It Could Happen Here Weekly 216

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to you can happen here a podcast where so
many things are happening here that we frankly have borne
out the bit about trying to use this as our introduction.
I am your host, Bio Wong. One of the many, many, many,
many many crises that are unfolding in this country right
now is a rolling ethnic cleansing carried out by Ice

(00:52):
and Border Patrol with the assistance of the cops. And
we have talked about this from a lot of angles.
But a thing I want to sort of draw attention
back to in this moment where there's increased attention and
scrutiny from truly a series of really hideous ice shootings

(01:15):
is what it's like to be in detention right now
and how possibly people can be gotten out of the
tension and with me to talk about something that I
feel like I can't even describe as the horrors because
it's simply worse than that. Is Ellie Bell, who is
a community organizer, does many things, wears many hats. Welcome

(01:40):
to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Thank you. Hello, I'm Ellie. And the reason I am
here right now for this specific podcast conversation is that
I am on a team that is trying to help
many immigrants by one in tourchainicular that I will be
talking about tonight Alberto, who is a father and a

(02:05):
husband and is currently detained in an ICE attention center
in Indiana after being transferred from his home in Chicago.
And you know, we are trying to get him out
and to get his family's story out there and his
story out there, and you know, among many other things
that ICE is doing in a way that it's into

(02:28):
all of that. That's what I am here to talk
about today.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Yeah, so let's begin. So I guess one thing that
I want to sort of lead off with here is
obviously the sort of the most intense ICE repression and
raids have shifted to places like Minneapolis right now. I mean,
who knows, as you're listening to this, maybe they've pivoted
it to another place. I don't know. Everything is moving

(02:55):
so unbelievably fast and horribly but also raised are still
continuing in the places where ice has normally pulled out.
Now the frequency of those raids has decreased because they
simply don't have the personnel to run these kind of
I don't know. They describe it as operational tempo. I
describe it as they don't have the people to kidnap
this many people at once.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
They can't kidnap or kill us all.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, which, you know, not enormously happy to see people
chanting that here. I have a bunch of visceral memories
of the last two times that I saw people chanting
that and didn't go great. So let's not go on
the likes to Dan twenty nineteen tangents. Yeah, actually no, no, sorry, sorry,
I am wrong there. The su Dan one was we

(03:40):
are not Afraid to Die, which is in some weeks
bleaker there.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
There is so much, there's so much history packed in here.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Moving to the presence of you know, our version of
the ethnic cleansing. Can you go to sort of the
start of this and talk about what the specific raid
here looked like.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, So, I mean, I think I want to zoom
out for a moment before I get into the specifics
of what happened with this man, this father, and hasban
done his family and then get into it. But you know,
as I'm sure you know we are all talking about,

(04:23):
we are being Ice escalating their tactics in just an
egregious way. They killed a woman in cold blood and
just executed her in the street the other day, Rene
and Good. Now, of course this is not the first
or only person that they've killed recently. It's one of many.

(04:45):
I think there are now eleven, it might be twelve.
The number just keeps rising every day.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Yeah, so we still don't having very good information about
what happened. But literally the next day in Portland, someone
either ICE work border patrol. At the time I'm recording this,
it's Tuesday the thirteenth. We still don't know whether it
was iberdoctil, but someone shot two people in Portland. So yeah,
and I think they're being charged right now for terrorism

(05:12):
because this is just what happens. Now.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, these are all connected, but you know we know
that there are I believe there's been it was nine
two days ago, then now it's like eleven or twelve.
It just keeps rising. The number of people that we
know of, I want to be really clear that we
know of and as you said, we don't have good
data on this. We do not have correct data on this,

(05:36):
which is also an intentional tool of the state to
obscure what is happening. But there are so many people
who have been killed by ice, and those are the
ones that we know of. You know, since let's say
in the last two or three months, there are so
many more. There are so many people missing from Alligator Alcatraz.
What we saw happen in Minneapolis last week is horrendous.

(06:00):
And you know, the same way that al Berrow, who
I am part of this team trying to help get
him out of detention. He did nothing wrong. He has
had no criminal activity. There was nothing to warrant the
excuse that he must be detained or treated violently. It's
the same as how Renee did nothing wrong and nothing

(06:21):
to deserve being murdered. He was witnessing, He was witnessing
and being there for her neighbors, and she was sitting
there in her car, and that is what we know,
but her murder the same way that these raids and
everything going on. It's an escalation tactic used by ICE.

(06:43):
That's part of deep rooted old school fascist and authoritarian
measures to test what they can get away with while
people remain complacent in times of genocide and ethnic cleansing,
and for societal people, you know, they just want to
see what they can get away with and how much
control they can exercise. So that being said, to get

(07:05):
into what happened to Albero and his wife is they
are in Chicago and they've been there for a little
over a year since they came here to seek asylum,
and they were first in a shelter and then they
finally were able to get the work they needed to

(07:26):
have a home with their three kids. You know, I
want to be really explicit that this person is a father,
a husband. He has other family members here who look
up to him, who he is a father figure or
an uncle too. He is a community figure and a leader.

(07:47):
After he was taken, you know, I was told by
a family friend who is part of the team that
I'm working with. They told me that the women in
the neighborhood the other like immigrant women in all like
work together and know each other. Called him a pendados,
like a loving term for someone who is just like

(08:09):
a community member, like a shining beacon in a community,
and that is that is who he is. And I
also really want to emphasize that it wouldn't really matter
if that wasn't who he was, and if he was
somehow quote unquote lesser than that or not a saint,
because there's no such thing as like a good or

(08:31):
bad immigrant. Nobody deserves to be treated this inhumanely, unless,
of course, you're a fascist, then I think you know
fair game.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Hey, look, I'm gonna put my foot down there and
say we are more than capable of dealing with fascists internally.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
Yeah, yeah we can.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
We can simply hold the line on no deportations and
simply right right us.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
But but so so, what happened was it was early
early morning the morning of Monday, December twenty ninth. Okay,
it's officially been two weeks since this happened. Monday, December
twenty ninth. It's like somewhere between maybe five and six am,
six thirty. It's still dark out. He and his wife,

(09:15):
whose name I'm not going to use to protect her
anonymity and her identity, but he and his wife got
into their car and the windows were rolled down. The
slightest bit they were getting in their car to drive
to work, so that then she could go back home
and be with her kids after taking him to work.

(09:35):
And I want to be really explicit that we know
that when ICE agents came to do this raid, they
didn't have their names when they approached them. They didn't
know anything about them until they took them in in
the Chicago area. You know, you can talk about this
a little if you want, but ICE has to have

(09:56):
a warrant for the people they're picking up. They can't
just pick up anyone. Based on the novel Cancaid decree,
which was just extended by the appeals court, we know
that in Chicago this is something that has been continuously happening.
And as we look at this from a broader context,
they go after non white people, kidnap them, and ask
questions later just because they think no one is going

(10:16):
to care. And part of the reason that I'm talking
about all of this is because I want to be
very clear that people are watching, people care, and more
people need to be watching, and more people need to
care when it happens to people who are not white,
not just white women, because obviously Renee's murder is horrific,

(10:36):
and I saw her be able to raise one point
four million dollars in less than a day, and Albero's
campaign has been at fourteen thousand dollars for more than
a week, and we can't raise more money because people
have so much more sympathy and empathy for white people.
And that is actually so tied into why ICE does

(10:57):
the things they do because of that same whiteness, that
same white supremacy where they think we can do whatever
we want to immigrants and brown people. Who's going to care?

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Yeah, And that's that is one of the major constituent
elements of this entire rolling ethnic cleansing is that you know,
and this is this has been a thing in Chicago
and since the raids really kicked off, is that every
fucking day someone just disappears and everyone just goes about
their lives.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Absolutely, and they count on us to do that, and
they count on us to not be paying enough attention
that we can't keep track of how shitty their data
is and how inconsistent their data is, and all of
the numbers we don't have.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, well, and the everything they're relying on is they're
relying on their not being any tend to stop them, right.
What they're relying on is you know, once once they
grab someone, everyone just going okay, well, that's just you know,
this is this is a statistic counting an encounter and
not this is a life that needs to be fought
for exactly.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
And that is why I find it so important and
why I am doing the work that I am doing
alongside everyone else who's doing this kind of work to
uplift stories and tell them because they can't be told
by the immigrants themselves right now, because they're being tortured
inside detention. And it's so crucial for people to understand

(12:30):
that these are not numbers, These are not just names
on a page. These are real people's lives. This is
a real man who's three children, whose three young children
have now gone to bed without him every night for
two weeks. They don't know where their dad is. They
don't know why he's not there, they don't know why

(12:53):
he's apparently being tortured. They just know that their dad
isn't there. And I need people to under stand you
know think about Can you imagine can you imagine being
away from your family for two weeks and counting, not
knowing when you're going to come back, if you're going

(13:15):
to come back, if you're going to die in distension?
Can you imagine being the child of someone? And a
lot of people don't have to imagine. I'm saying this
for like, you know, white people and privileged people who
don't have to think about these things or can get
away with just going about business as usual, because there
are a lot of us who have immigrant family and

(13:37):
have loved ones who this has been done to, and
we don't get to go about our day's business as
usual because it's just not possible. It's just not possible.
It would be like asking me to go about my
life business as usual when my family in Lebanon and
Palestine are being bumped. Yeah, it's not possible. It is

(14:01):
not possible. All of these things are connected, Our lives
are connected, and we owe it to each other to
pay attention and to witness, especially because we are seeing
that they will kill you for paying attention and witnessing
because they don't want you to be able to exercise
that right.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, well, and you know. The secondary thing, and this
is something that's been pretty well known for a very
long time, is that the more of you that there
are at a thing, the less likely they are to
kill you. Yeah, and then this has been a thing
with you know, US police killing the protest forever, which
at the US doesn't like fire regular bullets into crowds

(14:43):
because it's a terrible idea. It's how you get uprisings, right,
Like you know, I mean I say this on the
show all the time. This is how the Mexican government
lost control of the city of Wahaka. Like they literally
accidentally started like like a pseudo anarchistra in that city
by doing that. Right, So normally what they do is
they pick off people when they're on their own.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
I'm going to be totally honest, I kind of wish
that the government would make a ridiculous mistake right now
that lends itself to people being able to get justice.
That's all I'll say. I'm not going to give specifical yes.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
But I mean, you know, but it's also the other
thing gonna say about that that right is, like whether
or not they get away with this is also up
to us.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
It is, it absolutely is and that is that is
why I say we owe each other everything, and we
owe each other witnessing, because the thing is the job
of telling these stories, of trying to help get people vulnerable,
vulnerable people out of detention is also falling to a

(15:48):
select few people who are the most vulnerable already, and
who have things on the line and things We're risking
to do this because we know it's the right thing.
And there are so many people with so much privilege
who could be doing something, whether it's really really small

(16:08):
like donating five dollars or sharing someone's story, or calling
Congress to have them pressure Ice to let immigrants out,
whatever it is that you could be doing, there are
so many people who are not doing that. And when
there are so many people who are not doing any
of the labor, all of that labor gets distributed so

(16:31):
unevenly among a few people. You know. I always think
about the what is it James Baldwin quote about how
it is the job of you know, like a few people.
It's only a few people on this earth who are
like doing the job of like loving people. Well, I'm
completely butchering it right now because it's late at night,

(16:51):
and I you know, can't think of it, but it's
it's something like that, and I think about that all
the time and something that I'm thinking about right now
a lot, and having a lot of conversations, mostly with
white people, about Hey, you need to start doing something
because you have a lot of privilege that you're not utilizing,

(17:12):
and when you don't utilize it, you actually are doing
a lot of harm. Not in necessarily the same way
that the ice agents are, but you're still kind of
capitulating to what they want you to do by putting
all of this labor on vulnerable people who have so
much to lose and so much to risk. And we

(17:33):
can't afford to burn out constantly because we don't have
the support and the more equitable division of labor that's needed.
Like we need everyone. We need everyone who can possibly
do anything, whether that's putting your bodies on the line
in person, or or if you're a disabled person and

(17:56):
you're in bed and you can post something online or
you can tell someone like we need to activate our
community networks for each other.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Yeah, and there's also a lot of sort of logistical stuff,
you know. I mean, there's like the old line about
the army that like five or ten to one, like
logistics people for every person who's out on the front.
And that's also the way that if you're going to
have an organizing thing that works, there's a massive sort
of logistical tale behind everyone who's out doing stuff.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Absolutely right, you need you need safety people too at home.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to be done.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
I'll finish telling the story of what happens to Albero
two because I want to you know, center that because again,
you know, this is a this is a community issue,
and this is a community member who is missing now
who can't do his part as a part of a
whole community because he has he's been taken. And like

(19:04):
when he was taken, they had guns. They had one
pointed right at his wife. He was saying, you know,
they were saying, we're not resisting, but they kept danging
on the car window, and they reached inside the car
window and they like, you know, he and his wife
emphasized that they were just going to work. They weren't
doing anything, and I didn't care. They see a non

(19:27):
white person and they grow hungry for violence. And after
detaining her, you know, they asked her to sign a
document so that she could go get for kids. She
refused because she didn't trust them, and she told them
that she wasn't going to sign anything. And then later
they found out I think the lawyers found out that
what it was is that they were giving her a
voluntary deportation paper yep, for the whole family.

Speaker 3 (19:47):
And that level they do this all the time.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
They do this all the time. That level of deceit
and trickery is just horrible. Because they did it. They
gave it to her in English, and she doesn't speak English.
They thought they could get her to sign it to
get them out. This is being run by like the
same people who are banging doors down and just going

(20:13):
into houses in Minneapolis. It's all connected. They use the
same pactics of violence and fearmongering, and it's terrible.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, And I mean they've been moving personnel around so
like there's like a non zero chance that was literally
the same person, Like that person could be in Minneapolis
now we don't know. And this has become the sort
of background noise of American life. And he used to
fucking not be the background noise because they're fucking grabbing
people out of cars.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
It shouldn't be I mean, every day I see people
posts some type of video on TikTok or Instagram reels
or or Twitter or a blue sky, Like, I just
see people everyday people post God. You know, it feels

(21:07):
so horrific to watch all of this happen and have
to go to a nine to five. And I have
empathy for that, especially as someone who does community organizing.
And I mean, I think there is a lot of sacrifice.
I know there's a lot of sacrifice in the types

(21:29):
of things that I do, and there's also a lot
of privilege in the fact that I even have community
and loved ones who help me to pay my rent
so that I can do this kind of organizing without
worrying about not having shelter. And it's like we were

(21:50):
saying before we, you know, started the recording, like I
take it very seriously that I need to rest and
I need to feed myself, and I need to take
care myself because rest is not resistance, but me getting
the rest that I need and the care that I
need allows me to resist in a way that helps

(22:11):
someone else to get free. And that's like what we
all need to be doing for each other.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
I'm just gonna say this because you know, there used
to be a thing people would do whatever. There is
a large social upheaval. It was called the occupation of
the factories. Yeah, you could go read Mella Testa writing
about it in like nineteen twenty one. Very old thing.
See the Seattle general strike was like the most famous
example people doing this in the US. But it was like, Okay,
so there's some shit going on. We need to stop

(22:41):
something from happening. So we are going to take over
our workplaces and run the parts of it that need
to be run so that people could get food, and
then otherwise we're not and otherwise we're control.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
You don't actually just have to go to your line to.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
Buy the people in Seattle. Those people didn't know what
a television was. Wow, and they were able to do this.
You showed one of the people in like in like
the Seattle, like nineteen nineteen general strikes, people who who
did this, Like if you showed them a computer, they
would have a heart attack. And they did this. So
I believe that all of you you have seen things

(23:13):
that would have obliterated these people's minds.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Oh it's I have like a slightly different take. I
don't know if it is like a hot take or
a cold take or a lukewarm take. But my perspective
is one who said that you just have to go
to your nine to five while you watch all of
this happen. Who said that you are saying, oh, I

(23:38):
have to do that. No one is actually making you
do that. The consequences of that are that if you
don't go to your nine to five, or you take
a sick day or something, you might get fired, and
you might be in a similarly vulnerable position to someone
whose life is already on the line. But if we
all stood in solidarity with each other, that would be

(24:01):
less dangerous, Like if we chose each other over capitalism,
that would be so radical. But that's my take.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
There are not enough cops to evict us all. There
simply aren't.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
There, really just aren't. I think that people forget or
conveniently compartmentalize the truth that we as a collective, when
we band together, when we refuse to participate in individualism
the ways that they want us to, we are so powerful.

(24:40):
And I think that that scares people because that's a
lot of responsibility. But again, that's really only so much responsibility.
If you see yourself as an individual as opposed to
part of a collective. If you see yourself as bearing
a piece of responsibility as part of a collective, the
same way that ants all move in a colony and

(25:03):
carry like a piece of bread together, maybe you wouldn't
feel so much overwhelmed because you would understand that we
are in this together. And I think that we really
owe that to each other to reframe that in our
minds and in our nervous systems as well, so that

(25:23):
we can just like maybe shut up and show up.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Now, speaking of showing up, Okay, yeah, we're locking back
on shoes, We're locking in, We're locking the fucking we
can do this, I believe in us. So going back,
I guess from the sort of macro perspective to the
micro individual perspective of yeah, the exact specific ways that

(25:50):
one individual person gets treated.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Totally, so sure, locking back into what is happening on
a more micro level. Giving an example of how Ice
is dehumanizing immigrants in attention whether they are here quote
unquote illegally or not. Alberto is not here illegally, Okay,

(26:17):
he's going through the asylum process. When the immigration attorneys
on our organizing teams spoke with Alberto and specifically asked
about his conditions at Fay County. He said that and
granted this, I believe with some him in the last week.
I think they haven't spoken to him in maybe a week.
It's been hard too, But when they asked about his conditions,

(26:40):
he said that he had all the basics, is now
being given three meals a day, and was at least
at that point being administered medication. We don't have very
good context and accurate data on how often that's actually
been happening. He has a severe seizure disorder and he

(27:01):
requires medication to be administered at least I think twice
a day, and even one missed dose can be fatal.
It's been a while since they've been able to talk.
I do know that he checks in with his family
and a family friend every morning, only briefly. I spoke
to them just before this call to get any updated information.

(27:24):
There was a day this week where he didn't xt
first thing in the morning, and we were all really worried,
and we had no idea what that meant. It turns
out that the WiFi just was down, but oh my god,
how horrifying. Every day I wake up and I just
I don't know if he's still alive.

Speaker 4 (27:42):
And he is.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
Only one of many many immigrants that I have worked
on cases for and that I am trying to bring
attention to. And it's terrifying to never know if he's
going to be one of the many, many people who
have died in there, because it's been weeks or months
or a year, and so, you know, as far as

(28:05):
as conditions go, we don't have a lot of information
about his specific condition. We know that he has been struggling.
We know that it's been very hard on his health.
It would be hard on anyone's health, whether they were
disabled or sick or not, because the conditions are inhumane.
We do know as reported by other clients of the

(28:27):
immigration attorneys on our team. We know that at different
attention centers, many have told her that it's very cold.
One who is with the gen pop and could only
speak with her from a tablet in the room while
other detainees were around. Several have told her that they
were denied access to nurses and medical care when they

(28:49):
had headaches or a sore throat. I also want to
tie this back to, you know, the global pandemic. We've
seen a lot of people die of COVID or other
illnesses well in detention. This is a public health issue.
This is a public health and safety issue. Just the
same way that people who are in prisons are treated

(29:13):
poorly and not given the medical care they need, and
that faulty is part of the point. Immigrants and detention
are also completely deprived of medical care that they need,
and again that would be really dangerous for anyone, but
for Albero, he has a severe seizure disorder, Like one
thing could go wrong and he would be done. Yeah,

(29:38):
like his life hangs in the balance. There's another client
she has with castro intestinal problems told her that they
basically can't eat anything because the food quality is so
poor and coupled with their condition, they just vomit and
have diarrhea constant meat. This is what is happening in

(29:59):
IC attention facilities. They are just completely overrun with these
public health and safety disasters and they don't have the
care or attention because those conditions happening are orchestrated.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Yeah, like they don't give a shit or they're orchestrated.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
They're a part of the cool feed. They don't care. Yeah,
what's worse is they do care, but they care about
creating the suffering.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, well, it's like like for them, it's like these
people's ultimate goal is to not have non white people
in the US, right you could. You can look at like,
you know, Stephen Miller's wife, like, yeah, last week was
like posting shit about what will happen when they deport
one hundred million Americans. It's like, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
They want enough no estate, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
No, like they and they don't it doesn't really matter
to them, Like you know, it's it's kind of bad
PR if people die in their in their fucking camps,
but they don't give it gives. These people don't give
a shit whether if people die or like are sent away,
Like they don't fucking care, Like they care about hurting people.
They don't care where they live or die.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
They don't care about bad PR either to an extent,
because I mean, you know, this is what the show
is about. Authoritarian regimes and fascism is about control. Yeah,
I mean sure, I guess maybe if there's enough bad

(31:27):
PR and they can't literally control people on the streets
who are overtaking the situation and fighting back because they've
gotten bad PR. That's a problem, But in and of itself,
I don't really know if they care about the bad PR.
They should care about the results of the bad PR,

(31:48):
which is why we should all keep giving them bad PR.
We've seen a lot of that. There are so many
things that have happened since the escalation in Minneapolis last
week where Renee and Good was shot and killed. Okay,
I was collecting notes before this call, and I'd already

(32:10):
had many, and then when I was collecting notes just
from today alone, I was like, oh my god, twenty
things have happened. We found out in the last day alone.
There was a huge piece published in Slate today that
ICE is doing zero background checks on their applicants. A
journalist got officially hired despite being a prominent person who

(32:31):
speaks about leftism online. They failed a drug test, They
didn't even complete all the proper paperwork. ICE has literally
no idea who they're hiring, and they don't care because
they'll take anyone who is willing to terrorize people like
that's going to cause it's already causing a lot of
community ruptors. It's going to ruin communities. And the reality

(32:53):
is they don't care if it does, because it's actually
the point. If this were about accuracy or a real
quote unquote justice or Americans who are you know, quote
unquote being wronged by immigrants or whatever their narrative is,
they would have a vetting process. They would want the
best of the best. But they don't because it's just

(33:14):
about annihilation and control.

Speaker 5 (33:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Well, and the other part of that too, if you
want to look at the sort of more positive angle
of it, is like part of what's going on here
is that they can't find enough people who want to
commit an ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Here's my thing. I'm a little concerned that's not true.
They are incentivizing people to betray their values. And part
of what's going on in this country is that people
are out of work. People need to stay bet in house.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, but here's the thing, Like, if they were able
to really easily like recruit those people into doing this,
then they wouldn't be continuously upping the bonus rates, and
they wouldn't be trying to like store cops from other agencies,
Like I think they seem to be having legitimate problems
even in a shitty job market, and.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
We should we should give them more. I think we
should give them more. I think that we should incentivize
I personally would love to figure out how to incentivize
ice agents to quit their jobs. Like, I don't know
what I have to do. Maybe I'll gather my like
sex worker friends to organize them kind of campaign. I

(34:22):
don't I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
Well, you can you just just make their lives miserable
until they quit, Like that's the that's the easy, sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
And I And by the way, I say sex worker
friends specifically because doms are tough and they would bully
ice agents to no end. And I say this as
a former DOBS.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
I believe in US. I believe in US. We can.
We can. We can make these people's lives hell. We
could do this.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
I really think that if we take collective action and
we all take stock of what are my skills and
I and use that to put the pressure on the
people who are making this terror possible, I think that
we can. I think we can take them all down.

Speaker 6 (35:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
I think that we truly could convince people to quit
if we make their lives a living hell. Do not
let them stay at hotels, do not let them buy groceries.
Don't let them show their faces anywhere in public. Okay.
This is also another thing that happened today. I think
it was there was the largest data breach ever. There
was a data breach today or yesterday that was forty

(35:32):
five hundred names got leaked YEP, with info in them,
so they can't be anonymous. We have to take that
and run with it.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Yeah. Now, legal disclaimer, we are not advocating legal actions here.
We are simply not doing this.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
I'm just saying anything is possible if you believe.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah, however, coma what other people do with this data
is or something we can really control it exists now, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
I actually think it would be a shame if we
did something with that.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Yeah, you know, now, speaking of doing things with our data,
I don't know. I was probably supposed to have taken
like two outbreaks right now, but fuck it, we're gonna
We're doing one here. I believe in us, and we

(36:25):
are back now. One of the bleak things something that
you want to talk about, Alie, is that the conditions
that we're seeing here are things that have already killed people,
and that the danger here compounds. The more risk you're at,
the more you know, for a few again, but to

(36:46):
take to take it. To take a completely non abstract example,
if you need seizure meds twice a day when you
might die, the odds of terrible stuff happening to you increases.
But yeah, can we talk a bit about the other
people who if this has already fucking happened to.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
I mean, yeah, there's so many, and we can't name
them all because we don't know all of their names
because again we don't have all the proper data. We
only know some things. But that's why we're part of
a big part of this campaign has been asking people
to put pressure on congress people to release Albero, to
show that we're not going to give up on him

(37:25):
the way that other people have just been given up
on and died in detention, and that we're going to
work relentlessly to get him out because he matters. But
you know, as ICE escalates its attainments across the country
and in the Midwest, specifically in Ohio and Minnesota and
all these places Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, what happens to him,

(37:47):
so that's a precedent for others, the same way that
what's been happening to other immigrants. Has set the precedent
that this is going to keep happening, you know, showing
that Ice can't just take someone and disappear and get
away with it really matters for everyone else. People are
watching for every immigrant detained recently and everything that ICE

(38:08):
is rolling out and this is God the I don't
even know I've lost pack because the numbers keep changing
and growing. I wanted to say that the second person
that we know of that that Renee was the second
person that we knew of that Ice had murdered since
New Year's Eve. But it wouldn't be surprising if there are,
you know, so many. There's just so many immigrants who

(38:29):
have died in Pestidina are currently dying in fusity, which
is what we're trying to prevent. For Alberto and like
in La I still keep Porter in his own home. Meanwhile,
you know, in Chicago or now I guess Indiana, because
that's where they're keeping him. They're violating and detaining families
like Albero's who have done nothing to deserve this treatment.
We saw a forty four year old woman, Marie and

(38:51):
Blaze from Haiti who died in a US ice facility
two or three weeks ago, after being detained since February
of twenty twenty five, I believe who was captured and
taken into custody at an airport outside of US territories
and you know, once again showing ices lack of regard
for the law, just total lawlessness. She was transferred to

(39:15):
Louisiana and then somewhere else where she died after vocalizing
trust pain. And as far as I know, she didn't
go in with the disability, she didn't go in with
health condition. But the conditions are so horrifying there that
that is just to be expected, which is terrible, and

(39:35):
this dangerous pattern can't continue to unfold. We don't want
this to be Albero and his family's reality, nor any
immigrants living nightmare. You know, like this is such a
community issue across the world, Like every one of the
people connected to anyone who has died in ice attention

(39:56):
is impacted for the rest of their life by this,
you know, Like it's what I was saying when I said,
people who have immigrant family, we can't just go about
business as usual. Every day I wake up and I
don't know if something is going to happen to one
or all of my loved ones who might be targeted

(40:16):
by virtue of having dark skin, which is not a crime,
but in America we're trying to make it one. And
like again, we don't want this to happen to Albero.
He's a community member. Everyone in the community is saddened.
He's a father, he is an uncle, he is a husband.

(40:39):
His wife is so upset and so worried and doesn't
understand why this is happening, because to her, he is
a man who goes to work day and night to
help his family, to provide for his family, and there
just is absolutely no reason for him to be in there.

(41:01):
And she was originally in detention too, they were both detained,
but they let her out, and that also feels like
part of the cruelty, you know, part of the cruelty,
and the conditions of dyeing in ice custody are also
rooted in being separated from hair.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, and love.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
They let her out, you know. Probably we don't know,
We have no idea why. We can't begin to imagine
our guests, but it probably has something to do with
separating them because it makes the experience more expruciating.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Yeah, and you know, as as bleak as the situation is,
and it's really really fucking bad, we do in terms
of being able to turn this a try to save
one person's life and be use this as a precedent
we can use to fucking try to get other people out.
There is a legal advantage we have here that we
don't in most places, which is, Yeah, as you were

(42:01):
talking about earlier, this stop was so illegal. They literally
did a whole bunch of things that they were specifically
ordered by a judge not to do. Yes, and that
gives us, That gives us a little bit of hope
in a situation where it allows us to put pressure
in ways that normally, like would be very very difficulty.

(42:21):
So can you talk a bit more about.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
That the NAVA consent decree.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, or like or how it can be deployed here.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, I mean so right, there was nothing remotely legal
about what they did. The NAVA Consent decree that exists
in Chicago specifically, you know, limits ICE's ability to carry

(42:49):
out warrantless arrests and vehicle stops. They require predetermined fallible cause,
with the most recent rulings enforcing that despite constant violations
by ice, but you know, groups like the National Immigrant

(43:11):
Justice Center used that to successfully challenge those violations, leading
to potential releases and actual releases for people who have
been detained and orders for officers being retrained.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Which I mean, they're just gonna be doing it, right,
but like they're just gonna keep doing it.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
But you know, wait, what happened in Minneapolis for example
with Renee and good they got in trouble. Actually the
officers had something sent to them to remind them, like, hey,
so you actually like can't do things the way that
you did, and things like the NAVI consent decree. Right,
they cause problems because you can wave around a paper

(43:55):
and say hey, like you can't do this, and like
is it kind of as fake as the constitution in
some ways? Yeah, like they kind of don't care about it. Yeah,
But it is the tool that can be used by
lawyers like the wonderful immigration lawyers that we have on
our team, and we have Pala and and who are

(44:19):
or the immigration attorneys helping Alberto and his wife, and
they can use that like they've filed a habeas and
they can use all of this evidence of how they
were illegally detained and violated without any grounds to push
back and say you need to release him immediately.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
The piece of paper for the judge does give us
a little bit of openings here. And could you explain
to people, like what you know what people listening to
the show right now can do to help here?

Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah, I mean, I would say two folds. If we
are looking at Alberto's case and his family's case, they're
is a crowd fund that they can donate to. I
can send you the link that you can share.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, we will link in the description.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
We really need people to donate to that. Again, Renee
and Good was able to her wife was able to
raise one point four million dollars in a day, and well,
I am hoping and have faith that they will redistribute
that to other people in need who are impacted by
situations like this. It doesn't really feel great to see

(45:32):
white people get all that money when we can't even
push past fourteen thousand dollars for Albero. So we really
need people to donate. There is also a change dot
org petition for people to sign. We have a few
thousand people who have signed it, but we need more.
Asking for Congress to pressure Ice to release him. This

(45:54):
would also be monumental for other immigrants and attention. Yeah,
if we can use this as a case study, we
know what we can get done through people power, through
sheer will, and through not allowing things to just fall
through the cracks of social media because you're too busy

(46:14):
doom scrolling. That being said, what people can also do
is they can post. I mean, I think that people
should doom scroll less if it means that their nervous
systems will be more regulated so that they can go
up to defend community members and protect community members. But

(46:38):
if what you have is your phone in bed and
you're scrolling post fair, let people know what is happening.
Refuse to be silent, refuse to just go about your
day business as usual. Talk about things. Let them know
that people see what's happening and they're paying attention. And

(47:00):
we are not going to just let people be disappeared
or killed and die in detention. We are not going
to abandon vulnerable people. I every single one of us
as the opportunity to use our voice. You don't have
to be me, you don't have to be a well

(47:20):
known person who has large platforms. Every single one of
us has a community that we can activate at any time.
You text five people and tell them about something that
is being done to someone, and they text five people,
and they text five people. That's the entire world. Baby, Like,

(47:41):
we got this shit.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
I believe we can appropriate pubids, keep tactics to help people.
I believe in us.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Pete Seeger said, solidarity forever. Okay, I believe that we
will win. If what you do is make memes, make
a meme, make a copy pasta, make a copy pasta
and send it to people. Like if your method is
shit posting, sure, take whatever you got and find a
way to spread the news. And you know, do it

(48:12):
for other immigrants too, you know, do it for do
it for whoever. But the more you speak out, the
more you make it possible for other people to speak out, Yeah,
because they realize they're not going to be the only
ones even if they're afraid to say something.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, And it's hard, it's harder to crack down on everyone. Sure.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
And also the more you show people like I actually
have no idea. If he knows how much support he has,
I would love for him to know that so that
it helps him to get through. I know he knows
that he has his family's support, and that's a lot.
That's more than enough. But I would also, you know,

(48:57):
love for people to just really like hair for immigrants
and non white people in general right now who are
on this soil that we call, you know, the land
of the United States, because basically, anyone who is not

(49:18):
white right now is terrified of what might happen to
them if they're on the wrong street at the wrong time,
and they're rolling out these terror campaigns in Oregon and
Columbus and Minneapolis and Chicago and New York. I knew
they were going to escalate things in New York after

(49:38):
Zoron took office, because it's a great excuse. Everyone is
terrified right now. And the best thing that you can
do is show up every day and be human to
each other. Buy someone a coffee, like offer to just
listen to a non white person in your life, take
an anti racism course up as a human being who

(50:02):
cares about other human beings, because that is the thing
that matters most. When I think about stories that we
have from way back in history, like all just flag
you know, Anne Frank, because that's the one that everyone knows.
The thing that mattered for her. The thing that kept
her alive for longer than she could have maybe been

(50:24):
alive is people being human to each other. Like, I
think that's such an underrated way to show up, and
we take it for granted every day because we don't
consider always how our smallest actions impact each other. And
the truth is that your smallest actions could be the
difference between someone losing their life or not.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Yeah, I don't know. I'm to close this by doing
as this tradition about what in every twelve episodes I
do answer something from the fucking and Darnamic manifesto. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this is the he has this lie, hecauys. Remember that
the frontiers of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the

(51:09):
smallest act if insurrection pushes our lines forward, and it does, right,
It's impossible to know until it happens what the single
push that makes the damn break is going to be.
But it will be something, yeah, And it is literally
impossible to tell what it's going to be until you

(51:32):
know the The The only way you can find out
if the action that you are taking is going to
be the one that knocks everything over is by doing it.
So go do.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Absolutely, Yeah, we owe each other everything, and I'm gonna
I'm gonna do something kind of silly because I am
who I am. But this is one of my favorite
songs in the world. And this is a Shrek reference.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
Oh my God, all.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Star by smash Mouth, Like you know all Flickwitters's gold
only shooting Stars, break the mold. You'll never know if
you don't go, You'll never shine if you don't go.
Like that, it's a directive. That's a directive. I think
we should listen to smash Mouth and we should try.

(52:23):
We should just try for each other. I take that
song very serious.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
You know, I really, really truly. When I was planning
this episode like a week ago, it did not think
it was going to end with and Or and Shrek.
But you know, this is why you could never look.
You never know how things are going to go, and
sometimes they end well. Yeah, Allie, do you have anything
else that you want to make sure people know? And

(52:48):
where can people find you?

Speaker 1 (52:50):
I don't have anything else that I think people should know.
People can find me on Instagram at literally l I
T E R E l l Y like literally but
with my name E.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
L L Y incredible. Well, we'll have this in the
description too great.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
That's been my username everywhere on social media since I
was fifteen, so it's been sixteen years. People are always like,
how did you get that user name gil gil baby?
You had to you had to be on on Twitter
as a as a kid. But yeah, that's that's It's

(53:31):
my same username everywhere. I have a newsletter that you
could find on my social media where I write about
community care and what we owe to each other. I'm
way less concerned about people being able to find me
except to just, you know, go go share the campaigns
that I've shared on my page for Alberto and other immigrants,

(53:54):
because I am constantly sharing things. If you know, this
helps me to get more of a plot so that
people share more of the crucial campaigns that I share.
That is great. My main concern is I don't need
to be seen or heard or listened to any more
than is necessary to get people to take action to

(54:17):
help more vulnerable people than me. But if people also
want to listen to things I have to say, or
go for it. I quote Mashmouth a lot, and I'm
very gay.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
We love to see it. Okay, this has been it
could happen here a podcast done by the girl who
posted iost be destroyed after every single post for eight
goddamn years. And now we're here, so let's go fight.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
And now we're here, and for its ebooks, everything happens
so much.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
Yes, welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Last September, President Trump announced a federal crackdown on left

(55:12):
wing radical terrorism by signing an executive order dubbing quote
unquote Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and directing federal law
enforcement to investigate potential federal crimes related to political violence,
especially stemming from quote anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity,
and hostility towards traditional American values. Last month, the FBI

(55:38):
claimed one of their first big victories against so called
Antifa terrorism since Trump's National security directive. On December twelfth,
the FBI arrested four people in southern California, who the
government claims are members of a far left group called
the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The criminal complaint, signed on

(56:02):
December thirteenth by an FBI agent working at the Joint
Terrorism Task Force office in Los Angeles, alleges that these
four individuals conspired to construct and detonate a series of
bombs in southern California on New Year's Eve twenty twenty five.
The four defendants were first charged with conspiracy and possession

(56:23):
of an unregistered destructive device. Then on December twenty third,
a federal grand jury indicted them on additional terrorism related felonies.
Here's a brief clip from the FBI press conference announcing
the arrests where First Assistant US Attorney Bill Assley compared
the Turtle Island Liberation Front group to Antifa.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
This case is another reminder about the dangers that radicalized
Antifa like groups posed to public safety and the rule
of law.

Speaker 4 (56:56):
In court documents, the defendants are not just referred to
by their eagle names, but also by their direct action
or signal code names. Audrey Eileen Carrol aka Asanach or
Black Moon, Zachary Aaron Paige aka ak Ash Carrington or

(57:17):
Cuthulhu's Daughter, Dante Garfield aka Nomad, and Tina Laie aka
kickwere The criminal complaint states that after forming the initial
bombing plan, Carol and Page recruited additional co conspirators who
participated in further planning meetings and helped procure bomb making materials.

(57:40):
On December twelfth, the four defendants traveled to a remote
location in the Mohave Desert with the alleged intent to
build and test explosive devices. An undercover FBI agent was
present at the testing site and a surveillance plane observed
from overhead. Before the defendants completed assembling a functional explosive device,

(58:02):
the FBI arrested Carol, Paige Garfield, and Lie. From the
court documents that are currently available, the earliest allusion to
this New Year's Eve bombing plot is in a signal
message dated November twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, allegedly from
one of the defendants, Audrey Eileen Carroll, to whom they

(58:23):
believed was a genuine co conspirator but was actually a
confidential human source working with law enforcement. According to the indictment,
this alleged signal message from Carol stated that she and
quote unquote four comrades were planning to go to the
desert from December eleventh to December thirteenth, twenty twenty five,

(58:43):
to quote test the items we are going to use
for those party plans unquote. This message references pre existing
quote unquote party plans, which any prior origin of has
not yet been elaborated on. This confidential Human Source appears
to be an individual embedded in the Los Angeles activist scene.

(59:08):
The criminal complaint describes them like this quote. The confidential
Human Source is cooperating with law enforcement and is a
validated and vetted source. The Confidential Human Source has been
a reliable source information since in or around August twenty
twenty one. The confidential Human Source is cooperating for financial compensation.

(59:30):
The confidential Human Source does not have any criminal history.
The Confidential Human Source provided past reliable reporting on other
cases and has provided reliable reporting in this case.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (59:44):
The quote unquote. Turtle Island Liberation Front appears to be
a relatively new group with a social media footprint that
only goes back to July twenty twenty five. The Instagram
bio for their LA chapter reads quote liberation through decolonization
and tribal sovereignty.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
Their most recent post, from December twelfth, the day of
the arrests, is promoting a quote unquote Palestine pop up
market in Culver City. A post from November twenty eighth
reads quote if they hurt you, they hurt me too.
Our destinies are intertwined. Liberation for one must mean liberation

(01:00:26):
for all. The empire must fall, and from within the
belly of the beast, we must be the ones to
dismantle it. Revolution is the only way stop quote unquote
peaceful protesting, rise up, fight back. We are not outnumbered.
They are organize and be ready unquote. As news of

(01:00:47):
this group and the bombing plot spread around the Internet
last month among the left, there was a lot of
skepticism pointed at the authenticity of the story and the
Turtle Island Liberation Front grid group itself, with questions pointed
at its name and some language used in their social
media posts. The name derives from a term that some

(01:01:09):
Indigenous tribes used to describe the North American continent and
is common language among a certain sect of quote unquote
land back activists. The Liberation Front moniker has been used
by a collection of direct action based groups, most notably
the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front in

(01:01:30):
the two thousands. Though the Turtle Island Liberation Front group
doesn't seem to have been a formalized activist group for
very long, there were genuine people involved with this group,
as evidenced by there being for defendants in this criminal case.
The Turtle Island Liberation Front Instagram account was run by

(01:01:52):
one of these defendants, and the language used in their
posts is not uncommon among the quote unquote anti imperialists
whose ideology is grown in influence among the American left
during Israel's genocide in Palestine. And though both an FBI
informant and an undercover employee played a part in this investigation,
the group seems to have contained a collection of genuine

(01:02:14):
individuals who have participated in the wider Los Angeles activist
scene and especially anti Israel protests. The indictment and criminal
complaint outlined the material steps that defendants allegedly took to
detail the plans of this bombing plot and procure materials

(01:02:34):
to construct explosive devices without material support from FBI sources
or undercover employees. All the information in the indictment and
criminal complaint is alleged, and all the defendants should be
considered innocent until proven guilty. The indictment claims that Carol
set up an in person meeting for November twenty sixth

(01:02:57):
to discuss the bombing plot with another allegedly Island Liberation
Front member Zachary Aaron Page, and the Confidential Human Source,
who were instructed to quote where casual block no devices.
If you can't leave it at home, have it turned
off and wrapped in tinfoil makeshift Faraday bag.

Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
During this in person meeting, Carol allegedly distributed an eight
page handwritten document titled Operation Midnight Sun, outlining the plan
for the bombing to both the Confidential Human Source and
co defendant Zachary Page. Carol allegedly retained two to four
additional copies of the handwritten plan. The indictment says that

(01:03:38):
Carol explained that the document was handwritten because she quote
did not want any traces of the attack plan on
a computer. After this meeting, Carol allegedly sent an encrypted
message to the Confidential Human Source about the bomb testing
camp out in the desert. Quote this trip is very spicy, LOL.
Will be testing the things were going to make for December,

(01:04:02):
like the things in the instructions on that document I
gave you. Testing first is important so we know how
well they work, lol unquote. The plan was for teams
of four on the ground participants to plant backpacks containing
quote unquote complex pipe bombs or IED's improvised closive devices

(01:04:24):
outside of buildings at five locations targeting two US companies,
and then simultaneously detonate the bombs at midnight on New
Year's Eve twenty twenty five. There would be one off
the ground member assisting the teams remotely by listening to
police scanners or stationed in a vehicle in case quote
an emergency getaway is needed unquote, and one member of

(01:04:48):
each on the ground team would create graffiti of quote
a red triangle and one message of the teams, choosing
on the sidewalk closest to the building while the other
three are placing the devices.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:05:02):
The indictment claims that the handwritten plan also instructed co
conspirators quote, once you plant your IEDs, if there is
any time to safely do so, dump an accelerant around
the premises, such as gasoline for added effect. We want
to do as much damage as possible unquote. The plan

(01:05:23):
identified five target locations as quote unquote marks with five
more blank slots captioned add more if enough comrades. The
criminal complaint states that these targets were quote property and
facilities operated by two separate companies that are used or
engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:05:47):
I'm going to quote from three sections of the criminal
complaint that outline some of the opsec or operational security
precautions that are allegedly included in this handwritten plan. Quote.
The plan described multiple operational security measures the co conspirators
should take to conceal their identities, such as the use
of a burner phone that would be disposed of after

(01:06:09):
the bombings by quote submerging it in a concrete brick
after destroying the sim and then disposing of the brick
in a body of water unquote. The target date of
the operation, New Year's Eve, was identified as an opportune
time because quote fireworks will be going off at this time,
so explosions will be less likely to be noticed as
immediately as any normal day unquote. The plan emphasized that

(01:06:33):
quote absolutely no mistakes can be made.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:06:37):
The plans outline the use of quote unquote black block
over top of a layer of quote gray slash casual
block on top of normal street clothes, and noted to
keep hair very tightly concealed, and to wear gloves for
the purpose of avoidance of leaving behind DNA. The plan
further instructed that participants should leave their personal devices at

(01:07:01):
home and to make sure the devices were set up
to stream a long movie during the time of the attacks,
as so to craft an alibi or quote unquote, plausible
deniability by having it appear as though the actor was
actively using their devices. The plan discussed pre operational surveillance
of targets, identification of D block or D clothing locations,

(01:07:25):
and not leaving quote anything other than the IED's behind unquote,
as they could not quote risk any evidence tracing back
to us unquote. The plan also noted the benefit of
placing a small pebble in a shoe to alter natural
gait to obfuscate their identification. Instructions on how to purchase

(01:07:47):
materials to construct a pipe bomb suggested using cash only,
purchasing in small quantities to avoid suspicion, and splitting purchases
amongst a team rather than individually. In addition into the
plan of action and operational security tactics, detailed instructions were
provided on the components required to build a pipe bomb,

(01:08:08):
as well as how to create homemade gunpowder. On December second,
there was another in person meeting between the law enforcement
source Carol and Page, as well as two other co conspirators,

(01:08:32):
to go over the plan. They met again on December
seventh to review the bombing plot an allegedly discussed intent
to conduct future attacks against federal offices. This meeting was
also attended by an undercover FBI employee who was being
recruited to join the operation. The undercover asked Carol about

(01:08:53):
the black powder instructions in the handwritten plan, and Carol
responded that she conducted the recent search herself and discussed
wanting to test several different types of bomb to determine
which could quote unquote completely pulverize their assigned building on
New Year's Eve. To quote the criminal complaint quote, Carol

(01:09:14):
stated that she had acquired some components thirteen PVC pipes
and that she had bought potassium nitrate on Amazon using
a burner account that was scheduled to be delivered on
December eleventh, twenty twenty five. During this in person meeting,
Carol confirmed that she operated the Turnal Island Liberation Front
Instagram account and that she had met a co conspirator

(01:09:38):
through said Instagram account. The indictment claims that Carol told
co conspirators in this meeting quote what we are about
to do that's gonna be like a Luigi level situation unquote,
and that it was time for America to fall, and
that America falling will make Israel fall. According to the indictment,

(01:09:59):
during this December seventh meeting, Page told attendees again, including
an undercover FBI employee, that they were doing everything quote
to be as clean as possible because one hundred thousand
percent the FBI is gonna be like on that shit. Yeah,
so we all know what we're getting into unquote. In person,

(01:10:22):
Page outlined some of the operational security precautions to avoid
law enforcement detection, like covering shoes with socks to cover
shoe prints, and burning shoes after the bombing. Page also
allegedly asked attendees if they would like to receive firearms
training from a group that held a training about a
month prior, and Carol said that she had a contact

(01:10:45):
who could obtain unregistered ars. This wasn't the first time
Turtle Island Liberation Front members allegedly brought up firearms. The
indictment claims that on quote December third, twenty twenty five,
defended an page using an encrypted messaging application, asked the
confidential human source if the human source was interested in

(01:11:07):
receiving firearms training. Explaining his plan to shoot ICE officials
in a voice message to the Confidential Human source, defendant
Page stated quote, I just had this day dream. I
was like, we're just patrolling or whatever, and we're strapped
right and we see ICE trying to pull up on
someone or a group of people, and we just like

(01:11:29):
roll up on them, like strapped up, and we're like, nah,
get the fuck out of here. They're gonna get shot
if they try to do anything like, we shoot first,
we ask questions later. That's the policy. I told that
too in Brackets Defendant Carol. Defendant Carol knows all about this,
and Brackets Defending Carol was like, yeah, let's fucking do it.

(01:11:49):
But I'm like, seriously, that is what's needed. Maybe if
ICE agents they're like, wait, I don't want to get
fucking shot right now, they ain't gonna do it. And
if they still try to do it, well, well guess what.
Welcome to the dirt, motherfucker.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:12:03):
After sending this voice message, Page told the Confidential Human source, quote,
let me know when you listen. So I can delete
it unquote. Small lines like that are part of what
I find really interesting in this Turtle Island Liberation front case,
because the indictment and criminal complaint are just full of
the defendants recommending these security folklore practices like setting up

(01:12:27):
your phone to stream a long movie to create an alibi,
and placing a small pebble in your shoe to alter
your gait, deleting these messages after you send them, which
they're trying to do, all while working with not just
an FBI informant but also an undercover agent. During the

(01:12:47):
December seventh in person meeting, Page and Carol discussed plans
for future attacks after this New Year's Eve bombing plot,
specifically a plan to target ICE agents and vehicles with
hype bombs starting around January or February twenty twenty six,
with Carol noting in the meeting quote that would definitely

(01:13:08):
take some of them out and would probably scare the
rest of them unquote. Now, following this meeting, more co conspirators,
including an undercover FBI employee, were added to the signal
group chat called the Order of the Black Lotus, which
Carol described as the radical faction of the Turtle Island

(01:13:29):
Liberation Front and which Page described as quote unquote super underground.
The indictment contains some alleged messages sent to an encrypted
group chat. It's unclear this is specifically the Order of
the Black Lotus chat or another Turtle Island Liberation Front
related chat, but I will read through some of these messages.

Speaker 3 (01:13:51):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:13:52):
Page messaged co conspirators, including defendants Carol and Garfield quote
death to Israel, death to the USA, death to colonizers,
death to settler colonialism. In response to defendant Pages message,
defendant Carol stated, quote death to them all, burn it
all down, three burning heart emojis unquote. Defendant Carol messaged

(01:14:15):
co conspirators, including Page and Garfield, quote I identify as
a terrorist and I am a Hamas fangirl.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:14:26):
Garfield messaged co conspirators, including Carol and Paige, quote I
am here to destroy Zionism by any means necessary. Real
activism equals destroying Zionism by any means necessary, even if
it's risky. If you aren't willing to die for or
lose your freedom, then you're just another toy in the machine.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:14:46):
Carol messaged. Quote glory to the martyr's death to Israel
three salute emojis, and on December third, defendant Carol told
the confidential human source quote, these fucking SJA you peaceful
protest libs are insane, Like it's wild to me that
I've seen state violence enacted on some people like that

(01:15:07):
and they still think they can keep going with peaceful
protest bs and indirect roots unquote. Defendants used the BLACKLOADUS
group chat what Carol described as quote our group for
everything radical unquote, to discuss sourcing bomb making parts including
cotton string and PVC pipes, as well as coordinates for

(01:15:27):
the explosives testing site in the desert quote where we
will set up camp and where we will test unquote.
On the afternoon of December tenth, Page messaged the group
about just having acquired two parts for the bomb recipe
and that starter would be picked up later that day.
Page was under FBI surveillance around the time this message

(01:15:51):
was sent, and fifteen minutes prior to sending this message,
Page was seen grabbing a package from an Amazon pickup location.
Hours later, FBI agent's watched Page by pistol primers from
a store in Irving, California. Quote dressed in a manner
to obscure pages identity, namely wearing a medical mask, gloves,

(01:16:13):
ball cap, and longsleeve shirt. To quote the criminal complaint,
Carol replied to Page's messages about obtaining more items from
the ingredient's list, writing that another package was quote already delivered,
got to pick it up tomorrow, but yay with four
whys unquote. The criminal complaint says that quote. According to

(01:16:33):
Amazon records, on December seventh, twenty twenty five, Carol purchased
two five pound bags of potassium nitrate ninety nine percent
pure prilled Kno three five pounds for industrial and technical
applications to be delivered to the Amazon counter at the
Whole Foods located at three three seven seven South La
Sienna Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. The potassium nitrate was delivered

(01:16:58):
on December eleventh, twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:17:03):
In early December, Carol messaged the confidential human source on
signal a list of components chemicals and tools, along with
prices of the required items. Several of these components were
either listed as already purchased or designated to be acquired
by another quote unquote Comrade Carol advised the confidential human

(01:17:23):
source quote with the list, write it and down when
you have some time, then I'll delete that message, so
it's no in the chat, a'll well.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (01:17:32):
Carol also told the confidential Human source that they should
get some burner phones quote unquote bought with cash only
for the bomb testing camp out in the desert. Page
instructed the group to only bring two burner phones to
use in case of emergencies and for directions on the
way out to quote the complaint quote. Once everyone arrived,
their phones would be put in a small cardboard box

(01:17:54):
completely sealed with aluminum. The phones would not be returned
until the caravan was out of the campsite and back
on the main road. Quote forgetting to the desert, Page
wrote that each navigator should have a burner phone, quoting
page in the complaint quote no phones besides burners, and
all phones except navigators to be wrapped in foil or
a Faraday bag for the entirety of the trip and

(01:18:16):
install OSM. And it is an open source maps, so
no corporate tracking unquote. Garfield wrote, quote, I have a
few burners, but I'm saving for the big event, the
big party, celebrate emoji quote. On December tenth, Carol sent
the Confidential Human Source a message on signal, reading quote,

(01:18:39):
I kind of hand this notebook where I wrote down
multiple plans that never happened or got delayed, so it's
like my terrorist diary. Lmaoooo. I have to get rid
of that unquote. On the morning of December twelfth, twenty

(01:19:06):
twenty five, Carol, Page, Garfield, and Lye traveled to the
desert in two vehicles, the Confidential Human Source in one
car and the undercover in the other. To quote from
the complaint quote. In the undercover vehicle, Page discussed using
cigarettes as a delayed fusing device for the explosives. Once
they arrived in the desert, in the other vehicle, Carol

(01:19:28):
explained to Lie that the day's events were meant as
a test run for the New Year's Eve bombing plot,
which Carol described in detail, stating, quote, what we're doing
will be considered a terrorist act unquote. In response to
Carroll's detailing of the New Year's Eve plot, Lie asked
if there would be any people at the bombing target locations.

(01:19:50):
Carol responded in the negative, but noted that if they
saw any people such as a security guard at any
of the locations they would warn them. At approximately ten
one am, the co conspirators arrived at the desert and
began setting up a campsite including tents and tables based
on information from the undercover and confidential human source. Carol
Page and lie All brought bomb making components to the campsite,

(01:20:13):
including various sizes of PVC pipes, suspected potassium nitrate, charcoal,
charcoal powder, sulfur powder, and material to be used as fuses,
among others. After the undercover alerted law enforcement with a
predetermined signal indicating that bomb testing was imminent, FBI personnel
intervened and placed Carol Paige, Garfield, and Lye into custody.

(01:20:37):
This is a clip from the law enforcement press conference
announcing the arrests with a Keel Davis, Assistant Director in
charge of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office.

Speaker 7 (01:20:48):
On December twelfth, a group of individuals, again members of
this antigovernment group, traveled out to the desert to test
their explosive devices. They had precursor can mmicals there and
they were going to make They were going to create
these these bombs in the desert. What they are starting
to do is put their chemicals and wares and the

(01:21:10):
components out on the on the table on the table there.
This footage that you're watching is from our surveillance plane.
And then what happened after this is the Los Angeles
FBI SWAT team, along with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team
moved in and arrested all four subjects without without incident.

Speaker 4 (01:21:31):
The criminal complaint notes at the end that quote based
on conversations with the bomb technician. While no quote unquote
end caps were found at the campsite, the co conspirators
could have improvised using other material to plug the end
of the PBC pipe, though such method would have been
less effective than using a proper end cap. As noted above,

(01:21:52):
there were also sufficient parts to create several molotov cocktail
devices quote. After the arrests, law enforcement also raided the
homes of the Turtle Island Liberation Front members. In Page's residence,
police found a copy of the handwritten attack plan Operation
Midnight Sun. That same day, December twelfth, another Turtle Island

(01:22:17):
Liberation Front related arrest was made all the way in Louisiana.
A former marine who was member of the Order of
the Black Lotus Signal group under the name Darkwitch. She
her who was also planning to instruct the group on
quote urban tactics, accuracy, and combat shooting. She was arrested
while driving from New Iberia to New Orleans with a rifle, handgun,

(01:22:41):
gas canister, and body armour. The FBI believes that she
was going to carry out an attack based on a
Facebook post commenting on a border patrol rest in New
Orleans captioned quote shit time to recreate Waco, Texas with
these fuckers thuck Ice unquote. Three of the defendants in
the Los Angeles case, Paige, Carol and Lai, have pled

(01:23:06):
not guilty. Garfield is set to be arraigned the day
that I'm recording this, and the Turtle Island Liberation Front
trial is currently scheduled for the end of February.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
Welcome to It Could Happen? Here a podcast about which
calamity this country and many others are going through. This week,
I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are
going to be talking about the Federal Reserve. Now, those
of you who have listened to Executive Disorder are aware

(01:23:51):
that a bit over a week ago, as this episode
is being released. Federal Reserve Chairman Jiromage Powell released what
again I can really only describe as someone escaping from
a kidnapping and releasing a video about it in which
he discussed a Justice Department grand jury subpoena and a

(01:24:17):
threat to indict him over cost overruns on a new
Federal Reserve building. Now, Jerome Powell has claimed that these
charges are really about removing him and about eliminating the
independence of the Federal Reserve. He also claims that he

(01:24:39):
was directly threatened with these charges unless he was willing
to adjust the Federal Reserve policy to fall in line
with the Trump administration. And this is an astonishing video
for a number of reasons. One is that it's, in

(01:25:02):
a lot of ways one of the most direct points
of defiance that a government official has taken directly to
the presidents. It's also astonishing because it is actually technically
the second time that Trump has tried to do something
like this to a member of the Federal Reserve Board.

(01:25:25):
Because as you're listening to this, the Supreme Court has
been hearing arguments about Trump's attempt to fire one of
the other members of the Federal Reserve Board, a woman
named Lisa Cook. Now, obviously I don't know yet what
the outcome of that deliberation is going to be. It

(01:25:47):
seems right now that the Supreme Court is uncompelled with
Trump's ability to fire a Federal Reserve board member over
really truly very trumped up charges about mortgage fraud. I'm
going to quote here from the Supreme Court in what

(01:26:08):
has become a very important statement. Quote, the Federal Reserve
is a uniquely structured, quasi private entity that follows in
the distinct tradition of the First and Second Banks of
the United States. The importance of this statement is that
the Supreme Court has been willing to allow Trump to
fire the heads of other you know, what are supposed

(01:26:30):
to be independent entities, right, or fire members of what
are supposed to be independent federal agencies. He's been able
to just completely illegally, by the way, but with the
approval the Supreme Court, been able to fire a lot
of people who were appointed under the Biden administration to
posts in independent regulatory agencies. However, so far, the Supreme

(01:26:53):
Court has balked at doing this for the Federal Reserve. Now,
why is that and why is this entire thing so
important to understand that question and to understand why I've
spent so much time talking about what in the grand
scheme of things seems like a kind of minor, you know,

(01:27:15):
just like another example of Trump attempting to use the
judiciary and investigations to go after as political enemies. We
need to talk about what the Federal Reserve is and
what it does, because this is our guably the central
institution of global capitalism, and its importance in maintaining the

(01:27:41):
global capitalist economy is to a large extent, the reason
why this is the point at which US senators, who
are aligned with Trump on every other issue have actively
taken a stand against this sort of prosecut of Jerome Powell.
It's why the Supreme Court seems to not be interested

(01:28:05):
in allowing Trump to wield the executive power. And this
is because fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with
the money. So what is the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve,
to put it mildly, is an extremely confusing entity. So
if you remember back to a few minutes ago when

(01:28:27):
I said that the Supreme Court said that the Federal
Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi private entity, we can
ask the question. Okay, so it's a quasi private entity.
Is it a public entity or is it a private entity?
This is a relatively simple question. Here is the answer
provided by the Saint Louis Federal Reserve's website quote. The

(01:28:50):
Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government,
but they exist because of an Act of Congress. Their
purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed
private or public? The answer is both. While the Board
of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve
Banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold

(01:29:14):
stock in the Federal Reserve and earn dividends. Holding this
stock does not carry with it the control and financial
interests given to holders of common stock and for profit organizations.
The stock may not be sold or pleasures collateral for loans. Okay,
so here's the Federal Reserve's answer to is it a

(01:29:36):
public or private entity? Is both? The Board of Governors
is an independent agency. The Federal Reserve Banks are set
up like private corporations. So it's sort of both. Okay,
question settled, it's both. We can move on. Wait, hold on,
I am receiving word that the Federal Reserve has comments
on this idea. Hold on, hold on, let me, let me.

(01:29:56):
Let me turn to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve's website,
which has a comment on the idea that the Federal
Reserve banks or private entities. Okay, here we go, here
we go quoting them. Now, some observers mistakenly consider the
Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve

(01:30:20):
banks are organized similar to private corporations. For instance, each
of the twelve Reserve banks operates within its own particular
geographic area or district of the United States, and each
is incorporated, is separately incorporated and has its own board
of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal
Reserve system hold stock in their district's reserve bank. Now, okay,

(01:30:45):
let's look at what we have here. These are two
different websites run by two different parts of the Federal Reserve,
one of which says that the Federal Reserve Banks are
not part of the of the federal government, but they
exist because of an Act of Congress. So is the
Fed public or private? The answer is both, because the

(01:31:06):
Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations. That's
the Saint Louis at are Reserve. Now the National Federal Reserve,
says quote, some observers mistakenly considered the Federal Reserve to
be a private entity because the reserve banks are organized
similarly to private corporations. So you can see that we
are dealing here with an absolute goddamn mess because if

(01:31:29):
you read the two websites of different federal versions of
the Federal Reserve, National and sort of branches of the
Federal Reserve, they say different things about what it is,
and they sound like they're arguing each other. Now, Okay,
I am doing this because it's funny. Technically both of
these agree with each other. But this is a shit

(01:31:50):
show because part of the purpose of the Federal Reserve
is to be an entity that does research and distribute
information to the public, and its websites can't agree on
what it is. Now again, I'm being slightly pedantic here.
Technically both versions of this story do you say that
this is both a public and a private entity? Sort of?

(01:32:12):
Now again, And this is a basic question about the
Federal Reserve. Is it a public or private entity? And
they can't agree on it. And this is, to use
a technical term, a fucking nightmare, because again, the actual
answer is that it is sort of both. The banks
themselves are like technically private, but they're run by the

(01:32:34):
Board of Governors, which is technically a government agency, and
they were established by the government. So tending to sort
out this colossal mess has inside of academia, this has
caused a change in the conception of what the state
is because what is this crap? So okay, let's actually

(01:32:55):
run through the structure of the Federal Reserve. So importantly,
the Federal Reserve is kind of three entities in a way.
You can think about this like the Holy Trinity. Right.
You have the twelve Federal Reserve banks, and those banks
are collectively managed by what are called governors, who serve

(01:33:18):
on what is called the Board of Governors, which is
the second entity. And then there's also the Federal Open
Market Committee, which for our purposes we don't care about
that much, but is composed of the seven members of
the Board of Governors, and this is the quote defend itself.
Is composed of the seven members of the Bord of Governors,
the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

(01:33:40):
and four of the remaining eleven Reserve Bank presidents. You
serve one year terms on a rotating basis. So, okay,
we have three entities, right. We have the centralized Federal
Reserve banks, which there's twelve of them. They cover different
geographic regions of the country. We have the Board of Governors,
which oversees them. And the Board of Governors is the

(01:34:01):
part that is technically a government agency. And these governors
are importantly, for our purposes, nominated by the President and
confirmed by Congress. And this Board of Governors. The purpose
of this Board of Governors is to sort of run
all of it. Now they're running all of this at

(01:34:22):
a macro level. Each of those twelve federal reserve banks
also have their own border directors and their own structures
that each run all of the different banks. So this
is complicated. And again why talking about the Federal Reserve
is so complicated. If you just like start looking at
political stuff people have written about the Federal Reserve, it's

(01:34:43):
a nightmare. Like if you try to like do your
own research, your options are, I'll less you know where
to look, right, your options are at the Federal Reserve itself,
which is actually not a terrible resource for the most part,
because again, conducting economic research is one of the points

(01:35:03):
of the Federal Reserve, but it's not ideal. And then
also immediately you get a bunch of very weird, anti
Semitic conspiracy theories about sound money and the sort of
Rand Paull people who want to eliminate the Federal Reserve
because they're mad at the US dollar not being based

(01:35:24):
on gold. Nightmare, terrible, zero out of ten. We absolutely
hate it. Now, speaking of things that we absolutely hate,
it is not buying these products and services. We are back.

(01:35:51):
So all right, we've gone over the structure of the
Federal Reserve. So what does the Federal Reserve actually do?
And why are we talking about this at such length.
If you know one thing about the FED, it's that
the FED can print money. You may or may not
remember the FED printing money memes from twenty twenty in

(01:36:13):
that sort of era, and this is one of the
conceptions of the FED that is true. The Federal Reserve
is the entity given power by the US government to
print money. So when dollar bills are created, the Treasury
commissions the FED to print the bills. Technically speaking, coins
are still minted by the Treasury, which is a whole

(01:36:37):
side showed tangent that I had to cut out of
the story because it's like twenty minutes long. But you know,
if you are holding a US dollar, basically the odds
are very very very very very very very very good.
The way you were holding is technically a Federal Reserve note.
Now what does that mean? Be a what is happening here?
Why is it the government doesn't print money? Why is

(01:36:59):
it this quas I private public entity that's printing the money. Now,
what's happening here is slightly more complex than FED money printer.
An American dollar is US debt. Right, what you are
holding in your hands is a promise from the US

(01:37:19):
government to pay one dollar to the Federal Reserve. The
Federal Reserve is having this money distributed and is having
this debt distributed. And this is what US currency is.
It is based on debt held by in this case,
the Federal Reserve banks, which have been given a monopoly
to print this debt as Federal Reserve notes, and the

(01:37:41):
Federal Reserve can just sort of create this. It's also
worth noting that, you know, when we talk about the
FED creating money, I mean obviously like it prints money
for stuff commissioned by the treasury, so you can have
more bills in circulation, But most of the actual money
that's being created or not created is you know, this
is all happening digitally. It is funds appearing in the

(01:38:02):
bank accounts of the banks that use the Federal Reserve.
So the other thing you may have heard about the
FED is the FED funds rate or what's called the
FED interest rate, or you'll hear a bunch of talk
about the FED setting interest rates. So to understand what
this is, we need to kind of take a step

(01:38:22):
back and look at what these banks actually are. The
way this is commonly described is that the FED is
the bank of banks, right, which is when a bank
needs alone, they go to the Federal Reserve, and banks
put their money in the Federal Reserve and they use
it to move their money around. That's true enough for
our purposes. I should also state here that a lot

(01:38:45):
of what I'm going to be saying this episode, particularly
from here forward, is technically probably a simplification of what's
actually happening, because the mechanisms here are very very compt located.
But okay, so the FED interest rate, right, this is
the thing that is the source of all of the

(01:39:07):
tension here, right. What Trump is pissed about to a
large extent is that he thinks that FED interest rates
are too high and he wants them to be lower
because he thinks this will cause the economy to grow more. So, okay,
what does that mean is what is the FED interest rate?
The way this is explained to the public is that

(01:39:28):
the FED sets the cost of borrowing. That's like true,
kind of. Basically, there is a rate that is decided
on by the Federal Reserve Board. On a more technical level, though,
it's slightly more complicated than that. So when you hear
someone talk about the Fed's interest rate, what they are

(01:39:49):
talking about is the Federal funds rate, And technically what
they're talking about is the target Federal funds rate. So
I'm going to quote from the Federal Reserve self quote.
The effective Federal funds rate is the interest rate at
which depository institutions, banks, savings institutions, thrifts, and credit unions,

(01:40:12):
and government sponsored enterprises borrow from and lend to each
other overnight to meet short term business needs. The target
for the Federal funds rate, which is set by the
Federal Open Market Committee, has varied widely. Over the years
in response to prevailing economic conditions. So yeah, Also, by
the way, it is technically the Federal Open Market Committee

(01:40:35):
that sets the fund rate. But okay, when we're talking
about the FED setting the interest rates, right, there's kind
of two things going on. So the effective Federal funds rate,
which is the thing that they're trying to control, is
the interest rate at which all of these different banks

(01:40:56):
that have their money in here are all using it
to lend to each other overnight. Through the money they
have the Federal reserve, they're all lending it to each other.
The average of the rate of interest that whist are
lending to each other overnight, the average of that rate
is the federal funds rate. When people talk about like
the interest rates like three point two percent or whatever.
What the FED is trying to do is make sure

(01:41:17):
that at the end of the night, this effective federal
funds rate, which is the rate that all these banks
are lending each other money at, is at that rate.
But they don't actually technically directly have control of this,
because it is to be clear, the average rate of
which all of these banks are lending to each other
what the FED is manipulating directly usually is the interest

(01:41:39):
on reserve balances or IRB. So this is the thing
the FED does control. The interest on reserve balances is
how much interest they pay out for just putting your
money in the FED and leaving it there. I'm going
to quote the FED again. The Fed's primary tool for
influencing the Federal funds rate is the interest the FED
pays on funds that banks whole as reserve balances at

(01:42:02):
their Federal Reserve bank, which is the interest on reserve
balances rate. Because banks are unlikely to lend funds in
the federal funds market for less than they get paid
on their reserve balances at the Federal Reserve, the interest
rate on reserve balances is an effective tool for guiding
the federal funds rate. Okay, Mia, you've been spouting gibberish

(01:42:23):
for many minutes. Now what the fuck does that mean?
So what the FED is normally doing is all right,
so you put your money in a bank, right, and
that bank has an interest rate, and it pays you
out that amount of interest at the end of the year, right,
And that's the money that you are making for putting
your money in this corporation. The FED also has their

(01:42:45):
own interest on reserve balances, so that they have their
own interest rate for how much money you can get
from just leaving your money in the Federal Reserve. And
the theory, and this is like you know, true, is
that banks aren't going to lend each other money at
interest rates that are lower than what you can get
from the FED because otherwise you just leave your money

(01:43:08):
in the FED and you get them out amount of money.
So if you're going to you know, loan someone something, right,
the interest that's being charged here is going to be
higher than the FED rate. And that's when we talk
about FED setting interest rates. That that's what's happening on
a technical level, and this is actually very important in
the global economy because what this does, and this is

(01:43:30):
where everything gets extremely murky, and I'm going to go
to a very very high level of abstraction down from
sort of the very low technical details. Now in theory,
what this means is, this is how easy it is
to obtain money to invest in stuff. Right, This sets
the rate at which you can borrow money. And in theory,

(01:43:52):
if you have a very very low interest rate right
the FED, if the FED funds rate is really low,
then it's very read cheap and easy to get a
bunch of money, and that money flows to the economy,
and theoretically that money will you know, be used to
invest in stuff and that will increase economic growth. Okay,
so why wouldn't the FED rate just always be zero?

(01:44:13):
And the answer to that is that the FED is
an institution and this this is part of its legal
framework that established it is also trying to control inflation.
And the theory, effectively is that if you leave these
things for too low for too long, it will cause inflation,
and it will cause economic bubbles that are not actually
supported by the return on investment. Because if you can

(01:44:35):
just always continuously borrow money for zero dollars, then you
can just invest in anything as long as the return
is like slightly more than like nothing. However, comma raising
interest rates used as a way to try to slow
economic growth in order to not have inflation results, right
and also to not have there be sort of speculative bubbles.

(01:44:58):
And right now we've entered period in which interest rates
have been rising. After a pretty prolonged period of interest
rates being effectively zero, like following the two thousand and
eight financial collapse, they've been really low for like a while,
for some stuff in the nineties that we're going to
get to you later. But this is basically the primary dispute,
which is that Okay, now, obviously the FED is to

(01:45:19):
some extent a political actor. But the question here is
who is going to get to set these sort of
interest rates? Right? Is it going to be the President
of the United States? Right, is it going to be
that Donald Trump can just be like, oh, economy look bad,
turned down the interest rate? Or is it going to
be the Federal Reserve itself, which is how it presently
functions running this And that's what FED independence means. So

(01:45:45):
what is that stake here is one of the defining
the defining mechanisms of sort of economic control, of control
over the function of the economy. You know that this
is called like a macroeconomic policy lever Right. This is
one of the largest, most important and most powerful tools

(01:46:05):
that exists in the entire world economy for managing and
regulating the American economy. And the question is is this
going to remain with this sort of quasi technocratic independent
staff or is it going to be directly set by
the president. And that is a huge fucking deal because
as you mentioned last time I talked about this, there

(01:46:26):
have been times where presidents have gotten control over central banks.
For example, the sort of scare story that everyone is
talking about is Turkey where Airdwan, they're effectively dictatorial leader,
managed to break the independence of his own central bank
and inflation rates are now merely forty percent. So this

(01:46:48):
is what's at stake. It's who gets to control this thing?
Is it Donald Trump or is it the Federal Reserve?
Now we are going to go to ads and we
are going to come back and talk a bit more
about some of the nightmares that can happen here. Now. Okay,

(01:47:15):
so we've been talking mostly about the FED interest rate
because that is most of what it does, or that's
not most of what it does. That's the most important
thing that it does on a political level in terms
of you know, this is why Donald Trump wants it. However, coma,
the FED does a bunch of other shit, like, for example,

(01:47:35):
a whole bunch of the world's gold supply owned by
a bunch of countries across the world sits in a
vault under the Federal Reserve building. The FED has a
balance sheet right of like the assets that it owns
and that balance sheet is right now about six and
a half trillion dollars. The payment system that the FED

(01:47:58):
maintains has two trillion dollars a day moving through it. Right,
This payment infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Federal Reserve is
the core of the functioning of the entire American banking system.
Like I kind of emphasize this enough, and this is
also you know, important on a macro international level, right,

(01:48:21):
Like this institution functioning sort of normally is the difference
between capitalism working kind of normally, which is not good
but is working, and it's not working, and Trump is
trying to take control of it. And again, this is
a guy who wants to invade Greenland, and she is

(01:48:41):
trying to take control over one of the most powerful
economic institutions that has ever existed in human history. So
these are the sort of the stakes of the fight
that's happening here, because again, the FED is supposed to
be an independent entity, right The President is not supposed
to be able to order the FED to just do
whatever it wants. And this is what's at stake with

(01:49:05):
Trump trying to fire one of these Reserve board presidents,
with Trump trying to prosecute the current head of the
Federal Reserve and use that threat to bring the Fed
into line with doing what he wants to do. Now,
Trump is also again attempting to install his own guy
when Jerome Powell's term as the Chairman of the Federal

(01:49:27):
Reserve Board ends. And Okay, in terms of could the
Trump administration actually run this, right, I'm gonna read this
quote from actually a very good Yahoo story about the
search for Trump's knew who he wants to run the
Federal Reserve. This is starting with a quote from Trump's

(01:49:49):
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, Who's been the guy who is
running the candidate search. Quote, who can bring the board
along with them? Who has the gravitas, Bessett said, who
is going to have an open, green span like mind
that we could be going through a productivity boom like
we did in the nineties and not just throw the

(01:50:12):
brakes because we're alarmed at a high GDP number. Okay,
if you have spent your life closely following American macroeconomic policy,
that is nuts. That is a terrifying statement, utterly horrifying. Now, Mia,
why is it scary to say that he wants a

(01:50:34):
green span like mindset that doesn't throw the brakes on
the economy because they're alarmed by a GDP number. Why
is that scary? And this is also you know, why
is it scary for the Trump administration to have direct
control of the Federal Reserve. Part of the reason we
haven't had a full scale economic collapse in two thousand
and eight has been that there has been a bunch
of very very careful management of the economy by the

(01:50:57):
Federal Reserve. Right, they have done a lot of technical stuff.
You know, I'm saying they've done a lot of technical stuff.
Well when I say well, I mean for the functioning
of capital, like you and me and everyone listening to this.
Is it working for us? No, not really, but it's
working for capital, right, And they've been able to prevent
an economic collapse through a lot of sort of technical means.

(01:51:20):
In twenty twenty, and you see this now, they did
these things called overnight repo injections where they would pump
like one hundred billion dollars in liquidity into the bank
markets overnight in order to make sure there was liquidity
to because that was one of the things that cost
two thousand and eight collapse so they've been doing a
bunch of very careful management, some of it in these
large swings that have very little public attention, some of

(01:51:42):
it in just the way they've been doing policy. What
these guys want to do is the Greenspan stuff from
the nineties. So okay, meyah, what the fuck is that?
So what he's talking about is the green Span put now,
what happened to the nineties To simplify the story a
little bit, but I'm not evenly simplifying it much. Every
time the market went down, Greenspan would just lower the

(01:52:05):
interest rate to make the market go back up. Right,
So every single time it even sort of looks like
the market might be going down, he makes the cost
of borrowing from the Fed cheaper, so you can just
take more money out of the Federal Reserve and plunge
that money back into the stock market. Right, that's the
theory here. The economist Robert Brenner called it asset Kanesianism.
This is something we have talked about on the show many, many,

(01:52:28):
many times, and it is to a large extent, the
thing responsible for the two thousand and eight economic collapse,
and also the dot com bo will before that, and
arguably also the Asian market collapses in the nineties. Okay,
you know you're you're dealing with a problem, which is
that you don't have a manufacturing economy that can support

(01:52:49):
economic growth. So what are you gonna do instead? Okay,
we're gonna give everyone a bunch of money so they
can do speculative investing in stocks. And we're gonna give
him one a bunch of money so that they can
go invest in housing market because housing prices will only
ever go up, and that's the thing that these people
want to do. Right And in terms of why, okay,
why should you be scared about this?

Speaker 6 (01:53:10):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:53:10):
This is like saying that, Okay, we need to bring
back the guys who did all of the mortgage backed
securities in two thousand and eight that went up and
put them in charge of like the world's most powerful
economic institution. So the candidates that Trump is talking about
putting in place, I don't know if any of them
are going to make it right now, because I think

(01:53:32):
the kind of person Trump is looking for is not
the kind of person who like runs this kind of
thing normally. In terms of like what Trump would do
with the guy that he sort of installed there, we
can look at who they've already installed, right, And the
one Federal Reserve Board member that Trump has successfully gotten
in place is Stephan Miren who, and I kind of

(01:53:55):
emphasizes enough, I talk about how nuts this guy is
all the time. This is this's the guy who wants
other countries to pay taxes on holding US bonds. And
this is the guy that, again, is now one of
the governors of the Federal Reserve, war because Trump put
him there. I could spend another forty minutes ranting about
how bad of an idea his Mara Lago Accords, which
is his version of the Plaza Chords, would be. It's gibberish,

(01:54:18):
it's atrocious. And these people are simply not good enough
at technical economic management to be put in charge of
the Federal Reserve, the most powerful economic agency in the
entire world. And again, as I've been saying, right, this
economic management has been good for capital. Has it been
good for us? Like? No, not really. However, putting that

(01:54:45):
power directly into the hands of Donald Trump is an
even worse idea. But it's also very important that this
has been good for capital, because FED independence is the
red line for a lot of very very powerful sectors
of capital who would be fine with things like like
you could, like Trump could do public executions in the streets,
and like GP Morgan eventually would be okay with it. Right,

(01:55:08):
JP Morgan is like panicking over this Federal Reserve stuff.
So this is actually a line at which segments of
capital are willing to break with Trump because this is
an existential threat to them. Now, before I sort of
close this out, you know, I've been giving what is
essentially a very conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is,

(01:55:30):
because to some extent you need a conventional analysis of
what the Federal Reserve is to understand what the fuck
is going on with these board things. But I want
to give the final word to the anthropologist David Graper.
This is from his book Debt the First five thousand Years. Quote.
One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even

(01:55:53):
the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let
alone in official accounts. That is the role of war
and military power. There's a reason why the Wizard has
such a strange capacity to make money out of nothing.
Behind him, there is a man with a gun. True,
in one sense, he's been there from the start, I

(01:56:15):
have already pointed out that modern money is based on
government debt, and that governments borrow money in order to
finance wars. This is just as true today as it
was in the age of King Philip the Second. The
creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that
marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had

(01:56:36):
already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually
became the foundation of financial capitalism. And this is something
that's very very important. Right. We've been talking about how
important the FED is as an economic institution, and obviously
the importance of the Federal Reserve is tied in with
the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency,

(01:56:58):
which makes it the most important currency on Earth. It
means that every other country is doing a bunch of
transactions denominated in American dollars, and it turns out when
you can make American dollars that is an enormous advantage
for you. But this is all based on American military power. Right.
The reason that the dollar is the world reserve currency

(01:57:18):
is because all of the countries that had competing currencies
that could have been the international standard were sort of
annihilated during World War Two, and at the end of
World War Two it was the United States left standing
with the richest and most powerful economy on Earth. Yes,
but also like it was the country with nukes and
the largest army that wasn't the Soviets. Right. The element

(01:57:41):
here that Graber is pointing out right is that the
debt that you and me and everyone is like carrying
out our day to day stuff with is war debt.
Literally the thing that we used to like buy groceries
is to a large extent, it's a tiny bit more
complicated than this, but like loads that were taken out
to like go bomb Vietnam. And part of what's happening

(01:58:05):
under the Trump administration is that all of the things
that used to be under the table, right, the US,
you know, always had the kind of military power that
Trump is sort of throwing around to try to you know,
invade Greenland or just kidnap the president of Venezuela and
like run the country by gunboat. The US has always

(01:58:26):
had the ability to do this. It's just that it
was largely agreed upon by everyone involved running the system
that using this power under the table was more effective
than using it openly. The Trump administration thinks that, you know,
using soft power or not explicitly, just like saying we're
going to invade you is like womanly pussy coock shit,

(01:58:48):
Like that's effectively what's happening here, is it? And these
people think that these relationships need to be drawn out
into the open, right, And so what we're left with
here is a war between two sectors of capital, one
of which wants to immolate the world to satisfy the
ego of a tyrant, and the other of which wants

(01:59:09):
to let climate change immolate the world slightly slower, because
doing anything about climate change would hurt their bottom line,
but allowing the god king to immolate the world by
himself would hurt their bottom line too. And this is
effectively the problem with the moment that they're in, which
is that neither of these institutions, right, Donald Trump is

(01:59:33):
not on your side. The Federal Reserve is also not
on your side. What is necessary here, though, is not
for sort of comrade Federal Reserve to join us. What
is necessary here for our purposes is that enough sectors
of capital when the time comes right, when Trump finally

(01:59:53):
does something and when there's a popular reaction enough that
forces a confrontration between Trump and the American people. When
that time comes, what is necessary is that these massive
and powerful economic institutions stand aside and not defend the regime.
As I've talked about to a significant extent on this

(02:00:15):
podcast already, this is how the Bolsheviks won their revolution.
It's also how the February Revolution won, which was that
large portions of the populace, large portions of the ruling class,
and to some extent, large portions of the state simply
sat the conflict out because they didn't particularly like the revolutionaries,
but they also weren't going to go die for some

(02:00:36):
random tyrant. And that, in the end, is what's important
about this conflict. Right there is, on the one hand,
the possibility of Donald Trump just immolating the entire economy,
and on the other there is the possibility of these
people standing aside when we attempt to build a world
when we are not being lit on fire for profit. Husband,

(02:01:00):
it could happen here.

Speaker 2 (02:01:16):
What's getting assaulted by federal agents?

Speaker 4 (02:01:20):
No, don't I love when we start episodes both sleepy and.

Speaker 2 (02:01:26):
I'm Wired, I'm awake, I'm wide awake, baby, I'm a
white awake.

Speaker 1 (02:01:30):
Will you will you start? Will you do you are?

Speaker 6 (02:01:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:01:33):
We already started, We already started.

Speaker 1 (02:01:35):
We have it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
This is Executive Disorder.

Speaker 4 (02:01:38):
This is it 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, Mio Wong, Robert Evans, and
Margaret Kiljoy. This episode, we are covering the week of
January fourteenth to January twenty.

Speaker 2 (02:01:58):
First, you know a lot of news organizations don't go
woot woot geither cowards fucked up.

Speaker 5 (02:02:04):
That's because they don't drink fago.

Speaker 2 (02:02:06):
I know that's right.

Speaker 8 (02:02:07):
The official beverage of this journalist. This episode's printed by
four Loco at tea mugget. You're a in allowed test.

Speaker 6 (02:02:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:02:14):
Speaking of drinking, Actually, we will start this episode with
a big glass of whole milk. Everyone has one, right,
let's all go up at the same time.

Speaker 2 (02:02:22):
We finish it as we leave for the toilet.

Speaker 4 (02:02:24):
There we go, delicious, delicious whole milk.

Speaker 2 (02:02:27):
We drink a gallon every hour.

Speaker 4 (02:02:29):
We are not sponsored by the dairy lobby. There's nothing
fishy going on whatsoever. We're not a drinking whole milk now.

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
Not at all, not at all, Garrison Heifer, Davis.

Speaker 9 (02:02:41):
Heffer, even even Margaret Yeah, who's been a vegan for
how many decades?

Speaker 2 (02:02:47):
Look, you can be a vegan and still have a
lot of money in the dairy industry, Sophie.

Speaker 5 (02:02:52):
Well, all I'm saying is that if I increase my
meat diet by twenty five percent, it will stay the same.

Speaker 2 (02:02:59):
Look, that's that's accurate.

Speaker 4 (02:03:02):
We love we love that math Huber.

Speaker 1 (02:03:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:03:04):
And also, thanks to some of the new changes in
the way the Food and Drug Administration works, I can
guarantee you that American whole milk has almost no dairy
in it. It's mostly chalk and baby laxative, just like
our heroine.

Speaker 8 (02:03:20):
I have a theory about this. Can I sham my
bog theory? I think the grand unifying principle about which
we could bring American people together is that there are
too many milks. Everyone agreed, that's right.

Speaker 4 (02:03:31):
Principle, that's right, what should take over from class? Yeah, yeah, milks,
the great unifying milk principles.

Speaker 5 (02:03:38):
Yeah, the milk productionist.

Speaker 2 (02:03:41):
You know what place loves milk? Minnesota.

Speaker 4 (02:03:44):
Yeah, let's turn to Minneapolis. The continuing ICE raids. In
the fallout from ICE killing Renee Goody. On Wednesday, January fourteenth,
ICE agents attempted to pull over a vehicle whose tag
was registered to someone illegally in the country. The driver
was not the owner of the vehicle and tried to
evade arrest. After a fifteen to twenty minute car chase,

(02:04:06):
the driver crashed into a light pole, but continued to
run on foot. The man ran towards a nearby apartment building,
with agents now chasing on foot, catching up with him
after the man tripped and fell. A fedral Affidavid claims
that another man watching from a porch named Julio Caesar
Sosa Seles used a broom to assault the agents, while

(02:04:29):
an unnamed individual hit the agents with a snow shovel.
After the man they were chasing freed himself, one of
the ICE agents fired his pistol, hitting Soceles, who was
then hospitalized with a non life threatening injury. This information
is from an FBI report, which contradicts initial statements made

(02:04:50):
by DHS, which claimed that ICE was conducting a targeted
traffic stop for Julio Caesar Sosacelees, a Venezuelan national cool.

Speaker 2 (02:05:00):
I think it's worth noting that this is essentially ice
shooting the guy who saves the day at the end
of home alone. Just as a quick note, that's all
I've got to say.

Speaker 3 (02:05:10):
So, we haven't gotten very much good information about the
shooting that's not from the government. What we do have
is there is a livestream Facebook video of some of
the nine to one one call that the family member's
maids and I'm just going to quote from CNN here
in the video, the family tells a nine to eleven
dispatcher that agent shot so to sell Us as he

(02:05:33):
tried to enter his home. They were following my husband
for about thirty minutes. They were trying to crash into him.
He arrived at home, and because we closed the door
to them, they shot him. A woman can be heard
telling the dispatcher it's not clear who is speaking or
whether so sell Us is the person referred to as
being followed. So that's the only kind of independent thing

(02:05:55):
that we have on this right now, which also significantly
contradicts the story that they got attacked by a guy
with a snowshovel or brim.

Speaker 4 (02:06:05):
I mean, I don't think it necessarily contradicts that there
was a shovel getting moved in the direction of an
ICE agent at some point.

Speaker 2 (02:06:13):
Right, Yeah, attacked. It may have just been a guy
trying to create distance in space between itself and an
armed man.

Speaker 8 (02:06:20):
Yeah, knocked it over as he ran past it, right,
and then they tripped over it.

Speaker 2 (02:06:23):
Like, there's a wide variety of things that police officers
have framed as I was assaulted with this, and then
if you look at the video, it does not look
like someone assaulting a police officer.

Speaker 6 (02:06:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:06:33):
It might have just literally been a snowshovel on the porch. Honestly,
they might have assaulted a police officer. Yeah, I don't
care either way. I'm just saying we don't know what happened.

Speaker 2 (02:06:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:06:42):
The main report, which is in federal court documents that
were unsealed on Tuesday, have this FBI agent giving his
report based on his knowledge of the incident, which had
ICE chasing someone that bystanders used a broom and a
shovel trying to get the agents off a man who
was tackled on the ground. One ICE agent deflected a

(02:07:03):
shovel blow and it created a small gash in his hand.
The men that they were chasing was able to free
himself from being held, and as that man was running away,
an agent fired a pistol. That is the the most
detailed report that we have at the moment.

Speaker 8 (02:07:20):
Yeah, sure, and like we can't categorically say what happened, right,
You can't report a law enforcement testimony as you only saw,
so what you shouldn't Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:07:27):
Sure, shouldn't.

Speaker 8 (02:07:28):
I guess I can say that, like I'm in Minneapolis
right now, right, and so Margaret, you're comfortable with.

Speaker 2 (02:07:33):
Me saying you're also in Minneapolis.

Speaker 5 (02:07:35):
It's true, I am in Minneapolis right now.

Speaker 2 (02:07:37):
They are co located.

Speaker 8 (02:07:38):
As they say, It's very hard to report on these
things because essentially they happen extremely quickly, right and like
on almost every corner in most of the like dense
urban parts of town, there are people hanging out just
trying to keep their neighbors safe. And these things happen
so fast that big crowds aren't even able to gather

(02:08:00):
for the most part. If you combine that with the
fact that these iceage de germanly aren't wearing body worn cameras.
You're only going to get a couple of accounts, and
it's going to end up in he said, she said, right, right,
and then they're going to go with the law enforcement testimony.

Speaker 2 (02:08:15):
Which is what they want, which is exactly yep.

Speaker 3 (02:08:18):
And I think it is also worth noting that the
last three shootings that we've gotten, like the federal agents
lied about what happened. Yeah, and we got the videos
later on it showed that they were lying about it.

Speaker 2 (02:08:30):
So at this point, my default assumption is that, absent
other information, they are not telling the truth.

Speaker 5 (02:08:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:08:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:08:38):
Also they're framing the Asians, framing his decision to fire
as related to being afraid of his life, and yeah,
in the document, the fear would be based on the
presence of a broom handle and trumps.

Speaker 1 (02:08:52):
It is.

Speaker 4 (02:08:53):
It is a broom based assault that he cites as
the reason that you fired.

Speaker 5 (02:08:57):
Yeah, it's someone running away, right.

Speaker 3 (02:09:00):
And the woman who says that her son was the
one being pursued by ice, I'm just gonna read the
quote here because this is something that does directly contradict
the testimony. But in an interview with CNN, Mabel Lajorna,
the mother of Alfredo Alejandro Aljerno disputed both of those
claims on the basis of her connection with her son.
Immediately after the shooting, Aljorna said her son told her

(02:09:22):
he was the one being pursued on foot by Ice
and that the other guy was already inside the building
when the agent shot him, not outside where Ice said
the agent fired the shot.

Speaker 2 (02:09:33):
Geez. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:09:34):
Yeah, So that's the testimony that we have that's not
from the ICE people, and I think we'll figure out
in the coming weeks, like what happened.

Speaker 4 (02:09:42):
Yeah, maybe maybe three people were arrested after this incident.
The person that they were chasing, who they have claimed
two different people at some point, the man that Mea
just referenced, as well as the person who was shot.
And there's also this third individual who is allegedly the
shovel wielder, which is not named in the BIAFFA David, Yeah,

(02:10:02):
but all of these three people have been arrested.

Speaker 2 (02:10:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:10:05):
During a protest that same night, dozens of people broke
into two parked FBI vehicles, finding challenge coins and US
Marshall documents. One person has been arrested for stealing a
rifle from one of the vehicles.

Speaker 2 (02:10:20):
Bad challenge coins much safer, also safer.

Speaker 4 (02:10:23):
Today on Saturday, Governor Walls mobilize the Minnesota National Guard
and place them on standby to assist local law enforcement.
If deployed, the Guard will be wearing yellow reflective vests
to distinguish themselves from federal forces.

Speaker 2 (02:10:39):
Yeah. That's this is an interesting moment in and of itself,
just the acknowledgment from the both the military command and
the governor that like, yeah, you can't tell the difference
between a soldier and a cop anymore. Like we have
to do this so that people don't think the army
is the police. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:10:56):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:10:56):
And it's a very like oraboris moment too, because you
have just like the cops are dressing up like the soldiers,
so the soldiers are like, oh, well, I guess we
got to change how we dress now.

Speaker 2 (02:11:05):
Yeah, this could actually fuck up our ability to carry
out our mission. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:11:10):
Further complicating matters, fifteen hundred soldiers from the eleventh Airborne
Division at Fort Waynworth and Alaska have been placed on standby,
with Pentagon officials telling CBS News that they are preparing
to deploy to Minneapolis due to the Eleventh Airborne Division's
Arctic Forte. There has also been public speculation that this
activation may be related to rising tensions over Greenland, but

(02:11:32):
that has no basis based on what officials are saying
at the moment. Yeah A Sunday protest in Saint Paul
disrupted a church service because protesters believe that one of
the pastors is also the head of the Saint Paul
ice Field Office, David Easterwood. Easterwood's profile on the church's
website does appear to match the identity of the head

(02:11:54):
of the local ice Field office. Later that day, Attorney
General Pambondi released a statement quote attacks against law enforcement
and the intimidation of Christians are being met with the
full force of federal law.

Speaker 3 (02:12:07):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (02:12:08):
The Department of Justice announced that it was launching an
investigation into the protesters, including TV journalist Don Lemon, who
was streaming inside the church, for possible violations of the
Face Act, which makes it a federal crime to interfere
with people trying to access reproductive clinic services or exercise
their Firstmendment right of religious freedom at a place of worship.

(02:12:29):
Harmet Dylan, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, has also
invoked the Clan Act as a justification to bring conspiracy
charges against protest attendees, darkly ironic since this very protest
was partially put on by Black Lives Matter Minnesota.

Speaker 8 (02:12:47):
Yeah, that's also particularly well given like we've been driving
around today and seen multiple churches with like ice go
home kind of messaging. Obviously those people are not going
to be protected in the same way, right if they
choose to take care of migrants, Like I don't think
I've seen any churches with like anything other than that messaging.

Speaker 2 (02:13:05):
And in time cruising around today, I.

Speaker 5 (02:13:08):
Haven't seen any pro ice messaging anywhere, any pro Trump
messaging period. I have never seen a more united this
city in my life.

Speaker 8 (02:13:19):
Yeah, it's genuinely remarkable, like to see people who's I
don't think they would like identify as having radical politics,
but they are like out standing on street corners in
the freezing cold just to try and keep their neighborhoods safe.

Speaker 5 (02:13:32):
Yeah, this is the this is the warmer day of
the week. And I went and got all this like
extra snow gear, and I live in the mountains, right
that is like where I live, and I'm standing there
in most of my extra snow gear and everyone's like,
today's the warm day. Everything's fine, and I'm like I
need to get inside soon.

Speaker 3 (02:13:50):
Oh yeah, I will die. Welcome to walk to Minnesota.
Winters die.

Speaker 5 (02:13:55):
We're talking to a seventy six year old with no
hat on.

Speaker 8 (02:13:58):
Yeah, degree is incredible, warmed by pure anger. I mean,
that is warm, but she was ready to take on
the world. It was really Yeah, it's genuinely really wonderful
to see Like we went out, we talked to these
people for a while, some folks stop by and it's
just feeding everyone. It's really nice to see a community

(02:14:20):
like entirely in lockstep taking care of one another.

Speaker 5 (02:14:24):
And I feel like, to me so far, like the
actual headline around Minneapolis is that, like, obviously there's like
these instances of really horrific violence coming from the state
or coming from the federal government, right, But the actual
story that so far, the people we've talked to want
to get across is this. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(02:14:45):
journalists come here and just want to cover all the
bad stuff that's happened here. But this horizontal organizing and
this like feeling of togetherness and also more than anything else,
like I think even when you talk about the bad
thing that's happening, it's federal occupation, right, and like people
are very very aware of the fact that this is
an outside force occupying the city and it and so

(02:15:09):
even like anything that's happening, like individual bad actions taken
by the federal police, I think it needs to be
understood that, like, no one here is buying any other
line besides, no, this outside force is here to steal
our neighbors, right and us.

Speaker 8 (02:15:26):
You'll go past like fancy coffee shops and random like
like businesses, like I've seen businesses before having signs that
say like refugees welcome and we cherishow migrant neighbors. But
the ones here will also say like Ice get out
of town, Ice, go home. We don't want you here,
Like people like yeah, yeah, yeah, Like people are not
having it to a degree, which like I don't think

(02:15:48):
I've seen that. You know, I wasn't in Chicago during
the time that Ice was there, was in Los Angeles.
But like every neighborhood here feels like the neighborhoods sort
of most in lockstep in those cities, right, every neighborhood
we've been to, right, like in heavily Latino neighborhoods where
I live. Yeah, everyone's watching out for each other. Meant
in San Diego that is, but like here and every

(02:16:10):
single neighborhood, everyone is watching out for each other from
what we've seen, And like it is folks of every
age and demographic standing on street corners in the freezing cold,
just pulling a shift to keep an eye out.

Speaker 2 (02:16:24):
It's remarkable.

Speaker 3 (02:16:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:16:25):
I was like, there's no way. People are like, oh,
every neighborhood has like a neighborhood watch, and I'm like, yeah,
I don't know. There's like two people per neighborhood wandering
at any given time. Like I was like, how can
you watch a whole city? And like, oh, the answer
is everyone in the city does it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:16:40):
That's the story that I want people to take from this,
is that like nobody here wants this, and they're not
just like angry and going on the internet. They're angry
and getting to know their neighbors, going and organizing each other,
taking care of one another, and doing the things that
they can do to keep each other safe.

Speaker 4 (02:17:00):
During Trump's three hundred and sixty five days in office
press conference this past Tuesday, he discussed the killing of
Renee Good and expressed hope that Good's parents would continue
to support President Trump.

Speaker 2 (02:17:15):
Let's watch amazing.

Speaker 8 (02:17:17):
Yeah, come damn, I haven't seen it.

Speaker 4 (02:17:20):
Well you are unlucky enough to see it now.

Speaker 2 (02:17:24):
No, we'll do it live.

Speaker 4 (02:17:26):
It's gross, it's weird.

Speaker 8 (02:17:28):
Garson'spootingaupex dot com the everything website.

Speaker 6 (02:17:32):
And you know they're going to make mistakes.

Speaker 10 (02:17:34):
Sometimes Ice is going to be too rough with somebody,
or you know they're dealing with rough people.

Speaker 6 (02:17:39):
Are they going to make a mistake? Sometimes it can happen.
We feel terribly. I felt horribly.

Speaker 10 (02:17:46):
When I was told that the young woman who was
I had the tragedy. It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing.
Everybody would say. Ice would say the same thing. But
when I learned her parents, and her father in particular,
is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know.
It was a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump.

(02:18:10):
I loved Trump, and uh, you know, it's terrible. I
was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh,
he loves you, he he was.

Speaker 6 (02:18:21):
I hoped.

Speaker 10 (02:18:21):
I hope he still feels that way or that's hard,
hard situation. But her father was a tremendous and parents
were tremendous Trump fans.

Speaker 6 (02:18:31):
That's so sad it just happens. It's terrible.

Speaker 2 (02:18:35):
What is there even to say? You know, what do you?
How do you the fuck? Yeah, it's it's interesting that
he's he seems to be capable of, like legitimately being
upset at the thought of one of his fans not
liking him anymore. Yeah, Like that's weird the fact that
he like he brings it up in a way that
suggests like there's no artifice there, right, Yeah, like that

(02:18:58):
that's the genuineness of like, oh, he actually seems to
be slightly disturbed at the thought of one of his
fans no longer liking him, even though his secret police
murdered that guy's daughter. That's fascinating. It doesn't change anything, Like,
I don't know, there's nothing to do with that information,
but it's a fascinating understanding Donald Trump's mind data point. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:19:21):
No, it is one of the weird things where you
kind of see him be sincere and genuine briefly, but
it's for such a fucking weird thing.

Speaker 3 (02:19:28):
Weird.

Speaker 5 (02:19:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he understands that You're like, well,
you know, maybe maybe he doesn't like me anymore, but
I hope he does.

Speaker 2 (02:19:37):
Yeah, this would be a reason to change his opinion
of me. But yeah, I.

Speaker 5 (02:19:41):
Murdered his child.

Speaker 2 (02:19:43):
Yeah yeah, I don't know what else to say about that.
Yeah I didn't either.

Speaker 4 (02:19:51):
So part of the whole reason why ICE is doing
this operation in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge. This was started
in part due to allegations of COVID relief of fraud
among the Somali community in Minnesota. ICE Dirrector Todd LLINs
went on Fox News earlier this month in the lead
up to ICE's mass deployment to address this.

Speaker 11 (02:20:13):
You know, one thing we're really focused on is the
fact that unfortunately, with Minnesota's sanctuary laws and jurisdictions, it
attracts these type of frousts.

Speaker 3 (02:20:21):
It attracts people that do take.

Speaker 11 (02:20:23):
Money away from the hard working Americans in the people
of Minnesota. We want to help root out these people
that are committing fraud. And you look at the billions
of dollars that potentially could have been stolen, that could
have gone to foreign terrorist organizations that we're really focused on.
So we're hoping to get to the bottom of that.

Speaker 4 (02:20:40):
So as ICE is currently hoping to get to the
bottom of this fraud problem in Minnesota. Just this past week,
Trump has pardoned at least eleven white collar fraudsters.

Speaker 5 (02:20:53):
I think we can all agree the biggest problem with
that clip was the type oe in ice at the
bottom where they Fox News didn't put the period after
the E in ice, but they put the period after
the I in the sea. I think we can all agree.

Speaker 4 (02:21:07):
Yeah, get on it, Todd. Actually, uh, Fox News is
hiring is hiring a graphic design position in New York
right now. So if you want to apply to fix
the graphics, see you later, losers.

Speaker 8 (02:21:19):
Yeah, can you use Chad Gpt They probably did.

Speaker 2 (02:21:23):
Here's a job for you.

Speaker 3 (02:21:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:21:26):
Let's go on break and then talk about as Trump
calls it, Iceland.

Speaker 2 (02:21:30):
Jesus and we're back. First off, if you need to
tell the difference between Greenland and Iceland, just remember the

(02:21:53):
words of wisdom from either the first or the second
Mighty Ducks movie. Right, quack quack Greenland is and Iceland
is nice? Is the is the way to remember the two?

Speaker 4 (02:22:03):
Well, he can't spell nice without ice, Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:22:06):
That's rights in Iceland. Yeah, Yeah, that's that's how you
tell the difference. That's a little that's a little tip
for the president and everyone else, I guess trying to remember.

Speaker 5 (02:22:14):
That's probably that's how I've known the difference my entire life,
and it's almost certainly because of watching The Mighty Ducks and.

Speaker 2 (02:22:19):
The Mighty Ducks. Yeah, exactly, exactly the Mighty Ducks films. Sorry, yeah,
shout out to my Iceland friends. I enjoyed Iceland very much.
Shout out to whoever made the Mighty Ducks. Yeah, I know,
the knowledge of the creation has been lost in time.

Speaker 5 (02:22:33):
It was actually the whole thing was actually a propaganda
film by the Iceland tourist industry, a little known in fact.

Speaker 2 (02:22:39):
That's right, big Iceland. We are reporting this on the
day that it looks like Donald Trump may have just blinked.
He put up a truth announcing that he had reached
an arrangement with NATO and that tariffs would not be
necessary against all of Western Europe. Basically, it's kind of
unclear the details of the deal. He's saying that it's

(02:23:02):
a big, permanent thing. The US has sorted out its
security needs. Doesn't seem like we're going to be invading Greenland.
But you know, it's also Donald Trump, So we could
be in a very different position tomorrow. But that's kind
of the big update right now.

Speaker 4 (02:23:16):
Yeah, let's talk about kind of the lead up to
this ye moment. I suppose sure, multiple EU nations and
Denmark have sent troops to Greenland the past two weeks
for the Arctic Endurance military exercise aimed at countering Russian
security threats and to demonstrate that European NATO countries have
the capacity to defend Arctic territory without the US needing

(02:23:41):
control over Greenland. Now, Trump took this military deployment as
a personal slight and levied tariffs in retaliation, posting on
true social quote. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom,
the Netherlands and Finland have journeyed to Greenland for purposes unknown.
This is a very dangerous situation for the safety, security

(02:24:01):
and survival of our planet. Those countries who are playing
this very dangerous game have put a level of risk
in play that is not tenable or sustainable. Therefore, it
is imperative that, in order to protect global peace and security,
strong measures be taken so that this potentially perilous situation

(02:24:22):
and quickly and without question unquote. He then announced ten
percent tariffs against all of these nations, which would increase
to twenty five percent next month.

Speaker 2 (02:24:33):
Yeah, I guess my gut feeling is, you know, to reef,
you know, like it. But beyond that, this is kind
of just what Trump does now, right, is he threatens
everyone with like whatever the nuclear option is, short of
the literal nuclear option, which in this case is nuking
global trade. And then it kind of blows up in

(02:24:54):
his face because the EU actually has the ability to
collapse the dollar status as a reserve currency, and the
money awardens of the world are aware of that, which
is why the draft Dow plunged eight hundred points yesterday
and probably why Trump felt pressured to come to an
accommodation with NATO. I don't know that he ever literally
planned on invading, although at this point I think you

(02:25:15):
can't take that out of the equation. But like, this
is just what he does now, right, Like none of
this is like it's wild because he might have literally
bombed a fucking NATO member. But I don't know what
to say other than.

Speaker 8 (02:25:30):
That, Yeah, I can I can explain a little bit
more about the unhidden series of messages that Donald Trump
has been sending to various world leaders. God, we know
about these because they have all been released.

Speaker 4 (02:25:44):
Right, fantastic from Planetary Security.

Speaker 3 (02:25:47):
Yeah, thing is Fred's text?

Speaker 8 (02:25:50):
Well not just that, right, the Norwegians released the text
that was sent by him to Norwegian Prime minister. Right,
like the Norwegians, they're not normally like an impulsive nation.

Speaker 2 (02:26:01):
That's not what people know the Norwegians for now.

Speaker 8 (02:26:04):
No, they don't make big swings on the international scale
very much, but they have done this time. So I'm
just going to quote write from his message to Norwegian
Prime minister quote, considering your country decided not to give
me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars
plus pluses all in caps, I no longer feel an
obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always

(02:26:26):
be predominant, but can now think about what is good
and proper for the United States of America. Then Trump
released text from Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General, that
read quote, mister President, dear Donald, what you accomplished in
Syria today is incredible. We will get onto that. Return
to the quote, I will use my media engagement to

(02:26:47):
Davos to highlight your work there in Gaza and in Ukraine.
I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.
Can't wait to see you. Do you have the French
text as well? It's a French text.

Speaker 2 (02:26:59):
I do.

Speaker 8 (02:27:00):
I don't have it in here, but yes, the Macran
text message I'm more than happy to read because that
one was pretty funny. Actually, so we are totally in
line on Syria. We can do great things in Iran. Interestingly,
none of these sentences end with any punctuation. No punctuation,
no punctuation Macran rejoicing.

Speaker 2 (02:27:17):
It not helpful, so I'll just read them in one
continuous breath.

Speaker 8 (02:27:23):
I do not understand what you're doing on Greenland. Let
us try to build great things one lowercase. I can
set up a G seven lowercase G meeting after Davos
in Paris on Thursday afternoon. I can invite the Ukrainians
to Danish Assyrians and the Russians in the margins.

Speaker 2 (02:27:39):
Two.

Speaker 8 (02:27:40):
Let us have a dinner together in Paris together on
Thursday before you go back to the US. I manuel
lots of flowercase in there. Actually, none of the countries
getting up a case.

Speaker 4 (02:27:49):
Imagine setting your situationship this text and then he just
posts it on true social Yeah, it's so violated.

Speaker 2 (02:27:56):
Well, that's what's so weird to me is that this
is almost word for word the text. I say, James,
it's true.

Speaker 8 (02:28:05):
I've posted it on a new website.

Speaker 4 (02:28:09):
I do not understand what you were doing on Greenlands.

Speaker 3 (02:28:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:28:14):
I love that sentence, just floating on its own, like
it's it's magnificent.

Speaker 2 (02:28:19):
It's magnificent. And it's also like, yeah, that is basically
everyone feels like, man, I don't know what you're doing
on Greenlands, Like what is actually happening here?

Speaker 5 (02:28:28):
I mean, what do you do when like there's a
petulant child who also has a handgun or a nuke,
you know, and you're just like shut up kid, Oh
wait no, you could shoot me. Uh no, it's time
for nap.

Speaker 2 (02:28:38):
Yeah. This is why I have, like you know how
hotels have those like little sprinklers in the roof. I've
got one of those just for cs gas. Yeah, yeah,
just to keep just to clear out the house in case,
you know, you gotta calm everybody down. That's what we
need for the country. Yeah, we only need little holiday.

Speaker 8 (02:28:55):
Let's talk about Greenland, right, Greenland's a semi autonomous territory
of denmarkt as a colony, and then over the twentieth
century Greenlanders became Danish citizens and now they have like
the semi autonomous situation where that they have a lot
of home rule, but they are still part of Denmark. Denmark,
of course, is part of the EU and of NATO,
so therefore they are part of the EU and part

(02:29:17):
of NATO.

Speaker 3 (02:29:18):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:29:19):
As we said earlier, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, finn and
the Netherlands and the UK have also very small numbers
of troops to the territory in the past couple of weeks.
But the US is the one that has the most
troops on Denmark, right, because the United States has a base,
so they've kept this base that since World War Two.
It was there in World War two because the Nazis
occupied Denmark, right, and then the United States garrison Greenland

(02:29:43):
because it does have like they're not wrong in saying
it has an important strategic position right where it is now, it's.

Speaker 2 (02:29:49):
Really well located. And the reality of again this is
another mark in the column of like conservatives pretending climate
change isn't real and acting based on the realities of
climate change. Because of the warming oceans in that part
of the world, it's going to become much more navigable.
It used to not be as strategic because there was
just less possibility of moving naval assets through the area.

(02:30:12):
And now that that's not going to be a problem
because the world's warming and there's going to be less
ice there, Greenland has much more much higher like strategic
value just in terms of like as a place to
have as a potential naval joke point.

Speaker 5 (02:30:27):
Right, Yeah, are you saying that the people who named
it were actually being prescient ahead of the curve.

Speaker 2 (02:30:31):
Yeah, Yeah, they were ahead of the curve. They weren't
just trying to stop people from coming to Iceland. They
foresaw it in the ruins.

Speaker 8 (02:30:38):
So the US you speak, called Tula Air Force Base,
and essentially the US has the right according to Defense
Treaty creates Greenland to use Greenland to defend itself and
to defend the Arctic.

Speaker 3 (02:30:51):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:30:51):
So what they previously had that during they kept the
base during the Cold War because it was where they
would be able to identify missile launches coming from the
former Soviet Union?

Speaker 2 (02:30:59):
Was it time the Soviet Union?

Speaker 12 (02:31:01):
Right?

Speaker 8 (02:31:01):
And then they could intercept from from there with their
air Force base. They now it is now a space
Force space. Yeah, it's now the Petrifix Spaceport Space.

Speaker 3 (02:31:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:31:13):
And the US can expand or garrison this base as
it needs to write, like the majority of Greenland, it's
all occupied, right, but it is not like I guess,
urbanized or built upon.

Speaker 2 (02:31:25):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:31:25):
The US could expand this base, it could add more
assets to this base, but the United States has decided
that it's not enough and that it needs total sovereignty
over Greenland. So there are a few ways it could
achieve that, and we should just be explicit about those, right.
The first is obviously by direct military action. That still
seems relatively unlikely, but who knows these days.

Speaker 3 (02:31:46):
Hopefully.

Speaker 8 (02:31:47):
Yeah, there is an influence campaign that they're trying, right,
that they're attempting to influence Greenlanders into wanting to become American.
The polling data I have shown so that Greenlanders do
favor in the hindants. But yeah, they do not favor
joining the United States. They wouldn't mind leaving Denmark, and.

Speaker 2 (02:32:06):
Also overwhelmingly when presented with a choice between the United
States or Denmark, would prefer to remain part of death.

Speaker 8 (02:32:12):
Yeah, yeah, that situation right now, it's one that like
they don't want to go out the frying pan into
the fire, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (02:32:19):
I guess yeah, for reasons that make no sense to
me as I text my friend about the doctor visit
they can't afford.

Speaker 8 (02:32:26):
Yeah, Like it's interesting seeming as interviews where they're like,
why would we want that? We've seen what you people
have for healthcare?

Speaker 2 (02:32:32):
Yeah, what sucks? What is the appeal of being America?

Speaker 8 (02:32:36):
If Denmark has any spaces, California you know will join you.
So yeah, the other option will be to purchase it, right,
which is not on the card. It's like Greenland is
not for sale. So yeah, me, do you want to
talk about this this tariff campaign they've been suggesting that
they're going to leverage.

Speaker 2 (02:32:53):
Wait a second, what's that, James? Did you say?

Speaker 4 (02:33:00):
Jazz rocky jazz, bot.

Speaker 3 (02:33:07):
Rock, jazz rocky jazz.

Speaker 9 (02:33:10):
Bob.

Speaker 3 (02:33:12):
By God, it's Mia Wong's music.

Speaker 5 (02:33:15):
Yeah, I bet you would have picked that.

Speaker 8 (02:33:18):
We asked me what she wanted. She wrote it so made.
She went into a room, she wrote down music notes
on a piece of paper, and she came out with
something that.

Speaker 2 (02:33:25):
Turned out somebody else had done it before.

Speaker 3 (02:33:27):
Well we couldn't. We couldn't licensed Barracuda. So this is
this is this is what we got.

Speaker 2 (02:33:31):
That we actually were not trying to make a parody.
This is one of those things like the evolution of
the bow and arrow. We just kind of independently recreated
rock the kasba, but based around tariffs from fresh principles.

Speaker 5 (02:33:41):
That's the carsonization of songs.

Speaker 2 (02:33:43):
That's right, carsonalization of songs. All music becomes rock the
kasvo if you if you had given it up, give.

Speaker 8 (02:33:48):
It long enough on the Galapagos Islands. That's what we
sent me here to write a song on. She was
on the Glapica Islands for a long time.

Speaker 3 (02:33:54):
That's right, very nice there, so so speaker speaking of
things changing very very quickly. So two days ago, as
we are recording this, Trump was interviewed about these terrorists
he was going to impose by I think it was NBC,
and he said, quote, I will one hundred percent. It
is now Wednesday, and he has backed off of the tariffs.

Speaker 2 (02:34:17):
Tomorrow truly another day, who knows.

Speaker 3 (02:34:21):
Who knows. I think it's kind of worth noting as
of right now when we're recording this. Everyone is kind
of treating this as if this is over. But except
for the German finance minister who said, quote, it's good
they are engaged in dialogue. We have to wait a
bit and not get our hopes up so soon. Yeah,
which is significant. That's that's the smart play too. Yeah. Yeah.

(02:34:42):
And this is significant because Germany, as we'll get you
in a second, Germany has been one of the major
EU countries that does not want to deploy what is
being called and I can't believe I'm saying this, the
trade bazuka. So it's called the every single to go
today it is called what is the trade bazuka?

Speaker 2 (02:35:01):
It's okay, we're all asking ourselves that, aren't.

Speaker 3 (02:35:04):
We I okay. So before we get to the trade
of bazuka, it's worth noting that in terms of the
retaliation that has been being planned by the EU against
the US for trying to do this, there's actually two
different things on the table. One is a package of
tariffs that we've actually talked about before on this show.
That was the package of tariffs that EU developed as

(02:35:24):
part of the trade negotiations. Well, basically it was developed
in response to Liberation Day tariffs last year. They'd been
suspended as part of trade negotiations with the US, and
the US and the EU had finally reached an agreement,
and then Trump said this and the EU backed out.
So who knows what the tariff's status is going to
be and if the EU and the US are going

(02:35:46):
to continue to have come to this agreement that was
supposed to stave these things. So these retaliatory terrorists were
supposed to go into effect on February seventh. We had
just negotiated it not coming in. These are there are
a bunch of targeted tariffs on a bunch of US
goods that are specifically designed to hit red States. The
most famous of these is, for example, there's there's specific

(02:36:07):
tariffs on like Kentucky bourbon and whiskey and stuff, but
it also hits Boeing, a bunch of Rydom consumer goods.
It's just like chewing gum. It's on roughly one hundred
billion dollars of US goods. I think the biggest pressure
points here are Boeing in general dynamics. There's tariffs on
car companies. There's also very importantly there was a twenty

(02:36:28):
five percent tariff in here on soybeans, which I think
is a major leverage point because the US continues to
need a market to sell all the soybeans that China's
not buying.

Speaker 2 (02:36:37):
And yeah, China ain't buying them right now. We just
had another month where they bought none of our soybeans.

Speaker 3 (02:36:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:36:42):
So these are the tariffs that the EU was going
to put into effect on February seventh in response to
the Greenland tariffs.

Speaker 3 (02:36:50):
No, okay, sorry, back this up. This is a tariff
measure that was originally designed back in May of last
year in response to Trump's original ride of tariffs a
Liberation Day tariffs. Yeah, they've been suspended until now, and
they were about to just not go into effect at all. However,
the EU immediately has been like, okay, maybe we are
going to impose these ones.

Speaker 4 (02:37:08):
Ah, got it because of Trump's new because greenlands leverage tariffs.

Speaker 3 (02:37:13):
Yeah, I see. So this is this is one of
the two options that EU has. The other option and
this is okay, getting those tariffs would be a little
bit difficult, but that's significantly the more likely option. The
other option, the thing you've been hearing about, which is
the trade Bazuka, which.

Speaker 4 (02:37:30):
Was also my grinder screen name at the RNC.

Speaker 3 (02:37:33):
Trade bzuk you either get it?

Speaker 5 (02:37:36):
Are you deaf?

Speaker 3 (02:37:37):
You can? This is great? This is great. Okay, So
all right, what is the trade bazuka? We're just going
to move past that.

Speaker 2 (02:37:47):
So it's what a lot of Republicans were asking themselves
in twenty twenty four.

Speaker 8 (02:37:51):
Oh god, gogo trending term in Minneapolis, ORGA.

Speaker 3 (02:37:55):
Okay, So the trade Bazuka is an anti coercion instrument
that was originally designed by the EU in the early
twenty twenties as a response to some bullshit that China
pulled with Lithuania over embassy stuff in Taiwan. It's a
whole thing. I'm not going to explain it here, but
these measures are I think maybe the most extraordinary measures

(02:38:20):
that I've seen. These measures, if they went into effect,
would be more serious than the Liberation Day tariffs. They
are very, very difficult to enact. They require fifteen of
the twenty seven EU members, there has to be an
investigation process, there's a whole thing, and the negotiations have
to actually break down. And this is where it's really difficult,

(02:38:40):
because Germany in particular does not really seem to want
to do this. However, Trump has played this very badly
in the sense that two of his natural allies in
the EU are the UK and Norway, who he just
was threatening to leverage tariffs on.

Speaker 2 (02:38:54):
So you can't part of the EU anymore.

Speaker 3 (02:38:56):
But yeah, well for yeah, but those are those are
his two European allies, and the UK still has significant
leverage inside of their Now what is interesting is that
Macron has called first deployment if Trump presses to move
on Greenland. So the question sort of is what does
this thing do? And the short answer is everything. The

(02:39:20):
long answer is incredibly long, and the medium answer is
if you go read the document. I read it, I'm
going to roughly based by description of what it can
do on Willer Hail, which is a law firms version
of it. So there's ten things they can do. They
can put on tariffs. They can do important export restrictions
on goods. They can impose trade restrictions in general. They

(02:39:41):
can impose restrictions on government procurement and contracts and what
goods are bought by governments. They can do services restrictions.
They can do foreign direct investment restrictions. They can do
restrictions on intellectual property. Right protections. They can do capital
controls of financial services restrictions. They can do chemicals and
like sanitary goods restrictions, so they can stop the US

(02:40:05):
from importing goods to the EU. They can prevent EU
governments from giving contracts to the US companies or buying
anything from the US. They can restrict American intellectual property rights,
which I don't even know what that would do.

Speaker 5 (02:40:15):
I think that means that they can all pirate whatever
they want.

Speaker 3 (02:40:18):
Right, yeah, right, that rules.

Speaker 2 (02:40:20):
Spain did this for a long time.

Speaker 3 (02:40:22):
Yeah, it's like we're firing the trade Bizuka and now
you can use every Disney character like Disney would rise up.

Speaker 2 (02:40:28):
Yeah, just flood the market with with Mickey Mouse pornography.
That that is that is part of the EU's response package.

Speaker 4 (02:40:35):
I mean that, No, that that already falls under fair
you Strabert.

Speaker 2 (02:40:39):
Not the way I do it, Garrison, not the way
I do it.

Speaker 3 (02:40:43):
These are technically two different Mickey Mouses.

Speaker 2 (02:40:45):
Technically, no, no, no, I've been very clear about which
Mickey Mouse is in my pornography.

Speaker 3 (02:40:52):
So so the reason this is being called like the
trade bizuk or the nuclear option is that the actual
once this is enacted, which is very difficult. The actual
limits and what they can do are almost on existence.
They can once they've targeted it, it can kind of
do whatever you wanted to do to the extent that
they could in theory basically shut down all trade with

(02:41:12):
the US.

Speaker 5 (02:41:13):
Why didn't they call it the trade death Star? I honest,
Zook is not thinking big enough, like that takes out
a tank, Jenny Widely.

Speaker 3 (02:41:21):
I think it's being called the Bazuko because the people
reporting on this haven't actually read it and have not
thought through the implications of what this thing does, which
is that, like Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (02:41:31):
The trade mutually assured destruction device.

Speaker 2 (02:41:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's isn't.

Speaker 5 (02:41:35):
Mutually assured destruction? Is that what this whole thing is
built around.

Speaker 2 (02:41:40):
Yeah, because the EU's economy will also plunge.

Speaker 3 (02:41:44):
But yeah, so this was originally designed around China specifically,
but it's designed effectively as a nuke. Right, You're not
supposed to have to ever get to the point where
you're invoking it. It's designed to be a set of
trade things that is so damaging that no one in
their right mind would possibly risk it happening. Unfortunately, our

(02:42:04):
president is Donald Trump. Heah, we are Yeah, yeah, so
that's the sort of nuclear option here. I want to
mention one other thing which Robert Bluefly touched on earlier,
which is there's been a lot of discussion of a
quote from a report by the guy who is Deutsche
Banks head of Foreign Exchange Research, and he's talking about

(02:42:27):
how much treasury bond is owned.

Speaker 2 (02:42:28):
But you, I mean a lot. There are primary treasury
bond holders, right, like the four In terms of foreign
treasury bond holders.

Speaker 3 (02:42:35):
Yeah, yeah, between that and stocks, it's like eight trillion dollars.

Speaker 2 (02:42:38):
Yeah, and treasury bonds. By the way, the fact that
the EU is like our primary foreign treasury bond holder,
like treasury bonds and foreign countries holding them is why
the dollar is the reserve currency. It's why if you
are wanting to like ransom someone or buy illegal guns
and drugs anywhere in the world, they're more likely to

(02:42:58):
use dollars than euro. That is changing, you know, in
the in the international crime game, but the dollar is
still the default foreign currency. People around the world needed
a currency that's universally valued, the dollar is is the
best bet, and it's because of how treasury bonds work, right,
Like that's I'm oversimplifying but that's.

Speaker 3 (02:43:20):
A big part of it. Yeah, so okay, I'm going
to read the actual quote here. In an environment where
the geoeconomic stability of the Western Alliance is being disrupted existentially,
it is not clear why Europeans would be willing to
play this part. To translate this from like banking into
what is he actually saying. What he is arguing here

(02:43:42):
is that there is the potential for these countries to
stop buying US treasury bonds and effectively pull out of
American assets. It's not quite that easy, but this, this
would be the what we're talking about is like, is
the is the end of the US al res reserve currency.
And he's also very specific. This is about the fact
that the dollar status is reserve currency is a thing

(02:44:05):
that is allowing the US military to carry out these
kind of operations. Up until yesterday when he said this,
the only people I have ever seen actually say this
are you know, I mean economist who I like as
people like David Hudson, David Graber talks about this, but like,
this is a thing that you could only say if
you were like a Marxist or an anarchist. And now

(02:44:27):
you have Deutsche Bank analysts saying it. And this is
something that was impossible like two days ago, that there
would actually be serious discussion of, you know, using as
a geopolitical tool like getting out of US Treasury bonds,
which means ending the US dollar as a reserve currency.
And this was a big enough deal that the U
s Secretary of the Treasury is claiming that Deutsche Bank

(02:44:49):
called him to disavow the analysis. Wow, it's unclear if
that's true or not. But this, I think is one
of the things that really panicked them in terms of
why Trump backed off. Was there are multiple nuclear options
that are being put on the table for the first
time ever. And I think that that and the down

(02:45:10):
route was enough to just panic them for at least
one day. And we'll see what tomorrow holds. But yeah,
this is a really significant shift in what is able
to be discussed in terms of reactions to what the
US is doing.

Speaker 2 (02:45:25):
Well, you know what else is the United States?

Speaker 4 (02:45:29):
These ads another flawless Robert Evans molment everybody.

Speaker 2 (02:45:44):
And we're back, all right? What else we got to
talk to? Anything else happened in the entire world?

Speaker 5 (02:45:50):
I don't think so.

Speaker 4 (02:45:52):
Yes, there actually there is two more Davos thinks very
briefly that I think we should get to before we
kind of end with some other updates on ongoing stories
and situations that we've been covering on the pod for
a while. But when Mia was talking about how this
this sort of analysis was only used by you know,
like Marxists or certain tymes of anarchists before that is

(02:46:13):
now getting kind of paid lip service on the national stage,
that reminded me a little bit of Canadian Prime Minister
Mark Carney's Davos speech yesterday who which addressed some similar
things on the fiction of the quote rules based international order.

Speaker 2 (02:46:33):
Christ, holy shit, I mean I agree with that description
of the rules based international order. Mark conn has been
reading my book.

Speaker 4 (02:46:40):
Yeah, let's let's take a lesson.

Speaker 12 (02:46:43):
We knew the story of the international rules based order
was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,
that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that
international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity
of the accused or the victim.

Speaker 2 (02:47:05):
This fiction was useful.

Speaker 12 (02:47:07):
An American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open
sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support
for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign
in the window, We participated in the rituals, and we
largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

Speaker 6 (02:47:32):
This bargain no longer works.

Speaker 2 (02:47:35):
Let me be direct.

Speaker 12 (02:47:37):
We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy,
and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration
as weapons. Tariffs's leverage, financial infrastructures, coercions, apply chains as vulnerabilities.

Speaker 2 (02:48:01):
To be exploited.

Speaker 12 (02:48:04):
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through
integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Speaker 3 (02:48:15):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (02:48:16):
Yeah, it's really remarkable to hear the political leader of
Canada being like it was always very clearly a lie,
the rules based international order where the United States exempted
itself because it had power, but we pretended that this
wasn't happening. We like acknowledging that, Like, we ignored them
breaking the rules because it was convenient for Canada.

Speaker 5 (02:48:39):
Yeah, it totally worked out well for us, until now
it doesn't work out well for us anymore.

Speaker 3 (02:48:42):
Like I should invading a rock. It was fine, but
now like that fucking it might invade us one day.

Speaker 4 (02:48:49):
So oh yeah, it's really interesting, just totally pulling back
the curtain on this type of neoliberalism here.

Speaker 3 (02:48:55):
Yeah, I love too.

Speaker 2 (02:48:57):
Every time you get someone who would never ever give,
like anarchists or anarchist political theory the light of day,
like independently come to a conclusion very late. That is
like that anarchists has been yelling after you, like, yes,
it's a fiction. The rules based international order is a
fiction all the like. Everyone's playing lip service to these ideas,
knowing the US has exempted itself because hiding behind the

(02:49:19):
big guy is convenient. But that's a bad idea. The
thing that people who knew anything were saying when we
invaded Iraq, which was if you let them get away
with this, no one will ever be safe, that's the way.
And all those people got pushed aside is like, no,
you're just being hysteric, Like you're just being like that
you don't have like a real understanding of politics and

(02:49:39):
how it works, and there will never be any kind
of reckoning of people being like, oh yeah, all of
like the all of the people who were like inconveniently
critical were right twenty something years ago. They'll never say that,
but it's fun to see them admit it, like, you know,
kind of obliquely.

Speaker 8 (02:49:58):
Yeah, it sounds like he's been reading Charles Tilly. It's
kind of kind of remarkable.

Speaker 4 (02:50:02):
Carney did write this speech himself. That's something that he
has come out and said that this was not like
some speech writer who's pulling from like whatever, like you know,
Neil Liberal bookshelf is popular right now, Like he specifically
wrote this himself.

Speaker 5 (02:50:13):
Yeah, I mean he just crimmed from that book I
read as a kid. The Emperor has no clothes.

Speaker 3 (02:50:17):
Like clothes.

Speaker 4 (02:50:22):
So before the announcement of this ambiguous Greenland deal, which
neither the European authorities nor Trump has really given any
details of yet. But but before this, Trump did speak
Outdavos on Wednesday, where he confused to Greenland for Iceland
and said that they called him quote unquote, daddy, God

(02:50:45):
damn it. Play the clip.

Speaker 13 (02:50:46):
I'm helping Europe, I'm helping NATO, and I've until the
last few days when I told him about Iceland they
loved me. They called me daddy right last time. Oh god,
very smart man said he's our daddy. He's running it.
I was like running it.

Speaker 10 (02:51:03):
I went from running it to being a terrible human
being very cool.

Speaker 4 (02:51:07):
Mister President, based on the reporting, acknowledging that he multiple times,
not just in this clip, said Iceland when he meant Greenland.
Carolyn Levitt, pres Secretary, responded by saying no, his written
remarks referred to Greenland as a quote unquote piece of ice,
because that's what it is unquote, so saying that he
was literally calling Greenland like an ice land. Anyway, the

(02:51:33):
emperor is totally wearing clothes. I don't know what you're
talking about.

Speaker 3 (02:51:36):
What's that mon moth? But quote about they don't even
bother to lie badly anymore.

Speaker 6 (02:51:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:51:42):
Yeah, that's the worst excuse I've ever heard.

Speaker 4 (02:51:45):
It's incredible ice Land.

Speaker 8 (02:51:48):
I mean, it's going to be a remarkable thing to
be in her position right and just be like, what
the fuck am I going to come up with?

Speaker 5 (02:51:54):
Like?

Speaker 2 (02:51:54):
How do I what? What are we going to spin here?

Speaker 3 (02:51:58):
Ice? Pause?

Speaker 4 (02:52:00):
Spacelaneah Land one word? It's incredible? Wait what you go?

Speaker 3 (02:52:06):
Girl?

Speaker 2 (02:52:07):
Go off?

Speaker 3 (02:52:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:52:08):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (02:52:11):
Later at the CEO reception dinner, Trump said this, Oh god, we.

Speaker 6 (02:52:18):
Had good reviews in that speech.

Speaker 10 (02:52:19):
Usually they say he's a horrible dictator type person.

Speaker 6 (02:52:22):
I'm anna dictator, but sometimes you need a dictator. But
they didn't say that in this case.

Speaker 3 (02:52:29):
Sure, my guy.

Speaker 4 (02:52:32):
Share oh man, of.

Speaker 2 (02:52:34):
Course they didn't. I wonder why. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:52:37):
Multiple times during this speech he was like, if it
weren't for the United States and you'd all be speaking
German and maybe a little Japanese, it's like incredible.

Speaker 2 (02:52:46):
How did he think? Like, yeah, how did he think that,
like control was going to break down between those two countries.

Speaker 8 (02:52:52):
Slowly giving Japan right on Sundays it's Japan and the
rest of the time it's German.

Speaker 2 (02:52:58):
Incredible, Yeah, pan pulling up like your deadbeat dad to
be like, look this weekend your mind.

Speaker 1 (02:53:05):
If it wasn't a horrific monster, be really funny.

Speaker 2 (02:53:08):
We're eating sushi.

Speaker 1 (02:53:10):
He's so funny.

Speaker 2 (02:53:11):
He is really he's our funniest president by a wide margin.

Speaker 3 (02:53:15):
Evil, but he's so funny. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:53:17):
The way he pronounced dictator where there was like a
slight pause, like.

Speaker 2 (02:53:22):
He legitimately has good timing as a presenter. It's actually
two words Sophie.

Speaker 8 (02:53:27):
He was saying dick and then tata like the contraction
of potato like.

Speaker 1 (02:53:30):
It sounded like he was giving a recipe.

Speaker 2 (02:53:33):
I was like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 9 (02:53:35):
Oh my gosh, here, do we have anything else from Davos?

Speaker 4 (02:53:40):
No, I think that's all for DeVos. One of the
funnier DeVos isn't in recent memory. I agree, Yeah, Now
we just have some sad news that James is probably
gonna say.

Speaker 8 (02:53:50):
Yeah, so, I guess if we start with a run
right protesta continuing. The BBC had a piece today where
they were leaked to photos of hundreds of the people
who have been killed. Jesus, there's three hundred and twenty
six items, including eighteen women. The reason that they were
able to get these images is it seems that people

(02:54:13):
went to the mortuary and had to look through a
slide show of the faces of people who have been killed,
many of whom are so disfigured that they're unrecognizable, and
they have to flick through hundreds of images of these
brutalized human remains in order to try and identify their
loved ones. Right, it is unimaginable the scale of state violence.

(02:54:42):
Godoyen had an interview on his Twitter or his ex
dot com right that with people with someone inside Iran,
which I'd encourage people to read and which we will
link in the show notes. But like people continue to
be in the streets there and the state continues to
meet them with absolutely horrific violence. And talking of horrific violence,

(02:55:04):
I want to move now to Syria, right, specifically to
Syrian Kurdistan and the I guess majority Arab parts of
Syria that had previously been part of the Autonomous Administration
of North and East Syria.

Speaker 2 (02:55:17):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:55:18):
Last week we talked about fighting in Aleppo and then
we spoke about like fighting moving towards Euphrates. Right, fighting
has now moved past where it was last week, and
it's moving dangerously closed to Comeichlo and Hesseka, which are
the two biggest Kurdish cities. Hesseica is not just a

(02:55:38):
city where Curdish people live.

Speaker 2 (02:55:39):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:55:39):
Arab people, I mean not neither of these are right,
Arab people, are Syrian people, are Meinian people, right yuzds.
The ANES was a multi ethnic project like that. That's
what distinguished the SDF from the from the YPG and
the YPG right that they were multi ethnic, they weren't
just Kurdish.

Speaker 2 (02:55:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:55:59):
The the way that this has occurred is that the
Syrian Transitional Government has been able to flip multiple tribal
groups who are mostly Arab who had previously fought alongside
the SDF as part of the SDF right, but have
now flipped to the side of the Syrian Transitional Government.
So it's leaves the SDF with previously units that have

(02:56:22):
been there suddenly flipping, and they have lost huge amounts
of territory to include Raka, famously.

Speaker 2 (02:56:29):
Formber capital of the Islamic State.

Speaker 8 (02:56:31):
Yeah, the former capital where thousands died both as a result
of is violence and in the fighting for the city
and a result as a result of civilians died as
a result of coalition bombing during the fighting for the city.

Speaker 2 (02:56:43):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:56:44):
There have been absolutely horrific images of the brutalization of
the remains of captured YPG and YPGA fighters.

Speaker 2 (02:56:55):
Right, men and women.

Speaker 8 (02:56:56):
We have seen executions. This is not just executions are happening.
It is that people who are fighting not necessarily in
the Syrian Arab Army, but in at least alliance with
the Syrian Transitional Government, have been so comfortable carrying out
summary executions that they have decided to film and share them.

(02:57:18):
So on Monday, muslium Abdi, right, the general of the
Syrian Democratic Forces, traveled to Damascus to attempt to negotiate
a peace and was not able to do that. It
seems that he was offered some kind of position, but
he didn't want the position. There was not also some
kind of autonomy backstops for the remaining areas of the

(02:57:40):
AA and E S right, and so as a result,
there was a general mobilization in the AAN E S.
People from Bakur so, people from northern Kurdistan have crossed
the border. There's a border wall, fence wall, depending on
where you're at, in between Turkish Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan, right,
And at one point people have broken that down and

(02:58:00):
young people have entered into Syrin Kurdistan to fight to
defend the cities that are still part of the A
and E S. The counter terrorism group of the p
UK has entered Syrien Kurdistan. That's quite surprising, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:58:16):
Which is the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Yeah, which is
an Iraqi Kurdish political party effectively, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:58:23):
It is not aligned.

Speaker 5 (02:58:24):
Oh, Yeah, they're not lefty, right, or they're not democratic
and federalist.

Speaker 8 (02:58:28):
No, they I mean were at some point like.

Speaker 2 (02:58:32):
They are now today basically like an arm of the
Kurdish quote unquote state in northern Iraq. Right, they were
originally more of an actual political party and did have
some socialist elements. That's not really super relevant to what's
going on.

Speaker 8 (02:58:47):
Yeah, the ideology is not the same as the ideology
that you have seen in Imbrishava, right. Yeah, but like
I have not since Kabani have you seen more unity
of Kurdish people, regardless politics, right, Like a sort of
statement from the gacy stuff from Bazani, from Talibani. So
these are the two major political figures in Iraqi Kurdistan.

(02:59:10):
I've seen Kurdish religious leaders making statements right because people
are afraid of an ethnic cleansing, because they have seen
the ethnic cleansings of the Drus and the Ala Whites
that have already happened under the STG. Right, it's worth noting.
I guess at this point, like for whatever reason, they
have not chosen to remove the name Arab from the
country's name, like the Syrian Arab Republic, And I think

(02:59:32):
like that Syria is a multi ethnic and very diverse country,
and if it is to succeed under any form of administration,
it needs to acknowledge that, right. And it's it's really
worrying to see this horrific inter ethnic violence, and it
is being massively accelerated by people in the media right

(02:59:54):
to include a lot of like people who who might
be referred to as experts. I don't think that's a
reasonable appalach like they're their expertise. It was pretty limited,
but nonetheless, people who like to include journalists, telegram influencers
and then think tankers in the West. People are sharing
things that are either not true or that have not
happened in this time, like telegram videos are actually not

(03:00:17):
taken in Syria this week, right, that have taken different
places and times, And we are careening towards this not
becoming a fight between two different administrative projects, but becoming
an inter ethnic conflict, right, And I think we're pretty
much there at this point, and nobody seemed to be
looking for an off ramp, which is tragic. Like I

(03:00:41):
was in Hesseca two years ago and I was conducting
interviews there and a member of this little kid whose
father had died fighting Isis and like it was dark outside.
You know, this was during a time when when Turkey
was bombing the region quite heavily, and the little kid,
I think had been struggling to sleep because he's.

Speaker 2 (03:00:56):
Sleeping in the middle of the day.

Speaker 8 (03:00:57):
And then when he woke up, we were just hanging
out with his mother and I gave a little kids
some toys to play with that I brought with me,
and like, I can't help but thinking how scared that
poor little guy is now, you know, and his dad's
not there, right, yeah, because like twelve thousand members of
the SDF. He died fighting the Islamic state, right and
now another state is coming to put his family, his

(03:01:19):
kid in danger. Like that's horrific. What people have gone
through in Syria already is too much. And like to
see more killing and dying there is heartbreaking for me. Yeah, yeah,
it's very briefly. On the immigration update, it appears that
immigration and Customs enforcement are now under the impression or
there they believe that they can enter homes without the

(03:01:42):
consent of the homeowner, so they can use force to
enter in order to remove someone with a final removal order,
so long as they have an administrative warrant that is
a different thing from a judicial warrant.

Speaker 2 (03:01:54):
Right.

Speaker 8 (03:01:55):
This is often what people talk about when they talk
about does ICE have a warrant? They're looking for a
judicial warrant as opposed to warrant that they have issued
themselves at administrative warrant, and so this will obviously broaden
the amount of places that they can enter and times
when they end up entering people's homes by force. Right,
So we will likely be seeing more violence here as well. Yay,

(03:02:20):
I'm going to put a link to a have ASAW
fundraiser at the bottom of this if you'd like to
help people in Kurdistan.

Speaker 2 (03:02:26):
There are people who have been displaced.

Speaker 8 (03:02:27):
Four times now in the last few years versince twenty eighteen,
so if you'd like to help, you can do that.
Will also include a fundraising link for Minneapolis if you'd
like to spend some money closer to home. If you'd
like to email us, you can do so by emailing
cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you want
the email to be encrypted, you should send it from
a proton address.

Speaker 2 (03:02:48):
Well, we look forward to hearing more from Margaret and
James in Minneapolis, and I don't know. I guess that's it.

Speaker 5 (03:02:57):
We reported the news, did we We reported the news, Yeah,
all of it.

Speaker 4 (03:03:04):
Yeah, that's kind of how it feel.

Speaker 6 (03:03:06):
Awesome.

Speaker 5 (03:03:09):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:03:15):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 9 (03:03:21):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 4 (03:03:32):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 9 (03:03:34):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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