got this hundred full Guess
what I buy?

Speaker 3 (01:41:39):
No lie?

Speaker 7 (01:41:40):
True story. White t shirt is some Dickies.

Speaker 5 (01:41:43):
Yes, yes, yes, white t shirt is some Dikies out
of Walmoart in the country.

Speaker 3 (01:41:48):
You're I love it.

Speaker 7 (01:41:49):
So I grabbed these dickeys, white tea. Go back to
the group home.

Speaker 5 (01:41:54):
I'm still mad because ain't nobody called me, Nobody came
to see me, you know, none of that. And so
the next few days, man, me and dude we always
ended up in the living room at the same time.
And I'm I'm I'm mad.

Speaker 7 (01:42:07):
Yeah. So fourteen.

Speaker 5 (01:42:09):
You gotta think when I was fourteen, bro, I was
like probably six six foot six one. Yeah, like one
hundred and eighty two hundred pounds when I was fourteen.

Speaker 3 (01:42:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:42:19):
And so while I'm married, they had some little weights.
I had started lifting weights every thing.

Speaker 7 (01:42:23):
Oh man, I'm programming.

Speaker 3 (01:42:25):
I'm a big old kid. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:42:27):
So dude gets to talking crazy to me. We sit
in the living room. He like, man, what you doing, boy?
So my conversation goes back to the first time.

Speaker 3 (01:42:35):
Like god he racist?

Speaker 7 (01:42:37):
Yeah, yeah, now I know, now I know.

Speaker 3 (01:42:39):
I'm like what you mean? Boy? He like, you heard me?

Speaker 8 (01:42:41):
Boy?

Speaker 7 (01:42:41):
I'm like boys in kid or boy as in racist.

Speaker 3 (01:42:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:42:46):
He like, boy, you heard me. Now we're fighting.

Speaker 5 (01:42:48):
I said, hey, bro, I'm gonna tell you this one
more time. Don't call me a boy again.

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:42:53):
He said, what you gonna do?

Speaker 3 (01:42:54):
Boy? Lit that fool up?

Speaker 7 (01:42:56):
Yup, yup?

Speaker 3 (01:42:57):
I'm talking about right now?

Speaker 5 (01:42:58):
They style locked in big night night.

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

Speaker 5 (01:43:04):
So by the time they come in, I got him
by the back of the neck. Yeah, and I'm rubbing
his face across the carpet. Yeah, I'm like, what you
call me again? He stayed in saying, you know, he's like, boy,
you hurt. So now hindsight though, when I look back,
I had to think and say, yeah, dangn me and
him was sitting there at the same time. I thought

(01:43:27):
back and said, oh, he ain't had no visitors on
Christmas steeven. Yeah, oh he man like me. He just
as hurt as you.

Speaker 3 (01:43:33):
He was hurt.

Speaker 7 (01:43:34):
He ain't even know how the process.

Speaker 15 (01:43:35):
You the craziest storyteller ever, like, cause I'm like, you
can get to the point, and I.

Speaker 3 (01:43:40):
See it right there now. I know like he ain't
know how the process. So I rushed him up forever.

Speaker 5 (01:43:45):
So when the people come in and they see me,
you know, they like, grab me up cause I'm.

Speaker 7 (01:43:50):
Six foot yeah yeah, yeah, it's on your.

Speaker 3 (01:43:52):
Kid from the city. Yeah, you know, everybody record and
story they're coming here, so they know like he a
gang man, but he did he did.

Speaker 5 (01:43:59):
Yeah, so I'm no bressing. They snatched me up, throw
me in the room. They took me in this room
called an isolation room. This room is like an eight mychin.
All the walls were metal.

Speaker 3 (01:44:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:44:10):
The door was like this stick wood with a little
bitty wondering the thing on it. No way out unless
they let you out in carpet on the floor.

Speaker 3 (01:44:19):
Bro.

Speaker 7 (01:44:19):
When they shut that door, I just lost it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:44:22):
My brain said, you finna died in her, Ain't no
way out. Yeah, And I got to kick in the door.
I got to yelling, and I'm talking about Bro. I
just was wilding in that. But they just they paid
me no mind. They didn't even come to the door.

Speaker 3 (01:44:36):
It don't make no difference until you calm down.

Speaker 7 (01:44:39):
They like, he can't get out.

Speaker 5 (01:44:41):
And so this girl that I knew to her, she
came and sat down by the bottom of the door
and talked under the thing, and she was like, hey,
you gotta come around down. She's like, come down here.
So I laid down on the floor. I'm breathing through
the crack like I'm breathing under the door. She like,
you gotta calm down, Like they never gonna let you
out of her.

Speaker 7 (01:44:59):
They scurried.

Speaker 5 (01:45:00):
She like, I'm out here, like you gotta. So I'm
just laying there regulating, and I go to sleep. Wow,
and I wake up in the middle of the night.
I knocked on the door. They let me out to
use the bath on the dude like it was a
big white dude used to be overnight. He was like,
if I let you out or you're gonna get the trip.
And I said, nah, man, I just got to use
the bathroom. I already didn used it there once. I'm like,
I just want to go to the tarlet.

Speaker 3 (01:45:20):
Yeah. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:45:21):
So he's like, all right, come on, he let me out.
I went back in and he locked the door. When
I went back in there, bro, I said to myself,
this was my one of my origins. I said to myself,
I said, when they let me out of her fourteen
years old, I.

Speaker 3 (01:45:34):
Said, I'm gonna be different. Yeah, I'm be in control.

Speaker 7 (01:45:38):
I'm gonna show the world.

Speaker 3 (01:45:39):
Who I am.

Speaker 5 (01:45:40):
Yeah, when they let me out, I played the game
after that every since. And so I went to another
group home. I stayed there. I was supposed to be
there for a while. And I got to that group
home and I asked the people. I said, how do
the program work? As soon as I got there, Yeah,
they said, well, if you do this and then you
go to level this, and you go to this level,
you go to that level. I said, how long do
it take that? They said probably like ninety days. I said,

(01:46:02):
I'm gonna do it. Are sixty?

Speaker 3 (01:46:03):
I love it?

Speaker 7 (01:46:03):
They said okay and shown up sixty days later. Bro
leics than sixty I was done.

Speaker 3 (01:46:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:46:09):
They called my mama. My case had been dropped because
my mama was doing what she's supposed to.

Speaker 7 (01:46:13):
Do, and they like, you can go home.

Speaker 5 (01:46:16):
Yeah, So now I go home two days before I'm
turning fifteen. I get back home, though my mama was
on the same mission. And I've been outside ever since.
Beautiful man, and I think one thing I feel another
to just shape me into who I am.

Speaker 3 (01:46:29):
But the hero.

Speaker 15 (01:46:30):
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that that authenticity of
like even having the a wherewithal to know that, like
you know, at the end of the day, love Homie was.

Speaker 3 (01:46:40):
Scared, right, Yeah, he was hurt too, Like he was
just hurting.

Speaker 15 (01:46:44):
So when you have that sort of like level of
empathy and you know when you were outside, like the
reasons for which you were outside, you know what I'm saying,
and having those connections, it's so clear to me how
that fuels the direction you're in, and it rus to
me the cornerstone premise of my whole movement here, which

(01:47:04):
is like, yo, if you understand the hood, you understand politics.
You walked in there and said, what's the game? What's
the play? Okay, what's the play? How does this work?

Speaker 5 (01:47:12):
This?

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
Okay?

Speaker 15 (01:47:12):
Now, know how to work it. Here's a way to
make it better. I know how it, I know how
I felt in it. So if somebody else has to
be in there just the way it needs to be done,
because I know I would have succeeded had this this
and this happened. So let me let me let me
push you forward to now and then to more like
sort of the bigger like national conversation now, so like

(01:47:32):
the national conversation all of us we lived through, you know,
in the time that you were there, and the time
was going on in La too, like this this hyper
policing where you know, for us probably saying for y'all,
the cops were just another gang to us, you know
what I'm saying, Like y'all just as violent, as bad
and as dangerous as everybody else in these streets.

Speaker 3 (01:47:54):
Like you ain't make no difference to us.

Speaker 15 (01:47:56):
And sure, yeah, like in the same way that you know,
if you were having a rodent infestation at your house,
I mean sure you could bomb the house, right, and yes,
the rodents are gone. You're see what I'm saying, But
you've killed everything, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:48:13):
What I'm saying.

Speaker 15 (01:48:14):
But then you get to say, like you know, as
a metaphor, it's like, oh, look, we were tough on crime,
we ended crime, you know what I'm saying. It's like, well, yeah,
but that's what you locked us all up. Like it
didn't This didn't really help us. But you know, we're
seeing sort of across the country despite all of these
efforts and proof that like the streets are different, and
it's not because of any invading forts. It's because of

(01:48:38):
people like you, people like JB and OKC that are
like truly from the city, who really care and move
at the speed of trust, like I said, moving at
the speed of trust and like and are saying, Look,
it's one kid at a time, it's one program at
a time, it's one advocate at a time that like
says incremental slow door knock build true us one kid,

(01:49:01):
you know what I'm saying. That's like it's not fun.
It's not a movie. It ain't sexy. It ain't sexy. Bro,
you gotta be outside. You know, I'm gonna breeze through.
When you caught one to the leg. But like, even
in the process of doing the good you were doing,
there was a moment where like I knew of like
you're like you were in neighborhoods, like you know, doing

(01:49:22):
backpack drives and back to school things, you know what
I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (01:49:25):
But these are like in these are in active areas.

Speaker 15 (01:49:29):
Like you know, everybody can just walk in to this
park and be like I'm gonna do a fundraiser.

Speaker 3 (01:49:36):
It's like, like, no, we rob it, all of you,
you know what I'm saying. So like, after years of.

Speaker 15 (01:49:42):
Doing this, you know, one little Waiian didn't know who
he was dealing with, you know what I'm saying, caught
you slipping, you know what I'm saying. You had to
rebuild and I've seen even health journey from that moment
sort of change to bring you into the position you're
in sort of now, which is like, obviously it's somebody
we could deeply admire. Can you talk a little bit

(01:50:13):
about obviously without getting personal, without sharing anybody's like personal information.
But some of the sort of like things that you've
seen with some of the young homies who've been able
to maybe like calm some stuff down, you know what
I'm saying, like maybe actually like this working, you know
what I mean?

Speaker 5 (01:50:29):
Yeah, yeah, so I think you nailed it as a whole.
It takes a person that people trust to bring a
level of com So even when I got shot, when
I got shot, or I had dudes in my inbox where.

Speaker 7 (01:50:47):
Yeah, yeah that be outside ready to slide?

Speaker 3 (01:50:49):
Oh, ready to they ready to slide? Yeah, Yeah, that's like, hey,
who got you? You know it? Let's go.

Speaker 7 (01:50:54):
Yeah, And I'm like, nah, I'm cool. Yeah yeah, yeah,
you know.

Speaker 5 (01:50:57):
And so sometimes when things like that, I think people
take things into their own hands. Yeah, that you don't
know nothing about. And so after that, they were like,
do you want to do this news interview? I was
still broke up. I couldn't get out the bed. I'm like, yeah,
you know, but my reason for doing the news interview
was so people could hear my heart. Yeah, and you

(01:51:21):
have a thistle in every neighborhood around America.

Speaker 3 (01:51:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:51:27):
So here's the thing about police.

Speaker 5 (01:51:29):
Police are reactive Yeah, when by the time police on
a word of things, a crime has happened. Yeah, the
murder has already taken place, the shooting has already happened,
the robbery has already happened. The person that's stopping the
crime is miscathy that live on the block. Yes, that's say,

(01:51:49):
hey can murder. Yeah, where are you going? I could
tell you frustrate. We had this lady in our neighborhood
and name was miss a Miss Alexander. How many times
as a kid I be walking past her house on
my way to do something stupid. Yeah, and she'll say,
come murder yep, and you go sit there on the
porch with her and talk for like fifteen minutes.

Speaker 7 (01:52:09):
Respect is you have to respect her? Yeah, and you done.
Or the dude that used to be in the street.
It's a dude her in Saint Louis.

Speaker 5 (01:52:18):
I don't really know him, like personally personally, but his saying,
uh he goes by the name Yo Bangda uh huh.

Speaker 3 (01:52:26):
You know what I'm saying. Yeah, x street dude. Everybody
love him.

Speaker 5 (01:52:30):
You're me yeah, yeah, bro be outside like politicket, Yeah,
running programs, you know, doing stuff like that. So those
are the people that calls change in every community. Let
me tell you a place while we're on this subject,
where I think we fail it, especially with organizations. Organizations
that typically come into our neighborhood. They come for agenda, yeah,

(01:52:54):
and politics, And what they don't understand is what you're saying,
if you understand the hood, you want to staying politics.
So when they pull up on us in the hood
and they got this big organization with all this money
and they're like, this is what we want to do. No,
you're telling me that because you're trying to build an
army of people to fight for your calls. And what

(01:53:15):
they do is they come into our spaces and they
don't empower those people right there.

Speaker 3 (01:53:21):
I've said this to people one hundred times.

Speaker 7 (01:53:22):
If you really really really want to see.

Speaker 5 (01:53:24):
Impact and see change, you need to go to the
community and see the people that are already leading it.

Speaker 7 (01:53:30):
There you go the people that you're talking about.

Speaker 5 (01:53:33):
The reason I'm able to go into park in that
neighborhood is because I'm a leader over there.

Speaker 3 (01:53:39):
At one point, I was one of the leaders actively. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:53:44):
So people don't know me, they respect me, they understand
my journey and my transition, and that rapport is what
get the work done.

Speaker 7 (01:53:52):
Police a reactor. Bro By the said, the police come somebody.

Speaker 3 (01:53:55):
Dead, It's already done. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:53:56):
Yeah, it's people like me on the phone when Brok like, man, bro,
I'm about the snap.

Speaker 3 (01:54:01):
It's like, nah, bro, where you at? Like you know
what we're doing?

Speaker 5 (01:54:04):
And so I think those people need to be empowered more.
For any organization that's listening or that possibly here, it is.
We don't need you to come out our community and
build a hub. We don't need you to put an
office there. And I'm just gonna be candidate and bring
a whole lot of white people.

Speaker 7 (01:54:21):
Facts and gentrify a program.

Speaker 3 (01:54:23):
We don't need that.

Speaker 5 (01:54:25):
What is needed is if you have resources, you have money,
you have things you could bring structure, you could bring system,
but bring it to empower the person that's already in
that space. It's gonna take you thirty years to get
to kind of respect that person.

Speaker 3 (01:54:41):
Get over there already, Jims.

Speaker 5 (01:54:43):
And you know why they can't be fully involved because
they still got to work, They still gotta do thing.

Speaker 7 (01:54:48):
You still yes, you still yes, man.

Speaker 5 (01:54:50):
So if you want to really empower the community, take
that forty fifty sixty seventy thousand, one hundred thousand that
you're about to run on this campaign against whoever else
you don't like. Yeah, and take some of that money,
take about seventy five k that and give it to
somebody like Yo Bang.

Speaker 15 (01:55:08):
Yo bang a missad. Yeah, but it was Alex Carrasco.

Speaker 3 (01:55:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:55:12):
Get the people like that, yup.

Speaker 15 (01:55:14):
Because we lived in the Mexican hoods. You know, he
had his to despoon thos Like we already knew. He
was like, what what the people like that? Give it
to him? You know what I'm saying, he'd looked that man.
Took me camping for the first time with with Alex Carrasco.

Speaker 7 (01:55:27):
You know what I'm saying, Like, believe it or not,
believe it or not.

Speaker 5 (01:55:30):
Part of the reason that you turned out the way
you did is because of siege that people like him
playing it. Yep, no facts, It was the difference between
you and the other dudes on the.

Speaker 7 (01:55:40):
Block that didn't go.

Speaker 5 (01:55:41):
That's exactly like exposure, bro, is she what you're exposed
to right now? One of my missions I'm working on
over the next couple of years, Well, I'm gonna take
a group of kids from the.

Speaker 3 (01:55:50):
Hood to Africa. They have to see it, bro, that's
one of my missions.

Speaker 5 (01:55:53):
They have to Yes, Yeah, I'm gonna take a bunch
of kids from the hood to Africa, like so they
can get over there and see what it really look like.

Speaker 7 (01:56:00):
Yeah, but also just taking them other places.

Speaker 3 (01:56:03):
They could also go to, like Denver, Like.

Speaker 5 (01:56:07):
Yeah, I took a group of kids to Kaa a
few years back, like in the city kids, Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (01:56:13):
They were blown away. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:56:15):
Like like you said, going camping, you get to see
water and boats.

Speaker 15 (01:56:19):
When I used to teach, I taught in the city
called Pomona. It's in the Inland Empire. It's kids from
La I've never seen the beach, Like you've never seen
the ocean and you're from Los Angeles, you know what
I'm saying. So like, yeah, that exposure changes everything. Have
you set up some sort of like fundraising things so
we can see if we could get our listeners to
maybe like fund this Africa drip.

Speaker 7 (01:56:40):
So if you go to my page, just like one
hundred foundation dot or.

Speaker 3 (01:56:44):
Like one hundred foundation dot org.

Speaker 5 (01:56:46):
Okay, yeah, it's a donation tab, it'll go to the
give but.

Speaker 15 (01:56:50):
A page, Okay, we will link to that. Yes, see
that's all I needed. Yeah, listen, bro, I want to
thank you for your time.

Speaker 8 (01:56:57):
Man.

Speaker 15 (01:56:58):
Some of y'all know, like I've known this man for
a long time. We've we've ran ran into many A
cities and many A shows.

Speaker 3 (01:57:06):
And always appreciated you too.

Speaker 15 (01:57:09):
Yes, sirry Man, I think there was a little bit
of like we've been sitting in green rooms that both
of us know good and well that we just why
are we here, Like we have no reason to be
in this room, but we are. It just has very
much a very much like a real recognized real with
somebody like this man. And like you said, Bro, like
there's thistles in every city man, and I appreciate the

(01:57:32):
fact that, like, and that's part of what makes you
what you are, is that, like it's the things that
happen that when there's no cameras on that for us
that we're mostly proud of. It's not the stuff that
like everybody sees, it's what's happened, like you said, it's
when it's the phone calls you have to have, you know,
the meetings you have to set up, you know what

(01:57:53):
I'm saying, And like the like those things are are
are the things that really keep a city safe.

Speaker 5 (01:57:59):
I want to say before we go, we talked about
something before you start recording. Yeah, and I want to
point it out because I think it's important too. We
were talking about how resources prevent violence. Yeah, so everybody
know where there's no hope, there's violence, there is desperate right. Yes,

(01:58:19):
So right now in Saint Louis, we have been informed
that the senator who's a Republican centater.

Speaker 3 (01:58:28):
Yeah, he's linked.

Speaker 7 (01:58:30):
Up with pjt Okay, okay, and there you are.

Speaker 5 (01:58:34):
They're building an FBI base here and they're bringing in
more FBI agents to divert violence.

Speaker 3 (01:58:42):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:58:43):
One again, law enforcement is a reaction to crime. They
don't prevent it. Yeah, here's the reality that everybody that
has a brain to think should be aware of. I
don't care how many FBI you bring, how many police
you hire. There are not enough law enforcement to govern

(01:59:04):
the earth.

Speaker 7 (01:59:04):
Yes, yes, period, there's too many of them.

Speaker 3 (01:59:06):
Yeah, there's not there's too many of us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
you can't govern the earth.

Speaker 7 (01:59:11):
Yeah, like that's that's that's a no go.

Speaker 3 (01:59:14):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:59:15):
Most cases, when I see people make these arguments about this,
I'm a person I like to use facts.

Speaker 3 (01:59:21):
I get straight to the facts, like we get the points.

Speaker 5 (01:59:23):
So in Saint Lewis, right, from twenty twenty to twenty
twenty four, the murder rate in Saint Louis has dropped
by one hundred and thirteen.

Speaker 15 (01:59:35):
Come on, man, yeah, one hundred and thirteen, bro, that's
a lot of lives.

Speaker 3 (01:59:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:59:40):
So in twenty twenty, the number of homicides at Saint
Louis was two hundred and sixty three. The number in
twenty twenty four were one hundred and fifty. See, there
are certain things that I'm not gonna say they are
the exclusive reason. But there are certain things that I
know have contribute today. And it's not law enforcement because

(02:00:02):
our police force is short right now.

Speaker 3 (02:00:04):
They gone, they don't do too much and nothing.

Speaker 5 (02:00:06):
Yeah, there are a few things I know they have
contributed to that. The magic thing is resources, yeah, and compassion.

Speaker 7 (02:00:13):
But they are few. Through a certain few things that
I want to shout out.

Speaker 5 (02:00:17):
One of them is an organization called FCCY Freedom Center
Saint Louis. My hoomie Mike Milton. The other one is
Action Saint Louis. The other one is Missus Saint Louis.
The other one is we Power Saint Louis. We power STL.
They fund early childhood development. Word like crucially important for

(02:00:40):
our community. Wow, you got mcc action Saint Louis, missus,
Saint Louis Black Men, Bill, We power STL.

Speaker 3 (02:00:49):
Just to name a few people like your bangor.

Speaker 5 (02:00:52):
These are the people that have been actively in the community.

Speaker 7 (02:00:58):
For the past four years. A past mayor to Charlotte Jones.

Speaker 5 (02:01:03):
She probably got a lot of things wrong in people asked,
but she was directing certain things and empowering people in
a certain way.

Speaker 7 (02:01:12):
These organizations have thrived.

Speaker 5 (02:01:15):
Over the past four years and as a result, you
see the number of homicides in the city. D Chris, So,
why do we need to bring more FBI agents?

Speaker 3 (02:01:25):
What is that for? Show?

Speaker 5 (02:01:27):
Shouldn't we be throwing more money into these organizations if
they are out here the turn trying they got the
FCC has data, Yeah, they have data of reconciliation. I'm
talking about my boy, Mike Milton. He's stepping into roles.
With one case in particular, a young man was driving

(02:01:49):
in the car with another young man.

Speaker 7 (02:01:50):
He was drunk.

Speaker 3 (02:01:51):
The young man died.

Speaker 7 (02:01:53):
He reconciled him with the mother.

Speaker 5 (02:01:55):
The mother in return went to the judge and was like,
he don't need to go to jail here either, gonna treatment.

Speaker 3 (02:02:00):
Wow, Like why is he going to prison? Wow? Damn man.

Speaker 5 (02:02:05):
And then when they get when they get rid of justice, yeah,
with sort of justice. When they get released from prison,
they go to SCC and they spend time with them
and they learn.

Speaker 3 (02:02:17):
The storative justice. They take accountability. Wow. Wow.

Speaker 5 (02:02:22):
So if we go if we need anything in Saint Louis,
in DC, in Chicago, if we need anything in these cities,
what we need or people to be realistic about what's
happening and if you want to do something, say some
of the funds you're gonna use to have more law
enforcement into these places where you know people are already

(02:02:45):
doing things. Because let me tell you something else, it's
twenty twenty six almost, it's twenty twenty five. Ain't nobody
scared of the police like they used to be. This
ain't nineteen sixty.

Speaker 3 (02:02:52):
Two, bro, sir.

Speaker 5 (02:02:53):
Don't nobody's seen the police and be like, oh my gosh,
you'll go to police these grown men just like another
grown man.

Speaker 7 (02:03:00):
Ain't nobody scared of police no more? That ain't a
thing lead like the rest of us. That's not a thing. Yeah,
you belied like the rest of us. Mumble with the police. Bro,
they dangerous right now, straight spirt up. That's what I'm
trying to say.

Speaker 15 (02:03:14):
Look, we can talk about this right because that's the
way we are with these ice agents.

Speaker 3 (02:03:18):
It's like, you think I'm scared.

Speaker 7 (02:03:19):
Of you, bro, You think I'm scared.

Speaker 3 (02:03:21):
Of you homie.

Speaker 15 (02:03:21):
Yeah, anyway, thank you this, Thank you for it, for
like bringing it back to the data and shining the
light on like people actually doing the work. You can
follow you on Instagram. It's I am thiszle.

Speaker 5 (02:03:34):
Right, it's th hi is l this yeah, th h
I s l fl like one hundred foundation dot org
is the website social media.

Speaker 3 (02:03:43):
You've been found all that stuff there.

Speaker 15 (02:03:44):
You'll find all that all right, It can happen here.
Cool zone media. We appreciate y'all.

Speaker 7 (02:03:50):
Appreciate you.

Speaker 5 (02:03:51):
Bro.

Speaker 3 (02:03:51):
Yes, sir, I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to
start this episode with a horrible noise. Welcome to it

(02:04:14):
could happen to hear a show about things falling apart
with me today, Mio Wong, James Stout, I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 18 (02:04:23):
We have never as a society been this Year's of
Lead paint as we are now, Oh my god.

Speaker 6 (02:04:33):
Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 3 (02:04:35):
Speaking of things falling apart, the lead paint in my
room is crumbling. It's probably great things to my brain, wonderful,
love this, love this, so okay. Most a lot of
this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk
assassination and everyone's reaction to it, and everyone's sort of
losing their minds. But I think that the place that
we want to start is with a little bit about

(02:04:57):
the concept of the years of Lead Paint, which is
develop by friend of the show, Vicky Osterwall to explain
something I feel like almost everyone's forgotten about, which was
right after Trump got elected, there was that car bomb
outside of a Trump hotel that was like a tesla
that was a right winger who was trying to get
everyone to like do the purge.

Speaker 6 (02:05:16):
Yeah, the cyber trek, former Green Beret guy.

Speaker 3 (02:05:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (02:05:22):
And this is the kind of thing that you would
have seen during the original Years of Lead.

Speaker 3 (02:05:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (02:05:29):
So for people who don't know what the original Years
of Lead was, because this is becoming a thing that
people are using to understand what's going on now. And
I think there are problems with that that we'll get to.
But the original years of lead are this period from
I mean that there's you know, you can you can
start in a couple different places, but like roughly sort

(02:05:49):
of like the sixties or the eighties, like early mid
eighties in Italy that are this period of really really
intensifies in the seventies. It's really really intense period of
political violence in Italy. It is largely a right wing
reaction to this massive series of uprisings in Italy. I mean,

(02:06:12):
the whole the whole sixties in Italy are a time
of incredible sort of turmoil and left wing uprising. There's
I mean, I think there's first factory occupations are like
sixty five, but there's the fact there's the massive factory
occupations in nineteen sixty eight, which are sort of a
global phenomena. But then also the next year there is
an evance called and this is literally the term for it,

(02:06:35):
the Hot Autumn of sixty nine, which.

Speaker 3 (02:06:38):
I'm not even gonna really a.

Speaker 18 (02:06:41):
Nice great yeah, which which was this massive like a
second series of like you know, workers taking over factories
and starting like factory councils, and like there are so
many communist factions that, like the communist faction that's doing
this stuff, they have mutated to a point where they're
almost effectively anarchists. This is what's called the autonomists. And

(02:07:01):
this becomes like a major influence on like American anarchism
later and in response to the fact that these people
very nearly on multiple occasions, like very nearly take Italy,
a combination of rut wing fascist groups and organizations inside
of and sort of parallel to the Italian government developed
this thing called the strategy of tension, which and I

(02:07:24):
think this will to some extent sound familiar in terms
of what's happening right now, which is this strategy of
using terrorist attacks and using political violence to show this
like fear and panic and chaos that would cause people
to turn to the state for safety and cause people
to turn specifically to like a stronger, like more fascist

(02:07:45):
and then eventually just a straight up fascist state that
would permanently destroy the left and you know, like restore
the power of the Nazis, et cetera, et cetera. Well,
I mean not Muslin, these people Italian fascists, the og
fascists well, and also neo fascists too, because they're these
people are very weird Italians.

Speaker 6 (02:08:01):
Yeah, these people are Italians. Yeah, Yeah, many such cases.

Speaker 18 (02:08:04):
One of the big opening things is that the Piazza
Fontana bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills nineteen
people Injures, an unbelievable number of people, and it is
immediately blamed on anarchists. There's an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli
who he's among like eighty anarchists who arrested almost immediately,
he like somehow falls out of a four story window
of a police building while he was being interrogated.

Speaker 6 (02:08:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:08:28):
The Italian state, which will go on to admit a
lot of the shit that it did, maintains to this
day that he just got tired and fell out the
window himself. I'm gonna let you.

Speaker 6 (02:08:38):
Try your archductions.

Speaker 3 (02:08:39):
I think this guy died. I mean a lot of
a lot of anarchists are lazy.

Speaker 6 (02:08:43):
I can see, I.

Speaker 3 (02:08:43):
Can see that happening. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:08:46):
There is a good a play that I took part
in during high school called Accidental Death of an Anarchist
by Dario Foe, Yeah, which you can enjoy.

Speaker 3 (02:08:55):
This is the most like James backstory moment seen before.
This is wild. Yeah, whoa someone someone update the icy
HH wiki page. James backstory. This is great.

Speaker 6 (02:09:13):
Yeah my theater era.

Speaker 3 (02:09:15):
Who did you play?

Speaker 6 (02:09:16):
I can't remember? It was tragic twenty years ago.

Speaker 3 (02:09:20):
You should you should have remembered.

Speaker 6 (02:09:22):
Oh, I know. It was very fun. We had a
good soundtrack. It was very enjoyable for me and my friends,
and I'm sure all eight people who watched it also
had a wonderful time.

Speaker 18 (02:09:34):
So in less fun times, So this bombing was actually
carried out by a group called Ordine Nouvo, which is
it's literally new order. Fascist groups only have four names.
And this is a group that was aided by a
combination of Italian intelligence and this thing called Gladio, which
was this American netwill sort of stayed behind networking case

(02:09:54):
of Soviet invasion that had all of these weapons cashes
placed around the country that's eventually sort of repurposed into
these fascist terror cells. And they do a lot of these, right,
They do a lot of bombings and they and they
mostly blame the left for them. Probably the most famous
one is the Bologna train bombing, which killed like eighty
people injured a huge number of other people, was done
by a kind of like like another fascist group. Right,

(02:10:17):
this is also a period where like there is real
left wing violence. Right, the left is doing like like well,
one of the things they kidnap bosses and have like
show trials of bosses all the time. They love doing
this factory bosses.

Speaker 3 (02:10:31):
Just like in The Dark Knight Rises by Marxist historian
Christopher Nolan. God.

Speaker 18 (02:10:39):
I see, I thought you were gonna say, just like
cancel culture, but.

Speaker 3 (02:10:43):
Just like just like what the right's doing right now
for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk, you know.

Speaker 18 (02:10:50):
But but there was also stuff like, for example, Lota Continua,
which is a leftist group of staggering complexity, I like
killed the police officer who was interrogating Guiseppe Pinelli. So
you know, like there are left wing assassinations. A group
called the Red Brigades kidnaps the former Prime Minister of Italy,
Aldo Moro. See every other episode where I've yelled about this.

(02:11:12):
They had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being
manipulated by a number of intelligence organizations that if I
started listening to them right now, you would think I
was insane. Yeah, But the important thing about this period, right,
and this eventually works, it does destroy the left. But
the important thing about the structure of this in the
actual years of lead is that these are concrete groups, right.

(02:11:34):
They are shifting, they are flowing, people move between.

Speaker 3 (02:11:37):
Them, but actual organized factions any a legitimate armed struggle,
I mean.

Speaker 6 (02:11:41):
The Red Brigades are literally organized in a military fashion, right,
with like units and command structure.

Speaker 18 (02:11:47):
But this is also true of like, this is also
true of the fascists, right, yeah, and it's also true
of group I mean, you know, like obviously like autonomia
and the sort of like anarchistic communist factions are looser,
but like they're still they still are like organized, and
they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles.
And the strategy of tension is being deliberately managed by

(02:12:11):
by Italian intelligence and by American intelligence, and by a
bunch of other sort of like state groups. And this
is not at all what we're dealing with right now,
not even close yet. The Charlie Kirk assassination is neither
a guy who was part of like some Marxist group,
nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent

(02:12:34):
or something.

Speaker 6 (02:12:34):
Right, like just a guy it's a guy who got.

Speaker 3 (02:12:38):
Reddit gamer and discord political violence.

Speaker 18 (02:12:40):
Yeah, these are these are these these are decentralized acts
being fueled by sort of radicalization. But they're not like
active intelligence operations.

Speaker 3 (02:12:48):
I mean some of them aren't even fueled by radical
Like even even the word radicalization here is sometimes in
miss This one in particular is like not that really
a degree. It seems like a degree of like personal
motivation based on his relationship with his roommate as well
as this general like gen Z sort of nihilism that

(02:13:09):
allows you to do a pretty wild act like this,
I think specifically in this case, you know, it's like
existential violence manifesting an incredibly political action from someone who
otherwise isn't like overtly political. This guy's not a leftist.
It's definitely not a groper, as I've been trying to
argue for days now. Yeah, but I mean what he

(02:13:32):
did certainly is is political, even though he's not you know,
card carrying, you know, communist or you know, an anti imperialist,
like the guy who assassinated the to Israel embassy staffers
was right, which is kind of the only arguably like
left wing assassin we've like seen in the past, I
don't know, ten years in the United States, is the
guy who killed the two Israeli embassy staffers. Yeah, every

(02:13:55):
other assassin or attended assassin would not accurately be described
as like left wing in orientation, including someone like Luigi Mangioni,
who are very much not basically a teapot gray tribe libertarian. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:14:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (02:14:10):
And it's also worth noting that like from the state end,
these like this is not something that was like deliberately
unleashed by the state, except in the sense of like,
well some.

Speaker 3 (02:14:18):
People would argue otherwise, Yeah, but wrong right there.

Speaker 18 (02:14:23):
If that's the issue, you know, like like if like
the last time we saw something that you could argue
even sort of look like that is like there is
genuinely something kind of suspicious about the way that a
whole bunch of the most famous Black Lives Matter activists
who weren't the ones in the NGO suddenly turned up dead.
That's the closest thing, right, And that's not even a
like we know they did this, that's a like and

(02:14:45):
that was and that was over a decade ago, yeah, right,
that this is this is a long time ago, and
you know, and and I would argue it's important in
that it's part of the same series of uprisings that
like all of this fascist stuff is a response to right,
it's a response to Ferguson, it's response to twenty twenty.
But that structure, which is the structure that a lot
of people are using to analyze this of just purely

(02:15:05):
in American years of lead doesn't really work because we're
dealing with something way weirder, yeah, and way less concrete.

Speaker 3 (02:15:15):
Which is why we're calling it something else, the years
of lead paint, because these people are just like because
it is not the result of this large scale like
deep state orchestration, nor these legitimate organized fashions. Everyone is
simply brain rotted. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:15:35):
To contrast, right in the twentieth century that the prevailing
concept of how the left would change the world was
through the violent capture of state institutions or in the
case of the anarchists, I guess less. So that you know,
if we look at like this communist ideal of revolution.

Speaker 3 (02:15:52):
Yeah, how's that anarchist revolution going, buddy?

Speaker 6 (02:15:55):
Well, I mean, these guys are thirty years after the
Spanish Revolution, rights some of them have seen anarchists hold
whole cities and hold off the country's army. It's not
out of the out of the realm of possibility for them.
That concept of revolution, I mean, it does exist. It
exists with people with like anime Twitter avatars still, but

(02:16:16):
like for the most part, that concept of revolution is
not that relevant in twenty first century leftist political organizing
and so like it cannot be the same because the
nature of the thing that that's the struggle, it's not
the same on the left.

Speaker 3 (02:16:31):
There isn't even illegitimate left in the United States, like
in any meaningful sense.

Speaker 6 (02:16:36):
Yeah, I mean that there exists, Like I guess it's
like I don't want to call it incoherent, but like
a lot of the left exists. The people going hardest
on the left are going hardest on the internet. I guess,
this is what I want to say. And like, this
is nothing like post sixty eight Italy.

Speaker 3 (02:16:52):
We've seen a nice, nice like resurgence, stuff like union
organizing and that's like the most realistic manifestation of the left.

Speaker 6 (02:16:59):
But mutual aid organizing.

Speaker 18 (02:17:02):
And I will also say we did have this band
from twenty eleven to twenty twenty was like a really
massive period of like really large scale street movement in
a way that really terrified these people, Like twenty fourteen
petificlarly Ferguson and twenty twenty like really truly rattled the

(02:17:24):
psychology of all of the people who who are like
currently running this country in that it demonstrated that like,
oh damn, there could.

Speaker 10 (02:17:35):
Be a world.

Speaker 18 (02:17:35):
We're like, we're not automatically the superior race and we're
not like treated like that because it's betting bullshit and
people were willing to fight for that. But also like, yeah, no,
like we don't have the kind of like organization or
logistical capacity that like any of these things had, and
it's not clear to me that you like, you won't

(02:17:56):
get things that look like that anymore.

Speaker 6 (02:17:59):
Yeah, as much much is like the right wing YouTube
podcast Sphear wants to make it the case. First of all,
there is not like an organized revolutionary left in the US,
not as not a serious one. And secondly, like the
organized revolutionary left that existed in twentieth century relied on
a network that was international and that sometimes and not

(02:18:22):
always had its roots in Soviet I guess foreign policy
right that also does not like as much as a
YouTube world wished to be the case. China is not
sending people little yellow hard hats to go out in
Portland and get mad at the Feds being there. That
is not the case. Here's an advert for hard hats,
which you have to buy in your own because China

(02:18:44):
is not sending them to you.

Speaker 3 (02:18:55):
We're back talking lead paint, King of lead paint, and
in some ways the conspiratorial elements of the years of lead.
There is no shortage of conspiratorial thought permeating across the
entire spectrum of American politics in ways that I've never
really seen at this scale before, which isn't saying much

(02:19:17):
because you know, I'm not, however, old James Is, but
I have been Gris who fuck me, but I have
been monitor industream was politics was a decent section of time,

(02:19:37):
mainly the past like seven years, the past like five
or so years.

Speaker 6 (02:19:41):
Professionally, We're gonna have to watch another video because of
this whole second of the scarison. I have you known.

Speaker 3 (02:19:46):
I'm actually multiple months later for my workplace harassment training.

Speaker 6 (02:19:51):
I can see why, My god.

Speaker 3 (02:19:54):
But it's it's it's it's pretty bad. Just the the
total rejection of reality in the separation of truth and
reality as coherent concepts. And we've seen this and some
of people's responses across the political spectrum to the release
of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie
Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment

(02:20:17):
that dropped on Monday, which shows the a lled shooter
explaining to their roommate what they did and like how
they did it and in part why we'll talk more
about this in Executive Disorder. These actual messages and like
what they contain, but people's reaction to them, both on
the left and right, have been pretty wild. Matt Walsh

(02:20:40):
is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate
and the shooter as a way to absolve the transgender roommate,
referring to this strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad.
What a Breaking Bad is a television show, an American

(02:21:01):
television show released around two thousand and eight. I'm not
going to explain Breaking Bad.

Speaker 6 (02:21:06):
Garretson do you remember that?

Speaker 3 (02:21:09):
Oh my god, you were like Matt Walsh's. Matt Walsh
is comparing this to to something that Walter White did
during during Breaking Bad, saying that this feels like a
strategy that these two people cooked up by watching too
much TV, which in fact just shows that it is
Matt Walsh who watches too much TV, by the fact
that this is the first thing he thinks of. But
it's not just Walsh. Communists, anti imperialists, people on the

(02:21:33):
left are spreading a completely unfounded assertion that this text
exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter was quote
unquote obviously written by an FBI agent. Posts like this
are receiving tens of thousands of likes cross platforms. Yeah,
it's such a misunderstanding of how state craft works and
how like the legal system works that people communists really

(02:21:57):
think that this state of Utah could could orchest straight
and convincingly, convincingly orchestrate completely faked text exchanges Like that's
just simply not how our legal system works. And you
have people like Hassan spreading this sort of stuff. Yeah.
Quote half of the right thinks the messages are fake

(02:22:18):
because it doesn't implicate the transperson. The other half thinks
the shooter is a patsy because it was Israel that
killed Charlie Kirk. I will say the text messages are
too perfectly plugging holes for the investigators. Unnatural, Like come on,
come on, come on, guys. This is like I don't
even know what to like argue with, Like there's no

(02:22:40):
way to argue against people who believe in this in
any kind of real way.

Speaker 6 (02:22:45):
Yeah, right, Like, how do you someone who has rejected facts? Like,
how do you bring them back?

Speaker 3 (02:22:50):
They have to argue in court that the led shooter
actually did the shooting, right, That's what they're trying to establish. Yeah,
this is the evidence that will be agreed upon as
as evidence. To introduce the text messages in court, the
DA will have to prove their authenticity through chain of
custody and metadata. The reason why they were released now
is because they were included in the indictment laying out

(02:23:11):
the charges against Tyler Robinson. Robinson might use some odd words,
but he was raised Mormon and all this just tracks
at a face level to me. He's explaining his actions
to the person that he loves and instructs them to
delete the messages. He doesn't think that these are going
to come back to hurt him. And this isn't just
Betel's FBI saying this, This is the work of local

(02:23:33):
police and State of Utah police in the State of
Utah court, and this rejection of evidence, not what the
evidence argues, just the base evidence itself. Follows a week
of debate regarding this shooter's political orientation, which me and
Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week. And
I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it

(02:23:55):
in this years of led concept right of the right
using this to major crackdown on trans people and on
the left, which yeah, they're going to try to do.
But trying to argue at this point that he's a
groyper is just so faulty, and trying to argue that
these text messages are faked somehow, similarly, is just so

(02:24:17):
faulty and is so detached from how this situation actually
happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic
of political violence in the United States. On that topic,
a few days ago, Fox News is the Five was
debating if they needed more information to definitively say that
the shooter was on quote unquote the left. Greg Gutfield

(02:24:39):
went on about how high profile liberal and left wing
figures aren't being assassinated by people on the right and
wrote off the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hartman
and her husband.

Speaker 19 (02:24:51):
We don't need more information, really, yes, we don't need it.
What is interesting here is why is only this happening
on the left and not the right.

Speaker 3 (02:25:00):
That's all we need to know about that.

Speaker 18 (02:25:02):
There was absolutely no cos you want to.

Speaker 19 (02:25:05):
Talk about Meliss Horseman. Did you know her name before
it happened? None of us did. None of us were
spending every single day talking about missus Hortman. I never
heard of her until after she died. The matter, And
don't play that bullshit with me.

Speaker 7 (02:25:20):
You know what I'm talking.

Speaker 19 (02:25:21):
What I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about
that woman before she died. It was a specific crime
against her by somebody.

Speaker 3 (02:25:29):
Who knew her, the same thing.

Speaker 19 (02:25:31):
You can bring up, Joshua Piro, but then you will
not bring up, for example, that that was a pro
Palestine person.

Speaker 7 (02:25:37):
So don't use your what about this.

Speaker 3 (02:25:39):
The fact, the.

Speaker 19 (02:25:40):
Fact of the matter is the both sides argument not
only doesn't fly.

Speaker 3 (02:25:46):
We don't care. We don't care.

Speaker 19 (02:25:48):
About your both sides argument that shit is dead. For
one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our.

Speaker 2 (02:25:54):
Side on your side.

Speaker 19 (02:25:56):
Your beliefs do not match reality, so you're coming up
with these rationalizations like what about this or what about that.
We're not doing that because we saw it happen. We
saw a young bright man assassinated, and we.

Speaker 3 (02:26:14):
Know who did it. So if you look at like
left wing violence or violence targeting right wing figures, even
just like the past two years, right, there's the two
attempted Trump assassinations, which the right frames as left wing violence.
Though the first Trump shooter did not have left wing politics.
They had more of the psychological profile of a school
shooter who was looking to do something to get into

(02:26:35):
history books and came from a conservative upbringing. This person
was on a leftist right. But this is still targeting
a right wing figure, so it's framed in this same conversation.
The United Healthcare assassination similarly right, this wasn't a left
wing person who did this, but targeting a CEO on
a healthcare topic associates it with the left or with

(02:26:56):
progressive stances around healthcare. There's the arson against Jo Shapiro's home.
The guy who did this had a mixture of like
a pro Trump background but with pro Palestine motivations. The
most clear example would be the murder of two Israeli
Empacy staffers, and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 6 (02:27:15):
With the healthcare stuff, like we should probably point out
the Trump also ran on like medicine is too expensive, right,
it would cost too much to get the pills you
need to stay alive. Like that has been a cornerstone
of his platform too. It can be framed as like
a populist sentiment of populist stance, yeah, yeah, not necessarily
a leftist one.

Speaker 3 (02:27:32):
So that's the political background that these people on the
right are like coming from right, Like that's how they
see see this that that's like this spike and left
being violence that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts.

Speaker 7 (02:27:45):
Now.

Speaker 3 (02:27:46):
For Media has reported that a few days after Charliekirk's assassination,
the Department of Justice removed from their website a National
Institute of Justice research study showing a white supremacist and
far right violence far outweighs any other type of terrorism
or domestic violent extremism. Quote. Since nineteen ninety, far right
extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far

(02:28:09):
left or radical Islamist extremists, including two hundred and twenty
seven events that took more than five hundred and twenty lives.
In the same period, far left extremists committed forty two
ideologically motivated attacks that took seventy eight lives. So this
study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in

(02:28:30):
line with Trump and the right's general talking points about
this spike in left wing violence. I think in part,
the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo Nazi linked
violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative even
some like far right violence. They don't understand the linkage

(02:28:50):
from you know, explicit white supremacist mass shootings and you know,
make America great again. Right, That's something that they would
like reject as a legitimate coupling.

Speaker 6 (02:29:00):
In Congress today, cash Betel that claimed to have no
idea who did, then Rufe was for example, correct and
like what he was about a.

Speaker 3 (02:29:07):
Lot of them just aren't aware of this stuff. And
it's not just this National Institute Justice study. These findings
are incredibly consistent across multiple studies. The notably not left
wing Cato Institute found very similar results in their analysis
of six hundred and twenty politically motivated murders since nineteen
seventy five, excluding nine to eleven, most political violence comes

(02:29:28):
from the right. They counted three hundred and ninety one
murders from the right and sixty five from the left.
Can link that below to get a better look at
their actual methodology and what they count as right wing
what they count as left wing violence. Yeah, but these
stats simply don't matter to the right. In a lot
of cases, many average rightis will just reject these results altogether,

(02:29:50):
say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology.
But others might frame it as even if this data
is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating
left wing violence, specifically targeted left wing violence, not just
mass shootings. Here's another clip from Fox's The Five.

Speaker 19 (02:30:08):
I understand why people are saying what about.

Speaker 3 (02:30:10):
This and what about this?

Speaker 19 (02:30:11):
Because if you have to face the underlying fact to this,
your life is going to fall apart, because you're going
to realize you're not the good guys. If you sat
around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not
the good guys. If you sat six hundred seven hundred
cases of harassment against Republicans and you said, but what

(02:30:31):
about this?

Speaker 3 (02:30:32):
What about this?

Speaker 19 (02:30:32):
And then you see this murder after calling somebody a
fashion you fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy.
That is a hell of a realization to deal with.

Speaker 3 (02:30:41):
So therefore, therefore you.

Speaker 19 (02:30:44):
Have to grasp at rationalizations. You don't have to do that, Jessica.

Speaker 3 (02:30:49):
They do. I don't believe you're part of that group.
But why the hell do.

Speaker 19 (02:30:53):
You have to mimic an echo that crap?

Speaker 3 (02:30:55):
To us? He was a patsy. That guy was a patsy.

Speaker 19 (02:30:59):
He was under the hypnot expel of a direct to
consumer nihilism, the trans cult. And you know that if
you can decide that biology is false, you can agree
that that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable.
How you cannot see that alone and see that for

(02:31:20):
what the evil it is without having to attach all
of these other things is beyond me.

Speaker 6 (02:31:26):
His explicit claim that we should just like flag is
that it's not. He's not necessarily talking about leftists as
a whole. He's specifically talking about people who accept the
trans people are people being and like that the existence
of trans people leads to this nihilism. I guess, well, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:31:44):
I mean they see the existent trans people as like
a result of this nihilist culture, right, Yeah, Well, he.

Speaker 6 (02:31:49):
Seemed to put the cause all hour the other way though,
in that he seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes
from accepting trans people.

Speaker 3 (02:31:56):
I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's
saying it. I think they view it as it's both
causal but also a symptom. I think they play it
kind of both ways and showing how it's it's more
so just like the result of this like breakdown in
like a moral fabric, right, which is then breaking down

(02:32:19):
like notion of reality, which is right, like, you know,
transness is such an existential threat to the right wing
worldviewing like many senses. But that's another topic. I do
find it interesting how quick these people are just completely
discount right wing mass shootings, right. And I think one
key difference in talking about, you know, left wing violence
is right ring violence, it seems, and almost all their

(02:32:41):
examples here they're talking about assassinations targeted against specific people.
Most right wing violence in these like statistics from like
CATO and the National Institute of Justice, are are mass shootings,
right that the number of individual people might not be
that different, but the kill count or right wing and
specifically like white supremacist attacks are so much higher. I

(02:33:04):
don't think it's the actual numbers that matter to these people,
it's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence
that really freaks them out. For these commentators, the likelihood
of them being in a black church when a white
supremacist mass shooting happens is slimton'on right, Like, that's never
gonna happen to these people, But being the victim of

(02:33:26):
targeted violence against a high profile figure is to them,
it seems like an increasing possibility, and that really freaks
them out. Like obviously this type of attack directly affects
their political class in a way that a far right
mass shooting does not. I think that is influencing the
way that they're talking about this, you know, quote unquote
spike in left wing violence. We're gonna go on an

(02:33:47):
ad break and then return to talk about Jed Vance's
temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk Show and how his
rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence. Okay,

(02:34:08):
we are back on Monday, September fifteenth, Vice President j.
D Vance hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from his office
in the White House Complex, the Vice President sitting down
hosting a private citizens radio talk show. The show's intro
has clips from Charlie's studio with signs that read big

(02:34:29):
Gov socks warning does not play well with liberals. To
introduce the show, Jade Vance says that, quote, we have
to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left wing
extremism that has grown up over the last few years.
We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and
how to bring real unity unquote. His first guest was
Stephen Miller. Ben said he wanted to talk to Miller

(02:34:52):
about quote all the ways we're trying to figure out
how to prevent this festering violence that you can see
from the far left becoming even more and more mainstream.

Speaker 7 (02:35:01):
You have the crazies on the far left.

Speaker 13 (02:35:03):
You are saying, Oh, Stephen Miller and jd Vance, they're
going to go after constitutionally protected speech, and we're going
to go after the NGO network that fomens, facilitates, and
engages in violence that's not okay. Violence is not okay
in our system, and we want to make it less
likely that that happens.

Speaker 7 (02:35:21):
Walk me through at a high level, like what you.

Speaker 13 (02:35:24):
And I have been working on, what the whole administration
has been working on to try to make sure that
we don't reward and promote this craziness.

Speaker 12 (02:35:31):
Yes, so it's an excellent question. I've said this before,
but there's repeating. The last message that Charlie sent me
was I think it was just the day before we
lost him, which is that we need to have an
organized strategy to go after the lefting organizations that are
promoting violence in this country. And I will write those

(02:35:53):
words onto my heart and I will carry them.

Speaker 3 (02:35:55):
Out the NGO network. Yep.

Speaker 6 (02:35:59):
Yeah, this has been a thing with them for a while.

Speaker 3 (02:36:03):
Yes, there was supposed to be a series of executive
orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat
funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs, that it
was reported that Trump was about to sign, and then
they kind of disappeared. This was around like April to May,
and this has been something that they obviously have been

(02:36:25):
wanting to do but for one reason or another haven't
followed through on yet. But now are talking about this
as an impending policy that the Trump administration is going
to enact.

Speaker 6 (02:36:39):
I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from
the Trump administration's first term, when NGOs were very successful
in bringing suits that delayed or prevented some of the
policies that the mill of faction of the Trump administration
would have liked to implement.

Speaker 18 (02:36:57):
Yeah, and then I think the other angle of this
is just pueriety, Semitism, mango with that. Partly when they're
saying NGOs, they mean NGOs, and partly when they're saying
NGOs they mean Jews.

Speaker 3 (02:37:07):
And it's great.

Speaker 6 (02:37:09):
It's very often this specific focus is on he s
right highest Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Who I mean, we
see this in the Tree of Life shooting for instance
in twenty eighteen. Right, this has been with us for
some time on the right.

Speaker 3 (02:37:24):
I'm going to play another clip where they outline more
strategies for clamping down on left wing violence.

Speaker 12 (02:37:31):
And we are going to channel all of the anger
that we have over the organized campaign that led to
this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

Speaker 7 (02:37:42):
So let me explain a bit what that means. So
thirty seconds, it'll be quick Stephen the organized.

Speaker 12 (02:37:49):
Docs and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence,
the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, Combining
that with messaging, this design trying to trigger inside violence,
and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate
the violence.

Speaker 3 (02:38:05):
It is a vast domestic terror movement.

Speaker 12 (02:38:07):
But with the Goddess my witness, we are going to
use every resource we have at the Department of Justice,
Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle,
and destroy these networks and make America safe again for
the American people. It will happen, and we will do
it in Charlie's name.

Speaker 3 (02:38:22):
So in their discussion of taking down this big doxing network,
they also inadvertently and ironically describe the doxing campaign that
the right is currently doing at a far larger scale
and with way more institutional backing than any antif for
left being, doxing has looked like targeting people making posts

(02:38:42):
in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes
about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, with
a doxing website listing thousands of quote unquote Charlie's murderers,
which are actually just people who have made posts about
the death of Charlie Kirk. This is building off the
Canary Mission strategy used against pro Palestinian activists, which has

(02:39:04):
been adopted by the State Department for Immigration Enforcement and
judging visa applications. This is the actual, like organized state backed,
institutionally backed doxing campaign that exists right now in this country.
It's not your average torch Antifa chapter doing this at scale. Now,
it's the right with the mechanism of state encouraging them,

(02:39:25):
backing them, and tons of money being funneled into an
organized operation to actually impact state policy on who gets
allowed in the country. On that note, Mark Rubio has
talked about denying visa applications for people who celebrate the
death of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 20 (02:39:44):
We are not in the business of inviting people to
visit our country who are going to be involved in
negative and destructive behavior. Okay, so why should if I
invite someone? If we invite someone to visit the United
States of America as a student, as a tourist, has whatever,
then they have a different The standard they should be
held to is very high. We shouldn't be bringing people

(02:40:05):
into this country. We should not be giving visas to
people who are going to come to the United States
and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the
assassination of a political figure. We should not, And if
they're already here, we should be revoking their visa.

Speaker 3 (02:40:19):
So now there's an organized campaign to not only try
to deport and revoke visas or deny visas to people
quote unquote celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, but also
get citizens here fired from their jobs and disrupt their life.
Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, if you
were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or
liking something on this platform Twitter, we will fund your

(02:40:41):
legal bill, no limit. Please let us know unquote. What's
different about the right's use of these tactics is the
merger of like the right wing non government organization like
Activist Apparatus with the ruling conservative government. Like the Dems
in the left have never done this before. There's never
been this coordination between the actual democratic establishment and like

(02:41:03):
the far left. That's never happened, Like Palestine crackdowns started
under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many twenty twenty George Floyd
uprising cases. Federal assistance in the domestic terrorists investigation into
Cop City started under Biden. As for quote unquote organized
riots and street violence. Right wing street violence has been

(02:41:25):
encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration stand
back and stand by to stop the steal protests leading
to January sixth, which Trump played a large part in
making happen, and then Trump pardoned all the participants.

Speaker 6 (02:41:39):
Yeah, it's it's pretty clear.

Speaker 3 (02:41:42):
The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on
the same level as Trump pardoning all the January sixth
quote unquote insurrectionists. At the end of Vance's two hour
long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and
harassment campaigns and political violence. Here's another clip.

Speaker 13 (02:42:04):
I wrote a story in The Nation magazine about my
dear friend Charlie Kirk. Now The Nation is in a
fringe blog. It's a well funded, well respected magazine whose
publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.

Speaker 7 (02:42:20):
George Soros's Open.

Speaker 13 (02:42:21):
Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation
and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.

Speaker 7 (02:42:31):
The writer accuses Charlie.

Speaker 13 (02:42:33):
Of saying, and I quote, black women do not have
brain processing power to be taken seriously. But if you
go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to,
you realize he never said anything like that. He never
uttered those words. He made an argument against affirmative action
as a policy, He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice

(02:42:57):
as an individual. He never said anything about black women
as a group. He made an argument for judging people
of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits.
The very evidence she provides this hack of a writer
shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet
she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made

(02:43:20):
it through the editors, and of course liberal billionaires rewarded
that attack.

Speaker 7 (02:43:28):
Now, of course, even.

Speaker 13 (02:43:28):
If Charlie had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that
he deserved his fate. But consider the level of propaganda
at work. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and
well funded institutions of the left lied about what he
said so as to justify his murder. This is soulless

(02:43:50):
and evil. But I was struck not just by the
dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a
young husband's and young father's death quote, she says he
was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist. The Nation wrote,

(02:44:10):
who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses.

Speaker 3 (02:44:14):
There's a lot to break down there.

Speaker 6 (02:44:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:44:17):
First of all, the president of the Nation, not the
country the magazine. The Nation magazine has stated that they,
in fact, do not receive money from George Soros or
the Open Society Foundation. Vance's gesturing two left wing billionaires
carries three parentheses around that term. Second of all, let's

(02:44:38):
play the actual clip of Charlie talking about brain processing power.

Speaker 21 (02:44:44):
Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Shila Jackson Lee and
Catangi Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks. We would have
been called theis. But now they're coming out and they're
saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying,
I'm only here because affirmative action. Yeah, we know, you
do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be

(02:45:06):
taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white
person slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Speaker 3 (02:45:14):
So he just happens to be talking about three black
women and state that they do not have the brain
processing power to do their jobs and that they stole
a white man's spot. Yet in the position they are
in now. An opinion writer for The Washington Post was
fired this week for sharing this quote on Twitter, which
replaced the names of the three women's talking about with
just black women.

Speaker 6 (02:45:34):
Did she share it like in between quotation monks if
it was a direct quotation.

Speaker 3 (02:45:38):
She did share it as if it was a direct quotation.

Speaker 18 (02:45:41):
Okay, I see, so I'm going to read this from
the email that they sent this writer firing her. This
writer is a black woman. Among other requirements, the company
wide social media policy mandates that all employees social media
postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people on
their race, gender, or other protected characteristics. The policy also

(02:46:04):
reminds employees that everything they post is reflective on the
company and should not affect the integrity of the post journalism.
You're posting some blue sky which identify you as a
post columnist about white men in response to the killing
of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy. For example,
you posted refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes
on my face and performative morning for a white man

(02:46:25):
that espoused violence is not the same thing as violence.
And part of what keeps America violent is the insistence
that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white
men who espoused hatred and violence. So this is explicitly
a they think that reverse racism is real, and that's
saying that and talking about white people as a class

(02:46:47):
of people in the US that are responsible for things
is in fact racism. Is that is the argument that
the Post, the Washington Post is making in the email
where they fire her, which is like that River's racism shit,
even like three years ago was like a pretty fringe
right wing like like that was a not it was

(02:47:08):
originally like a Nazi thing, right And this is now
being used by like the Washington Post to fire their
own writers for writing really incredibly reasonable things about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 3 (02:47:21):
To close Charlie Kirk's episode and to close our episode,
jd Vance talked about before we can have any national unity,
we must, like Charlie, tell the truth. Unity.

Speaker 13 (02:47:35):
Real unity can be found only after climbing the mountain
of truth. And there are difficult truths we must confront
in our country. One truth is that twenty four percent
of self described quote very liberals believe it is acceptable
to be happy about the death of a political opponent,

(02:47:58):
while only three percent of self described very conservatives agree.
Three percent is too many, of course. Another truth is
that twenty six percent of young liberals believe political violence
is sometimes justified, and only seven percent of young conservatives
say the same. Again, too high a number in a

(02:48:20):
country of three hundred and thirty million people. You can,
of course find one person of a given political persuasion
justifying this or that, or almost anything, but the data
is clear people on the left are much likelier to
defend and celebrate political violence.

Speaker 7 (02:48:36):
This is not a both sides problem.

Speaker 13 (02:48:39):
If both sides have a problem, one side has a
much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.

Speaker 7 (02:48:46):
We must be told.

Speaker 3 (02:48:48):
So. These stats are from a recent you gov survey,
where twenty four percent of very liberals to say it's
okay to be happy with the murder of a political
opponent and twenty six percent of young liberals to say
some times political bolence is justified for two seven percent
of young conservatives. This study also found that Democrats and
Republicans are more likely to say that political violence is

(02:49:10):
a big problem after attacks on members of their own party.
Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced
by whatever recent events just happened. That's going to change
people's stated opinion on these questions. After the assassination of
Charlie Kirk, sixty seven percent of Republicans said that political
violence is a very big problem. Fifty eight percent of

(02:49:32):
Democrats agreed. After the assassination of Melissa Hartman, fifty six
percent of Democrats said it's a very big problem, only
forty four percent of Republicans agreed. After the assassination attempt
on Jos Shapiro, forty four percent of Democrats, thirty seven
percent of Republicans.

Speaker 6 (02:49:47):
Wait, just Shapiro wasn't assassinated, right, they tried to ban
his houseing.

Speaker 3 (02:49:51):
Yeah, they're counting that an attempted assassination.

Speaker 6 (02:49:53):
Oh, okay.

Speaker 4 (02:49:53):
See.

Speaker 3 (02:49:54):
After the attended assassination on Donald Trump, fifty one percent
of Republicans said political balance is a very big problem
forty six percent of democrats, And after the attacks on
Paul Pelosi, fifty three percent of Democrats said political balance
is a very big problem compared to thirty one percent
of Republicans. These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed

(02:50:16):
depending on whatever current events were current at the time,
whatever just happened. We're going to talk about this more
in a bit, but I think the way that we
frame cheering on political violence also massively varies based on
what you count as political violence. Is a police killing
count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly

(02:50:37):
affect the way we think about this question. Here's Vance
again talking about Trump's assassination and the pyramid that supports
political violence.

Speaker 13 (02:50:48):
Now, any political movement, violent or not violent.

Speaker 7 (02:50:50):
Is a collection of forces.

Speaker 13 (02:50:52):
It's like a pyramid that stacks on top one support
on top of the other. That Peermid's got a foundation
of donors, of activists, of journalists, now social media influencers,
and of course of politicians. Not every member of that
pyramid would commit a murder. In fact, over ninety nine
percent I'm sure would not. But by celebrating that murder,

(02:51:14):
apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the
fact that he said things some didn't like, even to
the point of lying about what he actually said, many
of these people are creating an environment where things like
this are inevitably going to happen.

Speaker 3 (02:51:31):
Benson goes on to talk about how people yelled at
him and his family when he visited Disneyland, and discusses
how after Charlie's death, one of his friends and a
senior White House staffer had left leaning operatives in his neighborhood,
passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and
where he'd lived and quote, encouraging neighbors to harass him

(02:51:52):
or God forbid to do worse. While he was mourning
his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry
about the political terrorists drawing a big target on his home.
He shares with his own children. Are these people violent?
I hope not? But are they guilty of encouraging violence?
You damn well better believe it. We can thank God
that most Democrats don't share these attitudes, and I do.

(02:52:12):
While acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a
lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority
on the far left, Vansk goes on to state that
he seeks no unity with the far left.

Speaker 13 (02:52:29):
There is no unity with people who scream at children
over their parents' politics.

Speaker 7 (02:52:34):
There is no unity with.

Speaker 13 (02:52:35):
Someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order
to excuse his murder.

Speaker 7 (02:52:40):
There is no.

Speaker 13 (02:52:41):
Unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day
after the father of that family lost a dear friend.
There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie
Kirk's assassination.

Speaker 7 (02:52:53):
And there is no unity with the people who fund.

Speaker 13 (02:52:56):
These articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,
who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father,
deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words
with which they disagree.

Speaker 7 (02:53:11):
Did you know that the George Soros.

Speaker 13 (02:53:13):
Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who
funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, Do you know
they benefit from generous tax treatment. They are literally subsidized
by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do
they reward us by setting fire to the house built
by the American family over two hundred and fifty years.

Speaker 3 (02:53:35):
On September thirteenth, Fox and News Morning host Brian Kilmeade
endorsed youthanizing homeless people with quote involuntary lethal injection or something,
just kill them.

Speaker 5 (02:53:50):
Billions of dollars some mental health and the homeless population.

Speaker 3 (02:53:53):
A lot of them don't want to take the programs.
A lot of them don't want to get the help
that is necessary. You can't give him a choice.

Speaker 2 (02:54:00):
Either you take the resources that we're going to.

Speaker 3 (02:54:02):
Give you and or you decide that you got to
be locked up in jail. That's the way it has
to be now, or involuntary lethal injection or something. I
just kill them, Kim Brian. Why did it have to
get to this point right?

Speaker 11 (02:54:13):
I would say this, we're not voting for the right
people in North Carolina.

Speaker 3 (02:54:16):
Wake up. Just kill them. Geez, the Fox News host
advocating the killing of homeless people. And he didn't get
fired from this. He apologized a few days later, but
he's not getting fired from his job for this, openly
advocating the death of homeless people. Yeah, murder.

Speaker 18 (02:54:36):
And I think it's worth noting whenever we're having a
discussion about political violence that two days after Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 3 (02:54:42):
Was shot, Ice just killed a guy.

Speaker 18 (02:54:46):
In Chicago who was driving away from their attempt to
detain him. He was driving away pretty slowly, and there's
video of it. Now, they pulled out their guns and
they killed him. And you know, all of these people
who are the people who ordered ice into this city, right,
who are directly responsible for the deaths of this man

(02:55:08):
who was also a single father. Actually well, no, Kirk
was not a single father, but this guy was and
was just murdered in cold blood by Ice.

Speaker 3 (02:55:18):
Right.

Speaker 18 (02:55:19):
This is not considered political violence by sort of either
liberals or conservatives, right, because they don't think the political
violence can be done by the state. And this is
also part of how you get to the situation now
where you can be like, well, the states should just
murder homeless people and that's not considered political violence because
it's the state doing it, and because they don't think
homeless people are people.

Speaker 6 (02:55:39):
Yeah, I mean to broaden that statement slightly or take
a different angle on it, right, Like there is a
complete bipartisan consensus that we should kill hundreds of people
a year acrossing our southern border because that supposedly serves
as a deterrent from other people coming, which it doesn't,
But that is not seen as political violence.

Speaker 18 (02:55:56):
Now, they just murdered three more people on a boat
but leaving Venezuela a few days ago.

Speaker 3 (02:56:02):
Yeah, yeah, as Evan's ended the Charlie Kirk Show episode.
He advocated that listeners find and call the employers of
people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a TEPA USA
chapter or to run for office.

Speaker 13 (02:56:18):
But I promise you that we will explore every option
to bring real unity to our country and stop those
who would kill their fellow Americans because.

Speaker 7 (02:56:27):
They don't like what they say. But you have a
role too. Civil society, Charlie.

Speaker 13 (02:56:33):
Understood this well, is not just something that flows from
the government. It flows from each and every one of us.
It flows from all of us. So when you see
someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call
their employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we

(02:56:54):
do believe in civility, and there is no civility in
the celebration of political assassination.

Speaker 6 (02:57:01):
The idea of the fusion of the state with civil
society is really notable there, like, that's not what civil
society is, right. That is a concept that is inherently totalitarian,
that civil society should flow downstream from the state and
the movement.

Speaker 3 (02:57:16):
It's this fusion between the two that the right has
deployed so successfully. Yeah, which has increased their ability to
actually like rule.

Speaker 6 (02:57:24):
Yeah. I mean that's that's what fatism does, right, like that,
that's yeah, Franco, that's Hitler, Like that is textbook.

Speaker 3 (02:57:30):
That's like the point of the brown Shirts.

Speaker 6 (02:57:32):
Yeah, or like the Women's movement in Spain, right to
give a more civil society example, they're not like, they're
not like a state police agency. There are a civil
society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.

Speaker 3 (02:57:45):
So to return to the years of lead Paint idea
that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now across
the political ocean is this flattening of tactics. As I
discussed on the show before in the Blue One episodes,
the right trojan horst political conspiracism into acceptable political discourse,
which the left is now embracing liberals and the left.

(02:58:07):
And you can see this with people's reactions to the
Charter assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the
left is embracing conspiracy theories. Meanwhile the right is adopting
and accelerating political cancel culture style docsing. The key difference
here is on the right, these actions have state backing
and coordination or serve to maintain state power. For example,

(02:58:32):
there's types of political violence that get cheered on by
the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of
police after officer involved shootings. Back the blue keeps alignment
with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging
violence against BLM protesters that supports the state structure and

(02:58:52):
advocating or celebrating the deaths of protesters gets viewed very
differently than the targeted assassinations that have happened in the
past year here and now the past few days, Trump
has discussed once again designating Antifa and other groups as
domestic terror organizations and bringing RICO charges against Code Pink

(02:59:14):
activists who screamed at him at a restaurant in DC
a few weeks ago.

Speaker 9 (02:59:18):
Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization?

Speaker 11 (02:59:24):
Well, it's something I would do, yeah, if I have
support from the people back here.

Speaker 3 (02:59:29):
I think would start with PAM.

Speaker 11 (02:59:30):
I think, but I would if you give me, I
would do that one hundred percent.

Speaker 3 (02:59:34):
And others also, by.

Speaker 11 (02:59:35):
The way, But Antifa is terrible.

Speaker 3 (02:59:39):
There are other groups, Yeah, there are other groups.

Speaker 5 (02:59:42):
We have some pretty radical groups and they got away
with murder.

Speaker 7 (02:59:45):
And also I've been speaking to.

Speaker 11 (02:59:47):
The Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the
people that you've been reading about that have been putting
up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.

Speaker 3 (02:59:56):
These aren't protests, these are crimes.

Speaker 11 (02:59:58):
What they're doing where they're throwing brit I said cars
of the of ice and mortar patrol.

Speaker 18 (03:00:04):
And I want to close by. You know, we've seen
the sort of repercautions that people have had, not even
for like celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for like being like, wait,
this guy fucking sucks, and this whole you know, this
whole argument about civility. And I mean that, I mean
the Vice President of the United States is making right.
I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh as

(03:00:25):
we're recording. This is this is from Tuesday, September sixteenth.
This was left wing LGBT terrorism. There was never much doubt.
Now there is none at all. All left wing terror
networks must be crushed, All of the terrorists and their
helpers and funders must be arrested, prosecuted, and put to death.
So and there have been absolutely zero consequences for again
Matt Walsh calling for this whole network of people that

(03:00:49):
he imagines exists being executed. That's their endgame, right, It
is to destroy the concept of free speech in order
to preserve quote unquote free speech right, in order to
sort of unquote and political violence. They want to carry out,
you know, mass political killings of their opponents.

Speaker 3 (03:01:05):
Coordinated at a state level with state resources. Yeah. Yeah,
And the state involvement makes it okay, That makes it
a moral action, not the actions of some like unhinged terrorist. Yeah.

Speaker 18 (03:01:17):
And this is a really significant problem for the way
that we think about political violence because this is something
that's true for both liberals and conservatives that they think
that the state is the appropriate arbiter for this kind
of political violence, which is how Obama can do a
drone strike on a sixteen year old American citizen and
kill him in cold blood because Obama had political disagreements

(03:01:37):
with his father, right, and how this is treated as
something that's fine by a huge portion of liberals. And
this is one of the things that's going to allow
if these people are successful, and I don't know that
they will be, but if they can be, that's going
to be.

Speaker 3 (03:01:54):
Why, Well, that is how we at the show understand
the years of lead Paint, or the current twenty twenty
five September era of the years of lead Paint. There's
phantoms everywhere, there's conspiracies everywhere and nowhere, and the specter

(03:02:16):
of political violence is around every corner. This is it

(03:02:38):
could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's
happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what
it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined
by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans. Yep. This episode,
we're covering the week of September eleven to September eighteenth.

Speaker 6 (03:02:56):
Normally a week in history when very little happens.

Speaker 3 (03:02:58):
The most normal week of a American politics. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:03:01):
Yeah, Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days
as ever mattered in American history.

Speaker 3 (03:03:08):
We should schedule our calendar just to block out this
whole section of the year each time.

Speaker 2 (03:03:14):
I already have it written down in Mike calendar as
the week to forget, so I just spend it drinking.

Speaker 3 (03:03:22):
Robert, do you want to introduce their first topic?

Speaker 2 (03:03:25):
Yes, I mean, our first topic, as we talked about
last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk,
particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's
being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote
unquote left different NGOs and other organizations that are being

(03:03:45):
accused of being part of a vast and let's say,
unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do
with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk's killer,
but nonetheless it's being used that way, And kind of
the first thing to probably talk about is what's come
out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we

(03:04:09):
recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised
Gare when we recorded on Friday. I had expected us
to need to do an update before Monday in order
to catch up. Really, there wasn't much that it came out.

Speaker 21 (03:04:24):
No.

Speaker 3 (03:04:25):
I did a brief update confirming that he was living
with a transperson, but that was really all we knew
at the time that could be confirmed. That was pretty
evergreen as we suspected it it might be, and I
will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear,
but we do have some more concrete details about his

(03:04:46):
online background. Yeah, and a few others, like ancillary pieces,
which is included in the charging document, as well as
reporting on his discord logs.

Speaker 2 (03:04:57):
Yeah. So I think we should talk first about the
whole trans roommate thing of it all, because obviously, first off,
this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen,
Like they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime
there's a shooting.

Speaker 3 (03:05:11):
They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after
it happened.

Speaker 2 (03:05:14):
And that's been the case with like the last year
and a half or two worth of mass shootings. Yeah,
or at least a sizable number of them.

Speaker 6 (03:05:21):
Yeah, that was a meme, right for why it's like
a four Chan thing to suggest that any mass shooter
was trans and now it's just become reality.

Speaker 2 (03:05:28):
Yeah, And in this case, the allegation started coming out
from the police that his roommate was transgender. This was
before the discord logs had leaked. So I want you
to talk a little bit. Gare you found the Reddit
profile of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah, so first question is
do we know if they actually were trans and do
we know if they actually were in some sort of

(03:05:49):
a relationship. What is the actual evidence that exists to
suggest that based on what we have so far.

Speaker 3 (03:05:54):
They did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and
public facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend
BF that was helping them cope with the results of
the twenty twenty four election. But that's really all we
can tell from this at the time of public Reddit
profile for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had again

(03:06:18):
some sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty gritty
you know, arc of their whole relationship is like not
explicitly clear, but certainly a pad a romantic relationship.

Speaker 2 (03:06:29):
Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should
be obvious to anyone who has like a third of
a brain cell to rub together against the inside of
their skull. There's not any evidence that this roommate was
tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes, and
in fact, the exit evidence this.

Speaker 3 (03:06:46):
The state is arguing this that the roommate had no
prior knowledge, yes, and has been fully cooperative. That the
roommate is not involved.

Speaker 2 (03:06:53):
Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.

Speaker 3 (03:06:57):
Like in part or produced evidence that was now used
in the Charging documentary. Tyler turned himself in with his
father like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.

Speaker 2 (03:07:10):
Yeah, And it's one of those things you can come
down morally on that however you want. It's just a
matter of there's absolutely no evidence. As people like Matt
Walsherre saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy,
their roommates seemed horrified to have been and you know,
understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act,
like massively famous active murder, right, Like that's a scary

(03:07:34):
thing to come to, like get a discord message realizing,
oh fuck now I'm potentially implicated in this. So I
do have some understanding for what a shocking moment that is,
Like it's hard to imagine, yeah, dealing with that in
any way, shape or form. That's just a wild thing
to have happened in the middle of your fucking day,
presumably while you're at work or some shit. This would
have been around noon, so I'm guessing they were on

(03:07:56):
the job when they got these messages. She's a horrible,
horrible thing to deal with.

Speaker 3 (03:08:00):
Yeah, let's go over some of the text exchanges included
in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because
they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah, it's a
placeholder for that. Yeah, but it's referred to as like
a charging information document that they included some text messages
because it was the clearest evidence to lay out to

(03:08:21):
charge them with the crime, though not the only evidence,
as we will soon discuss. And these textlogs are core
to like people like Walsh's current argument that the trans
roommate must have actually been involved because they think that
the messages that I'm going to read here we were
like scripted between the roommate and the shooter specifically to
exonerate the roommate, and that that's the conspiracy that people

(03:08:45):
like Walsh are spreading. Let's go over this section of
this document quote. The police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological
male who was involved in a metal relationship with Robinson.
The roommate told police that the roommate received messages from
Robinson about the shooting and provide those messages to police.
On September tenth, twenty twenty five, the roommate received a
text message from Robinson which said, drop what you are doing,

(03:09:07):
look under my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard
and found a note that stated I had the opportunity
to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take
it unquote. Police found a photograph of this note. The
following text exchange then took place. After reading the note,
the roommate responded, what with many question marks? You're joking, right, Robinson?

(03:09:31):
I am still okay, my love, but I am stuck
in orm for a little while longer yet, shouldn't be
long until I can come home. But I gotta grab
my rifle still. To be honest, I'd hoped to keep
this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry
to involve you, roommate. You weren't the one who did
it right, many question marks, Robinson. I am sorry, roommate.

(03:09:55):
I thought they caught the person Robinson. No, they grabbed
some crazy old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing.
I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop
point shortly after, but most of that side of town
got locked down. It's quiet almost enough to get out.
There's one vehicle lingering roommate, Why Robinson? Why did I

(03:10:17):
do it? Roommate, Yeah, Robinson, I had enough of his hatred.
Some hate can't be negotiated out. If I'm able to
grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence.
Going to attempt to retrieve it again. Hopefully they have
moved on. I haven't seen anything about them finding it. Roommate,
how long have you been planning this, Robinson? A bit

(03:10:37):
over a week. I believe I can get close to it,
but there's a squad car parked right by it. I
think they already swept that spot. But I don't want
to chance it, Robinson. I'm wishing i'd circle back and
grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle.
I'm worried what my old man would do if I
didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle. I don't know if it
had a serial number, but it wouldn't trace to me.

(03:10:59):
I worry about Prince. I had to leave it in
a bush where I changed outfits. I didn't have the
ability or time to bring it with I might have
to abandon it and hope they don't find Prince. How
the fuck will I explain losing it to my old man.
Only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel.
Remember how I was engraving bullets. The fucking messages are

(03:11:20):
mostly a big meme. If I see notices bulje ooh
wu on Fox News, I might have a stroke. Got
it all right, I'm gonna have to leave it. That
really fucking sucks. Judging from today, I'd say Grandpa's gun
does just fine. IDK, I think that was a two
thousand dollars scope. Robinson, Delete this exchange, Robinson. My dad

(03:11:42):
wants photos of the rifle, he says. Grandpa wants to
know who has what. The FEDS released a photo of
the rifle and it is very unique. He's calling me
r n not answering, Robinson. Since Trump got into office,
my dad has been pretty diehard Mega. I'm going to
turn myself in Willingly. One of my neighbors here is
a deputy for the sheriff. You are all I worry about,

(03:12:03):
love roommate. I'm much more worried about you, Robinson. Don't
talk to the media. Please, don't take any interviews or
make any comments. If police ask you questions, ask for
a lawyer, and stay silent. That's the end of the exchange.

Speaker 6 (03:12:18):
Yep, it seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging
with the Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:12:25):
There's not a good response to give to that.

Speaker 6 (03:12:29):
No, that's not.

Speaker 2 (03:12:30):
Yeah, Discord Again, one of the one thing I would
hope this would bust is this has to have been
a professional hit man assassin of some sort, which is
a job that I mean, it technically exists, Like there
are guys who are for the fucking crypts of the Bloods,
or you could call them professional hitmen, and that they
kill people for money, but they're not like the people

(03:12:52):
you see in movies, Like they're guys who will walk
up with a thirty eight and gut shoot somebody and
run the fuck off, Like they're not We're not talking
about like smooth operators. Those people almost don't exist as
a profession, and certainly not is a standard thing in
the United States. And that that like the fact that
he was having this kind of conversation on Discord.

Speaker 3 (03:13:15):
This is I believe, regular text.

Speaker 2 (03:13:16):
So these are regular regular text.

Speaker 6 (03:13:18):
This is straight up yeah sms, right, like yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:13:21):
He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a
note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods,
Like this is all about what you'd expect from a
twenty two year old kid who's a reasonably good shot
with a rifle and had no real other skills. Like
it's what it looked like.

Speaker 6 (03:13:38):
Yes, this doesn't even seem like someone who spent a
great deal of time planning, right, like learning about that.

Speaker 3 (03:13:45):
They said they've been planning about it for about a week.

Speaker 2 (03:13:48):
Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right, like Nick, Yeah,
and they seem almost surprised. Yeah, I got this weird
feeling reading it, Like Tyler almost is shocked that they
did it, Like there's this sense of being pulled by history.

Speaker 3 (03:14:02):
Yeah, it's seemingly confused by his own actions in a sense.

Speaker 6 (03:14:05):
Yeah, like watching himself almost like.

Speaker 2 (03:14:07):
Yes, and like I I scrite like one of the things.
It sounds like and this is a little unclear, but
it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up.
But he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd
ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing
he did for shit for people.

Speaker 3 (03:14:24):
People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well,
obviously the roommate knew something was up. If if the
roommate was aware that that Robinson was carving bullets. That's
first of all, that's not a crime. No, people just
do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the
range often maybe they're gonna fucking scribble on a bullet Like.
That's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning.

Speaker 2 (03:14:45):
Frankly, yeah, it's indication again that this guy was very
online in the gamer right.

Speaker 5 (03:14:50):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (03:14:51):
But that's it.

Speaker 3 (03:14:53):
So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting
doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals
and people on the left have taken to suspecting that
these could have been written by an quote unquote FBI
agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.

(03:15:14):
And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling
his dad his old man and referring to quote unquote
like law enforcement type language like interrogate and Yeah, to me,
this is not very confusing. He talks like this because
he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video

(03:15:35):
games thousands of hours I have. I have a Steam profile, huge,
huge gamer, and he might talk a little odd because
he just did a fucking crazy thing.

Speaker 2 (03:15:45):
I don't even think it's that odd. It's nice people
call someone they're in love with, my love. That's a
thing that happens in the world.

Speaker 7 (03:15:53):
Like that's not like a.

Speaker 3 (03:15:54):
Very normal What are we doing here?

Speaker 2 (03:15:57):
Why are we questioning this part of the Yeah?

Speaker 3 (03:16:02):
But and again like these texts were handed over to
local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would
jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot
of other evidence, DNA ballistic evidence, the fun group discord
chat where he also admitted to the crime right before
he turned himself in. Like these tex slogs don't even

(03:16:23):
like make him out to be a crazy leftist. He
talks like very vaguely about Kirk, like spreading hatred. Yeah,
he says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll talk
about because there's some evidence here suggesting that both Tyler
and their roommate, like their politics were mixed from what
little we can glean about them, right or a very

(03:16:44):
minor part of their lives in a sense like.

Speaker 2 (03:16:46):
Yeah, they're not talking about redistribution of wealth, they're not
talking about overthrowing the gun.

Speaker 3 (03:16:51):
Oh no, they're not talking about politics in that way.
This seems more like personal to him.

Speaker 2 (03:16:56):
Yes, he's in love with a transperson and he didn't
like what Charlie Kirk said about Tree.

Speaker 3 (03:17:00):
Yeah, And like, if the government's going to fake messages,
why would they do so in a way that exonerates
the trans roommate the real ideological target here.

Speaker 2 (03:17:09):
Especially, look at what the government is doing right now,
right they're going after quote unquote Antifa, They're going after
the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left
wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not
have referenced one of those organizations? Would there not be
a fucking black and red flag somewhere right there?

Speaker 6 (03:17:29):
Yeah, Like it would be so easy. If you're going
to implicate someone, you could implicate in text messages really easily.
Like it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this.

Speaker 3 (03:17:38):
Yeah, why would you fake that?

Speaker 2 (03:17:40):
Why would you fake it that way?

Speaker 3 (03:17:42):
Baffling, incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case.
There's plenty of other evidence. And this isn't the same
thing as like cops planting evidence or like a district
attorney making subjective claims about intent, Like you don't need
to overestimate state intelligence here.

Speaker 2 (03:18:00):
No, we don't even need for what we have. There
was no need for them to have done anything at all,
because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of
the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking
calls family knew because it is a unique gun. It
is an antique mouser that was sportized and rebarreled, presumably

(03:18:22):
personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his dad
seemed to have recognized it immediately. There was no getting
away with it once the rifle was found.

Speaker 3 (03:18:31):
This is totally different from like the MS thirteen tattoo thing,
where the trumpetdministration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and
then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped
letters to draw a parallel between what they think the
tattoos meant and with their interpretation of it as letters
and numbers, which trump in all of his genius, mistook

(03:18:53):
for being actual tattoos. And then they just ran with
it because no one has the capacity to tell the
president you were wrong. This is completely different than faking
all these text messages. There's metadata, there's cell phone records.
It's probably still on the roommate's own phone, like physical
a physical evidence, and like subjectively saying that you don't

(03:19:14):
know any gen z that talks like this, that's not
valid evidence. Twenty two year olds know how to use punctuation.

Speaker 6 (03:19:21):
Yeah, let me tell you of someone who crades hundreds
of papers every year from people who are largely but
not all, between eighteen and twenty five. Yeah, young people
can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of
forensic fucking literary analysis required.

Speaker 3 (03:19:37):
And the information obtained in these chat logs and through
interviews with his parents match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who
got leaked messages from the shooter on discord, very very similar.
Like lots of libs and people on the left are
saying this is fake because they wanted the shooter to
be conservative and they think that these texts damage the

(03:19:58):
narrative that they have chosen. And I think that's why
we're seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not
about actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right,
Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.
His dad's pretty mega. Robinson figured out he was bisexual
and started to move a little bit to the left
on like gender and sexuality issues. And like and even
like a lot of gen Z straight guys kind of

(03:20:20):
have this political profile, right, they're like pro gun, but
their life revolves around like gaming discord and read it
more than like the political.

Speaker 2 (03:20:27):
And they're probably often pro capitalist. They're just not bigoted
against queer people. Yeah, because that's not as common anymore.

Speaker 3 (03:20:35):
These aren't political partisans. Yeah, they're not even on our
slash bread tube, Like, yeah, that's that's not what's happening.
He played, he played furry sex games on Steam when
he was younger. One of his Steam names was Donald
Trump because yeah, he's twenty two years old. Trump was
an Augurat when he was like thirteen or whatever, Like,
oh god, yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:20:54):
It's.

Speaker 2 (03:20:56):
We fucked the kids up so bad.

Speaker 3 (03:20:59):
It's it's a large it's largely a political and like
this what he did is is existential violence manifesting a
political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political. Right,
because shooting Charlie Kirk incredibly political action, even if that's
not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it.

Speaker 6 (03:21:18):
Yeah, like this person happens. It happened across a queer
person who they are very fond of. Right, they have
queer people in their lives. That is not indicative of
any politics other than they have a queer person in
their life.

Speaker 2 (03:21:30):
If this person stand the Soviet Union, we would fucking
know about.

Speaker 3 (03:21:34):
It because they would be running with that.

Speaker 6 (03:21:38):
They'd have found a most into gud used a mosin
for what. So they would have missed.

Speaker 2 (03:21:46):
A little bit of Moses slander for you today to
break up the horrors. Yeah, speaking of crackdowns, crack down
on your wallet by buying.

Speaker 3 (03:21:54):
These products and services.

Speaker 6 (03:21:56):
Beautiful, lovely.

Speaker 3 (03:22:09):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (03:22:11):
Yeah, First Amendment crackdown. Massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen
Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of
the administration about going after the left, about dismantling particularly
organizations like the Open Society Foundation, going after George Soros
and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and

(03:22:34):
using the death penalty even on folks who are quote
unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly
described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially
just about anybody.

Speaker 3 (03:22:47):
This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs, legal support NGOs,
like it's really unclear at the exact form that this
is going to take. But this is stuff that the
administration has pined of a doing for a while.

Speaker 2 (03:23:01):
Yeah, and it's unclear.

Speaker 3 (03:23:02):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:23:02):
It's one of the big pieces of news that's happened
within twenty four hours of US recording this episode, which
we recorded on Thursday the eighteenth, is that Trump has
designated ANTIFAH a domestic terrorist organization. That he's said that
what I'm saying is he said that, he said up
words that he has said.

Speaker 3 (03:23:22):
Words that he has said before, including it in twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (03:23:25):
For the letter of the law, for one thing, there's
a wild difference between what you can do legally to
an international foreign terrorist organization, yeah, and in domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 (03:23:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:23:36):
Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally,
in terms of what is written law, the president can't
just declare a group of people to be a domestic
terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 (03:23:46):
It's usually an enhancement charge.

Speaker 2 (03:23:48):
Yes, and then just go after people who have spoken
out or donated money to legal charities that are randomly
declared to be in support of that. That's not league,
which doesn't mean it won't happened. Let me be really clear, Yeah, Yeah,
but that's not what the law is about.

Speaker 3 (03:24:01):
And they've tried to do that in Atlanta was stop
Crop City and the Lena Solidarity Fund and going after
the Bail Fund and people who had donated money to
like the Forest Defense Fund, and this Trump is similarly
actually to Atlanta. Is also talked about using RICO charges
to get people in trouble who are funding these quote
unquote domestic terror organizations. And on yeah, September seventeenth, Trump Truth,

(03:24:25):
I am pleased to inform our many USA patriots that
I'm designating Antifa, a sick, dangerous radical left disaster, as
a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly recommending
that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with
the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your
attention to this matter.

Speaker 6 (03:24:45):
Yeah, I mean for a use of word major, right,
which doesn't that's like there's a domestic terrorism is a
concept that's nebulus FTO, foreign terrorist organization is an extremely
clear legal definition. He didn't use either of those. Yeah,
this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I
think he enjoyed it. I'm sure there are other people

(03:25:05):
to vote, but Ted Cruz in before twenty twenty twenty nineteen,
tried to introduce a resolution in the Senate condemning Antifa
like this has been a thing.

Speaker 3 (03:25:14):
Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation which went nowhere or talked
about dilation. I don't even know if she actually introduced
it like this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's
been it's been something like Andy, you know, has been
advocating for for years.

Speaker 2 (03:25:27):
It's a really important point that they have attempted and
failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't
let them. And this is something that if you have
been in the riot reporting on public shootings business as
long as I said christ one thing I can tell
you is that in the wake of something like this,
it was the same with christ Church and the immediate

(03:25:48):
wake of christ Church, there was this really shocking moment
where a bunch of conservative I talked to these people
because I published the art the defining article on that shooting. Yeah,
a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you
know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants.
Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should
Like those people were talking about that people who you

(03:26:09):
would not expect that now, they didn't keep talking that way.
They got to work pretty quick. But what you have
in a moment like this is there's a limited period
of time where people's shock and horror and surprise at
what has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who

(03:26:29):
have an agenda and who have a clear plan for
what to push, to push the overton envelope in their direction. Right,
this is not a period of time that lasts forever,
and the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response
to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they

(03:26:51):
are making the best use of this period of time
that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact
that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean
there aren't law term consequences, doesn't mean that they can't
make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech.
Doesn't mean we're not in massive danger. Because we are
in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not. I'm

(03:27:13):
telling you these spaces of possibility don't last forever, in
part because the public moves on, and in part because
there is always a backlash to the backlash, and you're
seeing pieces of that already.

Speaker 3 (03:27:25):
We are seeing pieces of that.

Speaker 2 (03:27:26):
Fucking Carl Rove, of all motherfucking people, wrote an article
about how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists
for the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came
out and made a statement that like, if the government
is able to go after you for this, they'll come
after conservatives at some point. He's not wrong about I
don't credit him doing that because of a serious moral thing.

(03:27:49):
I credited him to be a relatively intelligent guy who
was like, no, no, no, if they're able to do
this to you know whatever, milktoast liberals, eventually it will
happen to me, right.

Speaker 3 (03:27:58):
And specifically, like Pam Bondi is Turner General made some
statements a few days ago about them going after quote
unquote hate speech, yeah, which spawned a whole bunch of
conservative commentators Steven Krawdertucker Carlson, as well as Matt Walsh.
And under no circumstances do you have to hand up
to Matt Walsh. But this prompted them to be like, no, actually,
we don't believe in hate speech as a legitimate legal category.

(03:28:19):
There should be social consequences for people who celebrate the
murder of an innocent man, but there should not be
legal consequences for hate speech.

Speaker 6 (03:28:27):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:28:28):
We're fine with the government helping us like dos you
and get you fired from your job, but prosecuting hate
speech as a category is something that we do not
agree with, and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been
like that small reaction, which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no,
when I say hate speech, what I really mean is
like threats and assignment of violence, and like, yeah, okay.

Speaker 6 (03:28:47):
Fighting words, I think is a legal term, right, Like
incitements to violence.

Speaker 2 (03:28:51):
Yeah, And you know, there's some stuff that's always been
illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives I've
been dealing with this for years, threatened to kill and
rape activists and show up outside of their houses and
harass them. As a general rule, the police don't do
anything if those activists are on the left, right, even
though that crosses the boundary into fighting words. However, they

(03:29:12):
have legally could they choose not to, right, But if
someone is out there saying in the wake of the
Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people to kill
this person. That is illegal. You're not allowed to say
I want to incite people to murder this person.

Speaker 6 (03:29:28):
That is a crime.

Speaker 2 (03:29:29):
If you're posting and saying that you have broken the law,
they won't go after a conservative for doing that, but
they'll go after you, right like. That is how things work,
you know. However, we have seen people who have been
attacked for speech that absolutely is not crossing the line
into fighting words.

Speaker 3 (03:29:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:29:48):
One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.

Speaker 3 (03:29:51):
It happened.

Speaker 2 (03:29:52):
You've had variants of this happened at a couple of
colleges all around the country. They're specifically at Texas Tech,
which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premiere
state schools. There was a video of an incident on
the day that Charlie Kirk was killed where a student
scene jumping up and down, yelling profanity at a vigil

(03:30:14):
in a free speech zone outside of a student union
building on the campus, saying y'all, Homie dead, making fun
of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At one point,
she touched a guy's hat. The video of her went viral.
Governor Greg Abbott called for her to be arrested and expelled.
She was expelled immediately. She was arrested and charged with

(03:30:34):
assault shortly thereafter. Her family has not made a statement.
Very wisely, there's really nothing they could say that would
be great at this point. There has been some pushback
from student organizations in the state because this is blatantly illegal.
Calling what she did assault is nonsense. In my opinion
from watching the video, she was at a free speech zone,

(03:30:56):
laughing y'all homely dead when someone is killed is no words.
That is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff
like that under the letter of the law. Does this
mean this person won't get convicted of a crime. It's Texas,
and she's a black woman.

Speaker 3 (03:31:12):
She might.

Speaker 2 (03:31:13):
And this is very chilling. This is deeply concerning. This
is not the only case. There's a universe, smaller university
outside of Austin where again a student was videotaped celebrating
individual for Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well.
There have been a number of teachers fired. Obviously, stuff
like this has been happening all over the country, right
and this is deeply worrying. And even if even if

(03:31:36):
the space of possibility closes on these people faster than
they're expecting. If the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation
doesn't happen, if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further
than the last time they've talked about going after Antifa,
stuff like this is going to continue to happen, and
it will only accelerate over the next couple of years, right,
and that is a massive problem.

Speaker 3 (03:31:58):
Part of this culture shift can be seen in what
some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest
attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life,
which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show
on hold quote unquote, indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC
and affiliate stations owned by Nextstar. Before ABC's announcement next

(03:32:21):
our release to statement quote, next Star's owned and partner
television stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt
Jimmy Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with Tonight's show.
Next to our strongly object to the recent comments made
by mister Kimmel concerning the killing and Charlie Kirk, and
will replace the show with other programming in its ABC
affiliated markets unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not

(03:32:42):
air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to
the Kirk family and donate to the Kirk Family as
well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show, quote, it's
really sort of past time that a lot of these
licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say

(03:33:05):
we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you
straighten this out, and we, the licensed broadcaster, are running
the possibility of fines or license revocation from the SEC
if we continue to run content that ends up being
a pattern of news distortion un quote. Carr then made
vague threats towards like direct FCC involvement, quote, we can

(03:33:26):
do this easy way or the hard way. These companies
can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly
on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for
the FCC ahead on quote. The SEC controls broadcast licenses
for local TV channels, and next Star is planning a
merger with Tegna, which requires SEC approval, and this is
obviously a coerced attack on free speech.

Speaker 2 (03:33:48):
And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot
getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because
they're companies. They're trying to do a merger. Right, that's
not new.

Speaker 3 (03:34:00):
Yes, this has happened with ABC already. This happened with
a CBS and paramount. I think some people, including people
on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of
the firing or the being put on hold, as well
as what, like Kimmel said, kim wasn't joking about or
celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly like

(03:34:21):
falsely insinuate that the shooter was Mega when evidence at
the time pointed otherwise. Kimill said, quote, we hit some
new lows over the weekend with the Mega Gang desperately
trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as
anything other than one of them and doing everything they
can to score political points from it. Quote. He then
went on to tell a joke about how Trump did

(03:34:42):
not seem very sad in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death,
comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind, that
was the way the joke was framed. Yeah, so that's
what kim Oll actually said. You can interpret that either way,
whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to
make it look like he's not one of them and
scoring political points, or you can interpret it as Kimmel

(03:35:04):
kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I
don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly
meant by that, But The Rolling Stone reported that sources
told them the quote. Senior executives at ABC, its owner,
Disney and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how
to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not
actually said anything over the line, but the threat of

(03:35:27):
Trump administration retaliation loomed unquote.

Speaker 2 (03:35:31):
Yeah, and this is again, this is chilling, absolutely chilling speech.
The things he said, we're not in line with the
best available evidence at the time that he said them.
But they weren't hate speech, they were not incitement to violence.
There was nothing a league know about them. And again,
you had a fucking right wing figure on television urging
for homeless people to be executed.

Speaker 3 (03:35:54):
The involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis. Quote,
just kill them. He's not getting fired.

Speaker 2 (03:36:01):
No, he had to make a half assed apology, but
that's it.

Speaker 6 (03:36:04):
Yeah, Like he had to pretend to be sorry.

Speaker 18 (03:36:06):
If I had a nickel for every time someone on
Fox News said that like any mass shooter at all
was linked to a trans person, Like none of my
trans friends would ever be homeless. Again, Like they say
this shit all the time and nothing happens, even though
it is I mean literally just it is straight up
tofammatory yep. And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens.

(03:36:28):
And this is just a really pure, i mean example
of just the latant political suppression of speech. And also
this sort of like we talked about this with the mergers,
is the structural problem with the way that like the
American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured,
which is that they're all for profit companies. And because

(03:36:51):
of that, all you need to do is just buy
out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall
in line. And that's what we've been watching with news
outlet after news outlet for news outlet like firing anyone
who said anything being about Kirk.

Speaker 3 (03:37:02):
Yep, I think with that that concludes our Charlie Kirk
assassination aftermath discussion for now. But there is in fact
other news this week happening. James, do you have stuff? Yeah,
un Fortunately, I'm like I'm embracing myself. I know that
James's news is never that good either.

Speaker 6 (03:37:22):
Yeah, so it was good news these days.

Speaker 3 (03:37:25):
Really the passport thing was killed, right, the Mark Rubio.

Speaker 2 (03:37:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is some good news. Actually, there
was a Senate bill, a writer on a bill that
was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio the power
to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political speech and
the guys of speech protecting you know, quote unquote terrorists.
That failed, like that was pulled by the sponsor, which

(03:37:50):
is good. There was a backlash to it, and again
when there's backlashes, that's that's good. Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:38:00):
Yeah, I mean it's it's it's so annoying to have
to like we all know that like pointing out the
hypocrisy doesn't work as like a real strategy, but like
there's if there's a way besides that to like actually
channel resistance to these authoritarian and like speech chilling measures.
Besides just smugly going like haha, the Party of free
speech strikes again, which I understand how that's emotionally compelling,

(03:38:23):
but no one cares. It's not going to stop them
from taking away your free speech.

Speaker 17 (03:38:27):
No.

Speaker 3 (03:38:28):
Yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some free ads.

Speaker 6 (03:38:32):
Yeah, we are back. I don't worry, folks. It is
all downhill from here. I'm afraid because things have not
been good outside of the coverage and repercussions to the

(03:38:55):
Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us
to talk about Ghana. And this is one stories that
unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but it
shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So
the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass
through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.
In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent

(03:39:17):
to a place and you send them back via another place,
that's called chain refoulment.

Speaker 3 (03:39:23):
Right.

Speaker 6 (03:39:23):
One could probably also pronounce that it's a bit where
a French word, but I have decided not to. In
this instance, they're sending people to Ghana when their home
countries has been deemed to be too dangerous by a
United States court, or they are unable to send them
back to that country for some other reason. Right, people
in this part of the world don't need visas to travel,
so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring

(03:39:47):
like that, the Ghana can just bust them back, right,
it doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a
court has ordered the United States that there was an
attempt right to secure protection for these people via them
into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being
sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the
time the case was filed, right, so to prevent them

(03:40:08):
being sent from Ghana to places where they may face,
as we're about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the
worst ship that can happen to people. So the court
did order the United States to produce a document which
details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At
the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that.
Ghanan sources have repeatedly suggested that one exists. Right in

(03:40:32):
Ghanaian government press conferences and internal Ghanan news reporting, the
case was bought by both Gambia and Nigerian citizens. Right, So,
people who don't want to be returned to those countries
in their attempt to obtain a restraining order. In one instance,
one of the people who bought the case fled after

(03:40:55):
torture by the police and military and was explicitly told
that if he came back they would kill him. And
what the US is doing here is using Ghana as
a pass through to send him back.

Speaker 13 (03:41:04):
Right.

Speaker 6 (03:41:05):
Yeah. Some of them also detailed in the case they're
transport They said they were in straight jackets for sixteen
hours on the flight the US. Right, the government, the
United States government in this instance has once again claimed
that these people are out of its hands and it
has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from
sending them back to these other countries.

Speaker 3 (03:41:25):
Right.

Speaker 6 (03:41:25):
This is an argument that is attempted to make in
several other instances. And I do just want to flag that,
like this, use of third party countries for deportation has
much increased under the Trump administration, But it was the
Biden administration who begun funding Panamanian deportations right way before
Donald Trump was even elected, and I have documented that

(03:41:48):
extensively in my series on the Darien Gap. The court
determined in this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction
to grant the plaintiff's relief right, so that means that
they're not able to get a restraining order. One of
the people had actually already been returned to the place
where they had a convention against torture protection from and
was in hiding at the time. At the court case right,

(03:42:09):
the judge said that the government's actions were part of
a quoting here pattern and widespread effort to evade the
government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.
We are recording this on the eighteenth of September. It's
a Thursday, and about fifteen minutes ago, another United States
flight just landed in Ghana, so this practice appears to

(03:42:31):
be ongoing. Secondly, what I want to talk about is
sadly another shooting, the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzales in Chicago.
Diegos Gonzales was a thirty eight year old father, a
Mexican national, and he was shot by either one or
two ICE agents while driving away from them. An ICE

(03:42:52):
state mclaim that he drove towards them and ended up
dragging an agent a significant distance. Surveillan's camera footage at
the scene shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzales in
his vehicle. We then see the vehicle reverse away from
them and then move around them to the left when
it sees a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have

(03:43:13):
placed their vehicle, which is an SUV, in front of
his vehicle, sort of cramping it into the curve right,
so he has to reverse backwards and then move forward
and to the left in order to try and drive away,
which is what he's trying to do. Right. We can
only see one of the officers in the footage. We
see the other officer later in other footage. The officer
in the footage does not appear to be dragged, but

(03:43:35):
he appears to draw his weapon in by standard footage,
we then see two officers pull vee Gas Gonzales from
the vehicle and they begin administering first aid. We're just
rewatching the footage now and you can see the other
agent on the other side of the vehicle.

Speaker 3 (03:43:52):
This sounds very similar to the time that ICE shot
at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 6 (03:43:58):
Sure, and Sam Bernardino absolutely, yeah. Generally, I have no
idea of what rules ICE are operating under. It's not
considered best practice to open fire a vehicle that is
moving away from you unless it's actively endangering no, someone
else's life, right.

Speaker 2 (03:44:13):
In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life,
a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah, maybe you
hit the driver, but the odds are just as good,
if not much better. Then it goes through a window
and remains lethal going past the car and endangering people's lives.

Speaker 18 (03:44:31):
And also it's worth mentioning on the other side of
the car from the officer who we see draw his
gun is the other agent. Yes, yeah, so if you're
shooting at the car, you're shooting at your other agent.

Speaker 2 (03:44:46):
Guns don't stop cars, generally, unless you're killing a fifty
caliber anti materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars. Yeah, like
they do stop people, but they but they keep bullets
keep going when they mess. It's just bad. It's a
bad thing to do. It's irresponsible, it's normal cap shit.

Speaker 6 (03:45:04):
Yeah, So what we see is at least two shots fired,
and then we begin to see that then they leave
the screen of the surveillance camera, right, so we don't
see exactly like we're unable to see. I guess where
those bullets impact the bystander. Footy Sen shows his vehicle

(03:45:25):
crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck, right,
and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could
also have been fatal, right, like the way that he's
he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the
car goes underneath, So it would be the driver who
would take the main impact because the because the trailer

(03:45:46):
is higher off the ground.

Speaker 21 (03:45:47):
Right.

Speaker 6 (03:45:48):
Hopefully that's making sense to people. Totally, He's traveled about
one hundred feet in this time period. Unraveled Press have
a pretty good account of this, if cobbled together. I
think most of the open source video and also the
surveillance video. There don't appear in those videos to be
any other agents present, And when we see the agents
rendering aid, none of them appears to be in the

(03:46:11):
state someone would be had they been dragged by a
fast moving car. Also, again, like with reference to shooting
at a moving vehicle, if the moving vehicle is dragging
your colleague, you're shooting also at your colleague if you
shoot at the vehicle. So unfortunately, none of this changes
the fact that this guy is now dead. Right, the
Mexican Consulate has confirmed his age. They said he was

(03:46:32):
working as a cook as his profession and that he
was from michual punt The Consulate has been in touch
with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar with this instance
and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican Consulate will help
with returning the remains of Mexican nationals to their families
in Mexico. That's most of what I have on his death.

(03:46:56):
It seems to have moved like very quickly through the
news cycle, which is unfortunate because obviously you have children
who have lost a father here like this. This is
a tragedy too. Yeah, no, this is tragic. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know. And I am sitting here haunted by the
fact that they killed this guy two days after the
Charlie Kirk shooting. I think most of the people who

(03:47:16):
are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.

Speaker 3 (03:47:19):
Yeah, these agents aren't going to get prosecuted in the
court of law for this, the same way that absolutely
the Charlie kirkissas as will.

Speaker 6 (03:47:26):
Yeah, generally, like local there have been some cases, but
I'm not really aware of any filed against border patrol agents. Generally,
DHS has an agency which investigates like use of force incidents, right,
and it is I will say it is extremely There
have been times when agents have been charged.

Speaker 3 (03:47:48):
They are rare Stephen Miller's DHS that seems very unlikely.

Speaker 6 (03:47:53):
Yeah, Like I'm aware of some charges, for instance in
San Diego, for agents who have allowed drugs to cross
the border.

Speaker 18 (03:48:00):
Sure, it is pretty rare. Yeah, So let's let's talk
about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been. Like, Yeah,
I kind of want to start with something that's been
very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that
Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like
not deploying the National Guard. There has been about oh,

(03:48:23):
if you resist trumpet will like you know, you can
defeat him, and like that's true. But also ICE and
Border Patrol are on the ground in Chicago as we're
listening to this right now, dragging people from their homes.
The raids have gone to a significant extent the way
that we expected them to.

Speaker 3 (03:48:44):
They have been.

Speaker 18 (03:48:45):
Largely very very fast lightning raids. A lot of them
have been an outlying part of Chicago land, which has
been making it difficult to both track them and determine
numbers because a lot of these parts of these massive
high suburby we're going to talk about one later called
Elgin then has one hundred thousand people in it, but
also doesn't have the kind of I mean they have

(03:49:07):
like local journalists, but they don't have like the kind
of press corps that they like the City of Chicago
proper has, and so documentation isn't much harder, which is
part of why they've been striking out there. It's largely
been Ice, but Border patrol has shown up, and part
of the Border patrol appearing has been that this has

(03:49:28):
also been a giant PR blitz for Trump administration officials,
as the people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll
be talking to them more next week about what things
have been like on the ground. A senior Border Patrol official,
Gregory Bovino, has claimed to we don't actually have like
photograph everyone's in there, but he was posting on X

(03:49:48):
that he was he went to Franklin Park, which is
where Ice shot that guy a couple of days after
the shooting. Okay, he has been releasing an entire higher
stream of TikTok and X posts to sort of like
advertise his presence in the city and doing this whole
we did this in La or doing this here now
thing on GMC. You don't talk a little bit about

(03:50:10):
who he.

Speaker 6 (03:50:10):
Is, Yeah, I do so. Baveno was, at least until recently,
he's appeared to be, as you say, working in Chicago.
Now his Twitter now reads Commander op at Large CA
Gregory K. Bavino. He was a chief patrol agent in
the El Centro sector when we saw Operation Return to
Sender right. Operation Return December was December of twenty twenty four.

(03:50:30):
That's happened under the Biden administration. This was the first
of these border patrol roving stops way north of the border,
right up in the central Valley, stopping people in home depots,
stopping people who appeared to be Latino Latina Latine on
the street. I would say that cal Matters has had

(03:50:51):
a really good coverage of that, and I can link
it in the show notes. We also saw the deployment
of border patrol to La Right, that was the El
Centre Sectl't familiar with El Centro east of San Diego
along the border right, it's sort of most of the
way to Arizona if your driving from San Diego. He
is really, like I would say, a man of the
moment in terms of Trump's Border patrol, right, Like, border

(03:51:13):
patrol is an agency that's changed a lot over the years.
There was a time with border patrol recruiter from the
Peace Corps. Now it's not that time. One thing that
Bavino has been very good at in the sense of
like doing what the administration wants from a border patrol
agent right now is his use of social media. My
understanding is that they have a whole team dedicated to
this in the El Centro sector, right that they have

(03:51:35):
videographers and photographers and such to make social media for
the border patrol. And Bavina really seems to have been
stepping up in importance, like he has this sort of
he also cuts a very distinctive figure with this kind
of crop side haircut, Like you can find a picture
of his haircut on and I don't know how to
describe it. His twetter brick picture shows him holding an

(03:51:58):
ar with a low power variable octic like he is
this new like like tactical aggressive, very aggressive social media
presence border patrol officer. Right, And we've seen El Centro
Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a
lot of these operations. As I said, even going back

(03:52:18):
to the Biden era, if you're wondering, border patrol sectors
are not just around the cities that they're named for, right,
They can go a long way north. So it's the
San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not
necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being
close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why
you would have seen them operating as far north as
Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors,

(03:52:41):
haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine
that there is a border patrol sector that pertains to
the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps Bavino is
now doing some kind of operational command for these urban
things rather than working in that sector. I'm not entirely sure,
but that's who he is.

Speaker 18 (03:52:57):
Yeah, and he's been, you know, he's been making it
enormous deal of showing up in Chicago, and this has
been something that's increasingly This is part of what it
means for ice and Border patrol to show up in
the cities. You get these fucking just absolutely hideous pr ops.
On Tuesday, Kursy Nome, last scene shooting a dog, joined

(03:53:22):
a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty far flung
suburb of Chicago with about one hundred thousand people in it,
and she showed up to do basically a pr junket
at this raid at five in the morning in Elgin,
where ICE arrived with helicopters. They blew up someone's door

(03:53:43):
and they grabbed a bunch of people, and then they
were forced to release two of the seven people they
grabbed because they immediately turned out to be US citizens.
Kurst has denied that they detained them and said that,
oh no, actually we just separate raided them for their protection.
What we did the operation like that doesn't seem to

(03:54:05):
be true from everything that we've heard from witnesses the scene.
But yeah, this is you know, these are the way
that these enforcement operations, the way that these raids have
gone is that the beginning of a major operation cycle
is turned into these press circuits for people like Chursy Nome.

Speaker 6 (03:54:22):
Yeah, GNOME's been on a few raids like this. Has
been a consistent thing, right that these raids are a
content creation exercise. As much as the law enforcement word.

Speaker 2 (03:54:30):
Yes, and it excuse to dress up all that good stuff.

Speaker 3 (03:54:33):
Yeah, and you know it. It's this.

Speaker 18 (03:54:35):
It's just like reveling both in this, you know, in
this sort of like like constructed like I'm holding an
Air fifteen lookout tough I am image, and also just
in the cruelty and the suffering in the same way
that the Alligator Alcatraz stuff was. But it's worth noting
that most of the raids have not looked like this.
Like this, this was a raid where like, you know,

(03:54:55):
people were woken up in this basically this random ste
at five in the morning because they heard an explosion
and ice had blocked off all of their streets and
their armored vehicles and helicopters. Most of what they've been
are not like that. They've been following the pattern established
in LA of very very rapid raids to avoid rep
response networks, targeting a combination of houses, job sites, and

(03:55:20):
places like home depot. And you know, we talked about
this beginning a couple of weeks ago. We talked about
how these people are being deployed largely from this naval
base that is hours out from the city, right and
that's part of why these a lot of these raids,
although they have been going to the South Side, which
is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids

(03:55:42):
have been in places like Elgin that are further north
and are more outlined because they are closer to this
naval base than the core of the city of Chicago,
and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance.
There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin.

Speaker 7 (03:55:58):
They took.

Speaker 18 (03:56:00):
Didn't from a community college. They've just been dragging people
from their homes and workplaces. There was a very very
well publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort of
outlying suburb, where they'd grabbed people who are like fixing
someone's roof.

Speaker 6 (03:56:14):
Was that the one where people remained on the roof?
Yeah some time? Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 18 (03:56:19):
Yeah, really horrible seeing people are extremely pissed off. There's
another story that I's gotten very very little coverage that
was horrifying in Displans, which is the suburb just north
of O'Hare, where ice agents and masks did a very
very standard thing that they've been doing. You know, this
is I mean a kind of standard ice tactic where
they wait for people to get back into a truck,

(03:56:41):
and then they block the truck off with their trucks
to prevent it from leaving. Yeah, and I'm going to
read a CBS report of what happened next because I
think it's important to understand what it is actually like
for these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who
was in the car, said that when the agent originally
came to the path passenger door, he tried holding the

(03:57:02):
door closed, preventing him from opening it. He said at
the time that he and his family had no idea
who was at the vehicle, and everyone was scared. When
the agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was
tased in the face. That's when he told everyone in
the truck to run for their lives. Despite being a
US citizen, they ran out of fear. So what's happening

(03:57:24):
here is there's these two brothers and their dad who
is undocumented. The two brothers were born in Chicago, and
they block off this car. They show up in masks.
The people in the car have absolutely no idea who
they are, and when they try to not get their
car broken into, they tase this guy who was an

(03:57:44):
American citizen in the face. He has to go to
the hospital because they tased him in the face, right, Yeah,
And there are stories like this, this is a particularly
bad one, but there are stories like the rest of
the raids that we've been talking about every single day
in Chicago that do not break containments at all. In

(03:58:04):
a country that is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk.
There are people being dragged from their homes, there are
people being dragged from their fucking places of work, They're
being dragged from their schools. And this is just what
the US is right now now, as fucking unbelievably bleak
as this is right, and people are terrified, but they're

(03:58:28):
also angry, and people are also organizing, and as we
saw in LA, people are forming rapid response networks and
they're showing up in places that I never would have thought.
I mean, maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing
things in places I just wouldn't have thought possible. I
want to close this by there was a report on
Thursday by Sean Molkay, who's the news editor at The Reader,

(03:58:51):
which is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So I
tried the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing
them in a summer called Wheaton, Illinois, and a bunch
of people when they tried to do this smash and
grab of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people
showed up and confronted them and screamed at them and

(03:59:12):
recorded them. And this caused the Ice people to take
off and run away without attending the person. And this
is a stunning development if you know anything about either
Chicago Land or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College,
which is like it's one of like the three big
right wing like Christian universities alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.

Speaker 3 (03:59:31):
This is wild.

Speaker 18 (03:59:32):
This was one of the home bases of power of
the Bush era moral majority, right like Wheaton College is
a school where dancing was illegal until two thousand and three,
like they abandoned dancing for one hundred and forty three years.
And if people in Wheaton are showing up to do
direct actions against Ice, these people, they're cooked right, They

(03:59:53):
will be able to do a significant amount of damage.
They have been doing significant amount of damage. We've just
been talking about the amount of damage they've been doing.
But if this is what is happening in places that
used to be moral majority strongholds right, places that produce
some of the most famous like Christian right wingers, who
shaped an entire half century of American politics. If people

(04:00:15):
there are showing up and doing direct actions against eisen Winning,
things are fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly. And
despite everything that's been happening by all of the kirkstuff,
Trump's pulling keeps getting worse and worse. And I think
this is a good reminder that, like these people, part
of the reason they're moving so fast and so hard

(04:00:36):
right now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular
and they have to get their crack down and they
have to build a political and legal power right now
before it gets even worse for them, and they're terrified that,
you know, if there are a thousand Wheatns, if enough
people resist them, they don't have the capacity to stop them.

(04:00:58):
Because everybody fucking hates these people and they hate what
they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock troopers showing
up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people they love
away from them. And it's going to be a really,
really long and hard battle but the fact that people
are fighting in places where that would have been unimaginable

(04:01:19):
even ten years ago is I think at least a
small sign of hope in the darkness.

Speaker 2 (04:01:27):
Yeah, and that's probably where we ought to end. Is
a small sign of hope in the darkness.

Speaker 6 (04:01:33):
If you would like to contact us, you can do
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Speaker 3 (04:01:46):
We reported the news.

Speaker 7 (04:01:48):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (04:01:56):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 1 (04:02:02):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 10 (04:02:13):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1 (04:02:15):
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