It Could Happen Here Weekly 217

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool 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):
Hello everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My
name is Dan al Kurd. I'm a professor of political
science and a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. Since
I last recorded an episode, those in power have been
very busy. The world looks different from a month ago.
What would the assault on Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Venezuelan

(00:50):
President Maduro, the as of this recording, possible invasion of Greenland.
It's been hard for even the best of us to
keep up as nemic from the series. And Or would
say the pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it.
And that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine.
It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident.

(01:14):
I will never not squeeze in an end or reference
when I can, given that this is the state of
the world. What's happening in Palestine has largely slipped out
of most people's feeds and certainly the media headlines. But
lots is happening, Lots of dangerous things are happening, and
I'm going to take this episode to give an update
of about what's been going on. Since the ceasefire was

(01:36):
announced three months ago, four hundred and forty nine Palestinians
have been killed by Israeli attacks and another one thousand,
two hundred and forty six have been injured. Over one
hundred of those killed were children. According to YUNISEF, the
Gaza strip has been reduced even further with a new
quote yellow line demarcating where Israeli troops will remain and

(01:58):
where Palestinians are not allowed to go. They literally placed
concrete yellow blocks on the ground in Gaza, and as
the BBC notes from a report January sixteenth of this year,
Israel continues to push the yellow line further and further
into what remains of Gaza. The United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs notes quote, the Israeli military

(02:22):
remains deployed in over fifty percent of the Gaza strip
beyond the yellow line, where access to humanitarian facilities and assets,
public infrastructure, and agricultural land are either restricted or prohibited.
In this context, and despite this context, the Trump administration
has declared that Phase one of the ceasefire agreement is

(02:45):
now over and that Phase two will commence.

Speaker 4 (02:49):
The US has announced the launch of the second phase
of the Gaza ceasefire Agreement. Special Envoys Steve Whitcoff shared
the news in a social media post, writing that Phase
two establishes a t transitional, technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza,
the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. He also
wrote that it begins the full demilitarization and reconstruction of Gaza,

(03:12):
primarily the disarmament of all unauthorized personnel. Whitkoff says the
US expects AMASS to comply fully with its obligations, including
the immediate return of the final deceased hostage, and warns
that the failure to do so will bring serious consequences.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Now, this is the declaration, even though really aside from
the return of Israeli hostages. No part of the twenty
point plan that the Trump administration put forward as the
quote peace Plan was realized. On the ground, it is
being let in, but not at the levels that it's needed.
Attacks against Pastinians haven't stopped. Nonetheless, Phase two is apparently

(03:50):
starting with the naming of members of the Board of Peace. Now,
if listeners will recall from a previous episode, Trump declared
himself the chair of this Board of Peace that's supposed
to bring peace to the Middle East, and Tony Blair
was tapped to run it, much to the outrage of
anyone who witnessed Blair's cooperation and the destruction of Iraq. Now,

(04:10):
this Board of Piece is going to run the Gaza
strip and it's quote unquote technocratic government, and it's going
to make sure how Masty militarizes and that Palestinians don't
step out of line. The Board of Peace is one
aspect of the Great Plan, Great Standing for Gaza Reconstitution,
Economic Acceleration and Transformation Plan, a plan that apparently will

(04:33):
turn Gaza into the quote riviera of the Middle East.
The Huffington Post reported January seventeenth that Trump is setting
a billion dollar price tag for any country that wants
to participate on this board. Members so far include Tony Blair,
Secretary of State, Marco Rubio son in law, Jared Kushner,

(04:53):
US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, Mark Rowan,
the CEO of Apollo Global Management, Israeli billionaire Yakir Gabay,
and a number of others along the same vein. Among
those Trump has invited include Vladimir Putin, famously very interested
in peace and not at all in eradicating Ukrainian existence.

(05:15):
Trump also sent a letter to Victor Orban, far right
wing president of Hungary, to join the Board of Peace.
Orbon has apparently accepted this invitation. To remind listeners, Orbon
is one of Trump's models for authoritary takeover of democratic institutions.
Orbon is also very close ties with Prime Minister Nittanyahu
in Israel, despite his anti Semitic politics. Now, I thought

(05:39):
the letter he sent to Orbon and to every other
right wing politician he's been inviting was quite telling. In
the letter, Trump invites Orbon to join, presumably with the
billion dollar pay to play, and calls the Board of
Peace a quote bold new approach to resolving global conflict.
Reuter is reporting on this issue, an anonymous diplomat saying

(06:02):
it's a trump United Nations that ignores the fundamentals of
the UN charter. In fact, the charter of the Board
of Peace doesn't even mention Gaza. So what is this
bold new approach to resolving global conflict. It's apparently a
resolution to conflict that includes a neocolonial oversight board run
by white men to make sure the natives don't get

(06:25):
too excited. Now, this oversight board is intended to manage conflict,
because let's be clear, this isn't about solving conflict at
the expense of the people who have been facing the
brunt of this conflict. So we should take them at
their word that this is going to be the way
that global conflict is going to be resolved from now on.

(06:46):
This is the blueprint. Gaza is only the test case,
and in this new form of authoritarian conflict management, the
world will operate without any pretensions under the premise of
might is right. And if the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration
and Transformation Plan is any indication, this plan is predicated

(07:07):
on encouraging Palestinians to ultimately leave Gaza at least some
significant segment of them. So not only might is right,
but ethnic cleansing is a more than fine way to
resolve a dispute. And finally, the plan is predicated on
the idea that reconstruction is a business opportunity, so to review,

(07:28):
might is right, ethnic cleansing is AOK, and war is
a prime real estate development opportunity. Now things get even
worse when we bring in the guy who's been tapped

(07:48):
to be the director general of this board. Nikolay Maladanov
is a Bulgarian politician an x UN envoy who has
been tasked with quote, disarming Gaza. According to a report
by Al Jazur published January fifteenth, he's the guy who's
going to oversee the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza,
the technocratic government, which is run by a Postinian bureaucrats,

(08:09):
and make sure that they stay in line during the
reconstruction phase. Somehow, these bureaucrats are supposed to reconstruct Gaza
while not being able to operate in most of it anyway.
Mad enough, this guy is really something. He's a Bulgarian
diplomat that worked as a minister for one of the
most corrupt governments in Bulgaria, a government that faced mass

(08:30):
protest pretty persistently. He is part of a right wing
populist party in Bulgaria. His father was also involved in politics,
specifically in the Bulgarian Virgin of the Kgib before the
transition from the communist regime. Since twenty twenty one, he's
been working in an Amarati institution, the Unwar Gagaesh Diplomatic Academy,

(08:51):
where he came out as a quote vocal proponent of
the Abrahamic courts, the normalization agreements between Israel and several
Arab states. Now it all checks out on that this
is the guy who's going to be the director general.
The fact that this person is the one being chosen
for phase two of the ceasefire, and the fact that
he has this kind of political background should make clear
that the Plant for Gaza isn't just a blueprint for

(09:12):
the world new levels of authoritarian conflict management with no pretense,
but also a part and parcel of the US Israeli
Imrati vision for the region. Now, this vision is one
where Arab authoritarian regimes and Israel, with the US supporting,
remake the Middle East into a quote modern, developed tolerant

(09:34):
Middle East, essentially by pouring concrete over graves and building
mega cities on top of rubble. Their vision of the
Middle East is one that is authoritarian and contained. More
citizens are subjects. These subjects can have some social freedoms
and maybe some economic opportunities, but should never think that

(09:55):
they can have an opinion on anything that happens to them.
This is a vision where states like the UA the
United Arab Emirates can arm militias to conduct ethnic cleansing
in Sudan, and Israel can get away with ethnic cleansing
in Palestine because ethnic cleansing and genocide are apparently a
perfectly reasonable way of getting rid of undesirables. Now, I'm

(10:16):
not saying that this isn't how these states operated even
before the genocide in Gaza, and I'm not saying it
wasn't how the US allowed certain allies to operate even
before Trump. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when
Palestinians were indefinitely occupied and no one cared, or when
Artzach was ethnically cleansed and Azerbaijan got away with it.
President Biden gave his blessing to the destruction of Gaza

(10:39):
after October seventh. After all, but there used to be
a pretense, a pretense of international law and a quote
liberal international order. There also used to be variation on
these issues. This type of authority and conflict management wasn't
always tolerated. In fact, Arab liberals who advocated for democracy
would often say that the US this is different from

(11:00):
China or Russia in that, at least it was committed
to democracy and international law and human rights rhetorically, even
if there was hypocrisy. They thought that that space between
reality and rhetoric could be leveraged and exploited. But now
there's nothing to be leveraged. Authoritarian conflict management is the

(11:21):
motors separandee of powerful states, and according to Donald Trump's
new doctrine, the Don Rohde Doctrine, each powerful state gets
to do what it wants in its own sphere of influence.
In fact, not only is territorial aggression valid, it's actually
the way the world should work. According to all of
Trump's spokespeople and parts of his administration, conquest is totally fine.

(11:46):
Here's Stephen Miller on Greenland, for example.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial
control for five hundred years. To control a territory, you
have to be able to defend a territory, prove a
territory inhabit a territory. Denmark has feeled that every single
one of these tasks.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
So Gaza is indeed the blueprint for what happens to
weaker states in war, or what happens in this case
to stateless people deemed undesirable and expendable. Now, what are
the Palestinians saying about all this? The technocratic government made
up of Palestinian bureaucrats, is saying it's committed to a
reconstruction of Gaza that is rooted in quote, peace, democracy

(12:28):
and justice. The Palestinian Authority, the largely illegitimate and undemocratic
governance body that apparently governs the West Bank somehow and
represents Palestinians. They're putting out statements welcoming the Board of
Peace and Trump's vision, maybe because they think this will
earn them a seat at the table, or maybe it's

(12:49):
a way to sideline their main opposition, Hamas, in whatever
crumbs of Palestine they're allowed to control in the future.
Hamas has said in a statement that they also welcome
the formation of the Administrative Committee for the Kaza strips
to quote a chief calm in Gaza while noting that
they are working with mediators to get to the next
stage of the ceasefire, and they accuses you of trying

(13:09):
to break the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli government ironically rejects
any Palstinian involvement, even at the technocratic level, and have
vowed to take it up with their front Trump and
the Palestinian people. Well, here is Gazen journalist Hendro Darev
al Jazir English.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
And what has been the reaction in Gaza to that
announcement of a move to Phase two.

Speaker 6 (13:31):
Well, just like you said, it an announcement, a symbolic
announcement two Phase two. Palatinians did not see anything on
the ground.

Speaker 7 (13:39):
There's no change.

Speaker 6 (13:40):
And despite all of that, we're still hearing drones as
you can hear in the background. We also heard a
couple of explosions since the early hours of the morning
were demolishings are still going on across the Gazza strip, especially.

Speaker 8 (13:55):
After the yellow line.

Speaker 6 (13:56):
Palatinians are frustrated, they're very disappointed. They thought that Phase
two would give them the freedom of movement.

Speaker 8 (14:03):
That would give them.

Speaker 6 (14:04):
Reconstruction of Gaza would also give them a little bit
of what they lost. But on the ground, nothing happened,
nothing changed. What we know so far is there are
fifteen members that have been approved on to be ruling Gaza.
But there are a lot of questions and concerns. How
is this going to happen, What is going to happen
to the people here, the reconstruction, the rough crossing, thousands

(14:28):
who need to get education, and also people who need
to travel abroad to either get their treatment to get
to reunite with their family. So there's a lot of questions,
but mainly there is a lot of frustration because there's
nothing changing on the ground.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
People in Gaza are beyond exhaustion. Everyone wants some path
forward out of this nightmare. But I really don't think,
for all the reasons I described here today that this
is it and we shouldn't let them, the Trumps and
or Bonds and billionaires of the world, get away with
the narrative that they're peacemakers and that apparently this is

(15:10):
all in the name of tolerance and peace. That's it
for me today. Thank you for listening, and hope you're
all Staying Safe.

Speaker 8 (15:30):
Hello, Welcome to Cool People, did Cool Stuff Slash it
could happen here episode And this is a little pickup
we inserted because James and I Hi, James, Hi, Margaret
and Margaret, that's James. We're on each other's shows this week.
We just spent three days in Minneapolis culminating in the

(15:50):
general strike last Friday, and we were there to cover
the rapid response networks and the mutual aid networks that
people have been building, and that's what we're going to
be talking about in these two episodes. But the reason
that we're recording this little pickup right here to listen
to at the front of it is that nine hours
after we finished recording these episodes, shortly after both of

(16:11):
us had left the city, a man named Alex Pretty
was killed by federal agents in what is obviously something
that you all are familiar with. And we just kind
of want to mark that because I think the tone
in what we're talking about right now is we're so
excited about these networks that people have been building. But

(16:33):
obviously the tone would have changed a little bit had
we recorded it only nine hours later, and we would
have been talking about something slightly different. And that's just
the breaks of podcasting.

Speaker 9 (16:44):
Yeah, the fundamental message, I guess wouldn't change, but we
all know that that doing what these people do can
have terrible costs, and we were reminded of that again.
Yeah Saturday morning. I guess we should just say that, like,
we agree his passing and we're sending her thoughts to
his family and the people who loved him. Yeah, it's

(17:06):
gonna be a really hard time for them.

Speaker 8 (17:08):
Absolutely, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Could Happen Here.
I'm one of your hosts, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me
today as my other host is James. Hi. Margaret, we
are doing a special crossover episode of it Could Happen

(17:28):
Here and Cool People who did cool stuff. And we're
doing it because James and I are in sunny Minneapolis,
which is true.

Speaker 9 (17:35):
The sun was out. Yeah, yeah, I saw the sun. Yeah, yeah,
I saw it through a cloud.

Speaker 8 (17:39):
Of cold, cold air, the vapor of our own breath freezing.
I have seen more people today with frozen eyelashes than
any other point in my life. But together.

Speaker 9 (17:53):
Yeah, I breathed into my goggles briefly and that froze,
yeah from my eyes. Yeah, yeah, it was minus thirty
fahrenheight feel I guess with wind shill, what is that
and what is that in Celsius they come together at
minus forty, So it's going to be like minus thirty five.

Speaker 8 (18:14):
I think something like that. It was.

Speaker 9 (18:16):
It was for those who are not familiar cold, very cold.

Speaker 8 (18:20):
And so the two of us came up to Minneapolis
a few days ago and we have spent the past
three days here talking to everyone we can about the
rapid response networks that people have built to try to
keep themselves and their neighbors safe from ice and federal
oppression and the sort of federal occupation of the city,

(18:41):
and so what we thought we would do this is
kind of Neither of us have written scripts. Yet we
are still here. We just had a fun, slightly hectic
day where we spent only about twenty minutes reasonably sure
we were getting arrested. We didn't get arrested. No, thank you, comrade. Train.
Yeah we got on a LA rail and we're able

(19:01):
to leave a kettle by a light rail, which is
a new experience for me. Yeah, I'm very European. Yeah,
and yeah, we came up here to talk to people
and that's been the like the story that I'm most
interested in, right, is that we have all of these
stories that are absolutely true. The stakes are really high here,
but the things that people are building here are really incredible,

(19:24):
and people know that they're holding down ice here in
a way that no one would have expected, I think,
And I don't know, So, yeah, you want to Should
we just talk about kind of our days? Yeah?

Speaker 9 (19:39):
I think I just want to ground people before we
do that in that so much as if reporting on
Minneapolis has focused on trauma, and so much reporting on
migrants focuses on trauma, right, And I think people who
have listened to our podcast know that that's not really
a game, and so I understand when they hear that
we've been in Minneapolis, I think we're going to talk
about horrific things that we've seen. I want to talk

(20:03):
more about the beautiful things that we've seen, because I
think those get missed and they're super important, especially if
you're listening in another city in the US which will
face some degree of this or is facing some degree
of this. Right, So I want to ground this in
saying that rather than talking about the trauma people experiencing,

(20:25):
which I'm sure will be incidental, I want to talk
about how closely people are holding each other here and
how special that is and what we can take from it.

Speaker 8 (20:33):
Yeah, and like without obviously we're like, we're not trying
to paint a rosy picture of what's happening here, because
what's happening here is like I must I'm a cold
hearted journalists, historian person, And I was crying the multiple
times in the past couple days as people told me
about some of the stuff they've experienced. But some of
it has been you know, we've asked people, We've said, like, hey,

(20:53):
what do you want people to take away from this?
And one of the main things is that kind of
a like hey, you can do it too kind of thing.
And the other thing that people have talked about is
like it would be really nice for people to see
that what we're doing is amazing here, even if it's
like coming out of such such horrendous adversity. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (21:16):
Like one of the things that I've taken throughout my
career is in hard times, we can build beautiful things. Yeah,
That's what I wrote my book about, really. Yeah, and
what I've tried to report.

Speaker 8 (21:26):
On all out of the world.

Speaker 9 (21:26):
They think this is more evidence of that, and so
like you're going to hear things which were amazing and
the people who've done them are wonderful, but they're not
uniquely special. You can do all these things too, and like,
I want you to see that it is possible where
you live.

Speaker 8 (21:45):
Yeah. So one of the first things that we did
when we got here we talked about, you know, to
put ourselves in the story. I drove a long way
and James flew a long way and yeah, you know,
I picked up Jane at the airport and we came
to where we're staying and we were talking about like
and it was late at night and we're like, all right,
what are we what are we trying to do tomorrow?

(22:06):
And what are we trying to see and what are
we trying to learn? Yeah, And one of the main
things one of the first questions we had was like,
what's the scale of what's happening here? Yeah? Right, Like,
like what were your impressions of the scale of what
was happening? Mmm? We should talk about what's happening here.
It's like really quickly, I bet you all know about
it in the news. Why do I have a different

(22:26):
tone of voice when I'm talking into a microphone in
this way, and so usually I'm in a zoom call.
But I staid, we're both sitting in a bedroom on
opposite ends of the bedroom talking into microphones, and I
somehow have a different cadence, and I don't know how
I feel about it. Also, I've had to drink caffeine,
which I don't do, because we've had to do an
awful lot. And anyway, what was I about to ask you.

Speaker 9 (22:48):
How widespread stuff is?

Speaker 10 (22:49):
Oh?

Speaker 8 (22:49):
Yeah, like, well, what was your okay? We were to
talk about what's happening here?

Speaker 9 (22:52):
But yeah, so if people aren't for media, werey ICE,
which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They're the agency charged
with removing people from the United States who are non citizens,
right who are considered deportable. Specifically, the branch of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement that we are seeing here is Enforcement
Removal Operations aka e o O. We're also seeing border

(23:13):
patrol right in the last year, actually more than a
year now, right this began under the bad deministration with
Operation Return to Sender in the Central Valley of California.
We are seeing border patrol agents used to do internal
enforcement right of people who are generally documented sometimes undocumented

(23:34):
but always non citizens. They are detaining them in the street,
they are detaining them outside schools, They're detaining them at
the bus stop, They're detaining them at places to work.
And when I say detaining, that's as they are grabbing
people out of cars. They're snatching children and using them
to bait out their parents. They're smashing people's car windows
and pulling them out. They're barging into businesses. In one case,

(23:56):
they at at a Mexican restaurant and then arrested the
workers later that day. I've visited a lot of places
where terrible things happen.

Speaker 8 (24:05):
Right.

Speaker 9 (24:06):
The ship that is happening here, it's a ship that
people come to America to get away from. Yeah, it
is men in masks with guns pulling people who have
done nothing wrong, who are here not harming anyone. People
who do not have criminal records. Just for the I
don't feel like I need to say that on this show,

(24:27):
but I need to say that every time I talk
about this. Right, like, the vast majority, something like eighty
percent last time I know to the status of these
people have no criminal records, and a criminal record could
be something like fucking parking in the wrong place.

Speaker 8 (24:38):
I've been arrested. Yeah. Also, I don't care. I would
give you a lot of crime. Everyone listening to this
has done a lot of crime. Whether or not you've
been caught, you're probably cried.

Speaker 9 (24:51):
Yeah you went a little bit too late through a
red light whatever, Like, I don't think that matters, actually exactly,
even if you're a lib, even if you believe it
or justice system is fair, it should be fair for everyone.
There shouldn't be different consequences for different people. Let's move
past that, right, So, how wide spread is this? Margaret
and I got in late, We sat up even later talking.

(25:14):
We got the shitty vegan pizza.

Speaker 8 (25:16):
We ate it. We kind of was, yeah, I've had better.
I won't name drop.

Speaker 9 (25:23):
We we woke up the next morning and within five
minutes while waking up, we heard like beat beep.

Speaker 8 (25:32):
Coming down the street. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (25:34):
Both Margaret and I ran to the front door, spent
a while trying to put on snow boots, and watched
an Ice agent rolling down the street in what they
normally drive in, right, which a rental SUVs with the
windows blacked out, and people following them alerting the block
the Ice was here, right.

Speaker 8 (25:53):
Yeah, and we're not downtown. We like picked an area
that's like slightly lightly out of it, but we got
warned that nowhere is goon free. Yeah, and they were right,
nowhere is good free.

Speaker 7 (26:03):
Right.

Speaker 9 (26:04):
I mean we have probably been within a thirty minute
radius of the spot we're staying at for three or
four days.

Speaker 8 (26:11):
Right.

Speaker 9 (26:11):
We've seen ICE pile their car into a telephone pole.
We've seen spent munitions on the floor, Ice tear gas
and people a few blocks from us, but they were
gone by the time we got there. And I don't
want to get this out like front and center at
the start, it was not Ice who kettle protesters. Today,
it was Hennepin County Sheriff's office. It was not Ice

(26:34):
who arrested people who approached them with their hands in
the air trying to work out what was going on.
That was Helipin County Sheriff's office. I've seen press conferences
with Minneapolis police. I don't know what their deal is.
I'll tell you the Hennepin County Sheriff's office for actively
participating in this. Right, I'm not buying this local cops good.
This will shock listeners. I'm not buying the local cops good.

(26:56):
Federal cops. Bad narrative when cops get asked what site
they're on? Now the side of the other cops.

Speaker 8 (27:01):
Well, it's interesting because the thing that you have is
that you have you know, there's the great classic like
if those were neutral in times of oppression or siding
with the oppressors, right, Yeah, because the overall situation here,
it seems to be, is that you do have much
more the oppressive force here as an outside forces compared
to any other protest movement I've seen in the United States.
People are very aware that it is outsiders who have

(27:24):
come to their city to steal their neighbors.

Speaker 7 (27:27):
Yeah, right, And.

Speaker 8 (27:28):
So because of that, the federal forces are the forces
everyone's mad at, whereas a lot of the people who
are standing up to federal forces are neutral or fine
with police, and even like the concept of other federal agencies.
They just don't want people snatching neighbors. Now that's not universal,
but it's like some of the people we've talked to. Yeah,
but what state level law enforcement has decided is that

(27:52):
they are committed to keeping the peace and they can't
keep the peace against ice, which they probably on some
level morally know that they need into but they don't
and instead they're like, all right, well we can mess
up with the you know.

Speaker 9 (28:04):
The protest. We protested the great protested, right.

Speaker 8 (28:08):
But yeah, like when we saw people drive down honking
the very first thing that we experienced in this town,
and we weren't sure what it was. We were like,
that is that people following ice and honking. And I
had done a fair amount of research before I came,
and I kind of knew about the whistles, and but
I didn't really know about this like incredible network that
people have built.

Speaker 9 (28:28):
Yeah, that what we saw was not in any way exceptional, right,
that was just a standard treat on a Wednesday morning.

Speaker 8 (28:35):
Yeah, And so we get into we get into my
vehicle and we start driving. You know, we have some
places we think we're going to go check out. We
have some you know, friends who are local who are
going to talk to us. And we get like two
blocks three blocks before we find people protecting Somali daycare. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (28:54):
Right, we uh, well before that, right, we went to
the food c up to get food. Yeah, And we
went into the food we got our food, and on
the way out, we see this big old sign on
the door which is like we're closed on the twenty
third ice out of Minnesota. Yeah, I sat in Minneapolis
whatever it is, and it's in English and Spanish, and
it's like, in solidarity with our migrant neighbors, we're not opening.

Speaker 8 (29:14):
Yeah, And like.

Speaker 9 (29:15):
Obviously it's a food cut op, right, it's not a
reactionary space that sort of planted a seed for me, Like, ah,
like this is a big ass business, you know, like
like it's not a business that necessarily relies on migrant labor.
But I can see it being a space for people
in solidarity. I wonder how why that is right? And
they even in the time we've been here, I've seen
businesses put those up that didn't happen. We were going

(29:37):
out on Wednesday, right, like people being like, nah, this
isn't right, but yeah, to go back. We What happened
was that Margaret was driving. I was riding next to Margaret.
I saw a group of people, one guy ahead, kind
of tanned trousers on and I was like stop, Margaret.
Margaret slowed down, signaled and turned into the parking lot.

(29:58):
Of these folks were apt and they they had seen
us right ham on the brakes and turn up in
a vehicle with that estate plates. Then we then we
better go speak to these people. We probably scared them.

Speaker 8 (30:09):
What's fin is we thought we scared them. No, yeah,
they're not scared of us. No, they're looking to see
if they're onto us. And it's such a huge difference,
right right, because when people are scoping us out, they're
not like, oh, that might be ice. They're like, is
that ice? Let's fucking get them.

Speaker 10 (30:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (30:25):
Yeah, like if that's ice, we need to roll right,
we need to we need to let people know, we
need to start honking, we need start whistling.

Speaker 8 (30:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (30:31):
So we get out, walk over and we start talking
to these people. And like, the person who was most
forth right, most forthcoming was an older lady. I mean
she shared her ragel. I think it's fine to say.
I think seventy six. Yeah, it's probably a round zero
fair andheigh, like even like that warmer than that, right, so,
like you know minus ten celsius something there.

Speaker 8 (30:52):
Yeah, plate's not wearing a hat. Yeah, just give a fuck. Yeah,
I'm chilly in my brand new winter clothes. Yeah, I
live outside in the mountain. I don't live outside anymore,
but I live in the mountains.

Speaker 9 (31:04):
Yeah, yeah, I'm wearing all my nice technical gear show
on to Parker and yeah, and she's just like so zealous,
is like she's so happy to be doing what she's doing,
and so proud of herself for being the person who
did it. Yeah, and in an earnest way, like in
a way that a self congratulatory way, but just in

(31:25):
a like I am one hundred percent convinced I'm in
the right, and I will talk to you. Yeah, and
I will say it with my whole chest. Yeah, Like,
do you want to share some of the stuff you said?
I thought it's really.

Speaker 8 (31:35):
One of the things that she said that, yeah, Like
I mean, you know, she I didn't get the impression
she was like a wild political radical or something, right,
and she's just like, you know, my father fought fascists
in France and Italy, and like he would be proud
of me, and like, yeah, I'm sure he would be. Yeah,
and I'm.

Speaker 9 (31:54):
Sure it would be disgusted at what's fucking happening.

Speaker 8 (31:57):
Yeah. And you know, and while we're talking, the Somali
family who's daycare it is, comes out and gives us
symbosas and we're like no, no, no, no, we're journalists. You
don't have to give us anything. We're like not even helping.
We're like, they're like, you're here, you're with us, you
are taking food?

Speaker 9 (32:15):
Yeah, guy, like no where some monies we feed people
like yeah, what's your deally vegetarian?

Speaker 8 (32:20):
We're like, we're with vegan.

Speaker 10 (32:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (32:21):
So he comes out, goes back, comes out with vegan ones. Yeah,
like they were delicious.

Speaker 8 (32:25):
Yeah, No, there's the best food I've ever eaten. As
we're standing there, more people come and go. So you're like, Okay,
this is happening here, right, you know, no pun intended.
And we as we we leave, we talk to a
few more people we leave, and and some of the
other people we talk to are like and the people
from different scenes, it's not you know, like.

Speaker 9 (32:41):
It's not just an old lady scene, right, it's a
diverse crowd, right.

Speaker 8 (32:44):
And you know, we talk to a father who I
tangentially know through the metal scene, who is like, yeah,
my kid goes to school here. Yeah, like no one
is taking kids while I can stand here, you know,
And he was like, I have work to be doing it.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
You know.

Speaker 8 (33:01):
He's like, we're supposed to be recording this band today
or whatever, and he's like, no, I'm here, I'm doing this.
There's no sadness, you know, there's.

Speaker 9 (33:09):
No He's like, this is what I have to be doing.

Speaker 8 (33:11):
It's the most important thing to do. Every two blocks
there are people on the corner, usually two people, sometimes alone.
And those what we later learned because we were like,
holy shit, there's ice watchers everywhere. Yeah, those are just
the marked people we see. That's the minority. There are

(33:32):
people driving constantly in very organized but entirely decentralized networks
of rapid response where they have come together in these
like hyper local Signal loops. Signal is an encrypted messaging
app that you can use on any device Android iPhone.

(33:53):
The government can't break its encryption. However, there's no truly
safe system.

Speaker 9 (33:58):
It's the safest when we have and it will amount
that he deletes mess user after a period of day if.

Speaker 8 (34:02):
You set it up to yeah, and which you should.
And so people are using this system, and you know
a ton of these people had never heard of Signal
before in their life and now they're using this system.
And also we talked to folks and people felt that
like a certain level of transparency about the networks they're
building is very useful.

Speaker 9 (34:17):
Yeah, we should probably address this head on, like just
to be super clearly. Yeah, everything we are sharing is
because people have implored us to share it.

Speaker 8 (34:25):
Right.

Speaker 9 (34:26):
We did not sneak in and find its information. People
openly gave it to us because they wanted you to
hear it.

Speaker 8 (34:32):
Right, Because they understand that this is the kind of
system that is currently proving effective and they want people
to learn from what they're doing, and so they've created
hyper local systems like block by block. We have groups
where neighbors are able to check in on neighbors and
people are able to say, hey, I saw this thing right, yeah,

(34:53):
you know, And so there is constant presence all over town.
And when I say town, we spent our time in Minneapolis,
but we have talked to a lot of people always
say the same Paul is doing a similar thing, suburbs
are doing a similar thing, even some small towns elsewhere
in Minnesota. You're starting to do this.

Speaker 9 (35:10):
Yeah, I don't quite know where the town is, but
if people are local, Like a few years ago, I
went to a massive renfare here and already outed myself
it's okay. I brought a cloak I must wear and folks.
Folks all the way out there are doing it too.
Which is that was that place had a rural Midwest vibe,
let me tell you.

Speaker 8 (35:28):
And so people are doing this all over.

Speaker 9 (35:30):
I have never seen unity like this, No, Like the
only time I've seen a city this much in lockstep
is when I was in Comishlo in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 8 (35:42):
And where is that.

Speaker 9 (35:44):
Comishlo is the capital of what is generally referred to
as Rajava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
And at that time we were being bombed by Turkey.
Turkey takes offense at Kurdish people having any autonomy. And
this is what that felt like, because there is someone
invading your town and taking your friends.

Speaker 8 (36:04):
Yeah, and everyone.

Speaker 9 (36:06):
I remember there were funerals, right, so one bomb killed
thirty four, say, show the internal security forces, and remember
everyone rolled out for the funeral like it was like
a general strike. And that's what it feels like here,
Like you could walk through town the day that happened
and see people were sad and but they were sharing
their sadness. And here people are mad and they're sharing

(36:28):
their anger but also their love for one another.

Speaker 8 (36:31):
Yeah, even when someone was killed by Ice. This did
not stop people from doing this work. Yeah, it brought
more people out to do this work because people are like, no, this, this,
this work needs to be done. And on some level
the scale is that, right, Like, because if someone is
seeking asylum, like, no one runs unless they have a reason,

(36:51):
you know, And so sending people back to the places
that they've sought asylum from often just means killing people.

Speaker 9 (36:59):
Yeah, I mean, look at the things that have happened
in the last month. Right, gay men being sent back
to Iran, where the punishment for that is death. People
from this community, Korene people right being sent back to
Mianmar where we know that they are directly delivered to
a military prison. They are sending people back to Mauritania,
where again you can be punished for being queer by death. Right, Like,

(37:23):
what is happening here is that people's lives are at stake.
I think sometimes people think, oh, we think of Vinie.
You go out a place where life is less, you know,
you don't.

Speaker 8 (37:31):
Have a target.

Speaker 9 (37:32):
No, that's not the deal. We're sending people back to Venezuela. Right,
We're sending people from the US to Venezuela. The US,
notably just kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Those people aren't
going to have a nice time, right, And if you
were a US intelligence agency and you wanted to insert
people into Venezuela, that's how.

Speaker 8 (37:51):
You would do it. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (37:52):
And Venezuela knows that venez we are then that dumb
and they are very paranoid. Yeah, and they are a
state which has a great deal of ability to do
finance based on that paranoia.

Speaker 8 (38:02):
And so people are aware of the stakes and they're
they're doing something about it. And what's cool. It's so
interesting because at the same time, but you know, there's
a little bit of like, yeah, we're built different and
certainly around the cold. That is absolutely true. And there
is all of this stuff in the history of at
least Minneapolis that people have built resistance out of, right,

(38:24):
you know, all of this very active multiculturalism going back decades.
We've talked to organizers who grew up and you know,
we talked to an organizer grew up in the American
Indian movement and was talking about like black and Indigenous
solidarity going back to the sixties and seventies, right, and
you know, and was saying, like there's all of this
multicultural and solidarity. There's also all of these like cultural events, right.

(38:46):
They have this huge Mayday parade right, or festival every year.
It's funny, I've spent a lot time in Minneapolis, but
I've never actually been here for this, but everyone's always
talking about it, where basically people go to this park
and build puppets and build giant puppets together. But it's
it's decentralized, and so there's all of this history of
decentralized organizing. And in twenty twenty, of course, you know,

(39:07):
the the uprising kind of began here and people are
very aware of that, and so they have all of
these networks that have been built for years, and they
weren't necessarily like crazy active in the intervening years. But
people know each other on some level. And that's the
thing though, because we expected kind of I expected people
being like, ah, yes, they had all of these deep interconnections,

(39:30):
and most people were talking to are like, no, I
know my neighbors. Now do you know six months ago
we had the we have these like small seeds, right,
and so there, so people here are and aren't special
about that, but do you know what is special? Else?
I can buy I shut it to think, Margaret. I

(39:51):
think what's special is the fact that you and I
run anti capitalist podcasts. It's special as a lot of meanings. Yeah,
that are inter by advertisements. Yeah, it is. It is different.
It is a thing. And here they are.

Speaker 9 (40:06):
Yeah, thank you please in certain name of advertiser here
for buying us a low grade vegan pizza which still
cost us more than fifty dollars.

Speaker 8 (40:25):
Andrew back.

Speaker 9 (40:26):
Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about like
the structures that exist, right, and I think probably the
way to do that is to break this down into
two distinct I guess categories. And I think these are
distinct in terms of organizing for the most part. Right,
one is mutual aid and one is rapid response. And

(40:47):
I just want to break down why people are doing
mutual aid.

Speaker 8 (40:51):
First.

Speaker 9 (40:51):
First of all, we're doing mutual aid because it is
the way that we build a better world by taking
care of one another without trying to extract profit from
one another. Why they're doing it is because people right
now who are at risk of deportation are afraid to
leave their homes.

Speaker 8 (41:06):
They are living like a lot of Jewish people lived
in nuts.

Speaker 9 (41:11):
This is a this is a comparison to somebody whose
grandparents fled the Holocaust made for us today.

Speaker 8 (41:18):
Like Jewish people did Nazi Germany. Right.

Speaker 9 (41:20):
The difference is this time they know their neighbors have
their back. Yeah, and so they're afraid to go out.

Speaker 8 (41:26):
Right.

Speaker 9 (41:26):
Schools are offering remote education because kids are afraid to
go to school because ice has been hitting school bus stops.

Speaker 8 (41:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (41:34):
People can't go out and get groceries, and they can't
go to their jobs, so they can't pay their bills.
And so that requires if we want to take care
of people, we have to feed them. We have to
help them pay their bills, meet their material needs, get
their kids educated. That is a heavy lift. Capitalism extracts
are pretty heavy fee for paying rent. Right, we give

(41:55):
most of our lives, yeah, capital so that we can
get food and pay rent, clothes and shit. We have
to do that without that here, right, And people are
doing it. So they are organizing food drop off, they're
organizing diaper banks, they're organizing to give people rides who
might not feel safe driving by themselves. Yeah, they're taking

(42:18):
people's kids some often.

Speaker 11 (42:19):
Right.

Speaker 9 (42:19):
A scenario that I'm very familiar with is citizen children
born to non citizen parents, So those kids, no one
is safe when you have this many people running around
with weapons, right and very poor training and then a
lot of anger and yeah, not very good at driving
in the snow. But their kids are still able to
go out and go to school. But it's about idea

(42:41):
for their parents are taken, right. So you're seeing people
organizing school runs, getting food for people. Then you've got
businesses that are owned by migrants, right like there, or
businesses that are largely staffed by migrants. So it's trying
to keep those places afloat so that community can continue
to care for itself. But when it's workers can't come
in or what if the majority of the clian tell

(43:03):
of the business of migrants, well maybe people volunteer to
do delivery, right, so that that business can stay afloat
and those migrants can still get the foods that make
them feel safe at a time when they don't feel safe.
Whatever it is, right, people are meeting each other's needs
without trying to extract like financial compensation from each other.

Speaker 8 (43:22):
And to talk about the decentralized nature of this again,
and it's like hyper local, like no org. Many orgs,
but no one org. Stepped in and was like, ah,
this is the way to do it. Here's this top
down flow chart. Instead. All of these groups started in
different ways, like we've talked to people from like different neighborhoods,

(43:43):
where like ah, it all started like this, and then
they paint a completely different picture from people from three
blocks over.

Speaker 12 (43:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (43:51):
Yeah, And like you know, someone was like the mutual
aid here started with one mom who was like, while
I'm making food, yeah, and in her own kitchen made food. Yeah.
And then it was like I will carry the entire
weight of the world as necessary upon my shoulders.

Speaker 9 (44:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And then other people.

Speaker 8 (44:11):
Were like, okay, I'll help you lift this. I think
of the have you seen the meme about like I
can't lift weights with my anarchist friends. No, I can't
lift weights with my anarchist friends because every time I
did pick up the bar bell, like thirty of my
friends come over and help me lift the bar bells
while singing John Henry.

Speaker 9 (44:31):
Yeah it's perfect.

Speaker 8 (44:32):
And that's like what's happening here? Yeah, you know. And
so so one person starts doing this thing and people say, oh,
that's a good idea, and there are these other networks
that can then tie that in and people will be
heavily involved in one network and have a little bit
of an understanding what's happening in the other networks. Yeah,
but enough people are talking to each other that they're
learning best practices, they're learning what doesn't doesn't work, and

(44:55):
they're also changing to get to mean the threat.

Speaker 9 (44:58):
Yeah, I think the thing is here that no one's
coming in with like tax deductible funding.

Speaker 8 (45:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (45:04):
Right, this is just people taking care of people.

Speaker 8 (45:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (45:07):
That has been sustainable for some time, right, like since
since mid December we're now in late January. That is
a thing that like there is a need for money, yeah,
to keep making that happen. And that is an area
where people outside of Minneapolis going to help if they
want to. So I just want to flag that, Yeah,
and we will drop some resources at the end of
these two episodes, and we'll drop at the end of

(45:27):
the first episode and hopefully you'll, if you feel so inclined,
you'll be able to help financially. But yeah, let's talk
about rapid response. ICE is not as large of an
agency as they wish there was. You know, there's so
much news about how hard of a time they're having
hiring people to the point where they like hired the
like leftist journalist too, was like, yeah, applied as a joke,

(45:48):
you know here.

Speaker 10 (45:50):
You know.

Speaker 8 (45:50):
And so they've they've had the surge here, the flood
they called it, I believe of agents here and you
know there's about three thousand I think the ice agents
in the city. Yeah, I think it was met first
surge here midway flood was Chicago, Okay, And they can't
do that everywhere at once. So if you play video games,

(46:10):
Minneapolis is tanking. Did do you know the concept of tanking? Yeah,
you'd ask to be a video game Dungeons Dragons, I know,
I know they do it. Yeah, you can tank in
Dungeons and Dragons, but the actual weirdly, I think the
concept of tanking comes not from Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah,
later additions that this is a nerd tangent.

Speaker 9 (46:28):
Anyway, James and Margaret talked about Dungeons Dragons eptomology.

Speaker 8 (46:32):
Yeah, the concept is that one person stands there and
takes the damage while other people heal that person and
do damage to the people attacking that person or prepare themselves. Yeah. Well,
in the video game version, as you you know, one
person takes all the damage while everyone else is also

(46:54):
helping do the damage back. Yes, that's literally just the
world of warcraft version. But Minneapolis is tanking. The Twin
Cities and Minnesota are tanking, and all of the ice
agents that are here aren't somewhere else. And one of
the ways that they're making that possible it is through
rapid response and rapid response that's what the name says.

(47:17):
That is a way to respond rapidly. Which is the
other Okay, this is the other question I had coming in.
Why does this work? This was my thought. I was like,
why does blowing whistles at ice agents make them not
able to kidnap people?

Speaker 10 (47:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (47:28):
So I was like, does this work? That was one
of the main questions we ask people. The answer is yes,
it doesn't work all the time. This is still a
tragic situation where everyone involves is kind of traumatized to
medium to greater degrees. I don't want to say the
lesser degrees. But what happens is is that if the

(47:52):
ice agents are out numbered, they usually don't successfully abduct anyone,
even though they're the only harmed people in the situation.
Even though they theoretically the way that police would act.
Being outnumbered. It helps, but it's not as much of
a game changer. Yeah, with ICE being wildly unpopular occupying

(48:13):
force so far at least currently, outnumbering them seems to
often stop abductions. At first, I believe decemberish, the way
that ICE was handling things was these big, spectacular raids
that we've seen in a lot of places. Thirty agents
are showing up and raiding this place, right, and so
if you get a call about that, a rapid response

(48:33):
can be twenty minutes, it can be thirty minutes. You
can show up and you're still part of fighting against
this happening. And this is what's happening all over the country, right. Yeah,
So ICE here adapted and started moving faster and faster. Yeah,
and so now often these abductions take two or three minutes.
So they were like, how do we get a crowd
in two minutes? And when when an organizer first, like

(48:56):
everyone here as an organizer, When a person who does
this first suggested that's to me, my thought was like,
well you don't, Yeah, that's impossible, it's not They do it, yeah,
and they do it because everyone here in Minneapps like
I cannot everyone everyone, but I I haven't run across
too many counterexamples. Yeah, is themselves willing to respond, yeah like,

(49:23):
and so when you hear people honking and whistles outside,
you go outside.

Speaker 9 (49:31):
Yeah, I mean we heard someone was mentioning that they
had seen and to be clear, this morning again the
real feel was in the minus thirties celsius and fahrenheit,
which is the last Friday if you're but they have
said they were on the block, they heard some honking,
they come outside their theybis were outside and cut off
pajama pants and crogs, screaming and blowing whistles.

Speaker 8 (49:53):
Yeah, right, like, and.

Speaker 9 (49:55):
You we saw it, even when someone mistook us for
ice agents. Right and within a couple of minutes, a
couple of people are come and we were to girl
with journalists like yeah, long hair like yeah exactly like
crusty like you can you can see us coming but
out of state plates.

Speaker 8 (50:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (50:12):
A city is made of people, right like that. The
people are out there, the blood pumping through the veins
of a city. It's not made buildings, and there are
people everywhere, and when all of them are willing to
show up, right or half of them.

Speaker 8 (50:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (50:27):
Well, in the entire time we have seen here, the
only person who has expressed any negativity about what is
happening is a person in a truck today who was
honking at a large protest that we were part of
in a way that was clearly adversarial. Oh yeah, yeah,
literally one person.

Speaker 8 (50:42):
He was also stuck.

Speaker 9 (50:43):
Yeah, he was also stuck and had been stuck for
some time, and it struggling with a merged situation that happened.

Speaker 8 (50:49):
When we actually don't know his political opinions. He was unhappy,
he was.

Speaker 9 (50:54):
Just That's the only person I've seen express any upset.
Like every person I can guess out at the supermarket,
the people who we have run into a coffee shops right, like, yeah,
Randos outside the Dollar General store. Yeah, people we see
in the street. But people we see in the street
are standing it. It's cold as fuck. No one, it's

(51:15):
just like vibing on a park bench currently. But everyone, yeah,
is one hundred in.

Speaker 8 (51:21):
It on the fuck these guys page, Yeah, like we
we today we heard about an ice vehicle that crashed
indoor pole And this is actually fairly calm, and I
believe because one they don't know how to drive in ice, yeah,
and Minneapolis is icy, and they were driving like a
I don't know whether the vehicles all we were driving not.
It was a Ford escape, yeah, but it was some

(51:43):
not altering tires.

Speaker 9 (51:44):
Yeah, No, those were pretty those were some Californior ass
to ice.

Speaker 8 (51:48):
Yeah. And it's just crashed in a pole in a
like pretty impressive way, like they had to be gone
at a decent speed.

Speaker 10 (51:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (51:54):
They both hair bags are deployed, the radiator was done,
the engine block was you know, like, Yeah, they'd crumpled
the front of the car. It's because they drive erratically
when people are driving behind them try and get rid
of them, and they are driving ill equipped, both skill
wise and vehicle wise.

Speaker 8 (52:11):
Yeah. And so we showed up. Yeah, an hour and
a half after the crash. They just abandoned the vehicle.
They're like, they came and got some of their stuff
out of the car, toss some to your guys, Yeah,
tossed them. S here, guys. We saw the canister on
the ground of SATs gas and they just left it
there and they were not going to clean it up.
I don't believe they will ever clean it up. That'll

(52:31):
be on the local police or whoever, you know, city
And we're standing there and a guy drives by and
he's just a normal man. Yeah, no distinguishing features, no
man yet, no belief to be a subcultural or lefty
or someone drives by and it is like, oh shit,
is everyone okay? And I was like, oh, that's a

(52:53):
nice vehicle and he just starts laughing the park say
his car. He gets down and this happens over and
this is must have been happening over and over over
an hour to happen.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (53:05):
What else I noticed then was like, so we were
walking up and this this this person popped out of
their house and was like, hey, what's happening.

Speaker 8 (53:12):
We're like, oh, I spitfed it into this pole. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (53:15):
And they were like okay, if you guys need anything,
like I'm here, I'm taking care of some kids or
an elder.

Speaker 8 (53:20):
I can't remember, but they were like, you need to
come in the house. It's called just come to come
knock on the door, like you need a hot drink,
you know, like and one more press. We're not like hello,
we are the activists, you know. Yeah, like you know,
I'm to be clear, I'm wearing a helmet mark. Were
both wearing helmets with with big blue press patches on them.
So one of the things I noticed is like, and
it's been repeated a bit and then reported on a

(53:40):
little bit, like these three D printed whistles, right, Yeah.

Speaker 9 (53:43):
One of the ways that people identify someone was saying
them that people know you're cool.

Speaker 8 (53:48):
It's like people are.

Speaker 9 (53:49):
All carrying whistles around the next like almost I was
just keeping an eye on this is as we met
people throughout the last few days. Everybody had a caribbean
with their keys and a whistle on it, or a
whistle on their neck, or there was a whistle on
a lanyard on their wrist. It's like a little market.

Speaker 8 (54:05):
And what's interesting is we've talked to people about how
at the beginning, I mean a lot of people are
like this seems kind of silly. Yeah right, You're like, oh,
they're the federal I mean they're the Gestapo, right yeah yeah,
and we have whistles and so it seems so absurd. Yeah,
but there's so many parts of it they hate. They
want to operate in secrecy. Yeah. Yeah, we see watchers

(54:28):
on every corner. We don't see ice, like this is
a city under occupation. But it's like visibly under occupation
by its own defenders. Yeah right, it is like infiltrated
by federal agents. Not like you don't you know, I've
been in places where you have like the the police
rolling around in their tank things with yeah, and like

(54:51):
this isn't that because they can't actually express much force.

Speaker 9 (54:56):
They can't even be seen as you go. They're trying
their very hardest to right. They have tinted vehicles, they
cover their faces. They keep getting different rentals so people
can't recognize it. Yeah, like they are trying their best
to blend in and failing.

Speaker 8 (55:11):
Yeah. And everyone having a whistle. So not only is
it effective because it draws attention to them, it makes
you a defender. It's a very cheap and easy way.
You hand them a whistle, and you're handling them responsibility.
You're saying like you are now it's like I mean,

(55:32):
it's handing some of their goddamn sword.

Speaker 13 (55:35):
You know.

Speaker 9 (55:35):
It a like night Fantasy land way right, Yeah, like
you're one of us when we take care of each other,
and you are going to defend people. Yeah, and you're
going to defend people by casting these people Like it's
so interesting because I'm so used to thinking like power
doesn't need to hide, right, Like, yeah, you know when
journalists are like, oh, well, what they really fear is

(55:56):
the truth, and you know, I'm like, well.

Speaker 8 (55:58):
Power doesn't need to hide.

Speaker 9 (55:59):
By the power is not with the folks driving around
and occupying the city right now. The more relevant power
is with the folks standing on street corners who don't
feel the need to hide, who want afraid, right.

Speaker 8 (56:14):
And like, this is part of why I hate saying
things like this. I think we're gonna win. Yeah, And
I haven't felt that way in years, And like, yeah,
I think that this spirit, the spirit that is animating
this city is the thing that will get us through it.

(56:36):
And when I say when when conditions are all weird
and hard and we're going to lose a lot of people,
like we're going to lose a lot of like.

Speaker 9 (56:44):
Grabbing people up the street here every day to spy
ale of.

Speaker 8 (56:46):
This because when I'm like, oh, people are stopping so
many abductions, they're also everyone we've talked to has stop
abductions and failed to stop abductions. Yeah, and that haunts
a lot of them. I think I think so too,
And yeah, people are really torn between those two things.

Speaker 9 (57:03):
Yeah, I'll just say that like as someone who's been
in it for a minute when it comes to like
advocacy for migrants, right. Yeah, If I go back three
years ago to twenty twenty three, it was one hundred
crusties and anarchists and Quakers and Sikhs who were feeding

(57:24):
thousands of people in the desert, right and in a
big city metro area of three million people forty five
minutes away. People didn't believe me when I told them
it was happening, because nobody gave a shit, to include
the local media. Then I was in La right in
summer this year, and there were young folks there who
were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, right,

(57:45):
and did really inspire instud really inspiring stuff and very
brave stuff. And so many of them were those kids
who are in that situation where they are citizens and
their parents are not. Yeah, and they believe in the
right to a freedom of expression of speech, and they
came to use it.

Speaker 8 (57:56):
Right.

Speaker 9 (57:58):
But I could walk five blocks from there and it
could have.

Speaker 8 (58:01):
Been any other day in La right. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (58:04):
I went to a fancy coffee shop. I overpaid for
coffee because.

Speaker 8 (58:08):
The white people didn't give a shit. I mean, or
if you didn't for the most part. No, you're right,
could have been.

Speaker 9 (58:12):
They cared. I think they cared. A lot of people say, oh,
it's terrible was happening. Yeah, but you know, some people
spoke to me about their film script. We say, lay write,
that's a given. But it did not feel like the
city was locked in.

Speaker 8 (58:25):
This feels different to that.

Speaker 9 (58:28):
Yeah, it feels more locked in than it even felt
in twenty twenty. Yeah, because everybody's fesis is an external thing.

Speaker 8 (58:38):
Yeah, but do you know what doesn't like doing transitions
right now? It's me. I don't actually like doing it,
but that is my job. And here's a maths and
we're back. The external threat part is really fascinating and

(59:01):
is like a key to a lot of this. I believe,
you know, the difference between the tone of twenty twenty,
where it was this nationwide internal threat. This is still
absolutely present, right, is absolutely all of the problems from
twenty twenty, yeah are still here. Yeah, earlier today and
we watched them arrest a lawyer. Yeah, and we'll get

(59:22):
to that. But the thing I've been thinking about is
that in protest movements you often say things like oh,
what radicalized you? Or I got radicalized by this, or yeah,
this isn't radical, even though it's higher stakes, more risk, like, yeah,
it's not radical to say, Man, I don't think you
should kidnap literal children, you know, I don't think it's normal.

Speaker 9 (59:47):
Yeah, Like, which is why very normal people are very
pissed off.

Speaker 8 (59:50):
Yeah, and like and one of the things has come
up from multiple people, you know, and and the internet
commenters will say, well, then why they vote this way?
And that's just a that doesn't get us anywhere. Yeah,
what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, we've talked to
a bunch of people who are like, oh, yeah, that
Republican business has closed for the general strike. Or my

(01:00:12):
neighbor who is very conservative, is pissed as hell.

Speaker 9 (01:00:16):
Yeah I saw a sign today and we'll get to
the big protest. I sorry, what would Ronald Reagan do?

Speaker 8 (01:00:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 9 (01:00:22):
The person right, So this person has not just thought that. Yeah,
they have got out their pens and paper and their
crafting supplies. They've made that sign, They've got their ass
down to the middle of town and it is minus ten,
minus fifteen, and they are out and about with their
what would Ronald Reagan sign, right, because they have that
pissed off and.

Speaker 8 (01:00:40):
No one's mad at them. Yeah, because at a certain
point it doesn't matter. Yeah, rather they were here. Yeah,
like exactly, And like the thing I've been thinking about
a lot is that glad you're here gets so much
further than what took you so long. Yeah, and they're
just is a line the federal government has crossed it.

(01:01:03):
And the more people who are aware of that, the better.

Speaker 9 (01:01:07):
Yeah. I think it's really important that part of the
organizing here has been so wide and so inclusive and
so broad and.

Speaker 8 (01:01:16):
Yet so focused. Right.

Speaker 9 (01:01:17):
Yeah, it's so focused on keeping their neighbors safe. And
that's it can be so broad because most people think
that's the right thing to do. That is what is
allowing them to do this right now. Yeah, And it
doesn't matter where someone was yesterday or in November of
twenty twenty four, if they're on a street corner today
looking out for their neighbors.

Speaker 8 (01:01:37):
And I'll say that I'm not going to name them,
but to shout out part of the reason I'm here
is that like someone I know who I don't know,
if they have a political ideology to their name, just
you know, a young queer person I know was talking
to them a couple of weeks ago, and they were
telling me about how, you know, I didn't understand the

(01:01:58):
scope of the rapid response networks, but it's hard to
see from outside.

Speaker 9 (01:02:02):
Yes, yeah, yeah, and necessarily it's something that people don't
always talk about to everyone, right.

Speaker 8 (01:02:07):
Right, totally, And so, you know, talking to this person
and they're like, oh, earlier today, I you know, went
and stood in front of apartment building because of ICE.
And I was like, your apartment building and They're like, no,
about a block away, and I'm like okay, and they're like, yeah,
I just want to go stand out front to make
sure ICE didn't get in. And I'm like, okay, I

(01:02:27):
don't quite understand, you know. And then they're like, oh yeah,
and I you know, I go to the hotels where
Ice are at and me and my friends sit there
and write down license plates and and I'm just like,
and I'm imagining this is just like an activity they're doing.
I don't quite understand, you know, But I'm like, why
are you doing it?

Speaker 5 (01:02:44):
Right?

Speaker 8 (01:02:44):
And not that not that it's a it's an obvious
answer on some level, but they're like because I told
myself I was someone who would do it's right. Yeah,
and I think that in all of our hearts, we
tell ourselves that when it comes down to it, we
do it's right. And like, you know, people like talking
about like comparisons between now in Nazi Germany and the

(01:03:04):
rise of fascism, and they're like, you know, there's the
meme about like how on end and up fascists if
you're failing an open note test? Yeah, yeah, you know,
but Minneapolis doesn't fail in the open note test.

Speaker 9 (01:03:16):
Yeah, yeah, they are passing with flying colors, right, Like yeah,
I mean yeah, I think you know you and I
have both history appreciators, and history has taught us a lot, right,
the big coalitions do better than small one or ones
a fracturing tow a million pieces that like, leadership isn't
what we need. Participation is what we need. Yeah, and yeah,

(01:03:38):
you see a lot of it in action here. And
like all of us, right, like anyone who's spent any
time reading, writing, learning, listening to history whatever sort, what
would I do? We're finding out is that yeah, we're
not learning at having thought what would I do? And
most people have said, well, I wouldn't be one of
the ones who did something. Yeah, so they're doing something.

Speaker 8 (01:04:00):
Yeah, And I think about maybe my last thought for
today is that when ice abducts people, which they do
every day, Yeah, did they just disappear people? Right? They
just show up? They pull someone over literally just for
being brown, to be really transparent. Yeah, Like the the
police have come out and been like, could you please

(01:04:22):
stop pulling over all of the brown cops? Yeah? Right, yeah.
Like and when they when they pull someone over, they
just take them and they leave the car, sometimes running,
sometimes in drive, yeah, and just drive away. And I
was like, are we walking into a ghost town? Right?

(01:04:43):
Are we going to see this everywhere? And like, in
my three days here, I haven't seen the abandoned vehicle
except the ice abandoned vehicle that get crashed. But it
is happening every day, and we have talked to people
who see it every day. And a very common activity
is the ghastly approaching an abandoned vehicle abandons though the

(01:05:06):
vehicle that has been has been stolen, and trying to
figure out who the fuck it was, and going through
and finding the information to contact people's loved ones and
say like, hey, your your wife has been stolen. Yeah,
you know, and like and that, and we were talking

(01:05:29):
to you know, a decent number of the people that
we talked to about this were Jewish, and they're you know,
talking about like this is what my family told me about. Yeah,
you know, and like that was one of the first
things that someone told me that really made me cry.
This whole thing has been like really challenging all my

(01:05:53):
cynicism and detached us from from hard things. But hearing
those stories and then just seeing the people who do that,
which could be anybody. Yeah, because people step up. It's
a god I just I say, I can only imagine it,

(01:06:15):
you know, but it like that is a daily reality.
Here is someone was just stolen. Yeah, a person was
just stolen, and I have to go through their effects
to figure out who they were. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:06:30):
I guess when we were speaking about that, I was
thinking about experiences I've had in the desert right where
you find someone's bag, Yeah, as they're walking through and
it's got too hot, they've taken off their bag, and
you go through all the little ephemera, the little things
that people thought were worth carrying across the world, and
you try to piece together their life and work out
who they are, and you look at picture of their children,

(01:06:51):
and you look at picture through their spouse and their home,
and you hope that they're okay, right, And in this instance,
they're not right. And it's not the abstract violence of
the structures of borders and walls and surveillances that have
killed them or taken them. In this instance, right, it's
five people in masks in a car over there, and

(01:07:12):
it's happening in the middle of cities where people can
see it.

Speaker 8 (01:07:14):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:07:14):
Part of the function of the border is to take
the violence away from where people can see it. And
they got away with that for so long that they
figured they could just bring it into cities. And it
makes my heart so proud that when people could see it,
they said, fuck, no, you're not doing this in my town.
Because for so long I've believed that if people could,

(01:07:36):
Like the reason I'm a journalist, right, the reason that
I have spent the better part of ten years I'm
like receiving trauma is because I really believe in my
heart that people could if people could see the cruelty,
they would care and they would do something. Yeah, And
like this confirms that for me, Right, people can see
it and they have cared and they have done something amazing, right,

(01:07:59):
and that makes me so proud of them.

Speaker 8 (01:08:02):
Yeah. The paradise built in hell, this soulment put it.
You know, people are finding community and a really active
way and learning what people can do for each other
and the levels in which people are plugging in. You know,
there's the whole long standing cliche that for every front

(01:08:24):
line access, there's ten support people. Yeah, and you're like,
well here, it's those lines aren't so clearly delineated because
on some level, you know, we've talked to people who
have been like, oh my my neighbor who you know
has so many mobility issues that they can't leave their house. Yeah,
they're just hanging on the front porch.

Speaker 9 (01:08:43):
Yeah, on the front line. Yeah, exactly, because the front
line comes to you.

Speaker 8 (01:08:48):
Yeah. Like we talked to someone earlier who was pepper
spray this morning while walking their dog. Yeah, you know,
because while walking their dog they witnessed masked agent. It's
stealing a person. Yeah, well I'm about do it for
part one if it could cool people here. M hmm,

(01:09:13):
And uh, we'll be back on Wednesday or whenever. It
We actually don't know what the scheduling is going to
be of this particular episode. Yeah, we'll be back.

Speaker 9 (01:09:20):
In the subsequent episode of the podcast video listening to you.

Speaker 8 (01:09:23):
That's right, that's right, and yeah, you're gonna final Let
me say this, right.

Speaker 9 (01:09:31):
I was really sad when I came here because my
friends were dying Reshaba. Yeah, and I wish I was
with them in a strange way, Yeah, because I know
the sense of togetherness they feel and I felt that
here and that was really special for me because I
would struggle to be dealing with this alone.

Speaker 8 (01:09:52):
Yeah, and we're gonna we're gonna talk a bit more
about rapid response stuff. And there's also just a point
some articles people. There's a series of articles that came
out from crimethink, which is crimethink dot com that have
talked about some of the structures of rapid response networks.
And people here are putting together a lot of resources
about what they have and haven't learned. And we're going

(01:10:15):
to be talking about some of those things that people
have learned and things like that. But it's really worth
understanding wherever you are because you're also that person who
can hang out on your front porch. I mean not
necessarily literally you hang out on your front porch. But
it's like the idea is when the entire city mobilizes,

(01:10:35):
it works. And I think that when we realize that
we can mobilize the entire country, it works. That's my theory. Yeah,
see you all soon.

Speaker 9 (01:10:47):
Hi, friends, it's me James. I'm back and I'm back
because we ask some people on the ground if they
could provide us with some links to places where people
could donate that have been vetted that they knew would
be going to people helping people on the ground, and
they provided us with a lot of different links. So
I'm going to tell you what each of these links are,

(01:11:07):
and if you'd like to donate, you can just scroll
on down whichever app you're using to the podcast show
notes and you can click one of the one of
the links below. So there's rent support for neighbors in Phillips,
rent support for neighbors in Central, rent support for neighbors
in Powderhorn, supplies for political art making, protective gear for
legal observers, diapers and menstrual supplies. There are Abolish iced

(01:11:32):
T shirts that you can purchase. There is a fundraiser
for north Star Frontline Street Medics and the Twin Cities
Swirlitariat bail fund. There are links for both of Venmo
and cash app donation there. Hi, friends, it's me James,

(01:11:59):
and I just wanted to explain as you're listening to this.
We recorded this around midnight on Friday, after having spent
I think three days four nights in Minneapolis, and the
tone of what we recorded here is hopeful. I remain
hopeful and inspired by the people we met in Minneapolis,

(01:12:19):
and I remained so proud of everything they've done. But
about nine hours after we sent this off to our editors,
Alex Pretty was killed by two Border Patrol agents. And
the tone of this would have been different if we
had recorded after that, And that's just the nature of
the work we do. But we don't want anything in

(01:12:42):
the hopeful tone here to suggest that we don't grieve
his passing, that we aren't thinking of the people who
loved him right now, because we understand that they're going
through a very difficult time. But we still want you
to learn from what's happening in Minneapolis and from what
people are doing there, and we hope that you remember
that as you literally say.

Speaker 8 (01:13:00):
And I think that honestly, those two things that we
have to balance just as we deal with the state
of the world. Is just you know, everyone we talked
to this is so present on their minds. Is both
an awareness of the beauty of the things that they
are building and also an awareness of the darkness that
has caused them to need to build these things. But anyway,

(01:13:22):
we hope you enjoy these episodes and are following more
closely with more current news about what's happening, and are
talking to the people around you wherever you are about
how you will keep yourself and your neighbors safe and yep,
thank you.

Speaker 9 (01:13:43):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Could Happen Here podcast,
which is what happens when two podcasts love each other
and go to Minneapolis go on a trip to Minneapolis
in the winter, where it is called I am one
of your hosts today. My name is James Stout, and

(01:14:06):
I am very lucky to be joined by my friend
Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 8 (01:14:09):
Hello, welcome to the thing that we're doing. Should we
talking about today? We talked last time about some rapid
response to mutual a and there's more to be said
about that.

Speaker 9 (01:14:19):
Yeah, today is the twenty third.

Speaker 8 (01:14:22):
Yeah, it's the past for you all.

Speaker 14 (01:14:25):
M M.

Speaker 9 (01:14:25):
But it's present for us. Yeah, it's amazing our podcasting
work like that.

Speaker 8 (01:14:29):
Today was the second realish, real general strike I've been
to in my life. Yeah. First one was in Oakland
during Occupy Okay, so they pulled off a pretty serious
general strike. Thousands of US shut down the ports. It
was really beautiful. But yeah, that was poss Today.

Speaker 9 (01:14:47):
No one I had to shut shit down really, with
the exception of the Federal building, which we will discuss. Yeah,
it's been remarkable. We've been here, it's Tuesday, it's Friday.
How just the momentum has grown. Like seeing we went
past someplace I think it was like a place of
repaired like electronics of some description. They just had a
little thing being like attention, we're not opening on Friday,

(01:15:08):
Like yeah, it's these businesses which have no reason, you know,
like these outward facing reasons too. You know, it's not
even businesses which rely on the community for business and
have to signal the community that they're with them, right,
it's just people who are being like yeah, nah, no,
you know, like that seems shut. Yeah, let's we got
to do something. Let's all close down and go protest.

(01:15:31):
One thing that I was sent and share this with you, Margaret.
Some unkind was a list of businesses that are like, yo,
we will not be participating in like profit making today,
but if you need X, that's what we do.

Speaker 8 (01:15:43):
Come by.

Speaker 9 (01:15:44):
Yeah, Like if you know, if you're hungry, if you're cold,
if you need a cup of coffee, what if you
need a bicycle fix whatever it is, like if you
want to screenprint abolish ice on a shirt, swing my
Like we'll just be opened up for the community. Comes
a high like we don't want your mind, we just
want your solularity. Like I thought that was cool.

Speaker 8 (01:16:03):
And on some level it's been happening for a while
to like to talk talk about how yesterday we went
to power out Grounds. Yeah right, there is an indigenous
own coffee shop called power Grounds. They're actually worth donating
directly too because of their mutual aid projects. That will
probably be in the list of things that we include.
And you go in and the coffee is free now,
and you know, we were like, well, we want to

(01:16:23):
pay you for tea, and they were like, you can
pay us for tea.

Speaker 9 (01:16:25):
Yeah, And we were able to like put some money
behind in case someone else came in and need.

Speaker 8 (01:16:29):
Right, But the entire space has been taken over by
a mutual aid organization. Yeah, and it's you know, Indigenous run.
We talked to someone from AIM American Indian Movement about
the work they've been doing there, and you know, which
is that they've been you know, basically just turning it
into like making sure everyone has everything they need. Yeah.

(01:16:52):
By creating these places that are good to hang out in,
you make really good rapid response places.

Speaker 15 (01:16:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:17:00):
You know, this is the first person we heard from
about just like I was like, how does this work?
How does the rap response work? And I was like, Oh,
there's more of us than there are them.

Speaker 9 (01:17:07):
Yeah, yeah, we shun keep showing up.

Speaker 8 (01:17:10):
Like and uh yeah, so like you know, people are
people are hanging out there and so you know, and
it's it's right in a place where Ice likes to
fuck with people. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:17:19):
Well it's like for people who aren't familiar with that block, right, Like,
I've read a lot about AIM. It's I'm interesting like
that Franklin Avenue. I believe it's where AIM began.

Speaker 8 (01:17:28):
Right, Well, that's an understanding with Community Watch, which is
what's happening now.

Speaker 9 (01:17:31):
Exactly, was doing patrols to keep their community safe.

Speaker 8 (01:17:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:17:34):
So it's a cool little full circle movement. So this
is a space which is obviously designed to like center
and protect indigenous folks. Yeah, but they were just like, yeah,
anyone who's out there doing the work, please come by.
We got snack packs for you because we made We've
got four different soups, got a vegan soup, we got
a gluten free soup. Like, like, they were more than

(01:17:55):
happy for folks to come by.

Speaker 8 (01:17:56):
Get fed, Yeah, gett warm. Yeah, big big thing here, people,
you know, sort of make light of. You know, there's
the whole quip that really works on me, which is
the like Ice made the classic Nazi mistake they invaded
a winter people in winter, and that's true. But it
is exceptionally cold right now.

Speaker 9 (01:18:15):
Yeah, Like we last night, I think, due to an
error on my part, were locked out of the place
we are staying. Yeah, I think it's fairly clear that
I fucked up there. Yeh, that's fine. It becomes a
risk to your well being pretty quickly. Yeah, to put
it in another way, how cold it is today. I
took the battery out of Margaret's vehicle and blue hot

(01:18:35):
air from a head dryer on it. Sometime so we
could try and start it.

Speaker 8 (01:18:39):
So a jump would work, because yeah, a jump wouldn't
work without also heating up for the battery.

Speaker 9 (01:18:45):
Yeah, the battery didn't have enough coal cranking.

Speaker 8 (01:18:47):
Yeah to get Yeah, despite being a brand new battery.

Speaker 9 (01:18:51):
Yeah, you need different tires for your truck, You need
different oil for your vehicle, You need your battery to
be warm.

Speaker 8 (01:18:57):
Yeah, people have engine block. Heater is for gas engines.
I don't even have a diesel. Okay. So this morning
we knew as the general strike. We went and got
enough supplies to have enough food without having to go
shopping today. And you know, we get up and we
knew that there was going to be a direct action
this morning at the Whipple building. And the Whipple Building

(01:19:19):
is Oh, I wish once, once this whole thing is scripted,
you will understand all this better. But there is a
building that used to be a fort. And it was
a fort in ye oldie even more murder of indigenous
people times. And it was the fort from which they
would go out and capture people. Yeah, and that is
what it is again. It is the center of the
ice operations here. It is where everyone has taken both

(01:19:43):
citizen and non citizen for processing, and there's like one
way in and one way out, and there have been
people I keep talking about we were talking about this
hyper local rapid response. Yeah, there's been people at the
Whipple building, at this wrap of a place with one
way in and one way out.

Speaker 9 (01:19:59):
These places a fortress ass building.

Speaker 8 (01:20:01):
Yeah, right where it's really easy to kidnap people because
the kidnap place is right there. Yeah, there have been
people there are basically every day. Yeah, and like just
blatantly being like we are here to track you all
anti ice people have been there every day. Yeah. So
there was a call to go to it this morning
and so we did and you know as press. Yeah,

(01:20:23):
and he did not get there on time because my
car absolutely that start. Yeah yeah, but multiple people came
to rescue us.

Speaker 10 (01:20:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:20:33):
Yeah, like multiple people showed up to help out of
towners who aren't even core of were We weren't there
to get stuff done. We're just here to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:20:43):
Like someone came to or for us to jump. Someone
else was like, hey, did you get a jump? Yes,
someone was like do you want to ride? Do you
need to borrow my vehicle?

Speaker 8 (01:20:50):
Yeah? And these weren't people we known very long.

Speaker 9 (01:20:55):
But yeah, the longest we've known these people was since Tuesday.

Speaker 8 (01:20:57):
It's Friday, and so people come up, get the vehicle working,
we drive there, and the whole time both of us
are moderately outdoorsy people, right, put it mildly in your
case and to be accurate in my case. Yeah, Like,
and we spent the whole time be like do we
have enough gear? Yeah? Do we have enough winter gear?
You know we both have these new insulated boots we

(01:21:18):
got for this trip. Yeah, and like I live in
the mountains. You were a literal sports person. Yeah. I
enjoyed to be in the matter. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:21:26):
When I have time, I will go into the mountains
and sleep outside.

Speaker 8 (01:21:29):
Yeah. Is cold? Is it was cold?

Speaker 9 (01:21:32):
You know there's a cold when your noseheads freeze when
you breathe in and then yeah, then there's a cold
when you're like my eyes are like actually icing over. Yeah,
Like this is alarmingly cold.

Speaker 8 (01:21:43):
Is the coldest day here since twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen?
Is what we learned.

Speaker 9 (01:21:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:21:48):
Yeah, And you know when I talked to my friend
before I came, I was like, it's going to be
horrendously cold. Are people still going to show up, and
you know, my friend who lives here is like, well
we will Ice will be miserable. Yeah, and we saw
probably ten thousand people outside today. Yeah, between the two protests,
mostly the larger one.

Speaker 9 (01:22:06):
Yeah. So we roll up right and there is a
small shield wall barricading one of the waves that Ice
gets into the Whipple building to incarcerated people who they
have snatched. There are probably half a dozen shields and
then two big corrugated steel which is the level of
bravery of that. Yeah, that is audacious. Yeah, because there

(01:22:28):
were maybe one hundred people in that whole formation, right,
and the shield walls facing two ways.

Speaker 8 (01:22:32):
We check it out.

Speaker 9 (01:22:33):
As we arrive, we see what we later learn was
an Italian camera operator that had been mased in the face.
I just want to break down again, Like we've made
light of the cold, and it's funny that it's cold.
You get maced, right, Generally you want to pour water
on your face.

Speaker 8 (01:22:51):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:22:52):
The clock is ticking pretty quickly once you start pouring
liquid on exposed skin in these temperatures.

Speaker 8 (01:22:58):
The clock is ticking. Unexpos skin in these temperatures, any
exposed skin is dangerous. I have this like basically balaklava
that I like, I don't wear to protest. That's sketchy. Yeah,
And then I'm like, oh no, I'm gonna like die
if I don't wear this thing that covers every inch
of my face. Yeah, Like I.

Speaker 9 (01:23:16):
Have a helmet with goggles, and I wasn't wearing the
goggles for particularly, like I didn't think I was going
to get a pepper ball in the eye. I needed
the air not to touch my eyes. So like, this
is amazing, is serious?

Speaker 10 (01:23:27):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:23:27):
And I saw that and I saw them pouring water
and I was like, oh shit, actually that's quite grave.
And they actually did have a staged water truck the
spray people. They didn't spray people with water. Yeah, yeah,
that's what we heard where there was a water truck
staged in the in the parking lot. To be clear,
like that could have killed someone really easily.

Speaker 8 (01:23:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:23:45):
So then that was one entrance. We were like, let's
go to go back the other entrance to see.

Speaker 8 (01:23:48):
What the whole scene is here.

Speaker 9 (01:23:50):
As we're walking, first of all, we come past someone
with one of those like trolleys that people pull. They
have the better part of like a thousand tangs in
foot warmers and they are stoked to be given them
out right, So we handwarmers inside our gloves. Then we
see someone who's pulled up in a minivan. That is
the warming car. People do get cold, they get in

(01:24:11):
there and they warm them up. We come around, someone
has snacks. Someone's playing public enemy. As we come around further,
we see this is the place that I are coming
in with people. Right, consider are people who were there
shouting at them. I saw a couple it's like snowballs thrown,
and like, yeah, there were people who are throwing snowballs, right,

(01:24:34):
But there were also folks who just turned out to
be like, you know, I'm more of a that's not
my vibe. But if you would like a snack while
you're throwing them, I'm here for you. No one was like, hey,
don't do that. Everyone was showing up in their own way,
and that was really cool.

Speaker 8 (01:24:48):
Yeah, and that's like one of the things that you know,
I asked at one point, I was like, what's the
like discourse like about you know, the usual thing that
divides people about, Like I'm going to use air quoter.
You can't see, but violence are non violence which are
like complicated age, right, you know, and you know, and
there's obviously people like we've met people who've been like
and we're non violent, and they're like really excited, and

(01:25:10):
that's an important party.

Speaker 9 (01:25:11):
Who had yellow vests on being like peaceful observer, don't shoot.

Speaker 8 (01:25:15):
Right, And then there's also people who are like, we
didn't see any of it, but there's graffiti all over town.

Speaker 9 (01:25:20):
Yeah, yeah, like fuck peace justice doesn't.

Speaker 8 (01:25:23):
Bring him back. Yeah, And I was like, what's the
discourse like between these groups, and everyone we've talked to
is like, there isn't time for that. Ah, we go
shit to be doing. Yeah, And like you know, even
when people are discussing things, they'll try to start having
a discussion and someone's like, hey, Ice is on that corner. Yeah,
and not that these discussions aren't worth it. Well, I
famously my pins post on Blue Sky's discourse is the

(01:25:46):
mind Killer. But like, and you can see it just
like right here, right, because there's people who are like,
when you show up with shields at a shield wall
at blocking a federal agents from being somewhere, you're clearly
being mildly antagon right. It is a it's a rowdy
thing to do, and you know, and at the same time, right,
Like we didn't make it to this because they were

(01:26:07):
happening at the same time more or less, but not
very far away at the airport. We're not the news
in this particular case. It could happen here is a
news show, but this is still not the news. We're
reporting right now, like one hundred and fifty clergy people
were restless of all disobedience because the airport's being used
to transport people away. Did real quick tangent about that.
I think it's really beautiful because there's so much you

(01:26:28):
know that the national presses of course, like these anti
Christian people attack church, and like, you know, the churches
are on our side, except like one or two.

Speaker 9 (01:26:38):
If we were staying next to our church. Yeah, and
like we get up in the morning that first day,
we heard the honking and we see like, yeah, the
church has got a sign being like yeah, I've knowniced ice.
It seems bad. Yeah, I don't think it's not what
Jesus would have done.

Speaker 8 (01:26:50):
Yeah. So we're at the thing and you know, we're like, okay,
this is happening, and we start seeing the police getting
ready to use munition.

Speaker 9 (01:27:00):
Right, we come back from the first place to where
the shield wall was right, right, shield wall is no
longer there.

Speaker 8 (01:27:06):
We think, huh, weird, no shield wall. And then there's
a line of police. Oh look at that.

Speaker 9 (01:27:11):
It's Hennepin County sheriff Department. Yeah, and yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 8 (01:27:16):
No, no, I mean that's the thing is, it's always
really sad when you come back and expect to see
a shield wall and instead there's a line of police. Yeah.
And they are yelling dispersal orders at the at the
shield wall, which is already banked burst. Yeah. They're like
they're they've been they've been pushed away. We can't there
one hundred yards away. Yeah, Like we just like straight
up can't see them. And we are told and no

(01:27:37):
uncertain terms by some other folks who are standing this
is not a large crowd. The crowd has been moved,
and we're just kind of yeah, they're craps between us
in our car.

Speaker 9 (01:27:45):
One, two, three, four, five, six of us. Yeah, there's
six of us. And I was going, I was counting
people in my head. I can I can't stay sick.

Speaker 8 (01:27:53):
No, No, you're right, And two of the people were
standing next to are like, yeah, if you cross this
red line. They told us that if we us this
red line, the National Guard will shoot us dead and
it we did not test that.

Speaker 9 (01:28:05):
Yeah, I'm not sure if they would a bit near
young over song about it.

Speaker 8 (01:28:09):
Right, and we're not Ohio, it would be fine and
Ministry to National Guard. Yeah, and so they they are
not letting us go. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:28:21):
To be clear, the red line would have signified we
were entering into like a military area.

Speaker 8 (01:28:25):
Right totally with no like barricades or anything like that.

Speaker 9 (01:28:28):
And just they had barricades further along right, Yeah, to
make vehicles weave yet drive straight up.

Speaker 8 (01:28:33):
It's the side of a public road where the light
rail station. So there's the line of police and they're
mostly facing away from us. There's about two people facing
towards us. Are cars between them. We are marked press.

Speaker 9 (01:28:46):
Yeah, and wearing a bright red helmet with presstickers on it.

Speaker 8 (01:28:49):
Blue helmet with presto because black.

Speaker 9 (01:28:52):
The first the cops keep pushing the shield wall further
away from us, and we hear them on the l rad.
This has been declared an lawful assembly. I did hear
somebody shout by who? That is a very good question, honestly.

Speaker 8 (01:29:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:29:08):
Unfortunately, the Hennepin County Sheriff's department were not very interested
in answering questions. Yeah, And the way that we learned
this is that a couple of people I would call
them older folks just from looking at them from a distance.

Speaker 8 (01:29:20):
They weren't the young rowdies holding shields.

Speaker 9 (01:29:21):
They were absolutely not know There was an older gentleman
in a male presenting person in carharts yeah right, who
walked up coveralls yeah yeah, with hands up right, very
clearly hands up and seemed to be asking or talking.

Speaker 8 (01:29:35):
Yeah. It was like probably going up to being like, hey,
what's happening? Yeah, like whatever, Yeah, can I go over there?

Speaker 9 (01:29:40):
That person was arrested, Yeah, so was another person who
was with them.

Speaker 8 (01:29:44):
Yeah, and they were told they were arrested on the
l rad. We could hear that. Yeah you are on
Dora Ros Yeah. Yeah, that was very strange.

Speaker 3 (01:29:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:29:53):
Then a bus arrived, more cops got out, and those
two people were put on the bus.

Speaker 8 (01:29:58):
Yeah. Three people, there's three, three of them, three to book.

Speaker 9 (01:30:01):
Yeah, okay, the majority of the police in turn to
face us, yeah all six.

Speaker 8 (01:30:06):
By now there's probably twelve of us. Yeah, because because
other people are like, hey, my car's over there too, Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:30:11):
There in between us and where we parked our cars
right now, Yeah, and then they turn the l rad
around right and then they tell us that they have
issued a dispersal order due to something about like a
legal conduct, which again, we are standing on the platform
with a light rail station at this point, and I
have seen no one do anything other than stand around.
I've seen someone through us, No, but up somewhere else
we're in a different location. And then they say we

(01:30:33):
have five minutes to disperse, and they they give us
a cardinal direction. We have to disperse east.

Speaker 8 (01:30:40):
Onto a road that no one with us knew what was. Yeah,
we're all looking like we're in a kind of weirdricade.

Speaker 9 (01:30:49):
I had previously tried to walk up to this line
and be like, can we go through to our car please?

Speaker 8 (01:30:55):
Yeah, we would like to disperse, Yeah, because at this
point we're like this is just going bad.

Speaker 9 (01:31:00):
Yeah, we're pressed now to be there, right, We're here
to report and if we get arrested, we can't report
and there's.

Speaker 8 (01:31:08):
Nothing to report on.

Speaker 9 (01:31:09):
Yeah, because the cops have cattled us with two other press.

Speaker 8 (01:31:12):
Yeah, the rest of the Italian news crew who can't
don't have a camera. But they're still trying to do reporting,
but brave as hell. Yeah, because they're just still standing
there and they're like, yeah, you know, fake Italian accents,
and they're just like our camera person got made.

Speaker 9 (01:31:28):
Yeah, they'll be fine, but they got made.

Speaker 8 (01:31:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:31:30):
And so the cops had very clearly indicated that they
were not interested in that arrangement. So we went back
to standing there, wondering which way was east. I was
trying to get under my last to my watch. I
could pull up a company.

Speaker 8 (01:31:44):
I had figured out which way was east. I even
had a suspicion about how to go that way. But
I am willing. I believe I'm talking to other people
who are elsewhere there that day, that day, today, this morning.
It's been a long day. I don't normally drink caffeine.
I am on caffeine. I believe that is where the
other line of police was starting to kettle people from you.

(01:32:05):
It seems like, so I actually believe they were not
actually offering us away out at all.

Speaker 9 (01:32:09):
Yeah, I, on the other hand, was readers. I couldn't
get to my watch was I knew it was before noon,
so I was looking for where the sun was, and
I knew some celestial navigation and at that point we saw. Well,
actually at that point we went to the train platform
and a light rail train was going not towards our
carpet away from it, but it didn't open the doors
when it came to the platform. Yeah, we were like,

(01:32:30):
we want to go though, I said, Margaret, We're fucked.
Margaret said, get ready to run. I guess yeah. And
then as they were advancing towards us, comrade light rail
train arrived.

Speaker 8 (01:32:45):
Everyone got on the train literally last minute.

Speaker 9 (01:32:48):
Yeah, scootle straight past the police line. And then we
got off and commenced walking around to try and find
a way back to our vehicle.

Speaker 8 (01:32:59):
So that was our morning and that was I mean, whatever,
it's weird, the party is least affected, but to be
like really just transparent about it. This is the coldest
day of my life. I've experienced negative temperatures before. Yeah,
I haven't experienced negative thirty something wind chill. Yeah, Like
we were seeing people getting off the light rail. Everyone's

(01:33:21):
eye lashes had frost in them. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:33:25):
Anyway, just to just to keep hitting that point. Well,
like that was one of my concerns with detainment, right
with like cops ledgendarily don't treat people in their custody
very well, right, and I was very worried about right two,
they did seem to be getting the people they arrested
quickly on that bus. Yeah, but like that my worries, right,
you got if you lose a glove when you're being handcuffed,

(01:33:46):
that's not a that's you know, that's serious.

Speaker 8 (01:33:48):
Yeah, that's like maybe you lose your fingers now at
the end of that like because it's like genuinely like
a I know, we keep harping on it, but it's
just it's a it's a present characteristic. Yeah, my car
is a mess right now because we can't clean it
because that involves standing outside in like negative eighteen or whatever.
The fuck. All of these numbers have become meaningless to

(01:34:08):
me at this point anyway. You know what keeps me warm, Margaret,
the handwarmers we purchased with the money that we get
from advertisements. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:34:16):
I was gonna say, thinking about thinking about how the
products and services support the show love to support me
and the work I do, But I don't think they
actually know what I do. And to look at our
listening numbers to be honest.

Speaker 8 (01:34:26):
Yeah, I think they don't hear our transitions in troubles
shirt and they don't and here they are ander back.
So we go to this and then we go to
the clear highlight of the day, which is the ice

(01:34:48):
vehicle crashed into Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:34:50):
Yeah, this is when we decided we got to We
received words and an ice vehicle had t boned telephone.

Speaker 8 (01:34:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I was doing a blue sky thread and
I was like, Nope, that's a shorter thread because we
got to go. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:35:04):
I'm not as good as Margaret is at skating when
I'm at things, so I'm so used to being in
places where it would be a risky to everyone involved. Yeah,
posted I was there. Yeah, so we yeah, we go, right,
we park a few bucks away. Once we see flashing lights. Yeah,
we start booging up the street at fast walk pace,
which is about as fast as you're gonna go when
it's an inch of ice on everything. Yeah, and we
see this car that has fair there's traffic coming roundabout

(01:35:26):
that clearly they were not expecting to be there. It
looks like they've they've been trying to go straight over
to round about and.

Speaker 8 (01:35:32):
Have Yeah, they're just like the front of their car
is just crashed in a fifteen mile per hour street. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:35:39):
Yeah, like a street where like you would expect a
child to be riding a bicycle in the summer.

Speaker 8 (01:35:42):
Yeah, and it's like it's one of those streets that's
like cars on both sides, one lane rane one lane
that two cars have to pass each other by backing up. Yeah,
and they clearly just blew through it. They don't give
a fuck. And that's like a thing we've heard over
and over from the people who who tail them is
that they they drive erradically, they drive, they drive recklessly

(01:36:04):
because they are they think they're immune to all consequences. Yeah,
and they are. They are until someone like the only
people giving them consequences are the people of the city,
not in the city itself or the state.

Speaker 9 (01:36:18):
Yeah, this is the thing. Actually, I'll just I have
spent more time than nearly everyone at the southern border
of the United States in more places right in California,
in Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona.

Speaker 8 (01:36:32):
I've been up and down the border.

Speaker 9 (01:36:33):
There is one thing that unites the border experience, be
it on torn or Dumb Reservation in Arizona, be in
San Diego, being New Mexico, or in the Rio Grand
Valley of Texas and is that border patrols driving is
a risk to everyone. And you can hear the most
straight up right wing people if they I love what
they're doing. I don't want the mirgrats in my country,

(01:36:53):
but I wish they wouldn't drive like digs and like
they've killed.

Speaker 8 (01:36:57):
People on the Autumn reservation.

Speaker 9 (01:36:59):
Right, this is serious and that what is happening once
again is that the border is coming to a city
and people are seeing this is not new, it's new here.

Speaker 8 (01:37:09):
The driving erratically is such a perfect though example of
what power does to people, Like you have an unaccountable force,
and they will do horrible things. Yeah, they will do
major horrible things like kidnapping people, and they'll do petty
I don't care. I am just drunk on power things.

Speaker 9 (01:37:27):
But they will leave the cars and drive when they
pull them out right like the second to popic Dew Park,
or like yeah in this case, will they will case
a telephone pole?

Speaker 8 (01:37:35):
Right anyway, So then we decide we're going to the
big march downtown. Yeah, you know, because the general strike
has a component that is a big march downtown. And
the single most important thing about that to me was
again to keep harping on it the cold, because I
know a lot of people who go to these sorts
of marches, right, and these are the sorts of marches

(01:37:57):
that a lot of people go to who don't necessarily
a ton of other political activity. Although here it probably
feels a little different because a lot of the people
go into that march who probably are the kind of
sign holding going to the big march kind of people
are also quite possibly at the very least showing up
on air whistles.

Speaker 9 (01:38:17):
Yeah, doing the work right there, buying the groceries, whatever
it is. Yeah, Like I think one thing, I was strucked.
So we're walking towards march, and it is one of
the genders you get us a lot when you're going
to a big action, right, you feel like a salmon
and everyone's just swimming up and swimming in the stream
together or you know whatever, tuna and you're all going
towards the same space. And that's cool. That's always nice

(01:38:39):
to feel the size.

Speaker 8 (01:38:40):
And then we get there and it's big, like there's
a lot of.

Speaker 9 (01:38:43):
People, and it's cold. Like I know, we keep talking
on about the cold, it is cold as shit. Margaret's
ear was a little bit out. We were both worried
about Margaret's ear. Yeah, like it's you want to ensure it,
like skin coverage in these temperatures. Yeah, we get there
and like so they're meeting in like a big square

(01:39:03):
and then they're marching through the street, right, Yeah, and
there are also people on like there are internal walkways
between buildings above the street and all of them around
with people with signs or cheering and stuff. And the
thing I noticed as we got there was like, immediately
we set foot in that square, we're once again being
offered hot cocoa hand warmers. There's a guy with like
a you know, there's orange insulatd containers that they use

(01:39:27):
it like sports like a gator. Then he's got soup
in it. Yeah, he's backpacking the super it's vegan and
gluten free and he's handing out soup. There are multiple
people who have just set up to care for people
because it's cold and people might need caring for, right, Like,
there are all kinds of facilities there to like look

(01:39:48):
after folks. Yeah, we received some hand warmers. I think
I think you and I both took some hand warmers.
And there wasn't at least where we were like a speaker.
There was some chanting at this point, like I would
love to include a be a roll of chanting. Unfortunately
it was so cold that both my voice recorders refused
to work.

Speaker 8 (01:40:08):
Oh yeah, one by one, every electronic device that James
brought ate shit, and I like, you know I much
you'll listen to my shit. I'm much more of a
ViBe's podcaster, where I like just observe and then write
everything down. James is a proper podcaster and journalist and like, uh,
you know, as b roll of things, not as much

(01:40:29):
today yet.

Speaker 9 (01:40:30):
Everybody, my voice recorder, which has been through the Darien
Gap as it tended this Syrian civil war, it's been
to the place where the US dropped a nuclear bomb.
She didn't make it out of Minneapolis. It's gone to
Valhalla now, yeah, which is sad. I even tried to
record on my phone, but my phone just black screened on.

Speaker 8 (01:40:45):
Me, like this comedy.

Speaker 9 (01:40:48):
Yeah, it was pretty funny when when the cell phone tired,
it was like previously I had been painting a picture
fuel using my nose to unlock the phone and then
like actuate apps because I didn't want to take my
glove off.

Speaker 8 (01:41:01):
We would we would take turns taking our hands out
of gloves to touch buttons on things, yeah, or.

Speaker 9 (01:41:07):
To like adjust each os clothes or like, yeah, someone
worts me doing the phone thing and they gave me
a nod like yeah doing the nose phone.

Speaker 8 (01:41:14):
Yeah, yeah totally, And like, I don't know, I just
I keep talking about how the sense of togetherness it's inspiring.
Like full disclosure, I'm not a big rally person. I'm
much personally more interested in mutual aid and direct action.
I'm disinterested in it when it seems like a way
for people to check off that they've done their resistance.

Speaker 9 (01:41:37):
Yeah, definitely if that feels like you're warm fuzzy and
that's all you want.

Speaker 8 (01:41:41):
But in this case, it was more I don't know
for certain, it was more of a warm fuzzy for
people who are also just doing this hard thing day
in and day out.

Speaker 9 (01:41:52):
It felt like when you and your friends, like, you know,
when you're doing a hard, long neutral aid thing, right,
you know, like or let's say you're in days a
prodict that feeds people every week and once a year
you get together and have a dinner together. Right, it
felt a bit like that, or like yeah, you know
a little bit like when we were feeding people in
the desert, we would sit down afterwards and was talking
about this with someone. Today we would like eat vegan

(01:42:14):
MRIs out of the packet like people.

Speaker 8 (01:42:16):
Eat go goots.

Speaker 9 (01:42:17):
Yeah, because we were too tired to walk of food
while we were hungry. But we would spend a little
bit of time in community and celebrate what we've done.
What was cool though, was like sometimes after those big
actions you feel a little lonely, but like it felt
like that was just everyone going over there, but like
there was also everyone elsewhere as you kind of went
around the city, you.

Speaker 8 (01:42:36):
Know, right, Like it wasn't like that was the end
of it. Yeah, And I was I was worried it would,
you know, draw people away from other things. But you know,
even this huge crowd was only a tiny portion of
the people doing things in the city. And people are
still doing things. And at one point I was like, hey,
it's it's maybe it's Thursday. We were like, hey, we
saw less people out today. Was that because the coal

(01:42:57):
was starting to dry? People inside? And we talked to
some and they're like, no, ice was less out today
than it was yesterday. But if ice had come out,
all of those people would have come out again. They
were all staged and ready to go. And one of
the things, actually, the warm fuzzy thing that feeling. One
of the things that we talked to is that people
are very aware that they're organizing for the long haul,

(01:43:19):
like yeah, you know, I again, I'm I don't have
the news in front of me. But the word on
the ground here is people being like, we think ice
might be here till June, right, and so people are like,
how do we do that? You know? And one of
the things is that, like there are people providing things
to the people doing things, you know, the people whose

(01:43:40):
job is to provide things for other people are having
people provide things for them. Yeah, And there's this moment
I think about all the time. I'll accidentally do like
the you know, I was at this protest in the
Netherlands and the cops try to grab my friend. Yeah,
and they try to grab him because he's screaming the
Netherlands as a police state, which they try to make
their point by trying to grab him, right, So everyone

(01:44:02):
holds on to him. So the cops start just beating
the crap out of the people holding on to him.
So people start grabbing onto the people who are holding
on to the person. They start trying to beat the
people who are holding non of the people who are
holding on to the people who are holding non of
the people. By the time it gets to like four
layers out, the cops are just like, yeah, fucking yeah,
fuck this all right. The center person is never arrested,

(01:44:23):
you know. And that's what solidarity is. But that's also
a lot of the mutual aid stuff, like we're talking
about to people who are like, yeah, we work day
in and day out on this stuff, and other people
are like massage therapists and regular therapists are talking with us,
you know, and like people are building the infrastructure to

(01:44:44):
try and make it sustainable, and who knows. I don't
know whether you can truly sustain what's happening here, right,
but like they're gonna fucking try. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:44:56):
The way I like to explain anarchism to people, it's
sometimes the confusion, right that people think anarchism is a
predilection for chaos and violence, and that's not what it is.
I like to explain that anarchism at its core is
building ways of caring for one another that don't reinforce
ways of controlling one another. Yeah, and that's what people

(01:45:16):
are doing here, right, Yeah, under any name. Yeah, it
doesn't mean that the rest of it is really ephemeral.

Speaker 8 (01:45:22):
A lot of them are anarchists, but not not anywhere
near the majority of them.

Speaker 9 (01:45:27):
Yeah, but I think that we can use what Gym's
got called the anarchist squint right, and sees people building
networks here that make the state unnecessary. Yeah, irrelevant right now.
The violence is still very much relevant, but others. Right,
the Feds are going to cut funding. Yeah, they can
cut foods damps in Minnesota. Yeah, people are still going
to get food to their neighbors.

Speaker 8 (01:45:46):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:45:47):
They can cut education funding. We heard that there are
schools which have a very diverse background. And by the
diverse here, I don't just mean like people of different races,
but also people of different income brackets.

Speaker 8 (01:45:58):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:45:58):
And the wealthier parents are like, which families aren't able
to work? How do I help them make their rent?

Speaker 8 (01:46:04):
Yeah? Oh god, it was funny when yeah, people were like, oh,
you know the thing where like the rich parents are
like really excited to help everyone and feed everyone. I
was like, no, that, Yeah, that's how you realize that
it's not the stereotype like it should be.

Speaker 9 (01:46:23):
Yeah, it should be. Well, I think folks are really like, huh,
what are the world without? These people look like worse?
I don't want that. Yeah, Like what do I have
that I can use to stop that? I have my time,
I have my body, I have my money. Let me
give them all of them? Yeah, yeah, I thought that
was very cool. I think the the specific thing that
has made people I saw little signs. They have the

(01:46:47):
name for one of the guys from Liam, the young,
very very young kid, right, the five year old kid
with the Superman on it was yeah, grabbed the spider Man. Yeah,
he was grabbed the other day. I saw a lot
of people with science about that like.

Speaker 8 (01:46:57):
Made me want to cry.

Speaker 9 (01:46:58):
And just seeing the signs with these little outrages continue
to bring people out of their safe, warm comfort bubbles
and be like no, like I am going to do
whatever it takes, my money, my time, whatever, right.

Speaker 8 (01:47:13):
Yeah you know William van s Bronson. Yes, for people
who are listening, there was an IWW member named William
von s Bronson who was killed by ice a number
of years ago now because he decided that he would
go and try to set some ice stuff on fire.
Middle of the night.

Speaker 9 (01:47:31):
Yeah, I think it was busses, right, unoccupied buses to
be clear.

Speaker 8 (01:47:34):
Yeah, middle of the night, empty buses, the busses that
they're using to kidnap people. And the cops showed up
and killed him. Yeah right, And he was seen as
kind of this this lone wing nut. Yeah, you know,
and I'm watching it and I'm like, this man is
going to be written about history books. That's like a
guy actually started doing something early about this. And in

(01:47:55):
his statement that he wrote, I'm not telling people that
this was a wise action for him to have taken, whatever,
But in his statement he wrote, he wrote a line
something like, I am off to fulfill my childhood promise
to myself to be noble, and like he knew he
was going to die doing that action, right. That certainly

(01:48:17):
seems to be the tone from the letter. But that
line the idea of fulfilling your promise to yourself to
be noble, And the thing that is beautiful here is
that you can now do that with people and effectively.
And I think that a lot of the things that

(01:48:37):
stop people from taking action is a belief that it
would be shot in the dark. It would be alone thing.
It wouldn't It wouldn't accomplish anything, right, because most actions
you can take yourself don't accomplish nearly as much. And
to be clear that the people who built rapid response
networks here they learn from other cities. They learn from Chicago,

(01:49:00):
who learned from la Right, that is the lineage that
I've heard presented. Yeah, but they have developed and expanded
because this is actually a bigger thing than operation on ices,
part than either of those. But so people can do
We've been put on this earth to do, which is

(01:49:22):
be our best selves. And I think that there's even
as hard as it is for people, I think that
there's a dark beauty that they get to know who
they are, and they get to know that they are
people who will make sandwiches, you know, because that's the thing,
and they will risk everything to make sandwiches. They will

(01:49:45):
risk everything to follow ice vehicles and honk it. Like
imagine following a murderer down the street, going this man's
a murderer. Man right here shoots people.

Speaker 9 (01:49:56):
Well, not just that, right, this person has the power
to kill me and not face constant.

Speaker 8 (01:50:00):
Yeah, that's what they're shouting at people. Yeah, and everyone
is shouting at that them. Yeah, yeah, and it works.

Speaker 9 (01:50:07):
Yeah, and it's people who you wouldn't expect the people
you would expect, both together alongside each other.

Speaker 8 (01:50:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:50:15):
I think a lot about how, like how much things
have changed in this country in a year. Lots of
it's bad, right, But like, abolish ice was a pretty
niche position in twenty twenty. Let me tell you you
didn't really hear it, right, Abolish ice is a compromise
position now as the centrist position.

Speaker 8 (01:50:34):
Yeah, that is reform ice center right.

Speaker 9 (01:50:38):
Yeah, yeah, I think reform ice is in some parts
of the Republican body, right, Abolish ice is pretty much
in between the two.

Speaker 8 (01:50:45):
Yeah. The political parties haven't caught up to this fact.

Speaker 9 (01:50:48):
Yeah, but they'd never do. They always take longer than
everyone else. But let me tell you, there was you know,
what would Ronald Reagan guy do? When you've lost? What
would Ronald Reagan guy do? You're in fucking trouble? Yeah,
total this country.

Speaker 8 (01:51:01):
Yeah, and I love how it's like we talked to
a lot of people with a lot of different political ideas.
Most people didn't have this is my political ideology and expressed. Yeah,
but like you know, people are like just blunt, like, well,
it would be better if the politicians were doing it,
and they're not.

Speaker 9 (01:51:20):
Yeah, it's this lady who Again the lady said, oh,
there's a local cops.

Speaker 8 (01:51:22):
You don't have to worry about them. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:51:24):
A couple of days later it turned out, but she
was like, it would be great about politicians are with us,
but they're not, So we're gonna do it ourselves.

Speaker 8 (01:51:32):
Yeah, Like that's all you need.

Speaker 9 (01:51:34):
The lady's done more anarchism than your your average internet
anarchist who Zoosh's out there fed posting every day. Yeah
all right, Yeah, that's that's really all you need.

Speaker 8 (01:51:42):
Yeah, well we're gonna take one more ad break.

Speaker 9 (01:51:45):
That's all you really need is advertisements.

Speaker 16 (01:51:47):
And it goes a little something like this, and we're
about I feel.

Speaker 8 (01:52:02):
Warmed in my belly by those advertisements.

Speaker 9 (01:52:05):
Yeah hopefully you buy something that you don't need.

Speaker 8 (01:52:08):
Yeah, I hopefully you skip past them.

Speaker 9 (01:52:10):
But yeah, you know they double tap the old headphone button.
It normally goes twenty seconds.

Speaker 8 (01:52:14):
See the problem is that I like, I don't usually
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I don't
have cooler zone media because I have Android. Yeah, so yeah,
I know, so the ads come home.

Speaker 9 (01:52:28):
Remember if you tag I write, okay, if you have
any issues regarding the yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:52:32):
Yeah, yeah, that'll that will definitely work. Yeah. And so
sometimes when I'm like, because I listen to a lot
of podcasts while I'm like doing like woodworking or like yeah, yeah,
doing some of my hands. Yeah, and so I like,
I'm like, I don't want to put down the saw
in order to yeah, press the button.

Speaker 9 (01:52:49):
So I do it with my with my left earl
against my shoulder. That's how I skip them. Yeah, because
I don't have cooler zone media.

Speaker 8 (01:53:00):
Yeah, but maybe you do.

Speaker 9 (01:53:02):
Which if you only a diversion about shit, it doesn't
bother you.

Speaker 8 (01:53:06):
Lucky, Lucky. We will have a lot more reporting. This
isn't the end of the episode, but we'll have a
lot more reporting about Minneapolis and the structures that people
are building, and Minneapolis and Saint Paul and the outlying areas.
Someone kind of correctly checked me on the fact that
I keep saying Minneapolis, it's just spend my day and

(01:53:26):
things are different, but things are different blocked by block,
but a lot of that we really want to kind
of do, right, and we're going to write scripted but
we're just really kind of in it right now and
really want to talk about this. And what part of
the reason we want to talk about this so soon
is because things happen really fast, and just that everyone
we've talked to has told us that they they want

(01:53:48):
people to know, you know, the horrors are getting out
on some level, which is good. It is actually good
that people are learning all these horrible things. But a
lot of the scale of the resistance isn't getting out
and afficacy of the resistance as in getting out, and
people want people to know because they want people to
know that they can do it too.

Speaker 9 (01:54:08):
Yeah, Like, I so someone had like like a shocking
these someone had a stupid opinion on the internet. Someone
had said that, like talking about this makes it dangerous
to these people.

Speaker 8 (01:54:18):
No, first of all, I think, I mean, there are
things that we don't know, that we shouldn't we wouldn't say.

Speaker 9 (01:54:25):
But like sure, there are things that yeah, yeah, there
are things that we wouldn't ask about or that people
wouldn't give us interviews about if you thought they were dangerous.

Speaker 8 (01:54:31):
Right, But like.

Speaker 9 (01:54:32):
What makes it safe is that everyone is doing it, right.
What makes us safe is that there are more of
us and what people asked us to do with share
this because they are safe for ifew do it too. Yeah, right,
there are hens of millions of people who are just
as outraged as that older lady that we met on

(01:54:54):
the first day. And what keeps that lady safe and
your neighbor safe and her neighbors safe, and people who
you've never met safe and yourself? Yeah, and yourself is
you doing it too?

Speaker 7 (01:55:07):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:55:07):
Like if it stops here, if you can't grab migrants
off the street here, then you can't grab dissidence off
the street somewhere else, right, And.

Speaker 8 (01:55:16):
Like you know, we've seen all over graffiti and you know,
we saw a huge piece of graffiti at the ice
building base.

Speaker 9 (01:55:25):
I read it into the mic, Actually it was my
mic was working.

Speaker 17 (01:55:29):
First we came to the undocumented, and I said nothing
because I wasn't undocumented. Then they came for the Somalis,
and I said nothing because I was not Somali. Then
they came for the activists, and I said nothing for
I was not an activist.

Speaker 9 (01:55:42):
Then they came for me.

Speaker 8 (01:55:46):
I am so grateful that we live in a generation
that has read that poem.

Speaker 9 (01:55:51):
Yeah, you know, and seemingly taken it to heart.

Speaker 8 (01:55:54):
Yeah, and more people have than I thought, and I
think I think all the time about solidarity. It was
shocked in this and you know, obviously the moment that
makes me cry on the most regular basis is of
course the charge of the row here him, when the
riders of Rohan ride to Gondor to face the anyway,
even though Gondor wasn't there for them. Where was Gondor?
But part of the reason that I love solidarity so

(01:56:17):
much is because, like I keep joking that I'm going
to write the Misanthropic Introverts Guide to Socialism m because
like I misanthropic introvert at that heart, right, I also
love people, right, Yeah, and I most just I love
most people over there. Yeah. And I grew up not
proud to say, pretty self interested, right, And I was

(01:56:40):
like very lost in my own head and kind of selfish.
And and I very quickly esponed as meeting anarchists and
meeting people who believed in responsibility and freedom was like, oh,
I am safer and more free and more able to
express my full self if I am part of a

(01:57:01):
community of solidarity.

Speaker 10 (01:57:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:57:03):
And so even though in the immediate moment it is
more dangerous. Like there's the old joke about like you
don't have to be faster than the bearer, you just
have to be faster than your friend. Yeah. That is
the single worst idea in the world.

Speaker 9 (01:57:18):
Yeah, because then bands eating people.

Speaker 8 (01:57:20):
Right, So if there is a monster and you can
outrun someone, so you think you're safe, you now have
to be the fastest person. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:57:28):
Yeah, right, you're safe until you're not.

Speaker 8 (01:57:31):
To be part of a community that turns around and
fights the monster might be more dangerous for yourself in
the immediate sense. And being someone who stands up is that. Yeah,
it is that saying like, well, even though in the
short term it is more dangerous for me to stand up.

(01:57:51):
By having been participated in a society where we stand
up for each other, I am safer.

Speaker 18 (01:57:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:57:58):
And so even if that means like my literal death,
like I will have been safer, even if you get
like weirdly utilitarian about it, yeah, and aggregate, you are safer. Yeah,
and so is everyone else. And so it's not a
it's not a charity, it's a it's a solidarity.

Speaker 13 (01:58:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:58:15):
No, like solidarity is in a sense it's in your
own self interest because we want to live in a
world where people take care of each other, right, not
just you know, like yeah, just in case we need
to be taken care of. But because I often think
about that, I think it's John Stuart mill Right asked,
not for him, the bell tolls, the bell tolls for
thee Like what he's saying there is not what's that

(01:58:37):
bell ringing. What he's saying is I participate in humanity,
and so when humanity is devalued in his case talking
about bell or funery bell, right, when humanity is devalued,
my humanity is devalued.

Speaker 8 (01:58:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:58:54):
And therefore, in this case where the bell is ringing
for me, I am a human and when they undermine
our common humanity, therefore the undermine this thing that I have.
And I won't let them do that because I participate
in humanity. And so as it happens, there's a person
who's been subjected to inhuman violence, and so I will

(01:59:15):
stand up for humanity, and in doing so, I will
stand up for making a humanity that will stand up
for me.

Speaker 8 (01:59:20):
Yeah, And like I.

Speaker 9 (01:59:22):
Think about a lot because John McCain wrote it in
an obituary for the last American, Yeah, Lincoln Brigade volunteer.
And I don't agree with John McCain on anything really, right,
but I do on that, And like I was thinking
about that today when I saw what would Ronald Reagan do?

Speaker 10 (01:59:39):
Guy.

Speaker 8 (01:59:40):
Yeah, because Jean McKay was the man who believe something.
He believed things I don't agree with. Yeah, a lot
of racist shit. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:46):
John McCain clearly thought that the Lincoln Brigadiers were on
the right side of history, right, right, And like Winston
Churchill's nephew for in the International Brigades, right, folks with
whom I share very little.

Speaker 8 (01:59:57):
In terms of politics.

Speaker 9 (01:59:58):
A lot of British upper class people fought in the
International Brigades. Yeah, they probably weren't anarchists, but they were
anti fascists. They were better anti fascists than the people
who stayed at home. And yeah, you couldn't tweet in
nineteen thirty six, but they would have been if they could. Yeah, right,
because they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Yeah,
and many of them died. Many of them are buried

(02:00:18):
in Smain and Spanish people remember them fondly.

Speaker 8 (02:00:21):
Yeah, right.

Speaker 9 (02:00:22):
They have annual ceremonies to remember the sacrifice. They made
before any of the people who are attending those ceremonies
are alive. And if more people had said, yeah, I'll
go right like the bells ringing for me. Yeah, I'm
not going to stand for a world where this happens.
I'm going to fight for World War it doesn't, then
we might not have had the Holocaust, right, we might

(02:00:43):
not have had the Second World War, It might not
have had Stalingrad.

Speaker 8 (02:00:46):
And also all the people who found Stalingrad are the
reasons that didn't get worse. Yeah yeah right, World War
two could have been worse. Yeah yeah, yeah, it would
have been worse if people.

Speaker 9 (02:00:54):
Hadn't fo yeah right, Yeah, we had staling gred, so
the Holocaust wasn't. More so that in Europe doesn't speak Germany, right, Like,
every single one of those people who stood up to
stop that probably wished that they'd stood up earlier, And
every single one of those people who stood up earlier
probably wish the more people that joined them. I think
about that a lot. It's not news to anyone who
listened to this that I wrote my PhD underspandied civil warrant.

Speaker 8 (02:01:17):
Think about it every day. Yeah, if you wanted the
non dramatic version of all this. You're listening to the
Wrongs podcast?

Speaker 9 (02:01:24):
Yeah yeah, But I think a lot about like what
we should learn from that, right? I translated a piece
for a Zene Strangers in the Tangled will.

Speaker 8 (02:01:34):
Oh yeah, it's a publishing collective that I work with.

Speaker 9 (02:01:38):
And I translated a piece by a Belgian anarchist who's
referred to as a constellation of acronyms. But Charles Riddle
was his birth name. Louis Mercier Vega was his name
he lived with for most of his life. And he
wrote this piece called Refuting the Legend, where he talks
about like what he feels that he owes the people

(02:01:59):
who die, right, And I think about that lot, Like
the thing that he comes up with is that he
owes the people who died the truth so that we
can learn from it and do better. And he shouldn't
just make them into heroes. He should make them into
real people with flaws, so that people can understand their
flaws and they can know what we.

Speaker 8 (02:02:15):
Can do better. I think about that a lot.

Speaker 9 (02:02:17):
Right, so many people have gone before us, so many
brave people have gone before us, and we owe it
to them to learn right and I think we have.
Like when I was thinking about this, when that older
lady said to us, all, my father was in the
Second World War, like, and I think about it again,
I saw the poem today, Like we have to learn
from that experience, right, and you'd have to stop it now,

(02:02:40):
not when it.

Speaker 8 (02:02:40):
Comes for you. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that we
talked to multiple people, some of their families had survived
the Holocaust.

Speaker 9 (02:02:47):
Yeah, the reason they were in America. In many cases
grandparents had come here to feed the art court.

Speaker 8 (02:02:53):
Who were making comparisons to that. And You're like, they're
not doing that lightly. And I feel like almost, you know,
when we talk with the sort of grandiose things, I'm like,
I almost feel like I'm like, oh, we're talking about
people with whistles, Like yeah, but we're not. I mean
we all we're talking about people with whistles. Let's hope
it stops it whistles, right, And that is what is
effective right now? And it like is you know, it's

(02:03:14):
spreading something and it it's gonna be so interesting to
see what comes of this. Everything will be changing, you know,
there's no reason to specifically set up everything that you
all do in whatever city or town you live in
exactly the same as they do it here. But there's
like so many things to learn from them, and more
than anything else, the thing to learn from them is
like you just show up. Yeah, it's not that every

(02:03:38):
single person in the city has quit their job to
do this full time, right, Obviously economies don't function like that.
But you don't have to quit your job to walk
outside your house when you hear someone yell help, which
is what is happening with whistles and honking yeah right,
and just spreading a culture of we take care of

(02:04:01):
each other and neighborliness, right, and that is like, weirdly
fundamentally it is an American cultural idea. We're just bad
at it. We've kind of forgotten a lot of it. Yeah,
you know, it's like because obviously isolation is a big
part of American individualism is a big part of it.
But like everyone's a little bit happy when they get

(02:04:21):
to like, oh you need it, you need a lawnmower.

Speaker 9 (02:04:24):
Or yeah, when I get to fix my neighbor's truck. Yeah, yeah,
I love that. Yeah, get out and give some moment
a change.

Speaker 8 (02:04:31):
So and one of the things that we to to
maybe kind of end on, and the thing that I
want to end on. You know, we're asking people like
what they wish other people knew, what other people could know.
And there's a couple of things that people mentioned, and
we'll write more about this and pump podcasts more about this.
But one of the things that people mentioned is they
wish they had started earlier about knowing their neighbors. M hm.

(02:04:52):
Obviously it wasn't too late. It's the whole like like
with any kind of preparedness, right, You're like, you wish
you so heady, Yeah, but you know now is the
best you know, yesterday is the best time, and today
is the next best time. Yeah, right, And like just
literally knowing them, not necessarily becoming their friends, like a
lot of people are like no, I wasn't friends with them,
I just sort of knew them, you know. And then

(02:05:13):
also one of the other things that people just as
another thing people mentioned that they wanted people to know
is that when you build these networks, you need to
build autonomy into them at every level. You need to
build the idea that the person who is following ICE
is at the end of the day in charge of

(02:05:33):
how they do that. Like even if you know, you know,
people are like, oh, Ice is over here. You can't
say everyone go do this, you can someone can suggest that, yeah, right.
But having built autonomy into these networks makes them so
much stronger, and in an interesting way, partly because it

(02:05:55):
makes them less predictable to Ice.

Speaker 9 (02:05:58):
Right, because you never know what I'm gonna what that
comfortable when they're not comfortable.

Speaker 8 (02:06:01):
With Yeah, So like that is basically a diversity of
tactics makes movements strong. If they don't know how we
are going to behave they can't you know, and not
just like if everyone's rowdy, no, like you're going to
be real combination and when the rowdy and non rowdy
support people support each other. Anyway, those are the kind

(02:06:24):
of last thoughts I have before I actually sit down
and look at all my notes and write something real.

Speaker 9 (02:06:30):
Yeah, I think for me, it's everyone here said that
like that. It was funny when people were like, we
were like, how did you start organizing? They were like,
you know, last July we had a blog party and
a pot luck. Yeah, and it just seemed to be
just a thing until it became the foundation of this
thing that exists now.

Speaker 8 (02:06:49):
Right.

Speaker 9 (02:06:50):
Yeah, if there's one thing you can do. It won't
cost you any money, it will take you a little
bit of time, and it will probably make your life better.
It is go out on your block and meet your neighbors.
And I know that can be hard for people. Yeah,
I know it can be scary.

Speaker 8 (02:07:04):
But we're talking like trans motherfuckers who are doing this too.

Speaker 9 (02:07:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it's people who are who have
more at stake than I do. Yeah right, Like I'm
the cisgender white man for people listening, The best thing
you can do is start to form community, and it
could be in so many ways. One thing that like
I really like to do is like I have, throughout
my life developed certain skills and certain hobbies, and I

(02:07:30):
love to share those with people. You know, if there
is someone in my neighborhood they've got a bike outside,
they're trying to fix a puncher, I'm going to go
help them because I've done that ten thousand times.

Speaker 8 (02:07:41):
Yeah right.

Speaker 9 (02:07:42):
Whatever it is that is your thing that you like
to talk about, that you're good at, that you know about,
think of a way you could share that with people.
Maybe you like to bake, maybe you like to knit,
maybe whatever, it doesn't matter, It doesn't.

Speaker 8 (02:07:53):
Oh there's people with like free hats and scarves at
these things.

Speaker 9 (02:07:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could just be the person who
knits the scarves. That's your way to contribute. If that's
your way to meet your neighbors, right, put on a
knitting circle, to put on a baking thing. I like
to grow plants, so I'm always growing plants, and I'm
stoked when my neighbors stop buy and say, hey, I
really like your bass or plant and I want to
make which is how they pronounce it when they yes,
they do, yeah, when they say to me, because otherwise

(02:08:17):
I look at them and say, get out of my home,
you know, and they want if they want to make something,
I give them some, right, or if they say, hey,
I just need a couple of tomatoes, and I noticed,
of course I'm going to give them right.

Speaker 8 (02:08:29):
Whatever that is.

Speaker 9 (02:08:30):
Your neighbors away for a couple of weeks. Hey, do
you want me to look after the house? Your car
won't start? Let me jump it, right. I have one
of those little jumper packs. I love to use a
little jumper pack.

Speaker 8 (02:08:40):
Oh yeah. If you have a tool and someone needs
the tool, having a multi tool on you is the
best way to feel good. All the time because someone's like,
oh I wish I had a rent or not I
wish i'd yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:08:51):
And there you go, like Superman do those things now.
I know we have Margaret and I both hop on
about this, but like, this is how you build a
better world. It starts on your block. It starts by
building a better neighborhood, building a better street, building a
better apartment complex. Lived in an apartment complex. It could
be hard to see people in an apartment complexes because

(02:09:11):
people sort of get in the lift and put the
look at the floor, put a little sign up, just
be like, hey, we're going to have a pot. Look, Hey,
the little bit in between the pavement and the road's
kind of fucked up. Anyone else want to help me
put some plants in it this springtime?

Speaker 8 (02:09:24):
You know?

Speaker 9 (02:09:25):
Yeah, whatever it is that is your thing, start using
that to build community, because it's community that's going to
get you through this.

Speaker 8 (02:09:33):
Yeah. And it's like, you know, I don't always like
targeting to people, but I just when I'm in a
new place, I'm just like, hey, I just moved here,
nice to meet you. I'm so and so. Do you
need my phone number? And I can do the kind
of like, you know, I want you to my phone
number because I want you to call me instead of
the cops. I'm being too loud, right, But like you're

(02:09:53):
going to make a little bit of a faux pas
in certain communities by being like, hey, we should know
each other. Yeah, but usually just to hey we should
know each other isn't actually offending as many people as
you think.

Speaker 9 (02:10:04):
Yeah, Like I know a lot of people don't live
in cities too, or some people were like I grew
up very very rural. Yeah, but actually like we had
to know each other because like there wasn't really anyone
else you could go.

Speaker 8 (02:10:15):
Oh yeah in my mind, I'm like when I live rural,
and I'm like, that's how you have to know people.

Speaker 9 (02:10:19):
Like yeah, like I remember someone's horse fell in wealthy
be bad a swimming pool, Like, yeah, I lifted the
horse out by myself.

Speaker 8 (02:10:26):
Oh yeah, my neighbors pick out the pools walking out
of my property. Yeah, it's not as big of a
deal as lowers falling in, but just constantly my neighbors
like my pig got out again?

Speaker 9 (02:10:35):
Yeah, like like were there are a million reasons why
in rural areas or I'd hope you were you would
know people anyway. But again, like, hey, I'm so and
so I just moved here. I just wanted to say, Hi,
maybe you bake something whatever, take something over. Most people
aren't going to be mad at you.

Speaker 8 (02:10:51):
Yeah. Well that's kind of our preliminary stuff and we're
going to be doing so much more with it, but
we just kind of wanted to get some ideas out
while we were both in the same place in this
shockingly beautiful city. Yeah, around people who are so fucking inspiring, Like, yeah,

(02:11:11):
everyone we talk to is so inspiring. And even if
the like the tragedy of it, you know, I feel
so weird being like, here's the hopeful stuff. When I'm
like we're describing it very horrible land of kidnappers, We're like,
it's just like literally kidnappers have descended upon the city

(02:11:32):
and like to kidnap people that will fund the kidnappings. Yeah,
for cool people did cool stuff. That's the core idea
of the show is that when people, you know, it's
the intro it's when people are trying to do bad things.
There's people trying to do good things. And so that's why, uh,
taking a break from history content talk about something that's
just fucking happening right now. It is cool people doing

(02:11:54):
cool stuff up here, and or maybe more than cool
because it's freezing.

Speaker 9 (02:12:00):
Yeah, freezing people doing cool stuff.

Speaker 8 (02:12:02):
Yeah. Feel free to workshop at home, Yeah, a better
way to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 9 (02:12:09):
I'm coming back from a place more hopeful than I left.
I know, that's my thing that I do. But like,
I really believe that in the darkest times we can
build beautiful things. And I don't believe that any less
after being here. Yeah, that's great thing about being a goth,
beauty and the dark stuff.

Speaker 8 (02:12:26):
That's like. Anyway, we will talk to you all, just
for me next week and for James, who knows, probably
freaking tomorrow. Yeah, a couple of days here. Yeah yeah,
yeah that my job is hard anyway. Yeah, good luck
with everyone, and take care of your neighbors and fuck ice.

Speaker 9 (02:12:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:12:50):
Thanks everyone for listening to all of this. And if
at the end of this you are thinking that you
would like to help some of the people who are
on the ground, we asked people that we trusted on
the ground to provide us with links to different fundraisers
and basically, you know, I never share a fundraiser unless
I can support it with my whole heart, and I
would support it with my own wallet. The links themselves

(02:13:10):
are going to be in the show notes, but there's
a couple different ones. There's rent Support for Neighbors and Phillips,
which is a neighborhood rent support for neighbors in Central
Rent support for neighbors, and Powderhorn Supplies for political art making,
Protective gear for legal observers, diapers and menstrual supplies is
another fundraiser. Abolish ice shirts, including the shirt I am

(02:13:33):
wearing right now as I record this, North Star Frontline
Street Medics and the Twin Cities swol A tariot Ale
fund and they'll be links to both Venmo and cash
app for that one. Anyway, thank you to everyone, and
take care of each other.

Speaker 14 (02:14:00):
Hello, and welcome back to It could happen here. I'm
your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today we're going to
be talking about something that is happening here, doxing Nazis. Specifically,
I'm talking to Christmasias about his new book, To Catch
a Fascist, The Fight to Expose the Radical Right. Chris,
thanks for coming on today.

Speaker 7 (02:14:19):
Oh my god, Molly, it's such a pleasure to be here.
Thank you.

Speaker 14 (02:14:22):
I'm so excited to talk about this book. You sent
me a copy of it recently. I don't think I
remembered until I was reading it and I talked to
you while you were writing it.

Speaker 7 (02:14:30):
Yes, yes, yes you did. Yeah, yeah, you're one of
the many, many people I talked to, and you are
quoted in the book. In fact, I can't remember if
you told it to me or if I cite it
from somewhere else, But you once compared the research that
goes into doxing unmasking nazis to basically investigating your ex's

(02:14:53):
Instagram account, which I thought was an amazing comparison, because
you're basically saying, like, this type of work is excess
if you've done that type of slew thing.

Speaker 14 (02:15:01):
Which is not something I'm admitting to doing. I got
brazy about my exes. I'm just saying it is something
many women are very good at, exactly, Yes, and they
don't realize it's a transferable skill.

Speaker 7 (02:15:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 14 (02:15:13):
But for those who don't know, christ mrher Mathias has
been covering the far right for more than a decade, right, yeah, yeah,
you were with Huffington Post for a long time, and
you've been independent for a couple of years.

Speaker 8 (02:15:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:15:24):
So I was at huff Post for like almost fourteen years,
and about ten of those I know, it's wild, and
ten of those years I was covering the far right,
which is how I ended up in Charlottesville in twenty
seventeen for Unite the Right rally, which is something Mollie
and I have talked a lot about before. And Yeah,
after I got back from Charlottesville, my editor at the

(02:15:46):
time was like, this is your beat now covering the
far right. So I was kind of like among this
like initial crew of like digital media journalists who suddenly
found themselves on the like the right wing extremism beat.
And pretty quickly, you know, I realized while I was
trying to unmask people in the far right that there

(02:16:06):
were already people doing that work and they were anti
fascist activists.

Speaker 14 (02:16:11):
Yeah, and so to prepare for today, I listened to
a couple of interviews you've done about the book so far.
It comes out first week of February.

Speaker 7 (02:16:18):
February third. Yeah, We're we're close. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:16:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:16:21):
I was listening to those interviews and I was thinking about,
you know, this is a different audience like you don't
need to explain to people who listened to it could
happen here when Antifa is or.

Speaker 8 (02:16:30):
What docxing is.

Speaker 14 (02:16:31):
Yes, but I think the book very delicately and unapologetically
explains those things to people who might be afraid of them.

Speaker 7 (02:16:41):
Yeah, I mean that was the entire intent of the book,
and I'm so glad you picked up on that. You know,
I think I kind of imagined writing this book for
my parents, for like kind of you know, boomer liberals,
if you will, or centrists and other people just I
think that have a lot of misapprehension about Antifa understandably,

(02:17:02):
And you know, the kind of the goal of the
book was to to demystify what antifa is, explain it
to a wider audience, and to make kind of more
radical politics that Antifa represents more palatable to a wider audience.
And the way I tried to do that was to
make the book a bit of a thriller so that

(02:17:23):
was accessible, and make it into like a spy narrative.
And I'm hoping that the very kind of average reader
will be able to dive into this and come out
understanding more radical leftist politics that maybe wasn't accessible to
them before.

Speaker 14 (02:17:41):
That's such a hard needle to threat because like I
could give this book to my dad, right right, But
I also enjoyed reading it. Yay, good for the listener.
You should go out and get this. It's not just
for your dads. You will like it to the cold
open right, like the introductory chapter, start sort of in
media res with your framework of the book.

Speaker 8 (02:17:59):
Right.

Speaker 14 (02:18:00):
This Vincent Washington, this infiltrator inside Patriot Front. And the
thing is I know about Vincent Washington. I read the
leaks that Vincent was responsible for. I was actually the
one who told Thomas Rousseau in person about the leak.

Speaker 8 (02:18:14):
What I didn't know that book?

Speaker 14 (02:18:16):
Oh yes, for the listener, Vincent Washington is not a
real person. Cully is a real person, but that's not
his real name. Yes, right, So within Patriot Front, they
all get a pseudonym and then their last name is
like their state. So Vincent Washington was a man whose
name is not Vincent, who might be from Washington, and
he infiltrated Patriot Front and he leaked all of their
rocket chats. And the day that leak was published, it

(02:18:40):
was January twenty first, twenty twenty two. Yes, it was
the day of the March for Life. Yes, So Patriot
Front was in Washington, DC, and I had a suspicion
that Patriot Front would be there. They don't announce that
the kind of thing ahead of time, but I was
pretty sure they were going to be there. So I
went to Washington, d C. And we were standing outside
the National Archives and Thomas Rousseau had a little bullhorn.

(02:19:00):
He had like twenty or thirty guys and the little
matching fits, and they were so tickled with themselves. They
were so tickled. People were just falling all over themselves
because these like scary Nazis were on the street. And
I actually I have a video. I'll embed it in
the final.

Speaker 7 (02:19:14):
Oh my god, Molly, Hey guys, your rocket.

Speaker 14 (02:19:17):
Chat just got leads on DIA secrets. Unicorn Ryan just
dropped your rocket Chat everything, all your dms, all your
dms Matadeia, the video we're just gonna make fun of you.

Speaker 2 (02:19:33):
The videos that you.

Speaker 14 (02:19:34):
Send your network leaders, those all have Metadeia and Unicorn
Ryan is posting.

Speaker 18 (02:19:39):
Them right now.

Speaker 7 (02:19:40):
Holy shit, Molly, how did I not ask you about
this for the book?

Speaker 8 (02:19:44):
I could have put this in there. Oh, my god.

Speaker 14 (02:19:46):
It was incredible because you know, Thomas were so later
was like, oh, it's like not big. He looked scared.

Speaker 7 (02:19:51):
Oh my god, he looked scared.

Speaker 8 (02:19:53):
Yeah, it's like I know.

Speaker 14 (02:19:54):
About Vincent, but seeing the story from his side of
things was so different. Like I use these leaks all
the time, but I, you know, never get to know
about the leaker.

Speaker 7 (02:20:06):
Oh my god. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. So again, this
is kind of my goal for the book, was that
these kind of anti fascist spies, and I feel like
most Americans don't know that Antifa had so many spies
over the last ten years that were infiltrating these groups.
You know, they were the hidden hand behind thousands of

(02:20:26):
news stories because they collected all of this invaluable intelligence,
you know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of private messages
that these white supremacists were sending to each other, which
then were posted on a database on Unicorn Riot, which
you know, wonderful researchers like yourself and other people used
to mine for clues and details that they could use

(02:20:50):
to identify all of these previously sseunonymous Nazis. So for example,
you know, and I wish I could have seen the
look on Thomas's face. I can't wait to see that video.
But yeah, I mean, like they released I believe it
was like four hundred gigabytes worth of rocket Chat messages

(02:21:10):
and you know, videos and photos and stuff.

Speaker 14 (02:21:13):
With metadata still attached to them.

Speaker 7 (02:21:14):
Exactly with metadata still attached to them, which we'll get
to in a second. By the way, there's a good
story about the metadata, but you know, ultimately that data
would contribute to doc saying unmasking I think about eighty
members of Patriot Front, which is just remarkable, and I think,
you know, part of the story I was trying to
tell was that these anonymous anti fascists who are doing

(02:21:37):
this work, you know, anonymously, like they're not doing it
for acclaim or glory. They're doing it because they see
it as a form of community self defense. And you know,
what they were doing, you know, I think outstripped the
efforts of major media news organizations, you know, academic institutions,
civil rights organizations, oh no doubt, law enforcement definitely, like

(02:22:00):
they were doing more work to destabilize and destroy far
right groups. Then I would argue, really anyone else.

Speaker 14 (02:22:07):
And then this subsequent work that builds off of that
by civil rights groups filing these like Large Klan Act lawsuits.
Those lawsuits don't exist without these leaks. Sins v. Kessler
doesn't exist without these leaks. The three lawsuits against Patriot
Front don't exist without.

Speaker 7 (02:22:21):
These leaks, Yes, exactly.

Speaker 14 (02:22:23):
And I've been thinking a lot about this this week,
right because it was the anniversary of Richard Spencer getting
punched in the face five years ago.

Speaker 7 (02:22:29):
Happy anniversary, Happy.

Speaker 14 (02:22:30):
Anniversary to those who celebrate. And that was a beautiful moment.
And I think we can all agree that it's so
funny to watch Richard Spencer get punched in the face.
But every year you see people say and that's what
stopped him, and he was never heard from again and
he shut up forever after that.

Speaker 7 (02:22:43):
Right, that's not true. That's not true at all.

Speaker 14 (02:22:46):
Like I love, I love the guy that punched him
in the face, but that didn't end it, Yes exactly.
An infiltrator did.

Speaker 7 (02:22:51):
An infiltrator did, And I think again, you know, kind
of the goal of the book is that most Antifa
in the public imagination is most often associated with Nazi punching,
and you know, for good reason, Like most people learned
about Antifa in twenty seventeen from videos like the video
of Richard Spencer getting punched. It's so interesting to look

(02:23:12):
back and realize that no one in America knew what
the fuck Antifa was before twenty seventeen, and then by
the end of that year, everyone had heard that word
or knew that word.

Speaker 14 (02:23:23):
It was the boogeyman.

Speaker 7 (02:23:24):
Yeah, it was the Boogeyman, and it was added to
the Webster Dictionary. Oxford Dictionary shortlisted it for word of
the Year. Like it's a remarkable climb for you know,
a piece of language, a word. But the like viral
videos that catapulted that word into the lexicon kind of
obscured the bulk of the work that Antifa was doing,

(02:23:45):
which was espionage and intelligence gathering and kind of like
the creation of this remarkable underground informal intelligence agency that
like just completely fucked up so many fascist groups, and like,
you know, at the end of twenty seventeen, Spencer famously
said Antifa is winning, and he was referring not only

(02:24:07):
to getting punched everywhere he went, but to these very
efforts to identify all of his followers, who knew that
if their Nazism was public, they wouldn't be able to
operate in public life, they wouldn't be able to hold
down a job, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 14 (02:24:22):
Because I guess both the Nazi punching and the Nazi
docsing they are different means to a similar end, which
is to enact a consequence, right, so that if you're
going to be a Nazi in public, there's going to
be a fucking consequence, whether that means you get decked
in the jaw, or it means all of your neighbors
know what you said online, your mom knows what you

(02:24:42):
said online, like people know who you are.

Speaker 7 (02:24:45):
Yes, exactly the way I always describe it is the
digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a klansman.
You know, back in the eighties and nineties, anti racist activists,
like with groups like Anti Racist Action, you know, would
post flyers in namehoods that said meet your local Nazi, right,
And what they were doing was not only warning the

(02:25:06):
community that that guy down the block is liable to
commit violence against people you know and love, but like
you were getting at, they were creating a social cost
for being a fascist. They're basically leveraging an existing societal
taboo against explicit white supremacy and fascism to ensure a consequence.
It basically says, it tells people, if you're going to

(02:25:28):
join one of these groups, we're going to name and
shame you. You're going to lose your job, your girlfriend's
going to dump you, you might lose your apartment, your family,
you might not want to talk to you anymore, like
you're going to be a pariah. And I think it
was really effective. I mean, you know, obviously, the animating
question of my book, of course, is what happens when

(02:25:49):
that taboo starts to disappear?

Speaker 14 (02:25:51):
But it's not gone yet.

Speaker 7 (02:25:52):
It's not gone.

Speaker 14 (02:25:53):
Some of the other interviews I was looking at, people
are saying, well, is there value in this anymore? Because
you can work for the State Department and be a
Nazi now right, you can do the White House social
media being Nazien now like, is there still any value
in this? And I think the answer is obviously yes.

Speaker 8 (02:26:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:26:06):
They wouldn't wear masks if they didn't have to wear masks, yes, right,
Like some of them aren't mask off quote unquote, but
like not all of them. Patriot Front still marches in masks.
Ice agents still abduct children in masks. They're covering their
faces because they know what they're doing is wrong.

Speaker 7 (02:26:21):
Yes, exactly, And I think it's also as much of
a mask off moment as we might be living in
in some ways. You know, this act of research and
identifying the threat is still so important because it's you know,
preserving that societal taboo. It's still saying that that social
cost is something we still want to preserve, and it

(02:26:42):
is you know, I think very interesting that the anti
fascist work now is kind of pivoting towards identifying ICE
agents and MAGA, and the Trump administration is horrified of
this tactic of identifying ICE agents, and for good reason,
because you know the story I try to tell my book,
like this tactic played a really big part in destroying

(02:27:05):
fascist groups. They know that it could destroy their ethnic
cleansing projects. And when you look at the polls like
since reine a good, the favorability for ICE is just plummeted,
and the support for slogans like abolish ICE have skyrocketed.
So like that societal taboo against kind of white supremacismsm right,

(02:27:27):
that's being displayed by ICE is definitely still there.

Speaker 14 (02:27:30):
And you ground this sort of in the history too.
In the book, in the chapter about sort of the
history of unmasking, whether that's with digital docsing or you know,
identifying members of the Klan, there was still a social
cost of being identified as a Klansman in the nineteen twenties. Yeah,
like there was there was no social taboo against being
racist in the twenties, but there was a social cost
to being identified as a clansman. And I think we're

(02:27:52):
we find ourselves in the same unfortunate place.

Speaker 7 (02:27:55):
Yeah, totally, I mean, and honestly, that was one of
my favorite parts about researching the book, was diving into
the efforts to unmask the clans. Obviously there were efforts
to unmask the First Clan, but you know, one of
my favorite stories about unmasking the Second Clan took place
in Buffalo, New York, and there was actually a very

(02:28:16):
large Clan chapter in Buffalo. You know, the Second Clan
wasn't confined to the South.

Speaker 8 (02:28:22):
It was everywhere.

Speaker 7 (02:28:23):
It was in the Northeast and the midwest, right, and
it was animated not only by anti black racism and
anti Semitism, but also by anti Catholicism. They were really
angry at this new wave of immigrants from Eastern and
southern Europe.

Speaker 14 (02:28:41):
They didn't allow Catholics in until the seventies. They had
to have a big summit about it. Yes, yeah, yes,
when they decided that Catholics are white.

Speaker 7 (02:28:47):
Yes exactly. And this is I mean, it's just it's
so much to unpack because like obviously, like my family's Catholic,
and I enjoy all the privilege of being white. But
like you know, back then, like you know, so Catholics
were you know this other.

Speaker 14 (02:29:02):
You had a dual loyalty to this mysterious king.

Speaker 7 (02:29:05):
Yes, exactly. So at any rate, the Klan in Buffalo
is really big, and you know, in one night they
even have this elaborate cross burning ceremony where eight hundred
people take the oath for the Klan. The mayor of Buffalo, though,
is Catholic and forms a coalition with you know, Black
Buffalonians and Jewish Buffalonians, and the mayor ends up enlisting

(02:29:29):
a spy to go undercover into the Klan. One night,
the clan's secret headquarters in Buffalo are ransacked, broken into
in ransacked, and suddenly this list of the clan's membership
ends up in the hands of the mayor. The mayor
has makes some like deft denials of any involvement, but

(02:29:51):
says that he's going to post the lists downtown. The
list is posted downtown, so many people show up to
look at the list to see who among their neighbors
is in the clan that they end up having to
move the list I believe, to a warehouse to fit
all the people so that they could form a line.
And then in the ensuing weeks and months, clan owned

(02:30:12):
businesses are boycotted and vandalized. Clansmen turn up to their
jobs only to learn that they've been fired, and before
long the klan just completely falls apart. And interestingly enough,
Clan headquarters down in Georgia heard about what was happening
in Buffalo and was really alarmed by it, so they

(02:30:33):
send an investigator to Buffalo to figure out who the
spy is. They figure out who the spy is, and
they get in a shootout and they both die Jesus Christ,
which like underscores you know the stakes of this work sometime.

Speaker 14 (02:30:47):
Right, which is why you know the Richard Spencer Puncher
and the infiltrators. They do their best to stay anonymous
because the Steaks are lethal. Yeah, right, they will kill
you back. Yes, organizations can't survive sunshine, and they're so
aware of that that. Yeah, people have been killed for this.

Speaker 7 (02:31:05):
Yeah, absolutely, You and I have both faced our share
of harassment and stuff. But there's older tales of you know,
anti racist action. Back in the nineties, two of its members,

(02:31:27):
you know, anti racist skinheads, were in Nevada, lured out
to the desert by Nazis under false pretenses and executed
in the desert.

Speaker 14 (02:31:38):
It is fourth of July weekend, right, Yes, we still
honor them on the fourth of July exactly.

Speaker 7 (02:31:42):
Yeah. Their names are escaping me right.

Speaker 14 (02:31:45):
Now, Spitting Newborn and Daniel Shrsey.

Speaker 7 (02:31:48):
Yes, And there is a fantastic Orlando Weekly feature article
about I Believe Spit that I think is one of
the best pieces I've read in a long time that
maybe we can put in the notes I think people
would really enjoy. Absolutely, and you know, and then there's
more recent examples of that too. You know, over the
last five years, there was three members of the base,

(02:32:09):
which is like a neo Nazi organization. Obviously, I love
that your listeners know all.

Speaker 14 (02:32:13):
This, by the way, no what they could use the recap, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:32:17):
But know who these groups are at least, but they
were arrested for conspiring to kidnap and murder to anti
fascist activists in Georgia.

Speaker 14 (02:32:25):
It was a couple living in a kind of remote
area and they had a very detailed plan to burn
down their home and like kill them in their beds
and kill their pets.

Speaker 8 (02:32:34):
And I mean it was Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:32:35):
If not for the FBI agent who was their friend, yeah,
that couple would have been killed.

Speaker 17 (02:32:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:32:41):
No, it's it's really wild to consider the.

Speaker 14 (02:32:43):
FBI agent was friends with the Nazis. I should clarify
there is almost always an FBI agent who is friends
with the Nazi. Yes, And that's that's the important thing, right,
you know, Like these anti fascists are infiltrating these groups,
and so is the FBI. Right, Like a lot of
these hate groups, somebody is either a paid informant, freelance informant,
or an actual undercover agent. And that's great, I guess,

(02:33:06):
but a lot of times they will prioritize keeping their
agent undercover, yes, over using the information to protect anyone.

Speaker 7 (02:33:15):
Yes.

Speaker 14 (02:33:16):
And when we do it, when anti fascists do that,
we are invested in protecting our communities. Not building a case.

Speaker 7 (02:33:22):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 14 (02:33:23):
You don't need to take this to a grand jury.
You don't need to keep a guy in there for
twenty years waiting for the big fish. You're protecting a community.

Speaker 7 (02:33:29):
Yes, I mean, there's an example of that in the book.
There was a kind of this white whale in anti
fascist circles that people were trying to identify. And he
was a leader in the Ball Patrol, which of course
is this community of Nazis that praises his mass shooters
and tries to encourage other Nazis to commit mass shootings.
And he was eventually identified as this guy named Andrew

(02:33:52):
Casserat in Sacramento, California. I remember Vic, yeah, and his
his pseudonym was Vic Mackie. Yeah, and anti fascists identified him.
I published a story at huff Post. It emerges later
that Andrew Cassat was already on like the no fly lists, yes.

Speaker 14 (02:34:12):
Which means the government already knew who that fucking man
was when he was he was recording a podcast about
shooting me in my womb through my vagina, and the
government already knew who he was, yes.

Speaker 7 (02:34:23):
And which is just insane. And you know, and they'll
claim it's like investigative secrecy, like it's some kind of
some kind of pragmatism, but it's like for what, Like
they're posing an urgent.

Speaker 14 (02:34:32):
Threat for one thing, I felt safer. And I was
safer once I knew who he was, once someone did
the work of identifying that man, and I could say
with certainty he is in California, he is not near me.
I was safer, Yes, And like anti fascist gave me
that the government did not give me that. The government
would never have given me.

Speaker 7 (02:34:51):
That, yes, exactly. And I think it's also you know, obviously,
you know, a big tenant of militant anti fascism is
that you don't trust law enforcem or the state in
this fight. And not only for the reasons we're describing now,
but there's like this historical irony in when the FBI
or law enforcement in general infiltrates white supremacist groups, they

(02:35:13):
end up finding a bunch of their buddies, and these
white supremacist groups, like they end up identifying a lot
of police officers. And I think it just goes to
show the ways in which, obviously law enforcement and white
supremacist groups often share similar goals.

Speaker 14 (02:35:27):
Very much so, and sometimes once they have a guy
in there. I mean, I'm sure it happens still to
this day. We don't have the records of it happening now,
but we have the sort of sixties and seventies era
co intel pro records now that do show that. You know,
they had tons of FBI agents infiltrating the clan, allegedly
to disrupt the clan, but that's not what they were doing.

(02:35:49):
They were steering the clan into disrupting the civil rights movement.

Speaker 7 (02:35:53):
Yes, yes, but I mean most famously the Greensboro massacre
where you know, the clan and an other white supremacist
murdered some anti fascist communist activists, and then it emerged
afterwards that an FBI agent was in the group but
didn't report kind of their plans for violence.

Speaker 14 (02:36:11):
Over and over again. Yeah, and those five people died
for it. Yeah, exactly, which is why I will always
trust an anti fascist infiltrator over an FBI agent. Yes,
I loved the historical parallels, right, you know, so you
take doxing all the way back to the second Clan.
You know, this outside agitator narrative is not new, It's
something Martin Luther King Junior wrote about you were seeing

(02:36:33):
that now, right, Like, you know, these people protesting their
outside agitators. This isn't the real community. The real community
wouldn't behave like this. It's the same as it ever was, right, Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 7 (02:36:43):
I mean I think you know, since Antifa kind of
exploded into the American consciousness, MAGA and the rights seized
on Antifa as a boogeyman, and they trusted that kind
of liberals and centrists were going to throw Antifa under
the bus, right, that like they were going to come

(02:37:04):
to Antifa's defense necessarily or even acknowledge a lot of
times that Antifa existed, and you know, that allowed them
to create this boogeyman of like epic proportions. So like
in twenty seventeen, after Charlottesville, a synonymous pro Trump troll
called Microchip starts a petition to declare Antifa a quote

(02:37:29):
domestic terrorist organization. This petition goes viral, gets like three
hundred thousand signees, and Microchip ends up giving an interview
to Politico where he's very upfront and frank about why
he's doing this, and it's not because the White House
is actually going to declare Antifa domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 8 (02:37:50):
Oops.

Speaker 7 (02:37:50):
Oops, there's no federal domestic terror statute to even do that.
Antifa is not an organization. He's very explicit to say,
I'm doing this to set up Antifa as a punching
bag and to deflect and distract from the far rights,
very real violence.

Speaker 14 (02:38:06):
Pretty wild that he said it.

Speaker 8 (02:38:07):
He just said it. Yeah, said it.

Speaker 7 (02:38:10):
Yeah, And it's like that he admitted it.

Speaker 14 (02:38:12):
Meme, Oh my god, he admitted it.

Speaker 7 (02:38:14):
He admitted yeah. Yeah. And you know, over the next
few months, every time there's a mass shooting, you have
folks like Jack Pisobic and other kind of disinformation artists
jumping in when you know there's not a lot of
information yet to blame these mass shootings on Antifa.

Speaker 14 (02:38:31):
I mean, there's a weird troll who still thinks I'm
responsible for January sixth.

Speaker 7 (02:38:35):
Yes, yes, exactly. Very impressive work, by the way. You know,
so they're using Antifa that way to like distract and deflect.
They're blaming Antifa for wildfires and trained derailments and all
this crazy shit. And then you know there's a little
bit of a wall. And then in twenty twenty, the
George Floyd uprisings happen, and you know, the George Floyd

(02:38:58):
uprisings are one of the biggest mass uprisings in American history.
It's completely grassroots and organic, and it is led by
black protesters in their communities inspired by uprisings again in Minneapolis.

Speaker 14 (02:39:15):
It's too soon for history to be repeating.

Speaker 7 (02:39:17):
I know, it's really crazy, but Antifa, the Antifa boogeyman,
now is repurposed as kind of this outside agitator's trope
on steroids. Right, So Trump and all these magget influencers
rush to blame Antifa for fomenting these mass uprisings, which
is absurd.

Speaker 8 (02:39:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:39:38):
Sure, and Antifa activists were at these uprisings, but you know,
they weren't instigating them, like nor would they have the
organizing power to instigate such a massive uprising like that.
When the right is doing this, it's an effort to
make these uprisings seem artificial or you know, kind of

(02:39:59):
astroterm something you can dismiss, something you can dismiss as
inorganic and artificial. And it's a way of like distracting
from the very real grievance at the heart of these demonstrations,
which is that we want cops to stop killing black people.
So throughout the summer of twenty twenty, the Antifa panic
reaches like absurd levels where you know, there are rumors,

(02:40:24):
viral rumors of busloads of Antifa roaming the countryside looking
to burn down white businesses. You know, again, Antifa's blamed
for wildfires in the West. All of a sudden, you
get these paramilitary groups, militia groups out West using these
Antifa rumors as a pretext to literally occupy towns, entire towns.

(02:40:49):
You know, you have forty white dudes in full camo
and vests carrying big guns patrolling the streets on the
lookout for this Antifa menace. You know, there's like story
about in a Standpoint, Idaho, which is this gorgeous town
in the Panhandle, and these like group of like high
school kids go on a Black Lives Matter march across

(02:41:11):
a bridge, and all of a sudden they're being followed
by these like middle aged white dudes carrying AR fifteen's
and calling them racial slurs Jesus Christ. So like, basically,
the Antifa boogeyman in twenty twenty is repackaged again not
only to sew division on the left, and to create
this outside agitator's narrative, but to create this pretext for

(02:41:34):
vigilante violence. And there was a lot of vigilante violence
that occurred in twenty twenty of course, you know, now
we're in twenty twenty six, and we saw last throughout
last year as well. The Antifa boogeyman again is being,
you know, summoned to call whoever opposes the Trump regime's

(02:41:55):
effort to ethnically cleanse the United States, you know, domestic terrorists.

Speaker 14 (02:42:00):
Right, The enemy is simultaneously very weak and very strong
in their minds, right, like, yeah, we're all a bunch
of soy boys who live in our mom's basements, but
we were also a massive, networked, armed organization with unlimited fundings.

Speaker 7 (02:42:13):
Yes, exactly, exactly, And you know, obviously Trump claimed to
formally designate Antifa a domestic terror group in September.

Speaker 14 (02:42:22):
Doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 8 (02:42:23):
He did say it. He did say it, and.

Speaker 7 (02:42:25):
Then he held a Antifa round table at the White
House with a lot of our friends anty no Jack Pisovic.
But you know, as farcical as it all is, it's
also deeply dangerous and alarming. In September, Trump designates Antifa
domestic terror group. And then last month they murder Renee
Good and cold blood and what do they do. They

(02:42:46):
call her domestic terrorists after the fact.

Speaker 14 (02:42:49):
Exactly, it's pretext.

Speaker 7 (02:42:50):
It's all pretexts, because.

Speaker 14 (02:42:52):
If you create this sort of shadowy network of unidentified
agitators who are responsible for unspecified but very bad crimes,
you can kill anyone.

Speaker 7 (02:43:01):
Say it with them, Yeah, exactly. I wrote a piece
for The Nation recently about how there's a tendency in
response to like this escalating mega hysteria about Antifa. There's
a tendency among liberals and centrists to dismiss Antifa as
not existing, to altimately say that it's not even a thing,

(02:43:22):
or to say, well, antifa just means anti fascists, so
we're all antifa, but like to me that entirely this
is the point, like a like, Antifa is real, and
it refers to like a very real subculture and a
very real tradition, militant tradition of anti fascist organizing. And

(02:43:43):
if liberals and centrists can't acknowledge that Antifa is real
and come to their defense, then you know, the people
doing this work might be in some danger. And I
think it's important to show them some solidarity right now.

Speaker 14 (02:43:57):
It's such a complicated reality, right because it's not a group, yeah,
but it is. It's also it's a thousand different groups
of two or three or ten. It's not like a
nationwide membership organization. You know, it is just an idea,
but it's also a history, a set of tactics. It's
all of those things, and it's none of those things.
And it's different depending on who you ask and why

(02:44:17):
you're asking.

Speaker 7 (02:44:18):
Yeah, exactly, And like anyone can do it, you know,
like right like anyone can take up the mantle of
like militant anti fascist work.

Speaker 14 (02:44:25):
A lot of people are doing it on their own.

Speaker 7 (02:44:26):
Yeah, and I think like that's what's been so kind
of inspiring to me about Minneapolis and the uprisings right is,
you know, everything that community is doing right now is
a grassroots, organic response, and they're doing it because no
one else is going to do it for them.

Speaker 9 (02:44:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:44:46):
There's this axiom that we talk about a lot in
anti fascist spaces and anarchist spaces and black liberation movements.
You know, this axiom of we protect us, and you
know that is on very big display right now in
Minneapolis where you have people doing what anti fascist activists

(02:45:07):
were doing to Nazis in twenty seventeen, which is monitoring them,
following them, disrupting them. They are figuring out where they
are staying, where they're eating, and pressuring those businesses and
those hotels not to serve them. They are showing up
outside their hotels doing noise demos, they are identifying them.

Speaker 8 (02:45:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 14 (02:45:29):
Yeah, and I think you know, we protect us is
such a you know, it's such a short, pithy phrase,
but you don't know what it means until you feel it. Yeah, right,
Like I think in Minneapolis people are feeling it. They're
protecting each other, right. You know, here in Charlottesville after
Unite the Right, you know, when local authority figures were
saying things about Antifa, you would have you know, white
grandma's get up there and say, don't you say that

(02:45:50):
about antifa? Right, don't you say that about antifa? You
know it is a word I didn't know a month ago,
but they saved my life. Yes, right that once you
have experienced that kind of community solidarity, that that we
protect us ethos, once you've seen it, you know what
it means, yes, exactly, And nobody's going to tell you different.

Speaker 7 (02:46:08):
Yeah, And like you know, it's also it's just so
clear in Minneapolis that like the Democratic Party and you know,
law enforcement, the local police are not doing anything, you know,
like they're not They're.

Speaker 14 (02:46:22):
The people that are supposed to protect you. Aren't going to,
aren't going to The police will watch you get beaten
in the street, yes, yes, exactly, and your center, your
senator will say nothing when the President calls you a terrorist.

Speaker 7 (02:46:34):
Yes, And so you know, I think it just kind
of goes to show that this kind of militant, anti
fascist tradition is it's an organic response to conditions. It
is like an insurgent form of community self defense. As
horrifying as the footage coming out of Minneapolis is, especially

(02:46:56):
that photo this week of the five year old God
being detained, which I can't get out of my head
and which makes my blood.

Speaker 14 (02:47:02):
Boil thinking of it, I can't cry on the recording.

Speaker 7 (02:47:05):
Yeah, no, it makes me want to cry too.

Speaker 14 (02:47:18):
Something that really struck me reading the book. You know,
I was saying, like, you know, I read Vincent Washington's leaks,
but he didn't know anything about Vincent. You said that
he told you he was moved to start taking this
kind of militant action by the Portland Max train stabbing. Yeah,
I mean that stopped me in my tracks.

Speaker 7 (02:47:36):
Yeah, you know. And I think one of the more
moving parts of researching this book was realizing that all
of the anti fascists doing this work had brushes with
fascist violence in their communities, and that's what inspired them
to do it. You know, Vincent was in Portland in

(02:47:57):
twenty what year was that was seventeen May twenty seventeen, right,
and he gets on a train at Hollywood Station in Portland,
goes to a friend's place, has a good time, and
then later reads the news and realizes that had he
taken one train before his that left about a minute before,

(02:48:19):
he could have been in this car where this white
supremacist named Jeremy Christian started harassing to black Muslim girls.
He is haranguing them, telling them to get out of America.
When three men intervene, Jeremy Christian slashes the throats of
the three men and two of them die. God, we're

(02:48:40):
gonna get emotional on this, but like one of the.

Speaker 14 (02:48:42):
Last times, this one really really gets to me. I've
sort of brushed up against the story and a couple
of things I've written, And I mean it's one of
the most moving encounters you know, of all of these
sort of moving pieces, right that a Nazi committing violence
against a Somali immigrant. Right, that's so relevant today, ordinary
people intervening. Only one of them was sort of an

(02:49:03):
active anti fascist in his community, the young man that survived,
Micah Fletcher. The other two were just everyday dudes, every
day dudes. They didn't have anti fascist politics. But they
saw a Nazi threatening a little girl.

Speaker 7 (02:49:16):
They saw Nazi threatening a little girl, and they lost
their lives. And as one of them, and I'm blanking
on his name right now, it's Talisian. Yeah, was lying
bleeding out. He said, tell everyone on this train, I
love them. So I actually flew to Portland's a few

(02:49:36):
days later and ended up interviewing his girlfriend. Oh my god,
you kept a journal of their relationship and read me
passages from it, and like, you know, how beautiful the
relationship was. They had just moved in together, they were
growing a garden together, and before he left that morning
he get on that train, he said something really wonderful

(02:49:59):
just about how much he loved her. So, you know,
basically his day started and ended with these expressions.

Speaker 14 (02:50:05):
Of love that would always really rex me.

Speaker 7 (02:50:08):
Yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker 14 (02:50:09):
But seeing that that was sort of you know, as
someone who got into this work after seeing what happened
where I live, Yes exactly, it was. It was very
striking to me that you know, it was the same
for Vincent. It was something that he was not involved in.
He didn't he didn't witness this stabbing, but he was
so close to it. It felt so intimate to him,
and he felt like, well, I have to do something.

Speaker 7 (02:50:29):
Yes exactly. And there were so many other examples that
I name in the book of these really horrendous hate
crimes taking place in Portland and Seattle and across the
Pacific Northwest, which you know historically has been a hub
for white supremacist organizing. So you know, for Vincent, if
the threat felt very real to people he knew and loved,

(02:50:49):
which is why he decided to go undercover into Patriot
Front and to fuck up Patriot Front. He had done
some other anti fascist work before that, like kind of
monitoring the Proud Boys, but then, you know, I think
when the Proud Boys were on a bit of a
decline after January sixth he started to look at groups
that operated more in the dark and were more secretive,

(02:51:12):
and he decided to focus on Patriot Front.

Speaker 14 (02:51:16):
And how prescient at that time. I mean, Patriot Front
in twenty seventeen didn't exist in early twenty seventeen, but
sort of as they rebranded into twenty eighteen from Vanguard America.
I mean, how prescient of him to know that that
would be the place to go.

Speaker 7 (02:51:28):
Yeah, No, totally like that. That's where I think the
energy was and like kind of the anonymous organizing was going,
and you know, and what he did was really remarkable.
I think a lot of anti fascist infiltrations and spy
work is done online. You know, people just creating a
username in an avatar and they can manage to do

(02:51:51):
most of the espionage from behind a computer screen.

Speaker 10 (02:51:55):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:51:55):
One of the more significant acts of espionage during this
era is like that goes undercover into Identity Europa and
again manages to get reams and reams of their private messages,
which end up on Unicorn Riot and that destroyed them too,
destroyed them and you know those messages, the panic and
the discord like database ends up identifying one hundred Nazis

(02:52:18):
in Identity Europa, which is just remarkable. The anti fascist
spy that did this I talked to and he just
had to do an interview with an Identity Europa leader
to get into the group and I got to listen
to that recording and it's remarkable. But you know, after that,
he didn't have to do that much in person, you know,
method acting to pretend to be a Nazi vincent. However

(02:52:40):
did he you know, for five months he was going hiking.
He was going hiking, man like, because Patriotfront requires you
to go on missions and hikes and you know, kind
of group activities. He had to do shit in person.
So like this dude was acting like deserves an oscar,
you know. So he climbed Mount Rain for two nights

(02:53:01):
with thirteen other Nazis, Oh my god. And by the way,
at this point had earned the trust of his local
chapters so much that he was named the official photographer
and videographer for the chapter, which is just delicious.

Speaker 14 (02:53:16):
They're so smart, smart, so smart. I mean it's like
it's like that Simpsons bit, right, Like videotaping this crime
spree was the best idea we ever take video of everything.
They do yes, and then because of these leaks, we
see that in several lawsuits against Patriot Front right like
they are recording video as they you know, vandalize civil
rights monuments and things like that, and then they got

(02:53:38):
sued in three places.

Speaker 7 (02:53:40):
Yes, and it's it's basically the stringer bell like, are
you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy? You know me,
they are, and they are, so you know, eventually all
this data that Vincent collects. And by the way, so
he's in the group for about five months, He's scheduled
to go to their big march in DC, but the
last minute claims he can't because the FBI knocks on

(02:54:02):
his door. That's a lie. He's just doing that to
scare Patriot Front when Patriofront gets to DC and goes
on their march. So anti fascists in DC know their plans,
and they know where they are parking their vehicles for
this march. They know where Patriofront is going to march.
And let's just say, some Nazi cars get redecorated.

Speaker 14 (02:54:24):
Some tires did not make it out of DC that night.

Speaker 7 (02:54:27):
Tires did not make it out of DC, some windshields
did not survive. There is some graffiti. Patriotfront gets back
to their U hauls. First off that they used to
get transported into d C from suburban Maryland. Their U
hauls are fucked up. They get back to Maryland finally
and to see all their cars fucked up, so you know,
there's an act of sabotage. They realize they have an infiltrator.

(02:54:50):
Before long they realize that it's the man they know
is Vincent, and I think they think that that's it,
like there'll be a few doses, but you know that
it didn't seem like he hacked their server. But then
of course a month later, all of their messages end up,
everything end up on Unicorn. Riot You tell Thomas Russou

(02:55:10):
the news of this, Oh that was such a treat. Yeah,
I can't, I can't believe we've never talked about this.
And over the course of the next few months years,
so many Patriot Front members are identified, and there's also
some other delicious details like Vincent, after his infiltration is over,
he has all this Patriot Front propaganda material that he

(02:55:35):
kind of took along the way, banners, pamphlets, shields. So
what he does on New Year's is he makes a
pire Towering Pire of this material and lights it on fire,
makes a really beautiful video set to old lang Syne
and post it online for Patriot Front to see, and
I think kind of warning them that, like you know,

(02:55:57):
there might be some more coming, some more docs coming,
some more stuff coming. And the thing is is, like
Vincent's story is just one story, one kind of remarkable
story of anti fascist spywork over the last ten years.
There are so many other stories that I heard about that,
for various reasons I couldn't put in the book, or
there wasn't room for in the book. But it's just, yeah,

(02:56:19):
I feel very privileged that I got to tell this
story that not many people know.

Speaker 14 (02:56:24):
It was such a great framework for the book because
it's not just about that particular infiltration, but it sort
of provides this this running framework, this sort of introduction
to the concept. I thought it was very nicely done.
I was excited to learn about Vincent because I have only,
like I said, read his leaks and then the lawsuits
that had inspired and then the lawsuit against him, right, yeah,
which was dismissed last week. Yes, it was congratulations Vincent,

(02:56:46):
Yes it was.

Speaker 7 (02:56:46):
Yes. The book gets into this a little bit, but
Patriot Front does end up ascertaining what it believes is
Vincent's real identity, and they file a lawsuit in federal
court in Washington, and it had been ongoing for the
last year or two, but was finally dismissed in court
this week. Yeah, or last week.

Speaker 14 (02:57:08):
So congratulations to the person who may or may not
have been Vincent.

Speaker 7 (02:57:11):
Yes, I'll never know.

Speaker 14 (02:57:12):
It didn't make it didn't make it to a How
think it ever made it to a hearing?

Speaker 10 (02:57:17):
No?

Speaker 8 (02:57:17):
Yeah, yeah, I know.

Speaker 14 (02:57:18):
I said I wouldn't take up a ton of your time,
but I can't let you go without talking about red Beard.

Speaker 7 (02:57:24):
Oh my god.

Speaker 14 (02:57:25):
This is the first concrete confirmed published docs of red Beard.

Speaker 8 (02:57:30):
Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (02:57:31):
Yeah. I can't believe it's taken us this long to
talk about it. Thank you for reminding me.

Speaker 14 (02:57:35):
So for the listener. You know, we talk about how
this is, this is worth that is accessible to everyone,
but it is not for everyone. And Red Beard to
someone I have read so many incorrect doxes of And
that's why it is so important. It's so important to
be sure of what you're writing, because I've read one
hundred failed doxes of this man. Yeah, and this one's real.

Speaker 7 (02:57:53):
Yeah, So red Beard, to those who don't know, again,
was kind of this white whale and anti fascist circles
white supremacists will basically insomuch as he was one of
the men filmed in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen beating DeAndre Harris.
For those that don't remember, DeAndre Harris was a black

(02:58:14):
counterprotester resident of the Charlottesville area. He was a nineteen
year old teacher for special ed students and he ends
up in a scuffle with Nazis that are leaving Charlottesville,
leaving the rally, and they end up in a parking
garage where five of them beat him while he's on
the pavement with metal poles and other weapons, and it's

(02:58:37):
captured on camera. I think it's one of the more
distressing things to watch from Charlottesville. I actually happened to
be in the garage at the time, was running towards
DeAndre when one of the Nazis pulled a gun and
started waving it around, so I ducked behind a car.
By the time I got up, DeAndre was stumbling away.
There was a pool of blood on the pavement.

Speaker 14 (02:58:57):
Wait, I have to go back to the footage. Who
was it that pulled the gun.

Speaker 7 (02:59:01):
I'm not sure it is.

Speaker 14 (02:59:02):
Oh, were you over on the police station side of
the divider.

Speaker 7 (02:59:06):
I think I was running pack.

Speaker 14 (02:59:08):
I had to go back and find you in the footage. Yeah,
I think the guy who pointed a gun at you
is Teddy von Nucomb.

Speaker 7 (02:59:12):
Oh my god. Well if we can make that idea that.

Speaker 14 (02:59:14):
Because he pulled because he pulled the gun he did.
I mean, somebody else may have pulled a gun, but
Teddy pulled a gun.

Speaker 7 (02:59:19):
Okay, I need to look at a photo of Teddy
van Nucam it all happened so fad Oh, oh it's
that guy. Yeah, Oh my god, Oh my god. Okay,
all right, let's talk about this.

Speaker 14 (02:59:28):
Way Molly here recording. After the interview was over, I
went back and reviewed that footage, and my memory did
fail me a little bit.

Speaker 9 (02:59:38):
Here.

Speaker 14 (02:59:38):
I was thinking about the right moment right after the
victim and that beating has sort of broken away from
the main portion of the assault and he's running away.
The video taken by Unicorn Riot hands over to follow him,
and as the camera sweeps across the area on the
other side of the parking garage, you can see a
Nazi named Teddy von Nucomb, that's his real name, changed it.

(03:00:01):
He takes a swing at the victim with what looks
like a baton, and at the same moment somebody does
pull a handgun, but it's an unidentified man standing right
behind Teddy von Nucom. I had the image mixed up
in my recollection. Sorry about that. Teddyvon Nucum, as I
said in the interview, is dead. He shot himself in
the chest in twenty twenty three, the morning he was

(03:00:22):
supposed to go on trial for fentanyl trafficking. I wish
I could tell you who the little nazie, what the
gun is, but it looks like there's no ID on him,
not yet anyway. Sorry for the listener. This is something
I think Chris and I have both spent probably one
hundred hours looking at frame by frame video from seventeen
angles of this particular assault for a variety of reasons.

(03:00:44):
Right right, So, it was this brutal gang assault on
this young black man, and four people went to prison
for it, yes, and some people didn't.

Speaker 7 (03:00:52):
Some people didn't. And one of them was a you know,
kind of a bigger white dude with a big red
beard wearing a baseball cap who from then on earned
the nickname Redbeard. There are all these like you mentioned,
kind of.

Speaker 14 (03:01:07):
A million just like every fat guy with a red
beard on the East Post has been identified as red Beard.

Speaker 7 (03:01:12):
Yes, exactly. And it was like all these like kind
of amateur online sleuths. I think Sean King was in
the mix for this back in the day, you know,
trying to idea this guy. No one can find him.
A lot of people are fossily identified. The Charlottesville Police
Department can't find him. A detective puts out like a
call for help, but nothing comes in eventually. And where

(03:01:34):
my book kicks off in this story is there's a
group of anti fascist researchers called Ignite the Right that
is dedicated to identifying every Nazi that turned up in
Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. And they create a database of
all these photos and videos and a list of all
the people that have been identified, and the list of
names that they are identifying keeps on growing and growing,

(03:01:57):
and they're identifying some like really crazy names. Like one
of the stories I ended up doing was about a
police officer who was working as Richard Spencer's personal Donnelly
John Donnelly security guard in Charlottesville. So they're doing a
lot of really significant docs is like that, but they
still can't find red Beard. Eventually, they decide to use

(03:02:20):
facial recognition, which is interesting. You know, obviously I think
anti fascists out of principle are opposed to facial recognition software.
But I think, you know, you kind of can't show
up to a gunfight with a knife kind of situation.

Speaker 14 (03:02:37):
What that's still I think is not enough in this case, right,
because the commercially available facial recognition software that you know,
the average non law enforcement person would have access to
really struggles with round faces like his and big beards.
So he's got a big beard and a hat and
his face is very round, and so it's going to
pull a lot of just sort of round faced redheads, yes.

Speaker 7 (03:02:59):
Exactly, and so like either, you know, there's it's a
very important and anti fascist work. A facial recognition hit
is never one hundred percent, you have to corroborate it.

Speaker 14 (03:03:08):
It's not enough.

Speaker 7 (03:03:09):
So they finally use facial recognition for Redbeard and they
get a hit, and the hit is a baby faced,
beardless like nineteen year old white dude in a army
uniform at a at a base in Georgia, and he's
about to shake the hand of President George W.

Speaker 8 (03:03:30):
Bush.

Speaker 7 (03:03:32):
And the reason he's photographed for this is because Bush
is making a visit to this military base. I believe
it's Fort Benning to announce his troop surge in Iraq.
So a lot of these people are about to be
sent off to his war.

Speaker 14 (03:03:49):
And then he brought the war home.

Speaker 7 (03:03:50):
And then he brought the war. Oh man, Yeah, brought
the war home. And then so the anti fascist zoom
in on this photo, but the name tag is Blory,
so they can't figure out who Red Beard is yet.
To make a long story short, I end up filing
a public information request to the George W. Bush Library

(03:04:11):
in Texas.

Speaker 14 (03:04:12):
Right, because they would have had to vet everyone who
was there.

Speaker 7 (03:04:13):
Yes, exactly, and if the president's yeah, and you know
my angle on it is that I ask for higher
resolution photos. We get the higher resolution photos and zoom
in and sure enough, there is his last name, Hilman.
Now all we have is the last name. So there's
a lot more work to do. These anti fascists go

(03:04:36):
through military yearbooks. They don't find anything. They go through
so many social media accounts, until eventually, one day they
see a Facebook account that belongs to a man named
Jay Heilman.

Speaker 14 (03:04:48):
It's crazy he still had Facebook all these years later.

Speaker 7 (03:04:51):
Oh it's it's wild. And there are photos of him
in the military being sent overseas somewhere. And then they
take no notice of this one particular detail, which is
that there is this meme he posts of fucking Tom
Hardy from The Dark Knight and he's saying the fire rises, right,

(03:05:13):
it's that meme of him saying the fire rises, which,
of course, in like the Dark Knight is supposed to
mean like all this like death and destruction is about
to commence, Like it's a phrase you hear in fascist
circle sometimes kind of us like a half joke. But
what was interesting about the meme wasn't so much the
meme itself, but where and when Facebook said it was posted.

Speaker 14 (03:05:34):
He left the location deatha on it.

Speaker 7 (03:05:36):
He left the location on it, which was Charlottesville, Virginia,
August twelfth, twenty seventeen. So that is how they unlock
the identity of Red Beard. You know, there's a lot
more to the story in the book, and I think
I will be identifying Red Beard in a news story
somewhere soon, so look out for that.

Speaker 14 (03:05:57):
I love to hear it. Make Joe Platania answer for
his refusal to prosecutes.

Speaker 7 (03:06:02):
Yes, yea.

Speaker 14 (03:06:02):
And it's not enough to say the victim doesn't want
to cooperate, because you don't need victim cooperation to prosecute
malicious wounding in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Speaker 8 (03:06:09):
Sorry, Joe, you heard it here first.

Speaker 14 (03:06:12):
I was hooting and hollering when I got to that
part of the book. I can't believe it because I
had heard he had heard through the grape vine that
the prosecutor was aware of his identity and had chosen
not to prosecute. But I didn't know his identity. So
what a thrill?

Speaker 8 (03:06:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (03:06:27):
Yeah, it was a real journey. My ex at the
time joked that there was a third person in our
relationship and that person was red Beard, because I was
so obsessed with trying to find him.

Speaker 14 (03:06:37):
I mean, truly, truly a white whale. Yeah, in I
guess several senses of the word.

Speaker 7 (03:06:43):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 14 (03:06:45):
But like I said, I promised I wouldn't take up
a ton of your time. I'm just so excited about
this book, about this story. It's not just for your
dad who doesn't know what antiva is. Yes, I thought
it was thrilling. I learned a lot about some guys
I've been thinking about for years.

Speaker 7 (03:06:58):
Right, Yeah, that means the world to me, MOLLI thank you.
And you also have been such an important voice in
these spaces in helping me out over the year, so
I appreciate it.

Speaker 14 (03:07:08):
I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much for coming on.
People can pre order the book to Catch a Fascist
The Fight to Expose the Radical Right by Christopher Matthias.
You can pre order it now from Simon and Schuster
and it comes out February third. Wherever you buy your books,
don't buy it at Amazon. I'm going to make sure
my local anarchist bookstore has put it in order for it.

(03:07:29):
You should all do the same. What else do you
want to plug? Where can people find you online?

Speaker 7 (03:07:34):
Yeah? So I'm freelancing these days for different places. Guardian
MS now the Nation Slate, so look out for me there,
but you can mostly just find me on Let's Go
Matthias on Blue Sky, and I'm still on the Nazi site,
but don't really post there anymore.

Speaker 14 (03:07:49):
At Let's Go Matthias as well wonderful and like I said,
make sure you pre order that book.

Speaker 15 (03:07:54):
It is a fun read.

Speaker 14 (03:07:55):
Buy a copy for your dad who's scared of Antifa.

Speaker 7 (03:07:58):
Yes, please, thank thank you so much, thank you.

Speaker 13 (03:08:14):
This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
news cast 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 Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
This episode, we're covering the week of January twenty first
to January twenty eighth. Massive snowstorm across most of the country,

(03:08:40):
at least the real parts of the country, which is
the East coast in the south. Now, and wow, there
is a lot of snow. It makes me feel kind
of like a penguin just walking off to the mountains
by myself, weathering the weather. Finally, I feel akin to
the President, who is now so a suicidal penguin.

Speaker 9 (03:09:02):
At the wrong end of the globe.

Speaker 8 (03:09:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:09:04):
Yeah, well, you know, as soon as they start the remigration,
they're going to be deporting penguins Stuffland Greenland. Yeah, it's
held in a military detention camp off of Greenland. Now
that we might own a tiny bit of our military base.
Still very unclear what the details of that Greenland deal are.

Speaker 2 (03:09:23):
No, he just wanted to be able to say he
made a deal. And I don't know if it's going
to be any different than the status quo was before.
But he'll claim victory and so will his supporters, and we'll.

Speaker 8 (03:09:34):
All move on as we kind of already have.

Speaker 2 (03:09:37):
Yep, there's too much other bullshit going on.

Speaker 9 (03:09:40):
That is the motto for twenty twenty six.

Speaker 13 (03:09:43):
Some of that bullshit is the third immigration enforcement related
shooting in Minneapolis in just three weeks, James, do you want.

Speaker 8 (03:09:52):
To start with that?

Speaker 9 (03:09:54):
So, yeah, I was in Minneapolis. I was actually just
in Minneapolis Airport when this happened. On Saturday of this week,
Alex Pretty was shot by two CBP agents in Minneapolis
while he was filming an immigration raid in which ICE
agents attempted to pursue someone into a donut shop that
seemed to have locked the doors. Pretty seemed to be

(03:10:16):
trying to assist a woman who had been pushed to
the ground by agents when the agents grabbed him, maceed him,
beat him, disarmed him, and then shot him several times.
Pretty he was thirty seven. It was a Veterans Affairs
icy Unice and when this confrontation with immigration agents began,
he was legally carrying a sig P three twenty handgun

(03:10:37):
concealed inside his waistband. I can go on and summarize
the video for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's obviously
quite distressing, so you know, if you're gonna watch it,
just know that you're going to see someone die. Video
shows several agents beating Pretty. This one grabs a handgun
from his inside waistband holster. Very quickly after this, ten
shots are fired by at least two agents. Can here

(03:11:00):
at one point an agent shouting gun, gun, He's got
a gun. Yeah, And then in the aftermath, another video
shows agents asking where is the gun, So it doesn't
appear that the agent who cleared Pretty's gun informed the
other agents that that had.

Speaker 13 (03:11:17):
Happened, though the agent that first fired at Pretty was
standing right behind the agent that disarmed him and is
literally like looking down at where the gun is being
removed as he then seconds later starts shooting yeah. Preddy
falls to the ground, then more agents fire on his
body as it lays flat on the ground.

Speaker 8 (03:11:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:11:39):
The CBP initial use of force review, which was sent
to Congress today suggested that on Wednesday, Yeah, this is Wednesday,
the twenty eighth, two agents fired. So we know at
least two agents fired right where it's not entirely clear.
I don't think if all of these were CBP agents,
but at least one one of the agents who fired

(03:12:01):
shots was an eight year CBP veteran. Then a range
safety officer, Greg Bovino has declined to identify them because
he said that.

Speaker 8 (03:12:10):
Would be doxing. That's not what that word usually means.

Speaker 9 (03:12:15):
No, DHS has claimed that Pretty had two extra magazines
on his person, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.
What they provided was a photograph of a sig P
three twenty with a red dot site and a slide lock,
backed clearly on the front seat of a vehicle with
two charge courts next to it.

Speaker 8 (03:12:32):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:12:33):
That's that's not normally how evidence is treated in a crime.
That is an unusual way to go about that. But
in mild the DHS Secretary Christie Nome has told reporters
that Pretty attacked and impeded law enforcement and was brandishing
his weapon. Videos don't show that the only time that
you see his weapon is when it is removed by

(03:12:56):
the agent who takes it out of this waistband.

Speaker 13 (03:12:58):
Pretty appears to be holding his black cell phone for
the entirety of this interaction.

Speaker 9 (03:13:03):
Yeah, and it's very clear that it's a cell phone,
right CBP agents us inches obviously from the phone in
his face. Yeah, there is no reasonable claim.

Speaker 2 (03:13:14):
Now, as a rule, throughout the interaction, there was never
any confusion that would have led them to believe he
had a gun in his hand or to be unaware
that he had been disarmed. Yeah, there's no argument for that.

Speaker 9 (03:13:26):
You can't make a case for that reasonably. People will
do unreasonably.

Speaker 8 (03:13:29):
I don't care.

Speaker 9 (03:13:30):
The allegation that he attacked members repeated by FBI Director
Cash Patel in the interview he gave to Fox News.
I'm going to give a little video of Nomes claim.

Speaker 19 (03:13:40):
This individual impeded the law enforcement officers and attacked them.
State the facts as they unfolded on the street today.
We were doing a targeted operation against an illegal criminal,
and this individual came with a weapon and dozens of
rounds of ammunition and attacked them, And these agents took
action to defend their lives and to defend the lives

(03:14:03):
of the people around them, and it acted according to
their training.

Speaker 9 (03:14:08):
CBP Commander at Large potentially no longer Commander at Large,
Gregory Bavino, claimed that Pretty had assaulted federal agents, and
throughout a press conference at Baveno, Gave referred to Pretty
as a suspect and the people who killed him as victims.
Vino also claimed that Pretty planned to quote, massacre law enforcement.

Speaker 11 (03:14:32):
Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk
into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic
and stand in the middle of the road and then assault,
delay and obstruct law enforcement? Or was he there for
a reason? Did he fall victim to that violent and
heated rhetoric by a mayor Fry, a governor Waltz. Look, Dan,

(03:14:54):
they're trying to portray Board of all agents and ICE
agents as Gestapo, Nazi and many other words. Did this
individual fall victim as many others have Okay, that one
type of heated rhetoric.

Speaker 15 (03:15:07):
I want to stay focused on this incident right now,
because what you were saying is that he went there
to try to stop this law enforcement operation. All of
the video that we have seen shows him documenting it
with his cell phone, which is a lawful thing to do.
And the only time he seemed to interact with law
enforcement is when they went after him, when he was

(03:15:29):
trying to help an individual who law enforcement pushed down.
So where do you have the evidence to show that
he was trying to impede that law enforcement operation.

Speaker 11 (03:15:41):
Sure, Dana, First, he was there in the scene. He
was in the scene actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement
to the place that's not illegal.

Speaker 15 (03:15:50):
He wasn't impeding it. He was filming it, which is
a legal thing to do in the United States.

Speaker 11 (03:15:55):
And Dana, let's don't freeze frame adjudicate this now. He
was there for a reason, and that reason was to
impede law enforcement too. And here, and here's a good point, Dana,
is the fact that de escalation techniques were utilized during
this action. Those de escalation techniques, whether it was physically

(03:16:17):
trying to remove them from that law enforcement scene, that
active law enforcement scene in which law enforcement.

Speaker 9 (03:16:22):
I wanted to include little bit more there because I
feel like that's one of the few times we've seen
him not just able.

Speaker 2 (03:16:26):
To deliver his right where someone's pushed a little Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:16:30):
Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:16:31):
Well, and there's a thing in the video that I
think is really effective where you know, you can hear
him lying about the video, and then the video is
playing next to it and you can just see what
is happening, and then he's just saying shit, Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 9 (03:16:45):
Good piece of television news.

Speaker 8 (03:16:47):
Gost.

Speaker 9 (03:16:47):
That's another worst piece I've seen him saying they used
the escalation techniques as you watch, half a dozen guys
makes him in the face and then beat him.

Speaker 8 (03:16:56):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 9 (03:16:57):
I mean, there's this line I think a lot about
Chapter seven of nineteen eighty four, which was the party
told you not to believe your eyes, and is it
was their final most important command. I mean, I don't
If this ain't that, then I don't know what is.

Speaker 13 (03:17:10):
Yeah, I mean yeah, they don't even try to convincingly
lie at this point.

Speaker 2 (03:17:14):
Like they just keep to the narrative that has been
set at the top.

Speaker 10 (03:17:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:17:19):
Well not even in this case at the top. It
was kind of set at like the upper middle ycause
the top has been backing off from this narrative at
least a little bit.

Speaker 13 (03:17:27):
We'll get to the kind of back and forth in
a sack. But I mean, it's very clear from this
that they just consider blowing a whistle to be impeded,
like that's that's all the justification that they need. Stay
consider his presence there as long as you are physically
presence there.

Speaker 2 (03:17:40):
Yeah, anything you do that they don't like is assaulting
an officer at this point.

Speaker 13 (03:17:44):
Yes, it's kind of a minor point. But also his
pronunciation of gestapo.

Speaker 9 (03:17:49):
Stopo, he does that every time.

Speaker 8 (03:17:51):
It's like, dude, we can we know, we know.

Speaker 13 (03:17:54):
Yeah, he's like, he's wearing that coat, he's wearing the
fit come on and yeah, no, it's it's pretty insane.

Speaker 10 (03:18:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:18:03):
I love the articles that are like, no, he's just
wearing a traditional old style military coat. It's not stuff foker.

Speaker 8 (03:18:12):
Guys.

Speaker 9 (03:18:13):
Come on, man, I've seen a lot of Border Patrol agents, guys.
No one else wears that coat. He picked that coat
because of how it looks. Ye, to my knowledge, that's
not a uniform piece for the Border Patrol.

Speaker 2 (03:18:24):
No, and he's never been in the military. Yeah you
know what he is and is a secret police unit anyway.

Speaker 9 (03:18:30):
Sorry, Yeah, no, I think it's a good it's worth
being that one. I want to talk about this ACLU lawsuit, right,
So in sworn testimonies, which are part of this ongoing lawsuit.
Multiple witnesses said Pretty did not brandish or draw his
handgun quote. I have read the statement from DHS about
what happened, and it is wrong. The man did not
approach the agents with a gun. He approached him with

(03:18:50):
a camera. He was just trying to help a woman
get up, and they took him to the ground.

Speaker 8 (03:18:55):
One set.

Speaker 9 (03:18:55):
Another witness, a doctor was prevented from performing CPR are
quote none of the ICE agents who were near the
victim were performing CPR, they said. Agents demanded the physician's license,
which evidently they did not have.

Speaker 13 (03:19:09):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:19:09):
They just ran out of their house in their pajamas.
Their testimony continues, quote, I could tell the victim was
in critical condition. I insisted the ICE agents let me
assess him. Did They appeared to be operating on the
assumption that these people ICE, some of them were CBP.

Speaker 8 (03:19:22):
I should just say that.

Speaker 9 (03:19:23):
They also noted that agents quote appeared to be counting
his bullet wounds. Yeah, Jesus, and there is video that
shows him doing bizarre things to his remains that are
not within the remit of trauma care or first to aid.
In my experience in training, which is pretty significant when
it comes to like this exact scenario.

Speaker 13 (03:19:44):
The documents that released today said that they placed the
chess seals on him.

Speaker 9 (03:19:48):
They were placing chess seals on him. Yeah, yeah, that
might explain. It looks like that're sort of pulling up
on his shirt.

Speaker 13 (03:19:54):
I mean, this whole again, this whole incident is very
very clearly documented with video multiple angles. After the shooting,
an agent is like on top of his body, screaming
for scissors to cut off his clothing. Yeah, and then
later they placed chess seals. According to that document that
was released to Congress. Yeah, we have not to carry
scissors in your first day kit when you were in outraualmushes.

(03:20:16):
But mine quimal, I guess.

Speaker 2 (03:20:17):
I mean these guys don't know what they were doing.

Speaker 8 (03:20:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, that's the thing, right.

Speaker 9 (03:20:22):
Bavina also noted in his press conference that the agents
were still at work, but they had been redeployed for
their safety. Outside of the Twin Cities. Following the shooting,
a vigil was held and there were protests, including some
armed presents. In the protests, Minneapolis Police Department attempted to
hold the space both to keep the vigil away, and

(03:20:44):
the earlier that day they had refused to leave when
told to do so by federal police. Later that night,
they deployed extensive lefleithor munitions to clear the vigil.

Speaker 13 (03:20:55):
Let's go on ad break and then return to discuss
the back. In fourth characterization of the shooting from Trump's cabinet,
we are back. The day after the shooting, Cash Pattel

(03:21:19):
went on Fox News to say that it is against
the law to bring a firearm to a protest.

Speaker 8 (03:21:25):
Nope, here's a clip.

Speaker 20 (03:21:27):
I guess Christy said. You cannot bring a firearm loaded
with multiple magazines to any sort of protests that you want.
It's that simple. You don't have that right to break
the law and incite violent That's wrong.

Speaker 13 (03:21:39):
In Minnesota, it is not against the law for permit
holders to carry a firearm well attending a protest. And
it's arguable whether what pretty was doing is even a
quote unquote attending a protest. These sorts of spontaneous mobilizations
against ice are not like a formalized we are protesting
in this location at this point, to protest rally its

(03:22:01):
community mobilizations. The term of protest is going to be
applied a little bit loosely.

Speaker 9 (03:22:07):
Now.

Speaker 13 (03:22:07):
The DJST statement three hours after the shooting made this claim, quote,
this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to
do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement unquote. This is
the phrase that Bavino said verbato at the press conference
on Saturday following the shooting. Mm HM Miller said something

(03:22:28):
similar on Twitter as he was tweeting at Democrat politicians. Quote,
it would be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement
and a domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.
Christy Nome also had a press conference the day of
the shooting where she said, quote, when you perpetuate violence

(03:22:48):
against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons
to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of
domestic terrorism. This individual, who came with weapons and ammunition
to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement
officers committed an act of domestic terrorism unquote. But by Monday,

(03:23:11):
the White House began softly backtracking previous detests claims about
the shooting. Press Secretary Carolyn Levit so that she has
not heard President Trump characterized pretty as a domestic terrorist.
That same day, Fox and Friends asked DOJ attorney Todd
Blanche about whether Preddy committed domestic terrorism, and he replied

(03:23:32):
like this.

Speaker 21 (03:23:33):
With all your respects, ser my question is more pointed,
do you believe your colleagues may have gone farther? You
are an attorney at DOJ. Eighteen US Code twenty three
thirty one. It has a legal definition of domestic terrorism,
and it doesn't appear to most of the country that
have watched the available video. And we'll see if there's
bodycam video. I'd love to know if that's going to

(03:23:54):
come out, if there was such a thing, But it
does not appear to have met that definition of domestic terrorists.
And so I'm just sort of wondering how you in
the DOJ are viewing whether your colleagues may have gone
too far.

Speaker 22 (03:24:07):
Look, don't I don't think anybody thinks that they were
comparing what happened on Saturday to the legal definition of
domestic terrorism. What we saw was a very violent altercation,
and I am not going to prejudge the facts. You're right,
there's a bunch of video that's out there.

Speaker 8 (03:24:22):
There's a bunch of video that we haven't seen yet.

Speaker 22 (03:24:24):
In the minutes leading up to what happened and in
what happened afterwards. And you're right to the extent there's
bodycam or other videos that witnesses are still providing to us.
So I'm not describing it as anything except for a tragedy.

Speaker 8 (03:24:40):
That's pretty pretty wild.

Speaker 13 (03:24:42):
Two days after, Christina tried to literally give a definition
of domestic terrorism at a press conference and then dooj
Attorney's just claiming, no, it's not the real legal definition
of domestic terrorism. Yeah, this word is just a rhetorical
tool for the administration to deploy at well.

Speaker 2 (03:24:59):
Yeah, we just we're using it because we killed a
guy and we wanted to shut down discussion.

Speaker 8 (03:25:04):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:25:05):
And when we didn't stick the landing because there were
multiple angles on video, now we got to find something else.

Speaker 8 (03:25:11):
Yeah, And we just did this, Like how many weeks
ago was the no?

Speaker 13 (03:25:15):
I mean, this whole incident shows how vital documenting interactions
like this can be, and how much public opinion is
something that is not just fully fully dictated by administration statements,
like they tried to deploy a narrative which, after enough
circulated documented footage contradicted public opinion of this incident. Formed

(03:25:38):
in pretty strong opposition to the administration's claims.

Speaker 8 (03:25:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:25:44):
Yeah, this has penetrated into a lot of places that are,
under ordinary circumstances, either extremely apolitical or very conservative.

Speaker 9 (03:25:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:25:54):
I am trying to remember, honestly, the last event that
I saw between this and twenty twenty and the George
Floyd uprising that had this kind of penetration into mainstream,
non political society. I remember one of the biggest things
that I saw was this moment of, oh, actually, this
specific shooting has gone to a point where it's reaching

(03:26:15):
people who normally would never hear about this stuff. Was
There's an NFL commentary named Kurt Warner who used to
be very famous quarterback. The only thing he ever talks
about is quarterback play in football. This is the only
thing he ever does. I'm not one hundred percent sure
about this, but when I look back, I couldn't find
him saying anything about George Floyd. And Kurt Warner came

(03:26:37):
out and gave a statement about how this shooting was
a horror and that the administration was lying about it,
and you saw this sort of rattling through again very
very conservative sports circles, which again this NFL's circle, specifically
where this kind of stuff never really penetrates this weekends.

(03:26:57):
You know, as as this sort of murder was happening,
the NFC and AFC championship games were going on in
the sort of immediate wake of this. And these are
for people who don't follow football at all. These are
after the super Bowl. These are this is the semifinals.
The winner of these two games goes to the Super Bowl.
These are the second most important games of the entire
NFL season. And fans at both of these games booed

(03:27:22):
the national anthem, a thing I have never heard of before.

Speaker 8 (03:27:26):
This is a football game. Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 12 (03:27:30):
Yeah, right, like the beginning of most football games, there's
a bunch of troops holding the flag and people. They
didn't do this in twenty twenty. They were booing the
national anthem. So one of these games was being played
in Denver and the other one was being played in Seattle.
And in the game in Seattle, the Fox broadcast kept
cutting out the national anthem because people kept chanting fuck Ice.

(03:27:52):
So they would just literally be cutting the audio anytime
that happened. And this just kept happening to the entire
course of this I have never seen anything like this
breakthrough into sports like this. It's it's been breaking into
there's a whole bunch of stories about just random groups
on a reddit where it's breaking through into where you're
getting statements from like, oh god, I wish I remember

(03:28:14):
who on bluse guys saw this from, but the person
who runs the subreddit where that's like playing your cat's
but like bongo drums.

Speaker 8 (03:28:22):
About this.

Speaker 2 (03:28:23):
Yeah, I'm glad they finally spoke up. Honestly, you know,
we've all.

Speaker 9 (03:28:27):
Been waiting, but like I saw this in spaces where
we're like like climbing forums or climbing subreddits.

Speaker 2 (03:28:36):
Like no, because they just shot a nurse in the head.

Speaker 12 (03:28:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the second time they
did it. And the thing to me that I think
is really significant about this happening at NFL games. Right,
one of the two teams that was playing in the
game in Denver is the New England Patriots. Right, the
New England Patriots are famously very very close to Trump
as an organization, their owner is very close to Trump.

(03:29:00):
So I had remembered a story from last year about
so the Patriots have a jet that is the Patriots
Jet that they fly all their players around in that
is has giant letters the Patriots on it. Yeah, that
is technically run through a charter company. But you know,
I remember last year there's a story about how their
jet was doing flights to Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 2 (03:29:19):
Sure that makes sense for the Patriots yet yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (03:29:22):
Yeah, right.

Speaker 12 (03:29:23):
This is the kind of organizations that we're dealing with here, right.
And while I was looking into the story about the
Patriots jet being used to do things to move apparently
not detainees to but apparently just military people and supplies,
which they do a lot, I found a completely unrelated
story about a different Patriots jet in during the Biden
administration doing deportation flights to Honduras. And this isn't considered

(03:29:45):
an ideological thing. Oh that's just funny, Like this is
the kind of conservatism you're dealing Yeah, you know, And
I mean this is technically it's the contractors you're doing this,
but you know, it's it's the plan with the Patriots
logo on it. And they were doing deportation flights under
Biden like four years three or four years ago. And
now people are booing the national anthem enchanting fuck Ice

(03:30:05):
a lot of the stuff that we've talked about and
we're going to talk about about the way the Trump
administration has been backing off of this is because they
have been forced to watch the entire country go, holy shit,
you just murdered this guy and then lied about it.
You just executed him in the street, yeah, and light
about it.

Speaker 10 (03:30:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:30:21):
I think the lying and you can just see them.
And this is also the second time they've done this
in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 13 (03:30:28):
Like, the lying thing is, like, I think for a
lot of people, that's the really insulting thing. It's obviously
a tragedy to have someone be killed by federal law
enforcement like this. Yeah, but it's just the blatantness of
the lying, I think is what really activated people here.

Speaker 2 (03:30:42):
Yeah, because this is for years they've skirted by on
the situations like the written house thing where you can
kind of see what happens, But depending on what you
bring into it ideologically, that can look like two different things, right,
depending on where whether you think those protesters areangerous or
not or whatever like that. That's a video that like

(03:31:02):
everyone saw the same video and took something different out
of it. Yeah, that's not the case with this video,
or really with the Renee Good video for most people. Yeah,
and it's really jarring for them, most people who were
not political, because that's what we're talking about is like
the sheer number of people who do not normally wait
into this stuff were making a comment. They would see
one of these videos that is much more like if

(03:31:24):
you're just kind of coming in and watching it, it's
kind of unclear what's happening, and they would go, oh,
it's another big com I'm just not going to get
involved with it. People are arguing about what this is.
Let them argue, I'm going to go on with my life.
This is very clear what's happening, very clear that they're lying,
and it's just upsetting. It's deeply upsetting to even people
who don't normally think about this shit.

Speaker 12 (03:31:43):
Yeah, and I think part of that too is also
you know, there were a lot of people who didn't
get involved with the Renee Good shooting because you know,
even then, people were still like, oh, well, maybe it's complicated.
But once you've seen the second shooting in two weeks
where the line from the administration and he's exactly the same,
and you have video images again, Yeah, that's how you

(03:32:03):
get someone like Kurt Warror, who was a faith family
football guy. He's very open about being a Christian, is
very open about he doesn't talk about politics, but he's
very obviously conservative in a way that he doesn't think
is political. And he looks at this and goes, holy shit,
they murdered this guy and the government's lying about it.
And that's a kind of breakthrough moment in all of this.

Speaker 9 (03:32:22):
I've seen a lot of stuff from like folks in
the gun community, like who you wouldn't normally expect to
be critical of the Trump administration being critical. Yeah, because
the Trump administration has come out with just like insane
they're repeating like anti Second Amendment talking points.

Speaker 8 (03:32:41):
Yep.

Speaker 9 (03:32:41):
I also saw his name is Tony Thomas, but he
was previously the commander of Special Operations Command. Right has
been sharing and unfortunately AI quote unquote enhanced photo of
the shooting.

Speaker 17 (03:32:53):
God.

Speaker 2 (03:32:54):
Yeah, that I need to talk a little bit about there,
but please continue.

Speaker 9 (03:32:59):
Yeah, it's it's remarkable that you've got someone whose job
has been killing people for the United States government, right,
who've like retired to a role in investment banking. It
doesn't normally make statements in public about immigration policy. But like, again,
this one is kind of broken containment, right, Like they
saw the police shoot a man in the back multiple
times in broad daylight from multiple angles, and yeah, this

(03:33:23):
one's been really hard for them, just been.

Speaker 8 (03:33:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:33:26):
One of the things that you know, when you talk
about sort of Reddit as a site of this, right,
one of the things on the front page A readit
for a while that day was just a thing from
like r slash picks where it's a picture of a
frame in this shooting and then it's a picture of
a Nazi officer with a gun to the back of
the head of a prisoner they're about to shoot, and
it's almost identical frame for frame, And that's the kind

(03:33:47):
of thing that's just going around on like the front
page of Reddit.

Speaker 2 (03:33:50):
Yeah, part of what I think is happening here is
they got very convinced that their ability to kind of
just brute force their own reality over what actually happened,
and maybe they gambled too hard.

Speaker 13 (03:34:00):
Yeah, So much of this story is like the ultimate
conservative nightmare of the government physically disarming you than executing you.
And that sequence of events is I think also in
part what has created this pretty consistent turnarway from the
Trump administrations and the dhs' is like initial statement on
what happened here, which the administrations themselves have started to

(03:34:21):
roll back on after the public rejected this claim that
they kept making, on him being like a terrorist, him
intending to massacre law enforcement, all these things that they
have no way to actually prove. On Tuesday, Stephen Miller
told CNN that they are quote evaluating why the CBP
team may not have been following White House approved protocol

(03:34:43):
and that the initial statement from DHS following the shooting
was quote based on reports from CBP on the ground quote.
On Wednesday, the DHS Spokespersonent Tritich McLoughlin repeated this claim
on Fox Business.

Speaker 19 (03:34:57):
Secretary Nome accused Alex Prette for being a domestic terrorist.

Speaker 8 (03:35:02):
Is the administration standing by that language?

Speaker 23 (03:35:05):
So initial statements were made after reports from CBP on
the ground that was a very chaotic scene. We know
that our ice law enforcement are facing rampant violence against them,
a highly coordinated campaign. So that is why this investigation
is so important so we can get accurate facts to
the American people.

Speaker 13 (03:35:25):
Trump has denied that Preddi was acting as an assassin
and has called the shooting a quote unquote very unfortunate incident,
but he has continued to say that Preddy should not
have been carrying a gun. Quote, you can't have guns.
You can't walk in with guns, you just can't unquote.

Speaker 9 (03:35:43):
Yeah, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus has been pretty impressive. Yeah,
I'll say that, like generally right, like, especially organized gun
owner groups in the United States tend to align very
heavily with conservative politics. They have been like reinforcing that
what pretty was doing was in no where legal, It
should no way need to be being killed.

Speaker 8 (03:36:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:36:04):
As of Wednesday, we do know now that the Border
Patrol agents involved in the killing of Alex Preddy have
been placed on administrative leave. Around January twenty sixth, Trump
struck some kind of deal with local officials, namely Mayor
Frey and Governor Tim Walls. Local officials have said that
quote unquote some federal agents would begin leaving Minnesota. Bonvino

(03:36:28):
is expected to return to California, with The Atlantic reporting
that he's been stripped of his quote unquote Commander at
Large title and has been locked out of government social
media accounts. Tom Homan has arrived in Minneapolis to take
over Immigration enforcement operations and local Minnesota law enforcement have
ramped up their policing of protests, especially outside of hotels

(03:36:51):
where ICE and Border Patrol agents have been staying.

Speaker 12 (03:36:54):
And it's important to note as as you're seeing a
lot of stories about sort of ICE pulling out of Minneapolis,
and you know, an administration rolled back because of the
sort of Bovino movement. Everyone that I have talked to
in Minneapolis, and this is a fairly large number of people,
have all told me that everything on the ground remains
the same. The raids are continuing, and they want to

(03:37:15):
make sure that everyone understands that the raids are continuing
and that the same kinds of things that ICE in
the Border Patrol have been doing up until this point
are continuing to happen under I guess quote unquote new management.

Speaker 9 (03:37:29):
Yeah, I think they may have withdrawn some Border Patrol agents, right,
but the bulk of the people they deployed were actually
ICE agents. They to my knowledge, have not been withdrawn home.
And is not exactly a like a liberal figure when
it comes to deportation. To build it mildly, it might
be like a change in the outward appearance that the
practice of what's going on that has not changed.

Speaker 13 (03:37:51):
Do we want to just have any kind of final
discussion on that AI enhanced image that's been circulating.

Speaker 8 (03:37:58):
Yeah, yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (03:38:00):
There's an AI enhanced image, and this is when I
posted this. I've seen people comment that like, oh, it's
more disinformation from the fascist. This is the opposite of that. Yeah,
someone AI enhanced a still frame from the video because
there's a question as to whether or not when one
of the ICE agents disarmed Preddy, did he actit negligently
discharge his firearm into the ground, and did that maybe

(03:38:20):
spook them and cause the remaining chain of events. I
don't think it's clear. And the video is not super
clear as to whether or not the gun is firing.
It's kind of grainy.

Speaker 8 (03:38:29):
Yeah, we don't know that yet.

Speaker 2 (03:38:30):
So and like the new AI enhanced version, you literally
see like a tongue of fire coming out of the
barrel of the gun and then a full round of
five to five six seems to be exiting.

Speaker 8 (03:38:43):
We like with the casing. Just make shit up.

Speaker 2 (03:38:46):
It looks like it has the casing. It looks not
like a firing gun looks And the text on this
is this is from the AI info Twitter account. An
enhanced video of a man who disarmed Alex Preddy shows
the show's gun allegedly misfiring his ice agent with it,
which has also been said to have spooked other agents
into firing. AI video also enhances the visuals of the bullets.
It would be clearly visible to the human eye.

Speaker 8 (03:39:07):
It was like, I didn't hit shit, you had to
fight you. You had the digital quivalent of a five
year old scribbling on it.

Speaker 2 (03:39:13):
And you know, I don't know, Maybe I guess this
could be them trying to be like, oh, it wasn't
the federal agent's fault. It's those damn sig P three
twenties that spooked everybody.

Speaker 8 (03:39:21):
Yeah, it's it's like number one.

Speaker 2 (03:39:24):
AI can't enhance, Yeah things, Nothing can enhance a photo
that's not a thing that's real. You can't just like
add details to a photo that weren't in in a
way that's different from just photos shopping them in. And
that's what AI did. Someone said, add visuals of a bullet,
and they did, and it's bad. It looks like a
fucking sparkler is stuck in the end of a handgun.

(03:39:46):
But yeah, it's just shit like this that's just going
to be everything, Like every clash, every murder, every controversial
thing that happens, there's immediately going to be a bunch
of different AI slot videos and analysis. What scares me
most or not even scares me. What I think is
the biggest problem isn't even just the straight up disinfo videos.

(03:40:06):
It's the stuff where people are claiming, look, I did
some research using this AI, and it revealed this thing
that isn't immediately visible to the naked eye, but this
is clearly what really went on. Yeah, and how that's
going to supercharge fucking conspiracy theories about stuff, and how
the response when people are like, but the AI didn't
enhance anything, will just be like you're not smarter than
an AI, you don't know, Like that's that's the kind

(03:40:29):
of thing where it's just got to be annoying. Like
the truth ecosystem is already so damaged. I certainly wouldn't
say that this is going to definitely make everything worse,
but it's going to make everything more annoying.

Speaker 9 (03:40:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:40:42):
Yeah, I don't think I've seen this image that you
were talking about, but I've seen a whole bunch of
other like AI enhanced images of the shooting. It's specifically
like the moment where where or like around the time
that the agents are firing into the back of Pretty,
And it's mostly like AI sharpened images, but taken to
such an extreme extent that literally one of the heads

(03:41:04):
of the border patrol agents is just missing.

Speaker 10 (03:41:07):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (03:41:08):
I wouldn't call that enhanced, but I'd say it's an improvement.

Speaker 13 (03:41:13):
You have to like kind of like look for it
because because of how much movement is in the night,
of course, but I've seen I've seen this the AI
hnts like like still from the Pink Jacket Lady, oh
God of the shooting. I've seen this image spread all
around by by people showing like how how like brutal
this looks, and it you don't need to spread this

(03:41:35):
AI sharpened version with the with the head missing, like
there is like regular skills that maybe are a little
bit more fuzzy, but they actually are are real. And
you've seen a few other like AI altered images spreading
around around this shooting. Specifically, there's been like AI altered
images of Alex Pretty that like slightly changes his like

(03:41:55):
facial proportions that have been used at some like memorials
have been have been running on the internet, and that
sort of stuff has been incredibly frustrating just to see
the sort of proliferation of these of these AI images
into like the news cycle.

Speaker 2 (03:42:10):
I shared the enhanced image that looks really bad. It's
really bad.

Speaker 8 (03:42:15):
That's like, that's like, wow, I've not seen that. Yeah,
it's like a kidergartender. It's unreal.

Speaker 13 (03:42:21):
You don't need to do this like that. People that
have seen the footage knows what happened. You don't need
to spread these fake images like public opinion is already
formed on this.

Speaker 8 (03:42:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:42:28):
Well we'll go on ad break again, but I think
to close this section, I'll play the short clip from
the Minnesota timber Wolves game, which is which is a
basketball game, I believe, Yeah, which they held a moment
of silence for pretty and people chanted Towards the end,
I'll shorten the moment of silence.

Speaker 8 (03:42:48):
For the audience, but you can take a listen.

Speaker 10 (03:42:51):
Here are the tragic laws of Alex Purty that occurred
yesterday in Minneapolis. We extend our love, support and heartfields
some of these two Alex's family friends in our community
during this difficult time. Please join us in honoring the
life and memory of Alex Pritty with a moment of silence.

Speaker 13 (03:43:32):
All right, we're back. After the shooting. On Saturday, Chuck
Schumer said that Senate Democrats would not be advancing a
House approved appropriations bill with the currently included DAHS funding
Right now. The Senate is considering a six bill spending
package that was narrowly approved by the House thanks to

(03:43:53):
seven Democrats, and now Senadems are seeking to separate out
the DHS bill and advance the five others. These six
annual spending bills are set to expire on January thirty first.
If at least some Democrats don't sign on to the
bills by Friday, there will be a partial government shutdown
on Wednesday. Schumer reiterated, quote until ICE is properly rained

(03:44:16):
in and overhauled legislatively, the DHS funding bill doesn't have
the votes to pass the Senate unquote. Possible immigration enforcement
concessions that Democrats are pushing for include, but are not
limited to, independent investigations into the recent shootings, mandating judicial
warrants for immigration arrests, mandating body cams, requiring agent identification,

(03:44:39):
no masks, no arrest quotas, no roving patrols and restricting
border patrol agents to the US border.

Speaker 9 (03:44:47):
Yeah, so I want to address I've actually addressed the
roving patrols before, and that the evidence standards for stops
on those patrols. I'm not going to do that, but
I do want to address this last one right with
the quote unquote US border. So in the statute, border
patrol is supposed to operate within a reasonable distance of
the United States border, which they interpret to be a

(03:45:09):
one hundred mile distance. Now, when you are thinking of border,
you might be thinking of land borders, but remember this
also includes ocean borders. They interpret the Great Lakes to
be international waterways, and thus it begins one hundred miles
from the shore of the Great Lakes. For context, That
still doesn't get you into Minneapolis, right, You're looking at

(03:45:30):
a bit further. One hundred and fifty miles was the
shortest line I could draw on a map. People seem
to be operating under the misapprehension that this includes airports
and it does not. And I keep seeing this repeated online,
and then people keep telling me the statue is actually
very clear on what does and does not constitute a border,
and it has talked about external borders and airports are

(03:45:52):
not included in this. Border Patrol does not operate within
one hundred mile radius of every international airport in the
United States.

Speaker 13 (03:46:00):
Really unclear if Democrats will be able to get some
of these things. Obviously, pushing for more training has its limits.
The people involved in the shooting had years and years
of training and gave the training. In some case, they
were doing what they were trained to do. Yeah, but
there's other stuff in here, like like mandating body cams,
which though Border Patrol currently has body cams. ICE in

(03:46:23):
Border Patrol they have body cams, they're not required to
always have them on. This will be seeking to change that.
Other things like requiring the identification of agents deployed, not
wearing masks, not having arrest quotas. These would significantly change
the way that ICE operates on the ground. Possibly the
most important thing that they are seeking here is the

(03:46:44):
emphasis on judicial wards as opposed to this administrative warrant
that ICE has been using as its primary justification the
past few months.

Speaker 9 (03:46:52):
I think we should refer to those I've been called
the ad ministry of warrants. I think a better I
guess down to use is the form two fifteen, because
that's what it is, a form that they filled out
right like it. It's not a warrant in any meaningful
sense of the word.

Speaker 8 (03:47:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:47:06):
But yeah, I'm just noting that because that's a change
I'm going to be trying to implement in my work
going forward.

Speaker 13 (03:47:10):
The last Minneapolis related story for this episode, which is
mostly Minneapolis episode I Guess Yeah, is based on a
CNN report that has claimed that federal agents encountered Alex
Pretty a week prior to killing him. Pretty is said
to have been driving and stopped his car when he
witnessed ICE agents chasing a family on foot. Pretty began

(03:47:31):
shouting and blowing a whistle before agents tackled Pretty and
broke one of his ribs. Party was later released on
the scene. DHS has told CNN that they have no
record on this incident, though an anonymous source told CNN
that Pretty was a known and identified protester to federal
officials on the ground, quoting CNN quote. Earlier this month,

(03:47:52):
the DHS official in Minneapolis sent a memo to Immigrations
and Customers Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations officers assigned to the state,
and a temporary duty asking them to use a form
to input information on protesters and agitators. It is unclear
whether the new intake form was used to share Pretty's information.
It's also not clear whether federal agents who encountered Pretty

(03:48:14):
on Saturday recognized him before they confronted him.

Speaker 9 (03:48:19):
Yeah, it's definitely HSI that has been doing the federal
stuff that involves citizens, I guess, right, like when they
are investigating detaining people. I know Pam Bondi is there
today again and it has posted pictures of people who
are detained with HSI officers, which is not a usual
thing to do. But yeah, HSI, for whatever reason, they're

(03:48:42):
kind of using as their like surrogate FBI in these instances.

Speaker 13 (03:48:48):
Jason, you can also speak on the sort of like
surveillance of protesters quote unquote agitators that Feds have been
doing on the ground based on what you saw in Minneapolis.

Speaker 8 (03:48:58):
Yeah, that's thank you, Gay.

Speaker 9 (03:48:59):
Yeah, So, like I was at the Whipple Building, right,
the Whipple Building being the federal building in Minneapolis where
they are taking people who are being detained and where
ICE and CBP are deploying out of every day, right,
I would say there because there was a protest on
Friday as part of a general strike, and I noticed
they look like CBPO ice right then they had like
what I would describe with tactical helmets and gear on,

(03:49:20):
but using DSLR cameras to take pictures of people protesting.
They were in vehicles and they were shooting. I can't
remember they had the door or the window to allow
them to take photographs. But I noticed, like that is
an effort at surveillance, right, It is not unreasonable. I know, Garrison,
you also have this video which happened in Maine, right
of an agent more or less saying this, But it's

(03:49:42):
not unreasonable to think that there is surveillance of people
who are engaging in First Amendment protected activities.

Speaker 13 (03:49:49):
Yes, and there has been some desire among ICE officials,
including Tom Hollman, who went on Fox News earlier this
month to say that he's pushing for a database quote
where those people that are arrested for an interference, impeding,
and assault, we're going to make them famous unquote. So
this news that Alex Freddy had been previously identified in
some way by federal law enforcement follows an incident last

(03:50:11):
Friday where a federal agent in Maine photographed a legal
observer's car and said, quote, we have a nice little database,
and you're now considered a domestic terrorist. I'll play this
clip here.

Speaker 8 (03:50:23):
It's not illegal to record.

Speaker 10 (03:50:26):
Exactly.

Speaker 8 (03:50:26):
Yeah, that's what we're doing. Yeah, why are you taking
my information down? Because we have a nice little database.
Oh good, and now you're considerable domestic terrorists. So we're
videotaping you.

Speaker 14 (03:50:39):
Are you crazy?

Speaker 13 (03:50:42):
Georgia McLaughlin has told CNN that there is quote no
database of quote unquote domestic terrorists run by the Department
of Homeland Security unquote.

Speaker 8 (03:50:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:50:52):
I want to say something about this main video, which
is that I've been seeing a lot of people circulating
this is Oh, there's new repression tactics app here. They're
going to show up to people's houses. This has been happening.
I mean, I know it was happening in Chicago. It
probably was happening in la I just don't remember off
the top of my head.

Speaker 8 (03:51:08):
But the stuff that's.

Speaker 12 (03:51:10):
Happening here where these people take pictures of your face
is not new at all. It's not some kind of
new innovation in these repression tactics. Like, obviously be careful,
but this is not a reason that everyone suddenly needs
to be afraid that there's like a giant crackdown coming.
They've been doing this the whole time, and so far
it really hasn't like it sucks, but it hasn't stopped Minneapolis,

(03:51:30):
hasn'toped Chicago.

Speaker 13 (03:51:32):
No, they're trying to intimidate you stop doing this like
that is the point of this agent walking by and
joking about how you're now a domestic terrorist.

Speaker 8 (03:51:41):
Yeah, because that's not actually real.

Speaker 13 (03:51:42):
That is a way to scare you into not showing up,
based on the u based on the idea that if
you do, they'll take a picture of you, and now
you get added to this domestic terrorist database.

Speaker 8 (03:51:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:51:53):
Is it possible that they're making like some kind of
catalog of pictures of protesters that they can maybe use
for reference in the future to build a case against someone,
or if they arrest someone, they can look to see
if they've been at previous protests. No, that's not impossible.
That is something that they've been doing for quite a while.
It is sudden that anti fascists to do against like

(03:52:13):
Proud Boys back in the day, where you just document
a lot of people at a protest and then maybe
eventually the information will become useful. Right, that is not
like surprising, but like I've seen some pretty outrageous claims
going viral that, like after Preddy had this encounter with
law enforcement previously where they broke his rib that Preddy
was then specifically targeted in the following weeks, Like.

Speaker 8 (03:52:34):
There is no information for that.

Speaker 9 (03:52:35):
Yeah, we have no evidence to prove that.

Speaker 13 (03:52:37):
There's no information that this database led to him being
intentionally targeted by federal agents on the ground that is
that is just speculation at this point.

Speaker 12 (03:52:44):
Yeah, there's no evidence of that, and there's no evidence
that this is like a new kind of campaigner repression.
And I want to be very clear about this. If
you are spreading this as a you need to be
afraid now because there's a new thing that's happening. You
are doing their job. You are spreading the fear that
this is an intimidation that this is designed to do,
so please stop doing this.

Speaker 9 (03:53:05):
Yeah, I think, like I understand that for a lot
of people, any form of activism is very new and
everything seems scary, But this is this is one of
those times when you need to check what you're doing because,
as Mia said, right, this has. The legal term is
a chilling effect. Right, like the government generally courts a fan.

(03:53:25):
The government should do not should not do things that
have a chilling effect on First Amendment protected to speak.
That's absolutely what the government is trying to do. You
don't have to help them or not the government, but
that particular agent, I should say, acting at work saying
he's building a database, right, that is what that is
trying to do is to have a chilling effect.

Speaker 12 (03:53:43):
Well, I mean I would argue the government's also doing
this fear, you know, calling every legal observer domestic terrorists.

Speaker 8 (03:53:48):
Right, yeah, I guess, yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (03:53:51):
So we should mention this just so we don't leave
it out. Although we don't have a ton to say
at the moment about this, but like the day before
we were corded this on the twenty seventh of January,
I believe elean Omar was doing a town hall in
Minneapolis where she is a representative, and was assaulted by
a man named Anthony James kasmir Zak, who was a

(03:54:14):
fifty five year old. He was carrying what looked like
a syringe but without a needle, just like a like
a large syringe, like the kind you'd used to like
give medicine to an animal or something. Yeah, an irrigation syringe, right,
and it was filled with some kind of off brownish
yellow liquid. I don't think we know what it was.
It apparently was foul smelling, obviously, and he ran up

(03:54:36):
screaming you must resign, and sprayed some of it at her.
I don't know how much God on her. He was
tackled very quickly by a security guard. Omar seemed to
be squaring up and ready to fight him, which was
you know, expected, given like the kind of shit she's
had to deal with, right, she had to be a
very tough person. She doesn't seem to be injured. I

(03:54:56):
don't think there's any evidence that the liquid or whatever
was something that caused or is likely to cause health issues,
which I mean doesn't make it not assault.

Speaker 17 (03:55:05):
It.

Speaker 2 (03:55:05):
I don't think she's currently in any times, you're thankfully. Yeah,
there's been a chorus of denunciations about the attack on
her from a bunch of other elected leaders. I know
people have said that like it's been ignored, but at
least it hasn't been from other people in the house, right.
There's a lot of folks, including some Republicans who have
made comments on it, just because none of them like

(03:55:25):
the thought of having shit sprayed on them. I think, yeah, yeah, Anyway,
we don't know a ton about this guy and why
he did otherwise, other than that he presumably hated illin Omar, right,
and that he wanted to get her to quit her
job or otherwise harmor in some way. We don't really
know much about this guy. There's some people talking about

(03:55:47):
the fact that his kids seem to be on the left. Well,
he's clearly not. As if that's weird.

Speaker 8 (03:55:52):
It's not.

Speaker 2 (03:55:53):
If your dad is the kind of crazy asshole who
will spray poison on elein Omar hit a town hall,
I can see how maybe you become the opposite of him.
But yeah, that's about all we know at the moment.

Speaker 12 (03:56:04):
I do want to mention Trump's comment on it, where
ABC News asked Trump if you'd seen the video, and
oh yeah, Trump said, quote, No, I don't think about her.
I think she's a fraud. I really don't think about that.
She probably had sprayed herself knowing her.

Speaker 2 (03:56:18):
Yeah you said that like a guy who thinks about
her constantly.

Speaker 8 (03:56:23):
Hey, yeah, yeah, really hideous stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:56:28):
Producer Sophie here with a quick pickup as we did
not have this information at the time of recording. This
is as of January twenty twenty six, per AP news quote.
The Justice Department has charged a man who scorted apple
sided vinegar on Democratic Representative Omar at an event in Minneapolis.
According to court papers made public Thursday, The man arrested

(03:56:50):
for Tuesday's attack, Anthony kasmar Zak, faces a charge of
forcibly assaulting, opposing, impeding, and intimidating Omar. According to a
complaint filed in federal authorities determined that the substance was
water and apple cider vinegar. According to an Affidavid, after
kasmar Zak sprayed Omar with the liquid, he appeared to say,
quote she's not resigning, You're splitting Minnesota's apart end quote,

(03:57:15):
the affi David says. Authorities also say that kasmar Zak
told a close associate several years ago that quote somebody
should kill end quote Omar quote. Documents say kasmar Zak
appeared briefly in federal court Thursday afternoon. His attorney told
the judge her client was unmedicated at the time of
the incident and has not had access to medications he

(03:57:37):
needs to treat Parkinson's disease in other serious conditions he
suffers from US Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster ordered that Kazmarzak
remain in custody and told officials he needs to see
a nurse when he's transferred to the Sherburne County Jail.
End quote again, that is via AP News.

Speaker 9 (03:57:55):
So I want to very briefly update people on Rajava.
The bfke bassing for a whole episode.

Speaker 8 (03:58:00):
We will do one.

Speaker 9 (03:58:00):
I've been in Minneapolis.

Speaker 2 (03:58:01):
It's kind of a lot going on right now.

Speaker 9 (03:58:04):
Yeah and me you may have noticed, but this is
all very important, right Like, horrible things are happening. So
the STG that's a Syrian Transitional Government Ahmed al Shara
Jiulani government right and the SDF Syrian Democratic Forces which
includes the YPG and YPG the armed forces that defend Rashava,
have signed a fifteen day extension to their ceasefire. But

(03:58:27):
both sides are accusing the other of widespread violations of
the ceasefire. Both of them are right, like, I've seen
a lot of videos of ceasefire violations. Ceasefire was internationally mediated,
likely by the US, and likely because of huge concerns
around the escape of Islamic state prisoners. There was an
attempted is suicide bombing in a ruck yesterday as we

(03:58:49):
record this. That's the first time I can remember one
of those happening in a while that the person was apprehended.
But the US, I know, has been transferring detainees from
the prisoner Hesseka and they're transferring them to US facilities
in Iraq. Right, it doesn't the prince of the detainees
is not the thing that is going to make the

(03:59:10):
US support their allies in Rosjavo or their former allies
in their SDF for I guess I should say now
that the US, once again it is not going to
be a good friend to the Kurdish people. Trump has
also truthed that Iraq should not appoint Nurial Malachi as
its next prime minister. In his Truth, he said quote,
I am hearing that the great country of Iraq might

(03:59:32):
make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nuriel Malachi as
prime minister. Last time Malachi was in power, the country
descended into poverty and total chaos. That should not be
allowed to happen again because of his insane policies and ideologies.
If elected, the United States of America will no longer
help Iraq. And if we are not there to help,
Iraq has zero chance of success, prosperity, or freedom. Make

(03:59:54):
Iraq great again, Jesus Chris.

Speaker 2 (03:59:58):
First off, I mean, get us suck like he's a
really bad guy.

Speaker 9 (04:00:04):
Yeah, this is not a like yay Malachi post, but
this ain't the way to go about doing that.

Speaker 2 (04:00:09):
No, I mean just the whole we will cut all
ties and support to Iraq thing. When everything happening there
is still downstream of us fucking with them.

Speaker 8 (04:00:17):
Yeah, we did this.

Speaker 9 (04:00:20):
We spent twenty fucking years killing people in a ruck.
Like you don't just get to be like, oh yeah,
and like the idea that we were doing regime change,
but when the regime isn't and the one that we
like that people are liked, and I was like, we're
doing regime change again, Like obviously the whole thing was
a fraud and a lie.

Speaker 8 (04:00:36):
Yes, yeah, still is.

Speaker 9 (04:00:38):
Yeah, very concerned for my friends. All the parts of
Curtis dannergy. The peace process between the PKK and Turkeys
is falling apart, and state violence in Iran is still
absolutely repugnant scale. Right, Yeah, a pretty tough time in
that part of the world. I thinking of them.

Speaker 12 (04:00:57):
So finally, I want to give a brief update on
my story from last week about this attempt to end
FED independence and this attempt to sort of do an
investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve. So earlier today,
as we were recording this, we got the result of
the Fed's vote about what they were going to do

(04:01:18):
with interest rates. There's a whole episode about that. Go
listen to that if you want air.

Speaker 8 (04:01:22):
Send what this is.

Speaker 12 (04:01:23):
But the FED, instead of cutting rates as the administration
has wanted, has decided to hold interest rates at the
same level, which was what was expected out of the
Federal Reserve before Trump started putting even more pressure on them. However,
we did not get any updates from anyone at the
Federal Reserve about this Department of Justice investigation or any

(04:01:45):
of the Trump pressure that's been being put on the
Federal Reserve. So we'll keep you updated as the situation evolves,
but all we got was a very normal interest rates
are being held at the same level.

Speaker 9 (04:01:58):
We will include our list of mutual aid fundraisers for
Minneapolis again in the show notes for this episode. Would
like to donate, put a transfer on your couch yep
and if you want to email us cool Zone Tips
at proton dot me use of proton mail addresses.

Speaker 17 (04:02:13):
Send it.

Speaker 7 (04:02:14):
We reported the news, We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (04:02:22):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 18 (04:02:28):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it Could Happen here listed directly
in episode descriptions.

Speaker 8 (04:02:45):
Thanks for listening.

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