It Could Happen Here Weekly 226

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alz 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):
The past few weeks, my social media feeds have been
more apocalyptic than usual, Oddly enough, not due to the
escalating war with Ron, the shell shocked economy, or oil prices,
but because of a wave of posts and news articles
proclaiming impending doom for trans people in the United States.

(00:50):
Attacks on trans writes are obviously not new and have
steadily risen the past ten years, but this recent collection
of worrying claims are especially grim or out right genocidel.
Justice month, I've seen viral posts citing online articles saying
that ICE is going to round up and quote unquote
disappear trans people, that the FDA is making a quote

(01:13):
unquote registry of trans women, and that an adult trans
healthcare ban is imminent. Welcome to It Could Happen Here?
A show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. For
this episode, I'd like to emphasize the could in it
could happen here.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
It's not.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
It will definitely happen here, and there's nothing you can
do to stop it. These panic inducing claims and the
articles they're sourced from are referring to real things or
movements happening in either right wing activism or anti trans
policy and legislation, but are framed in a way to

(01:51):
maximize catastrophe rather than actually understanding what's happening at the
moment and what we can do about it. To unchecked panic,
clickbait reduces the process of staying informed to being in
a state of constant doom and feeling hopeless against an
unstoppable enemy. Or it makes someone completely check out and

(02:13):
not believe anything they see online even if there is
a real pressing threat, both of which cloud our ability
to assess and respond to very real threats. For the
book of this episode, I'm going to focus on an
article that claims ICE is now permitted to detain anyone
for quote unquote looking trans. This reporting and the online

(02:34):
discussion around It is a microcosmatic example of how we
understand both the Trump administration's attacks on trans people and
how and why ICE operates as an agency. This story
can be traced to a sub stack post with the
headline trump administration opens the door for ICE to target
anyone suspected of being trans. The sub headline continues by

(02:58):
reading quote, under a new rule, the State Department will
be able to revoke trans people's visas over quote unquote misrepresentation.
It'll give ICE grounds to suspect all trans people of
being in the US illegally unquote. The information contained in
this headline is the furthest many people will engage with
the content of this article. Combining that headline with preconceived

(03:21):
notions about how ICE functions under the second Trump administration
makes us a very frightening claim. So what evidence does
the subset article include to support this claim? Earlier this month,
the State Department updated its policy for the Diversity Immigrant
Visa program, also known as the Green Card Lottery. The
new rules require that applicants upload a scan of their

(03:43):
foreign passports, biographic and signature page to cut down on
fraudulent diversity visa program entries. The policy update also changed
the gender entry to sex on application forms policy will update.
The State Department wrote, the marker reflected in the sex

(04:04):
field on any visa application, including the entry form, should
match the applicants' biological sex at birth, even if that
differs from the sex listed on the applicants foreign passport
or other identifying documentation.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
The substack article claims this could force a quote mismatch
between trans people's applications and their passports, something it can
then use to declare their applications fraudulent and disqualify them
entirely on quote. The first half of that sentence is true.
A mismatch may occur between the gender listed on foreign

(04:39):
documents and the sex the US government wants you to
list on a visa application, but it is simply not
the case that this mismatch will inevitably result in an
application being deemed fraudulent and then denied the kind of
fraud this rule change is trying to combat by requiring

(05:00):
a passport scan is not unique to trans people, according
to Melita Picasso, staff attorney for the ACLUS LGBTQ and
HIV Rights Project. Picasso said in an email that the
new rule quote seems to more directly target fraudulent activities
involving third parties basically entering the lottery on behalf of
individuals without their knowledge and consent, and then extorting them

(05:22):
for large amounts of money if they are selected.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
Unquote.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
The stipulation requiring an applicant to list their biological sex
at birth on forms has actually already been State Department
policy for both immigrant and non immigrant visa applications for
over a year, effectively since Trump's executive order mandating the
those government officially recognized two biological sexes which are determined

(05:46):
at birth, and that quote government issued identity documents, including visas,
and all forms that require an individuals sex, shall accurately
reflect an individual's immutable biological classification as either mail or email.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
There's just no basis for the claim that a mismatch
between the gender listed on a foreign document and the
sex marked on application forms will itself quote unquote disqualify
someone from receiving a visa. ACLU staff attorney Melita Picasso
told me that the new policy itself recognizes this could

(06:21):
cause discrepancies, and that she doesn't see a quote new
or heightened risk of being accused of fraud or wilful
misrepresentation if a transgender person follows the instructions by listing
their sex assigned at birth on the application, even if
they also file a per certificate that has been updated
to reflect their gender identity.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
The State Department has been aware for a while that
this kind of policy will create these kinds of mismatches.
A February twenty twenty five State Department memo reads, quote,
there may be instances when a consular officer becomes aware
that the sex listed on the foreign passport may not
be the applicants sex as defined in the executive order.
In such cases, the adjudicator should confirm the applicant sex

(07:06):
as defined in the executive order, indicate that sex on
the visa, and add a case note documenting any discrepancy
between the passport and the visa to prevent issues at
the port of entry unquote. Later, in April of twenty
twenty five, the United States Citizenship Immigration Services officially updated
their policy on requiring quote unquote biological sex on immigration applications.

(07:31):
The policy also states that quote USCIS does not deny
any immigration benefits solely based on a failure to properly
indicate that benefit requesters sex unquote. Acale U staff attorney
Milita Picasso told me that USCIS officials have quote unquote
a lot of discretion and that the policy says that

(07:53):
failure to list biological sex quote will cause delays in
processing the application while USCIS tries to verify your sex
assigned at birth unquote. Now, the State Department has said
there are grounds to deny these applications for trans people
if they make a quote willful affirmative material act of

(08:15):
misrepresentation by misrepresenting their quote unquote biological sex at birth
in application forms or to a consular officer to gain
entry to the United States under false pretenses. Legally qualifying
as willful mess representation is a relatively high bar, and
this language was specifically written with the intent to restrict

(08:37):
trans athletes from entering the country to play sports. The
sort of misrepresentation the State Department is talking about is
if a trans woman quote unquote misrepresents her birth sex
to procure a visa or admission into the United States
for the purpose of competing in a women's sports competition.

(08:58):
This same sports relo, dated February twenty fourth, twenty twenty five,
also states quote, if there is a discrepancy either in
the applicants documents or in electronic constantly records, or if
other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant sex, you
should refuse the case under two two one G and
request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
Section two two one G of the Immigration and Nationality
Act is a temporary visa refusal pending further documents or
information provided by the applicant. For an athlete visa, the
bar is very high and the burden is on the
applicant to prove they have the special un rare qualities
required to be eligible for a visa. But the substat

(09:41):
article doesn't just claim that being trans could disqualify you
from receiving a visa. The article escalates its claims, stating
that trans people who already have a valid visa could
have it revoked and be deported for misrepresenting their sex
in the past, citing US law that if if an
alien is found to have obtained a visa quote by

(10:03):
fraud or wilfully misrepresenting a material fact, they are ineligible
to be in the United States. The article also refers
to a section of the Foreign Affairs manual, which includes
providing quote a fake birth certificate in support of an
immigrant visa application as misrepresenting a material fact unquote. The

(10:24):
article goes on to assert that the Trump administration could
refuse to recognize trans people's amended birth certificates from foreign
countries and essentially consider them quote unquote fake, thus making
their visa eligible to be revoked by quote unquote misrepresenting
a material fact. The author of the substack links to
another one of her own articles on a new policy

(10:47):
regarding the issuing of US passports with sex markers reflecting
biological sex at birth. The passport policy instructs the state
parmer employees to check birth certificates for signs of being amended,
and if they are amended, request more documents that list
sex at the time of birth, such as medical records,
hospital records, or early school records. ACLA staff attorney Picasto

(11:09):
says that this does not mean entire amended birth certificates
or quote unquote fake for the purposes of establishing fraud
or willful misrepresentation, which is again a high bar, and
that Trump administration has never argued this as such.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
I think it's dangerous to even suggest that illegally obtained
and valid birth certificate could be viewed as quote unquote
fake without a much clearer statement from the federal government
to that effect. Picasto advised in Trump's recent travel bands,
they have specifically mentioned the availability of fabricated birth certificates
in certain countries. And this whole claim about trans people's

(11:49):
visas being revoked because of applications of misrepresentation is contradicted
by the State Department, which said last year quote currently
valid US visas issue du prior to the effective date
of this guidance bearing a sex that differs from the
visl holders sex as defined in Executive Order will remain
valid through its expiration date. The visa holder does not

(12:12):
need to apply for a new visa with an amended
sex marker until the current visa expires. So the first
half of this article covers what I argue are gross
misrepresentations of State Department visa policy. The second half of
the article speculates on how this misrepresentation could be enforced

(12:32):
by ICE in it Supreme Court ruling last year, just
as Kavanaugh wrote that ICE could detain people based on
a combination of factors such as working a certain kind
of job, ethnicity, and speaking Spanish or talking with an accent.
Kavanaugh said that ICE can detain someone for questioning quote
if they have a reasonable suspicion based on specific articulable facts,

(12:54):
that the person being questioned is an alien illegally in
the United States. The author of this substacked article argued
that Kavanaugh's concurrence quote unquote effectively permitted ICE to use
the fact that someone looks trans as the quote specific
articulable fact, allowing its officers to question, harassed, detain, and

(13:14):
even deport both citizens and non citizens as long as
it has a reason to claim that being trans makes
a person more likely to be in the US illegally unquote,
with this substacker adding that because of State Department policy
requiring applicants to list biological sex at birth on forms quote,
ICE now have the enforcement rationale to assert that trans

(13:38):
people are more likely than says people to have misrepresented
themselves during the visa process and therefore are more likely
to have entered the country unlawfully unquote. This assertion from
this substacker rests on the idea that looking trans makes
someone more likely to be in the US illegally. This

(14:01):
idea is not supported by any immigration policy memo or
guideline that also assumes that the justification for a Kavanaugh
stop is the same as the legal process of removal,
which it is not. This idea was invented by the
author of this article, It's not based on any enforcement
directive from ICE, and misrepresents what the State Department means

(14:24):
by intentionally misrepresenting biological sex in the visa application process.
Discrepancies in gender markers across government documents is not itself
grounds for detention or deportation. In fact, it's federal policy
to create such discrepancies. Furthermore, dealing with potential discrepancies between
gender markers on foreign documents and the Trump Admin's insistence

(14:46):
on only using biological sex at birth on federal documents
is handled by State Department consular officers and USCIS employees,
not ICE Enforcement and Removal operations officers who work under
an entire different agency. But the main thing that makes
me believe that ICE will not suddenly start targeting people

(15:07):
for being trans is that this State department policy requiring
sex at birth on visa applications isn't actually new. It's
existed in some form since February twenty twenty five for
both immigrant and non immigrant visas. The only recent change
is that the Green card lottery rules have been updated
to use this same language. Quote. Nothing about this new

(15:32):
rule makes it more or less likely that ICE will
be free to scrutinize trans people's documents and detain those
whose documents show any inconsistencies unquote, affirmed a CLUS staff
attorney Melita Picasso put plainly, state department restrictions on stating
assigned sex at birth on Green card or visa applications

(15:52):
does not give ICE any new justification to roam around
disappearing random people who quote unquote to look trans. But
it could make border crossings more risky for non citizens,
and visa applications harder to navigate and subject to delays.
This policy from the State Department is bad, but turning

(16:14):
that into saying that ICE is now going to round
up trans people and vcode them doesn't understand how this
will actually affect immigrant trans people or trans people currently
in federal custody.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Side note.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Vcoding refers to this systematic enabling of sexual abuse towards
incarcerated transfomen to please mail prisoners. Near the end of
the substack article, the author suggests that transpeople in Kansas
could be at extra risk of getting detained by ICE
because of a new law invalidating driver's license and birth
certificates with amended gender markers, possibly leaving some US citizens

(16:51):
temporarily unable to prove citizenship with a valid birth certificate.
This new law is certainly dangerous, and any attempt to
strip a people's legal ID is very worrying and carries
potential for abuse. In the case of Kansas, already having
a passport would be really ideal. Otherwise, a hospital birth
certificate or early school records can theoretically be used to

(17:14):
help prove citizenship, and it is worth saying that a
citizen temporarily losing documentation does not put them at the
same level of marginalized risk as an undocumented immigrant. The
new Kansas law does direct the Office of Idle Statistics
to quote reissue birth certificates when necessary to correct this

(17:35):
sex identification unquote. Similarly, DMVs were instructed to reissue a
quote unquote corrected license once the invalidated one was turned in.
We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back, who

(18:00):
it could happen here. The unsubstantiated claims made in that
substack article went viral across multiple social media platforms like TikTok,
Blue Sky, and Twitter, bolstering further speculation. Social media posts
further extrapolated the potential harm facing trans people by ICE
agents beyond the claims made in the article by saying

(18:22):
that ICE will now deport or disappear trans citizens. Anyone
who tried to push back on the legitimacy of those
claims were labeled dangerous or fence for trying to quote
unquote downplay the threat posed by ICE. Assertions of new
pressing danger in this back and forth discourse largely took

(18:43):
three forms. One saying that because ICE is already doing
X bad thing, that means they could also start doing
this new bad thing. Two people asserting that ICE is
in fact actually already doing this, and three arguments based
on distrust of the government and ICE's general lack of legality.

(19:05):
Much of the discussion emerged from the genuine belief that
ICE has been granted new power or has been quote
unquote authorized to detain someone for looking trans, that Trump
has quote unquote opened the door for ICE to start
profiling trans people, that, like the Streame Court's ruling last year,
profiling has been essentially greenlit for trans people, or that

(19:28):
checking the consistency of gender markers has been added to
ICE's quote unquote jurisdiction. And to be one hundred percent clear,
there's not been any new ICE memo or policy related
to transpeople, gender markers, or documentation being in their jurisdiction.
State department policy on requiring biological sex on applications has

(19:50):
existed for over a year. The real danger posed by
this policy is that more trans immigrants could have their
visas delayed or, in extreme cases, denied. People may need
help navigating this increasingly confusing application process. Still, people have
tried to assert that ICE's intentional targeting and profiling of

(20:12):
people for being trans was quote unquote already happening. In
the past year, ICE has detained transpeople. It's hard to
get exact numbers on this because ICE stopped collecting detention
data for trans people last year to comply with Trump's
anti trans executive orders, though we do know of attempts
to deport transpeople from news reporting. Last August, ICE detained

(20:35):
a transwoman who over stated a visa by six years,
and in November, a transwoman who lost her lawful permanent
residence status in twenty twenty three after pleading guilty to
a felony was quote unquote inadvertently deported to Mexico despite
a court order specifically barring her from being sent to Mexico.
We have no evidence that these women were targeted for

(20:57):
removal on the basis of being trans, but what happened
to them is still horrific. As of now, there has
been no reporting on people being targeted for detention based
on looking trans, because the government has not actually argued
that being trans itself qualifies as reasonable suspicion of illegal presence.

(21:20):
When I voiced skepticism about the claims sourced from this
substack article, people responded to me saying that even if
this has yet to happen, one could argue that ICE
still could expand their operations to include profiling and targeting
trans people for detention, since they're already profiling and rounding
up quote unquote random brown people. After all, this podcast

(21:43):
is called it could Happen here, and ICE has detained
both citizens and legal immigrants and sent them to quote
unquote camps. Though this show is called it could happen here.
That doesn't mean we should spread unsubstantiated doom spiraling, disconnected
from the material reality of real policies, advancing a fascist project.

(22:04):
The Trump administration has been very clear and open about
targeting groups of people flooding through our southern border. That
is who ICE is designed to target, and they have
policy directing them to do so and new permission from
the Supreme Court. It is true that ICE has temporarily
detained US citizens when looking for people they suspect our

(22:25):
undocumented immigrants. This has been for two reasons. US citizens
accused of interfering with ICE activity while protesting, or because
ICE suspects US citizens may be undocumented based on factors
like skin tone, occupation, or speaking a foreign language, usually Spanish.
This second group of people then must demonstrate proof of
citizenship or if they are immigrants, they're legal status. The

(22:49):
period they're detained is supposed to be relatively short, usually
a few hours, though in extreme cases that's stretched into
multiple days. When I posted about this online, someone sent
me a Wikipedia article claiming it proved that ICE has
deported one hundred and seventy US citizens during Trump's second term.

(23:11):
The article actually said one hundred and seventy citizens have
been detained since Trump took office. Again, there have been
a few reported instances of US born citizens being deported.
These are citizen children who are deported with immigrant parents
to avoid child separation, though many many children do end

(23:33):
up being separated from their parents when their parents are deported.
The last argument that people fall back on is simply
that ICE is a completely lawless agency and it can
do whatever it wants, including going after trans people. After all,
ICE has murdered US citizens on camera in broad daylight,
but it's important to remember that happened for a reason.

(23:56):
Those weren't random acts. ICE and CBP murdered people protesting
ICE rates targeting their immigrant neighbors. Federal agents killed people
because the protesting was an inconvenience and there was use
of force policy and training directing them to do so.
For decades, CBP agents have killed people at the border

(24:17):
and gotten away with it. The Trump administration may not
care about the law, but this analysis is not based
on any assumptions about legality. It's based on the administration's
own stated goals, which they've been very open about, and
the policies and practices currently in effect, none of which
relate to ICE targeting people for quote unquote looking trans.

(24:41):
From what we know, the Kavanaugh stops framework have never
been used to target trans people for being trans as
the reasonable suspicion of being illegally in the country, and
there's been no changing guidelines saying that being trans can
be the basis for said stops. Asserting otherwise is simply false.

(25:01):
Insisting that because of State Department application policy, ICE will
now randomly arrest transpeople is conflating two very different things.
This isn't about the potential legality of ICE targeting transpeople.
I'm simply saying there is no such directive instructing ICE
to do that. Asserting that the Trump administration is completely

(25:24):
one hundred percent unbounded by law also ignores the fact
that federal and immigration courts are still in active terrain
of battle. While the administration has repeatedly ignored courts and
judges orders. People have also been successfully released from ICE
custody by filing habeas corpus petitions. It's not that I

(25:45):
believe in the personal integrity of ICE agents, far from it.
But this concept of ICE as this vague fascist desk
squad that will go after any group the Trump administration hates.
Turns ICE into this abstract idea rather than a single
material agency with concrete motivations and limits that leaves a

(26:06):
wake of destruction in the course of achieving their purpose.
ICE does raids where there's high concentrations of immigrant workers.
The targeting isn't actually random. ICE is going after undocumented
immigrant workers, sometimes using skin and language as a rough
proxy to do document checks. To assert the inevitability of

(26:30):
ICE going after trans people, people invoke comparisons to the Nazis,
and as rhetorically useful as it is to equate ICE
to a modern version of the Gestapo. This is not
Germany in the nineteen thirties. ICE is a contemporary version,
but the current world is different. The chronically online doomer
may retort, but once ICE is done with immigrants, then

(26:53):
they will go after trans people. After all, what's the
purpose of increasing ICE is staffing and funding or building
a network of tension camps across the country, if not
to use them against the undesirables. There's about fifteen million
undocumented immigrants in the United States and about three million
trans people. That's five times as many undocumented immigrants than

(27:16):
trans people. Last year, ICE reached a record high number
of deportations, over six hundred thousand. This number still leaves
millions and millions of undocumented immigrants. ICE will never be
quote unquote done with immigrants. This logic again reduces ICE
to this vague, abstract evil and fails to consider the

(27:38):
purpose of ICE and why it currently operates as it does.
So what motivates ICE? Do Individual ICE agents share the
same motivations as the agency itself or the people directing it.
Individual agents certainly could be motivated by racism, political ideology,
a paycheck, or a combination thereof, but the motivating forts

(28:00):
across the entire agency cannot solely be based on ethnicity itself,
or else you wouldn't see as many Hispanic ICE and
CBP agents. People tend to think of hate as a
vague causal force itself, rather than it being the result
of complex societal factors shaped by material forces like the economy, jobs,

(28:22):
in security, and housing shortages. These material forces are often
expressed as racial or ethnic prejudice, but the underlying motivation
of ICE as an agency and by extension, DHS, still
rests on material forces, not racial hatred as an abstract ideal.
Rank and file employees could have entirely different motivations compared

(28:44):
to some of those at the top of the agency
or the agency as a whole, and people in charge
of the agency may themselves even be confused as to
the material motivations that underline the existence of immigration enforcement agencies.
But this lack of alignment is a weakness in the
agency and DHS more broadly, as demonstrated by the fallout

(29:05):
of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which left ICE and
DHS in a compromised state. So why does ICE exist?
What material role does it fulfill? It seeks to stabilize
the social order by targeting surplus populations, and what's the
most efficient way to do that by going after the

(29:27):
most marginalized populations with the least amount of legal and
economic protections, which are undocumented immigrants. This operation maybe sold
to the public, and indeed it's enforcers by marketing it
in the language of race and crime categories, which are
often equated, But underneath that, it's still an attempt to
solve problems caused by material economic forces. In reality, this

(29:52):
material motivation establishes a certain direction of impact, as well
as material limits like budget, personnel, and balancing between public
approval and public opposition. So with that in mind, does
it make sense to claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement

(30:12):
is going to conduct the targeted mass detention of trans
people as a class?

Speaker 4 (30:18):
Signs point to know.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
It's not that I disagree with the idea that trans
people are under threat from the government, but they're under
a different threat than that of undocumented immigrants or people
detained by ICE based on profiling. Obviously, trans immigrants have
an overlapping threat vector. As such, migrant support should remain
focused on things like ICE Watch, rapid response networks, and

(30:42):
providing immigrants legal resources, including to trans immigrants who madeed
assistance navigating the visa process, and working to get people
out of ICE detention. The latter is especially important considering
Trump's executive order forcing transwomen in federal custody to be
detained with men and Trump administration's plan to end federal

(31:02):
prison rape protections for trans people. But most people engaged
in this discourse genuinely don't understand how state department policy
on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what
we can then do to support trans immigrants, But this
whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most

(31:24):
at risk of ICE, which are still undocumented immigrant workers.
Lilith in Seattle with a one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars a year tech job is not at high risk
of being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who
are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and
status to support others who do not have the same

(31:45):
safety provided by wealth or status, whether they're transgender and
immigrant or both. Misleading articles in the larger panic driven
information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to
be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount
of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared

(32:06):
to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the
world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus
on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security.
Retreating solely into the rule of the victim achieves a
sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from

(32:26):
the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.
In this discourse, there's a tendency to make the enemy
out to be an unstoppable monster, which further justifies in
action because it doesn't allow you to understand the limits
of the enemy, whether logistical or ideological, and resigns us
to power before an omnipotent all powerful evil. ICE operations

(32:49):
are an expensive, unpopular, destabilizing thing. We must keep an
eye on the fragility of power, as that informs us
on how to fight it. When removed from action in
the real world, people have no way to confront truth.
It is a frightening time to be transgender. On top
of what feels like never ending attacks on healthcare and

(33:12):
our ability to exist in public life. You now see
news stories about a US state invalidating people's IDs, at
the same time as viral social media posts claim ICE
has been given new authority to detain transpeople and deport
immigrants for having the wrong gender marker. Various attacks on
trans rites separated through time, could be viewed as a coherent,

(33:34):
centralized strategy towards a singular, horrific end, but they also
may be in fact disparate, often petty attempts at cruelty,
intending to demoralize transpeople and make translife prohibitively difficult. The
way Red states and the Trump admin are trying to

(33:55):
eliminate transgenderism, as Michael Knowles would say, is to simply
make it incredibly difficult to socially and medically transition, like
by not recognizing gender on government documents, be excluded from
public bathrooms, and continuing efforts to restrict healthcare. Will do
one more break and return for a final segment. The

(34:28):
state of catastrophic fear I've been talking about is maintained
by a near constant wave of articles with panic inducing headlines,
which fuel social media posts that further escalate and abstract
claims maiden headlines to a Nazi Germany esque level of
potential danger facing trans people. One such impending danger circulating

(34:51):
online this month is the claim that the FDA is
making a registry of trans women and moving to crimin
diy estrogen. This claim originated from an article in a
trans news outlet published March twelfth, reporting that anti trans
lobbying groups sent a petition to the FDA to create

(35:13):
a registry of transwomen who take estrogen and restrict the
use of feminizing HRT, which if implemented, could quote fast
track a pathway to criminalizing estrogen use. Importantly, this citizens
petition is not US law or proposed government legislation, nor
is it FDA policy or regulation. It was written by

(35:36):
an anti transactivist coalition and sent to the FDA over
three months ago in December of twenty twenty five. The
petition requests quote unquote immediate action by establishing a new
docket for the public to officially comment on the safety
and effectiveness of estrogen in gender transitions, and to schedule
a public hearing on the subject. That is mainly what

(35:58):
the petition is for, though it doesn't make further recommendations
following the conclusion of a public hearing. These recommendations include
adding a warning label to estrogen, conducting a safety review,
having clinicians report adverse effects to the FDA, and requiring
the drug manufacturers quote establish a patient registry as a
part of a risk evaluation and mitigation study to capture

(36:21):
real world safety data unquote, and that is the registry
mentioned in this panic headline. This article, or more accurately
distorted versions of its claims, went viral across trans Twitter,
with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands
of quote unquote views, but the article received strong pushback

(36:42):
on Blue Sky for being quote unquote sensationalist and inflammatory.
The outlet that originally published the story later updated the article,
clarifying that the FDA receives hundreds of petitions a year,
and even if implemented, they can take years to go
into effect. Twenty thirteen, only six point six percent of

(37:03):
FDA citizen petitions were approved and resulted in new regulation.
A study from twenty sixteen found that, on average, quote,
these petitions require two point eighty five years for a
final agency decision, and many decisions remain pending ten to
thirteen years after their initial submission unquote. This FDA petition

(37:26):
story was not the only article this month theorizing about
a trans registry or adult HRT restrictions. In mid March,
multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that Republican lawmakers in Tennessee
advanced a bill that would quote unquote create a public
list of trans residents in the state. The bill in
question mandates insurance companies also covered d transition, and would

(37:50):
require that care providers submit statistics on gender affirming care
to the Tennessee Department of Health, which must quote not
contain individually identify information defined in HIPPA unquote. The Tennessee
Department of Health would then use that information to make
a publicly available statistics report. But online accounts are spreading

(38:11):
this story as if Tennessee is making a quote unquote
sex offender style public registry with the names and locations
of all trans people in this state. A bill like
this could potentially be used for harm, and it may
face court challenges for possibly violating parts of HIPPA by
collecting data on county of residents and procedure dates. But

(38:33):
the reporting on the bill and the viral reaction online
make it out to be something completely different. There's no
reason to believe this bill would create a publicly accessible
registry or list identifying trans people by name in this state.
The bill has not yet passed the state Senate, and
it may not in its current form. Right now, it's

(38:56):
unclear what exact form the collected data will take with
in a statistics report and what level of anonymizing data
aggregation will be employed. This is something to keep an
eye on if the bill does pass and the state
Department of Health drafts guidelines for the mandatory statistics reporting,
But the way it's being reported is incredibly misleading. Interestingly,

(39:17):
the source for this public list claim is the same
substec outlet that created the false story about ICE now
being able to detain people for looking trans. Also earlier
this month, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that the Fourth
Circuit Court approved state bans on gender affirming healthcare for adults.

(39:41):
On March tenth, a Republican appointed three judge panel of
the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can
prohibit gender affirming surgery from being covered by Medicaid. The
ruling affirmed ban on Medicaid coverage for quote sex change
surgeries in West Virginia, with the panel arguing it doesn't
discriminate against trans people because it applies to specific procedures,

(40:05):
not specific individuals. This is certainly bad news for trans
people in West Virginia on Medicaid, but reporting that this
decision could soon result in trans people losing healthcare in
other states or nationally is misleading and removes key context.
This is not a total ban on these procedures. It's

(40:27):
a ban on state Medicaid coverage of these surgical procedures.
The ruling is not a ban on other forms of
gender affirming healthcare. Like HRT, nor does it threaten the
hospital's ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds for providing
gender affirming healthcare, like the Trump administration has threatened so
far unsuccessfully. Still people postulated on how this ruling could

(40:49):
be laying the legal groundwork to eliminate adult transgender healthcare,
but trans journalist to David Forbes noted that this ruling
will likely be appealed to wider Fourth Circuit, which has
recently ruled in the opposite direction of this three panel ruling.
What paniced assertions of an impending total ban on trans

(41:11):
healthcare tends to overlook is that going from a state
ban on Medicaid coverage for surgery straight to an all
ages ban on gender affirming healthcare skips a lot of steps,
and those steps are crucially important. The panic, clickbait induced
doomer mindset treats every horrific potentiality as an inevitable eventuality.

(41:36):
This undermines our ability to accurately assess risk and effectively
dedicate resources to oppose what are pressing threats. So what
purpose does this sort of posting serve and why are
people so primed to believe it? These panic driven claims
rest on the very real fact that trans people are
facing present danger. Oftentimes, people boosting these panic stories are

(41:59):
genuinely trying to help inform their own community of potential harm.
In the case of that ICE story, it was based
on the assumption that there was a legitimate recent rule
change enabling iceo target people under suspicion of being trans.
It makes sense that people would want to raise the
alarm about ICE gaining new powers. But acel U staff
attorney Melita Picasso cautioned, quote, we are supporting our community

(42:23):
by trying to warn people, but these warnings need to
be clear and accurate, otherwise we end up inadvertently contributing
to the chaos and fear unquote. Other times, these panic
stories are spread with the hope of scaring allies into
caring about the ongoing attacks on trans people. Perhaps this

(42:44):
is successful in some cases, I don't know. But as
a side effect, this strategy deals significant damage to the
people it's trying to protect. Forecasting doom twenty four to
seven can drive people into hopeless despair and push them
away way from strategies to fight against the current attacks
on trans rights. Panic driven agit prop could also contribute

(43:07):
to a girl who Cried Wolf scenario where allies start
to discount concerns about certain attacks on transrights due to
previous unsubstantiated viral claims. Though many people spreading these claims
may have genuinely good intentions, the people creating these claims
may develop certain material incentives. Traditional mainstream journalism has failed

(43:30):
to question the massive government overreach into the lives of transpeople,
and in some cases helped manufacture consent for the stripping
away of trans rights. This state of affairs has made
trans people lose faith in the big outlets, leading to
small upstart outlets filling in the information gaps in trans
news coverage, but without any institutional backing. Independent news sites

(43:51):
and sub stack style blogs have to build an audience
to generate traction and stay operating. It turns out thousands
of people constantly freaking out creates high social media engagement,
and this creates a loop where trans panic fearmongering boosts
social media engagement, which further encourages more irresponsible clickbait framing.

(44:13):
Those who are successful may slowly develop a new class position,
which then needs to be maintained. Financial incentives may even
pressure journalists who have done good work in the past
to fall back on panic driven engagement bait to attract
new traffic. This isn't exclusive to trans outlets either. Following

(44:34):
the assassination of Charlie kirk Ken, Klippenstein reported on his
substack that the FBI was about to quote designate transgender
people as violent extremists. His report contained no new, verifiable information.
The core evidence was an unnamed quote unquote senior official
who told the Clippenstein he quote unquote feels like trans

(44:57):
people could be labeled nihilist via extremists. Clippenstein has previously
misunderstood the nihilist violent extremism label. The term actually predates
the second Trump administration and refers to groups like seven
sixty four Child's extortion rings and communities like the school
shooter fandom TCC. Hours before Clippenstein's report was published, the

(45:20):
Heritage Foundation and the Oversight Project publicly released a petition
calling for a new classification of extremism called trans ideology
inspired violent extremism, to categorize attacks they believed are motivated
by transgender ideology. The petition memo denied that all trans
people and their allies would be designated domestic terrorists. Under

(45:43):
this label, only those who quote, encourage, promote, condone, take
or insight unlawful violent action or threats based on this
ideology unquote. The Heritage petition also runs contrary to Clippenstein's
report by advocating against the use of the nihilist violent
extremism label to describe transgender motivated violence. A Heritage petition

(46:09):
to establish a new category of extremism is different from
an unnamed official who feels like trans people as a
whole could be labeled as nihilist violent extremists, and it's
important to understand that distinction. That was last September. It's
now half a year later, and neither of these things
has come to fruition. The closest we got was in

(46:32):
late September, following Trump's Antifa Terrorism executive Order with the
National Security Presidential Memorandum Number seven, which listed quote extremism
on migration, race, and gender as common recurrent motivations and
indica of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of
self described anti fascism unquote, among many other threads animating

(46:57):
violent conduct. Regardless of that, people online interpreted both Clippenstein's
report and the Heritage petition as meaning the FBI classified
the entire class of trans people as domestic terrorists. Social
media both amplifies and distorts already misleading claims, turning news

(47:18):
into a massive game of telephone, and the siloing of
certain users and platforms makes countering this misinformation incredibly difficult.
The social media economy carries certain incentives for the producers
of panic bait that could be attention, status, and money,
but the consumers of panic also stand to gain something

(47:38):
catharsis justification for their actions or lack thereof, as well
as attention from fellow consumers. These clickbait panic pieces explode
around trans Twitter, which is still quite active, consisting of
sex workers, gamers, TTT style posters, and zoomers who think
Blue Sky is crunch and liberal. Some of these panic stories,

(47:59):
like the FDA A registry, don't do very well on
Blue Sky because that's where a lot of trans journalists
who do actual journalism are, but those journalists are not
active on Twitter and TikTok, making it harder to counter
our misinformation on those platforms. Countering trans paniclick bait also
suffers from algorithmic suppression because it doesn't get people as

(48:21):
riled up. A wave of emotionally charged doom posting is
boosted much farther than a calm and calculated rebuttal. The
biggest TikTok about ICE detaining people under suspicion of being
trans has one point two million views. The biggest TikTok
fact checking this claim has two hundred and ninety thousand views.

(48:42):
So much of social media politics is emotional manipulation based
on anger, fear, or catharsis. Posting about perceived danger is
essentially viewed as a form of activism, and if someone
casts a doubt on what's seen as an existential threat,
that person becomes emotionally equated with the enemy. Panic produces helplessness,

(49:03):
but helplessness can actually be cathartic for the individual. It's
not helpful for people currently in the most danger. So
then what is there to do in terms of the
trans panic information economy. Don't be afraid to openly question
the legitimacy of certain reporting due to fear of backlash
from the community. If it's good reporting, it should be

(49:26):
able to stand up to scrutiny. So when you see
a new story that triggers an emotional response. Stop a
moment before clicking share and find out where this claim
is coming from. A reliable journalistic outlet, an independent publication.
What other reporting has this publication done? Has it been accurate?
Who is the reporter? Are you familiar with their reporting?
What else have they reported on? Is it speculative? Are

(49:48):
there logical jumps without supporting evidence? Again, I'm not trying
to minimize the danger coming from a tax on trans people.
Quite the contrary, the right is continuing to take away
trans rights and these threats should be treated seriously. But
when trying to counter these real attacks, one must be
cautious about looking so far ahead into this speculative future

(50:11):
that it takes the focus away from the clear and
present harms. This isn't about trusting the government, It's about
understanding the world in order to change it. See you
on the other side. You can find a text version
of this episode on the Shatterzone substack, with hyper links
available for many of the terms or reporting referenced.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me James,
and I'm very lucky to be joined by Marianne today.
He's an outspoken member of the Venezuelan diaspora, writer, photographer,
and we're gonna talk today and at about our shared
frustration with the left in this country talking about Venezuelan people,
but not to Venezuelan people. So thanks for.

Speaker 6 (51:08):
Joining me tonight, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah, this is something that we've been trying to put
together for a while, and I'm really glad that we're
finally doing it. So I guess if I can just
frame this discussion, We've spoken about this extensively, so like
I'm sure we won't need much much prompting. I do
not understand how people arrive at a position of identifying
as being leftists if they don't love and care about
other people, And if you love and care about other people,

(51:33):
then you should listen to them. And I am appalled
at the discourse about Venezuela which is happening without Venezuelan
voices for the most part, where people will talk to
Venezuelan's at all in the US press. It's far too
often people in the diaspora who are talking to the
right wing of media and highlighting what are sometimes recent

(51:57):
objections to Madulas, sometimes which are completely insane. But it's
a complete failing of us on the left to not
talk to people from Venezuela. Maybe you could just share
with us, like how it's been since January. To see
it offered it as a binary right. You can either
exist on the Maduro and people can live in poverty
and suffer, or you can watch your country get bombed

(52:23):
and choose like mcm like and none of this is happening.
Was asking you what you would like, Can you like
share how that's been.

Speaker 6 (52:31):
Oh my god, it's been. It's been a wild ride.

Speaker 7 (52:35):
I mean, there's a lot of different emotions going on,
which is one of the things that I think a
lot of people don't understand that are not Venezuelan. But yeah,
just a lot of emotions. I mean I remember when
it first happened. I immediately messaged my family back home,
So my brother, my mom, my, my grandparents. My family

(52:59):
is from Karaka, so they were all right. They were
just saying, you know, it's calm where where we are,
it's fine. But yeah, the immediate thing was concerned. Then
obviously I couldn't sleep that night because of everything that
was going on. I live in Europe, so by that
time it was like, I don't know, it was like
five in the morning or something eight in the morning.

(53:21):
I don't remember it was. It's all just a blur
to me now, but I remember I was just like
on my phone seeing the updates like every minute, trying
to contact my friends who did live in Karakas, and
they were just saying, yeah, like we hear bombs. We
don't know what's going on. And then eventually, like some

(53:42):
people started saying that they bomb liked some strategic military
basis or like in Paracio Mira Flores, which is the
presidential house, and so everyone was like all over the place,
and then we got all this information that they took
Maduro whatever.

Speaker 6 (54:00):
And then at that point it was just like Okay, concern, worry.

Speaker 7 (54:06):
Confusion, and then joy because not because the place was
bombed by Americans, but because this guy was like taken
away who he deserves.

Speaker 6 (54:18):
Worse than prison, to be honest.

Speaker 7 (54:20):
But then concern again because what are the Americans gonna
do now? So it was just a lot of different
things going on, Like I think a lot of people,
including myself, were just like paralyzed by all these different emotions,
like joy because again, this guy who has done horrible

(54:43):
things to the Venezuelan people is now paying for his
crime somewhere, but at the same time fear because of
what is going to happen next.

Speaker 6 (54:52):
I mean, we're not dumb, we know what the US
is capable of.

Speaker 7 (54:57):
So it was a little bit of both of those
feelings after we knew what had happened. And ever since
then it has been just a struggle because of course
there's a lot of misinformation going out there. It's been
frustrating because I see many of my people's voices being

(55:19):
silenced by people on the left. And then also you
have a lot of people on the right like appropriating
our narrative to like push their own pro American propaganda whatever.
So it's kind of just like everyone's trying to like
appropriate or steal their own narrative and suffering for their
own gain, and the left and the right are doing

(55:41):
both like equally. Yeah, So it has been kind of
frustrating because I mean every time I even just try
to leave a comment on Instagram or say something, I'm
called a fascist like Trump supporters, Cia Masade agent whatever.
And you know, it's frustrating to see so many people

(56:05):
because most of the people I follow are like leftists, right,
But I've unfollowed like seventy percent of the people I
used to follow because they started posting like Promaduro stuff
and talking about how he was so great whatever.

Speaker 6 (56:18):
And you know, it has been very.

Speaker 7 (56:20):
Defeating to feel like we don't have anywhere to go
to nobody supporting us, because again, one side just wants
to rob us from our resources and steal a narrative
to like push their own agenda. But then the other
side is like completely denying or calling us like all
these horrible things to also steal our narrative. Right, So

(56:44):
it has been really frustrating and scary and isolating. Yeah,
it has been a lot, to the point where I think,
I mean, do I even have a place in the
world of nobody wants to hear my voice? So it
has been very difficult, right yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 (57:03):
Very disheartening.

Speaker 7 (57:04):
But then yeah, like if that's why I told you about.

Speaker 6 (57:08):
The baseball thing recently, it was.

Speaker 7 (57:11):
Kind of like the positive thing, like a because one
of the good things about that game is that people
were finally like getting to know us and how we're
actually good people, and that was kind of like a
pick me up after how horrible life has been since
January third, So yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yeah, yeah, like people obviously like undervalue sport. I think
they do. I wrote a book about sport and anti fascism,
so I'm kind of predisposed to this disposition. But like,
these moments of joy are really important, and like the
God knows, the world tries to rob us of joy
at the moment, so that we should embrace them and
enjoy them and not feel like we had We are

(57:55):
like obliged to be sad because of all the sadness
in our worlds. Yeah, I think something you said that
like struck home with me. Are two things I guess
let's address the first one. It is fundamentally a colonial
impulse to steal someone's narrative and assume that they're incapable
of speaking for themselves, so you must speak for them,

(58:18):
right Like. That is something that I have seen, not
just now, but for years about Venezuela, right Like, it
must have been really frustrating to see this kind of
campiss tendency to literally steal like the voice of Venezuelan
people to speak on their behalf.

Speaker 7 (58:40):
Yeah, that's nothing new though, I mean I remember when
I was in college it was kind of the same.
Like there were I think it was like twenty seventeen.
There were some protests and people were saying all sorts
of things, and I remember losing a lot of my
friends in college because of that, because I was saying, like,
you know, it's more complicated than that, like you know,

(59:03):
actually people do dislike this person for this, this and
this reason. And yeah, I remember losing a lot of
friends because of that. Maybe not a mental breakdown, because
it was just like a right.

Speaker 5 (59:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (59:17):
I remember even at one point I went to like
a cafe. It was one of these like calfes where
people right on the walls and it said like fuck Venezuelan,
and I was just like, what a fucking dystopia am
I living in? And I also used to work at
a front desk and this guy somehow found out that
I was Venezuelan and he started saying like, oh, Madulu's

(59:39):
the best, like whatever, and my boss had to come
in and like take the guy away because he was
just being really like rowdy.

Speaker 6 (59:47):
Right, So yeah, it's calm.

Speaker 7 (59:50):
Yeah, in fact, us like when we introduce ourselves, like
we don't say that we're Venezuelan and immediately just because
it can be dangerous at times.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
So yeah, especially now we have this combination of like
we we've discussed this, but like on the on the right,
venez will and people are all perceived to be fucking
members of trend Ragua now and then yeah, it's that
or you line up behind the regime. And even when
those two things like are not as distinct as people
you know sometimes in their imagination see them, or that

(01:00:22):
they're also not as joint as other people in their
imagination see them. Yeah, it doesn't give you a place
to express your identity, right, you just have to fit
into someone else's box. Yeah, something else you said really
struck me, Like there seems to be and again it's
like it's not distinct from the colonial impulse, right, I
think about the uplift civilized and Christianized, or the white

(01:00:44):
man's burden or these like notions of people who were
subject to colonial violence being lesser than or incapable of,
and like, what are the things I see? It is
like the idea that Venezuelan people are not aware of
United States imperialism. I lived with Chilean's in Caracas in
like the first decade of this century, right, Like people

(01:01:06):
were very extremely fucking aware, Like I live with people
who have been tortured because of because of United States imperialism.
They've played me to have our records and then told
me how they chopped his hands off, right, Like, Yeah,
you're a person on the left. You have an understanding
of the world and world politics, and you've studied and traveled,
But like, there is a cultural understanding of this right

(01:01:27):
which does not require one to attend university. Can you
explain how people because people are weighing on the one hand,
we have this malorda regime which is killing people, which
has imprisoning people, and which is acting as a fundamental
constrain on our autonomy. And on the other hand, we
have the Americans dropping bombs and we know what the

(01:01:47):
Americans have done, Yeah to this part of the world.
If you could just talk on that little bit, explain
how people live with that balance.

Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
I think it's a combination of multiple things.

Speaker 7 (01:01:58):
So first, I mean, for many years, the government horribly
mismanaged the country and then blamed the US for everything
that went wrong. I mean, there were moments in which
we knew and had proof that these problems were coming
directly from the regime's actions, and yet so many times
they simply lied about it and said that it was
the US's fault, to the point where many of us were,

(01:02:21):
you know, simply desensitized to the idea of US intervention.
It's a case of the boy who cried a wolf,
but in this case, it was the dictator who cried intervention.

Speaker 5 (01:02:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:02:32):
Second of all, I mean, for many years now, every
cent made from our country's resources have gone everywhere except
to the people. Our resources have been going to other
country let's say Russia and China, just to name a couple,
and yet we, the Venezuelan people, have not seen a
single cent of that. So at this point, we're used

(01:02:55):
to being exploited and we're used to being cheated. So
when people in the US say, hey, the US only
wants to steal your oil, or hey, like they're going
to exploit your country, it's ignoring the fact that we
have already been living through that very same thing for decades,
and many believe that our material reality won't be affected

(01:03:16):
just because now it's someone else stealing out resources. If anything,
people are willing to see if these new guys, aka
the US, might do things differently now, whether that's right
or not, what it really speaks to I think is
I guess my final point, which is that people are desperate.

(01:03:38):
Every time a leftist says, oh, your life is about
to get so much worse or so bad or whatever,
they say that without knowing how bad things have already gotten.
I mean, I remember going to school during like the
worst parts of the famine and seeing like a skeletal
dead body lying on the street. Like that's an image

(01:04:00):
I still have nightmares with. And I mean for a time,
I remember someone I knew dying or being killed every
single week.

Speaker 6 (01:04:09):
The abuse and the torture we've endured at the hands
of this regime.

Speaker 7 (01:04:14):
I mean, anyone can google, like what's going on in
places like Ellinikoire or La Pumba or any of the
other torture centers in the country. I mean, people experience
mock in real executions, getting electrocuted like by their genitals, rape,
being forced to eat feces, and a whole list of

(01:04:36):
medieval sounding torture methods. And you know, people are truly
desperate for a change, any change. And the fact is
that the global campus left ors me and my friends
have begun calling them the imperial Left, has done nothing
for us they've given us no sustainable solution, and if anything,
have completely sided with our pressors. So you know, if

(01:04:59):
Trump and says I recognize this regime is bad and
I'm going to do something about it, people are going
to take that. And this is what is so frustrating
to me is that many of these leftists will go
ahead and then criticize Venezuelans for siding with their enemies.
But what they don't see is that they have sided

(01:05:21):
with ours, and at the end, all that does is
make life even harder for us. We've gone so desperate
that we've run directly into the hands of vultures because
they're the only hands that we've been given. I personally
don't love what the US is doing to our country,
but I mean I understand why many Venezuelans have reacted

(01:05:44):
the way that they have, and this is how I
can best explain it to those who don't understand it.

Speaker 6 (01:05:51):
It's sad.

Speaker 7 (01:05:52):
I know, it's very sad, and it's hard for people
who haven't lived through this to wrap their heads around
this level of despair. But it's the simple truth, and
it's a hard truth that I think many leftists need
to hear and understand. And I say that as someone
who is also saddened by this, because I want to
see a more left leaning future, especially for my country.

(01:06:15):
But I don't think it can happen if people don't
start accepting realities like these.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
The other thing that gets collapsed a lot, I think,
is a Venezuelan opposition, right. Like it is always amusing
to see, Like I myself, I'm not a communist, right
I'm not a state communist anyway. And I've seen like
the Venezuelan Communist Party and the Communist youth of Venezuela,
Like they'll put out a thing being like, we support opposition,

(01:06:53):
and then you'll see people being like, oh, no, we're communists,
but like like American communists who don't speak Spanish, Yeah,
like I engaged with them. It's it's very funny to
see that, like in their mind all opposition in Venezuela
is of the right wing, like MTM, yeah, tendency right, Like,
there are many very valid reasons where people on the

(01:07:14):
left will be opposed to what's happening. Does it feel
particularly isolating to be of the left and at the
same time have this constant assumption that to be in
an opposition you have to be of the right.

Speaker 7 (01:07:25):
It feels isolating when it comes to dealing with non Venezuelans,
But when it comes dealing with Venezuelans, not really. I
mean pretty much all of my friends, I mean as
a queer artist, like most of my friends are also
like pretty left leaning. Yeah, you have different kinds of
people on the left, right, But but yeah, like when

(01:07:47):
it comes to my Venezuelan friends, it is not isolating
at all because precisely we already know what's going on.
You know, we know that the that the opposition isn't
just like.

Speaker 6 (01:07:59):
A right wing saying yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:08:01):
It doesn't feel isolating because we know the political diversity
that exists, right, Yeah, and so you just kind of
have to find your tribe and it exists.

Speaker 6 (01:08:10):
Again, we're a.

Speaker 7 (01:08:10):
Country where people have all different sorts of opinions, and
so you know, between my Venezuela and friends, it seems
pretty what's the opposite of isolating.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
Yeah, like inclusive, I guess.

Speaker 6 (01:08:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:08:25):
When it's dealing with my non Venezuelan friends, that's when
it gets isolating because there's just not an understanding, Like
they just don't seem to understand. No matter how much
I try to break it down to them or how
much I try to explain to them. I have been
successful and many of my good friends who are like leftists,

(01:08:46):
most of them are anarchists. But when I do try
to explain it to them, they do seem to understand
because they know who I am and they know that
I'm not like, you know, bullshitting them.

Speaker 6 (01:08:58):
But yeah, but again that doesn't mean.

Speaker 7 (01:09:00):
Like I told you earlier, I have lost many, many friends,
and you know, have had to unfollow many people like
I don't feel welcome in all, like leftists or even
queer spaces sometimes because of what I think, which is,
you know, a free Venezuela isn't just free from imperialism
but also free from dictatorship.

Speaker 6 (01:09:21):
It's free from both.

Speaker 1 (01:09:22):
Yeah, yeah, right, I shouldn't be controversial.

Speaker 7 (01:09:25):
But that is something that most of my Venezuelan friends like,
they completely agree because it's similar to me. But my
non Venezuelan friends or ex friends, as I should say,
they just don't understand that at all.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
So it's always interesting. Like you know, I spent a
good deal of time with Venezuelan people coming to the
United States, so have recently arrived in the United States,
and it's funny to see how people represent their operation
to Maduro, like because at first I'll be like, oh,
it's guys an American, so they're like, oh, it'd be great.
The Americans came to liberate ats and like, you know,

(01:10:00):
what a wonderful country. And then like, once people begin
to feel comfortable and safe with you and you talk more,
everybody knows we don't have it all figure out either.
Everybody knows the history right like, and then people, yes,
of course have a wide and varied range of things
that they would love to see in Venezuela, but they
are united behind seeing an end to dictatorship yeah and

(01:10:21):
stay violent.

Speaker 5 (01:10:22):
Yeah no.

Speaker 7 (01:10:23):
And I think that's honestly kind of like a beautiful
thing where, you know, in spite of our differences, because
I may have differences with other people who may be
moderates or right wing or whatever, but we've all united
against this like bigger evil. And I think that's something
that I wish actually the US could learn about, right

(01:10:46):
putting their differences aside to actually like tackle that bigger evil.
I think that's something that US should learn about us.
How we've been able to do that. How you know,
we can all say, you know, we may not agree
on on how certain things are done, but we all
agree on what needs to be done, which is you know,

(01:11:06):
like getting rid of this regime, right, So yeah, I
mean it's it's actually pretty pretty cool. And although it's
not always easy because again, like you have, like in
any country, we have all sorts of different opinions going on,
it is really nice to see everyone united for one
thing and one reason and that's really the important thing.

(01:11:28):
So so you know, I wish other countries could maybe
learn a little bit about that too.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Yeah, left in this country could learn a lot from
the way that, like a vast variety of left organizations
in Venezuela have managed to unite with organizations that are
more centrist, so straight up on the right, Yeah, to
achieve at least one goal, with the understanding that they

(01:11:56):
still retain disagreements that are pro found.

Speaker 6 (01:12:00):
Other things exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
That's something we can learn a lot from. And like,
I'm always kind of in awe of the capacity for
solidarity that I see, especially from Venezuelan people, like and
I think it comes from in part, like decades of
dictatorship and earn of hardship more generally, right, But like
the continuous resolve that I've seen to get through it

(01:12:23):
together rather than for each person to get their own
and sort of leave the rest behind. Yeah, it's remarkable, genuinely,
like seeing again, like a lot of my experience, I
have not been in Karrakas for probably fifteen years, maybe longer.
It's seeing people in the diaspora and migrants, but like
people who have grown so used to the state ironically

(01:12:46):
failing to provide the basic necessities of life that they've
got used to just obtaining them and from each other. Like,
even if those people are not anarchists, they are probably
doing more mutual aid than people who spend a lot
of their time being anarchists on the internet. Yeah, Like
that's a beautiful thing that we should be in aura
of rather than invalidating. It's so many people on the

(01:13:09):
left e.

Speaker 7 (01:13:10):
And I think that's something that really starts with our
own crisis, because I remember at the height of the famine, right,
I mean I'm speaking maybe like twenty thirteen fourteen around time,
because by twenty seventeen, when there was like another big
like famine going on, I was not in Venezuela actually,

(01:13:32):
but I remember when that was happening, like it was
very common, Like, hey, so in my backyard we had
plant takes and our neighbor had avocado, so you we
would like exchange things somebody needed anything, like if somebody's
grandmother needed like this medication that can only be found
in like this one place in Karakas, like. But then
I didn't have gas, but maybe like my cousin had

(01:13:54):
gas so that we could drive to Karakas like. So
that's kind of how it worked back there, Like we
had that solidarity towards each other, and I think obviously
if we go abroad, we're going to continue showing that
same Yeah, I like that same attitude because it's just
like part of who we are.

Speaker 1 (01:14:12):
I guess, yeah, it just seems to be very much
like part of the character of community. It's even like
when I was there, you know, a decade before that,
quite a decade maybe sometime before that. It's funny, I
went to this place where they're having like a revolution
which was extremely grounded in state power, and came out
realizing that the state is not the vehicle for human

(01:14:32):
liberation and the other people are just I just find this,
this impulse on the left to invalidate and and like
therefore refuse to learn from Venezuelan people so frustrating. It's
like a mile phrase. But like what can people do?

Speaker 5 (01:14:48):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Like, We're in a situation now where we have like
Maduro without Maduda rail, but we have Delsa doing like
tweeting how much he likes Donald Trump all the time.
We are the worst of all possible outcomes. Really, right,
we still have this apparatus for repression. But at the
same time, the US is basically engaged in a colonial

(01:15:08):
relationship of extraction of resources and anything else it wants
from Venezuela. Like, how can people better be in solidarity
instead of like trying to force you all into one
box or another box. Yeah, if we assume most of
our audiences in Europe or the United States, right, and they, yeah,
there haven't been big Like we're in solidarity with the
Venezuelan anarchists or even the Venezuelan socialist or communists who

(01:15:31):
are opposed to Maduro to DELTI Now.

Speaker 7 (01:15:34):
For non Venezuelans, I think the key thing is to
speak about this from a complete perspective. The whole perspective,
because what's the issue. And I can tell you personally.
Sometimes I see, I don't know, like anti imperialists, you know,
US get out of ven Azula protests, and I would

(01:15:56):
love to join because I want the US out of
my country.

Speaker 6 (01:16:00):
But then I see them with pro Maduro.

Speaker 7 (01:16:02):
Signs or just like free Maduro or you know, talking
positively about the regime, and then I'm like, ugh, actually,
I'm not going to participate in that. So you know,
you're actively excluding Venezuelan voices by doing these kinds of
unilateral thing. And what do I mean by unilateral? So

(01:16:24):
I understand that many let's say Western non Venezuelans are
speaking and looking at things from their own perspective, which
is Trump is a bad guy.

Speaker 6 (01:16:35):
He's not going to do anything positive.

Speaker 7 (01:16:37):
We know the history of the US, and so they
are from their own perspective. They see what they're bad
guy is doing, right right from the Venezuelan perspective, we
also see what our bad guy is doing. Like we're
speaking up about this particular bad guy more than what
we are about.

Speaker 6 (01:16:57):
Trump, the other bad guy.

Speaker 7 (01:17:00):
It's kind of like we have two different perspectives here
and both are looking at their own right, And so
the issue here is that those two perspectives are not combined, right.
So I would say the first thing you need to
understand is that you know, I understand why you're looking

(01:17:23):
at things from your own perspective, but you also have
to include Venezuelan perspectives in your activism in order for
them to actually be productive towards the Venezuelan people, right,
Because when you say, you know Fremaduro and you know
us get out of Venezuela, you're still not addressing the

(01:17:44):
necessities of the Venezuelan people, right, which is we need
to get out of the regime. Sure, like one of
those necessities is the US getting the fuck out of there,
but you're not addressing the main issue.

Speaker 6 (01:17:57):
That has plagued us for the past thirty years.

Speaker 5 (01:17:59):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:18:01):
So when you're not doing that, and that's a dangerous
thing about you know, conversations like that of Venezuela or
Cuba or even Iran as well. When you speak about
things from one specific perspective, when you omit one side,
you're making it seem like the other side is better,
when it should be abundantly clear that both the US

(01:18:24):
and Maduda need to be out in order for Venezuela
to actually be free. Right, So I think it's key,
it is very necessary that when we have these like
free Venezuela protests, it's not just about the US, but
it's also protesting the Madula regime, right because otherwise what

(01:18:46):
you're going to do is you're going to exclude many
people who also want the US to back off from
your own protests.

Speaker 5 (01:18:54):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:18:54):
And if you know it's it gets even.

Speaker 7 (01:18:57):
Worse because I've seen Venezuelan activists actually getting you know,
pushed out of conversations on Venezuela because they're talking about
you know what I'm telling you right now, right, so
they're talking about what the regime has done and maybe
focusing on the regime well, also mentioning that the US
should like, you know, they know US history, but they're

(01:19:18):
focusing on the Venezuelan perspective because it's a Venezuelan that's
what you want to bring into the conversation, right, Like
non Venezuelans can go ahead and out of that you know,
anti peerless part of the conversation or you know, perspective
to the conversation. But they do need to make space
for the Venezuelans who also need to speak out of
the regime, right, So it needs to be a combination

(01:19:39):
of both, and in your advocacy you have to include
both at the same time always because again, if you
don't speak about one, then you're sort of like portraying
the other one is like the good side, right, And
what that does is that continues to isolate Venezuelan's I mean,
including myself, Like I said, I can't even go to

(01:19:59):
free and as well protest because I'm never going to be,
you know, next to somebody chanting free ma duro.

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:20:07):
So that's like the key thing that the leftist, like
non Venezuelan leftists need to understand.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
Yeah, I think a lot about how people on the
left for some reason, and this is particularly odd with
the fact that we have lived through a genocide in
Gaza for two and a half years, the people seem
to only be able to understand solidarity with states and
not with people. And we have the Palestinians right, a

(01:20:36):
stateless nation. People seem to understand that there to an
extent right, albeit that for many people like Palatinians, statehood
is a solution to the problem. It just seems to
be such a condemnation of the organizing or much of
the left that people cannot and this is my general

(01:20:57):
frustration with the world, well one of them. They can't
think outside of the state model. They cannot conceive of
an alternative that does not already exist. Yeah, even though
there are movements outside of the state right, like a
Kurdish struggling in the north Easyria for example, it's one,
but like I don't know, like we should be able

(01:21:18):
to dream of a better world or a beautiful life,
and it seems like so many people have forgotten that
that's what being on the left is about. And they
identify as revolutionaries, but they're extremely reactionary in their politics
and their goals. Like, yeah, it must be so strange
to come from. I don't know how old you were.

(01:21:39):
When do you remember like very early Chevismo.

Speaker 6 (01:21:42):
I remember parts of it is like a memory.

Speaker 7 (01:21:45):
So I was born in ninety seven, So okay, early
Chevismo was like a fever dream.

Speaker 6 (01:21:52):
I remember, you know, during like the.

Speaker 7 (01:21:56):
And all that, and yeah, I would like go outside
of like my apartment and it's like like go to
my window, Like we used to live in a building
and we would like take out pots in like cast
roles and start basing and everyone, and then that was
like my favorite part of the day because I, as
a kid, didn't really understand that it was a protest,
but I loved banging on things.

Speaker 6 (01:22:15):
So I remember that. I remember like my.

Speaker 7 (01:22:18):
Parents not being able to find certain things that maybe
in the past they could find. I remember like at
some points, like not being able to go to school
because like there was something happening. It's like you're reallyving
his own thing. But I remember thinking, I hope there's
another cool so that I don't have to go to
school tomorrow. Yeah, that's kind of like what I remember

(01:22:45):
of early Chevismore. I also remember as well, sort of
seeing the division, and that to me is like the biggest,
most impactful memory, right, the division that existed so on
my family. I remember, just for context, like part of
my family, half of my family is like middle class

(01:23:05):
and the other half of my family was working class,
like you know, brown working class from the coasts, right,
so shout out to Okuma. So you know, it was
like different realities, different necessities, And I remember both sides
of the family arguing a lot, Like there was a
lot of division, very similar to what's going on in

(01:23:27):
the US right now in terms of division, right, yeah,
where there were like heated arguments, people did not speak
to each other, people hated each other because of you know,
like part of my family was Cha Vista, the other
part was opposition or whatever.

Speaker 5 (01:23:44):
It was.

Speaker 7 (01:23:44):
That was one of the biggest things that I remember,
was like half of my family hating the other half
of my family because they had different backgrounds and different
political stances. So so yeah, that was a big thing,
as well as the fanaticism right existed, especially yeh list
does I mean remember my grandmother had like a poster

(01:24:05):
of Chavis and like like a figurines and she dyed
her hair red because she supported the regime whatever. So
so that's one of the things I remember the most,
is my family, both sides like hating each other because
of it is And it's something that I'm seeing in
the US right now a lot, and I think it's

(01:24:27):
operating in a very similar fashion.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
Yeah, it does seem to be. And like, did your
family reconcile at some point, Oh, do you still have
people who are like die hard?

Speaker 5 (01:24:38):
No?

Speaker 7 (01:24:38):
So, for example, my grandmother that I told you about, Yeah,
she says that she's still Chavista but she's not Malis.

Speaker 5 (01:24:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:45):
Yeah, I've had this done too.

Speaker 5 (01:24:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:24:48):
It's just like, you know, she supports like what the
revolution initially meant, but like she doesn't support Maduro, right yeah.
Or for example, like her husband, my grandfather, he's just like,
you know, this revolution was all bullshit. We thought that
this was going to be good, but they ended up
being absolute traders, like you know, they ended up not

(01:25:10):
doing what they promised to do, right, So it was
all just disappointment. And the other side of my family
is just like chill, I don't know, like.

Speaker 6 (01:25:23):
They were just never chevy stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:25:24):
So that's kind of you are like strong environmentalists, so
that's why they kind of hated Chavis because they were
also doing some crazy shit in the Amazons. So it's
kind of like they do all get along much better, right,
So that's good, Yeah, I guess because like once I
realized that actually this guy was not that good, right,
But that particular side of my family that was Chevistad

(01:25:46):
that's how they think right now. Or it's like either
it was disappointment or that perspective of you know, I
support Chavis but not Maduo.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
I've heard that from a lot of people, right, like
what Javis wanted to make Venezuela better for us, and
like if we just look at the shit he said, Yeah,
I want people to have enough to eat, I want
them to have education, I want them to be able
to go to the hospital. I want them to have
safe houses. Like I want all those things too. They
didn't get those things. But like I've heard a lot
of people say that, like, oh, yeah, we wanted it too,

(01:26:17):
so we supported it, but it wasn't We didn't get that.
We got prisons and cops exactly. And like that stance
seems to be entirely absent in any discussion of Venezuela,
which is it's so common, like you just don't hear
the like it's not like a left critique from other

(01:26:38):
left stances. It's a left critique from the same place
that chav Is more claimed to come from. And it's
completely absent in our discourse. And like I can't, well,
it's because we don't talk to people from Venezuela. But yeah, yes,
it's extremely frustrating, and I think like there's a lot
that the United States can learn because we're already seeing

(01:27:00):
large numbers of people being like, oh, yeah, I've voted
for Trump one, two, three times, and now something has
alienated them, right, whether it's mass deportations, whether it's a
war with a run, whether it's the economy being shit,
whatever it is, Like, we need to learn how to

(01:27:22):
allow people to change their minds or like to get better,
like the vendants, where in opposition wouldn't be what it
was if they said anybody who supported chabb As at
any point can fuck off, we don't want you, right, Like, yeah,
it's it wouldn't work, It wouldn't function. And I think
if we would listen to people, there's so much that

(01:27:44):
we could learn from that, but we seem so locked
in on talking down to them instead.

Speaker 7 (01:27:49):
That yeah, I mean exactly, That's what I mean by
like it reminds me of that like division. You know,
it's almost like rap, right, Like people are foaming at
the mouth. That's kind of like the level of division
that I remember growing up. And to be honest, a
lot of what's going on in the US is eerily
similar to what I grew up seeing. I think both

(01:28:10):
Trump and Chavas are very similar kinds of people. And
you know, I used to live in the US. Now
I live in Europe, but that's one of the reasons
I decided to leave, because I saw many similarities to
what happened in my country, and I decided to just
Skidadle as soon as like, because I sort of knew

(01:28:31):
where it was all going.

Speaker 6 (01:28:32):
But I knew where it was all.

Speaker 7 (01:28:33):
Going because of what I already lived through. There was
actually one more thing that I'm thinking about it that
it didn't get a chance.

Speaker 6 (01:28:50):
But you mentioned Palestine. I think it's really.

Speaker 7 (01:28:54):
Interesting because the school that I went to, actually, Venezuela
has really big population of Middle Eastern people, among them Palestinians.
There was a Palestine club in my hometown and I
remember during was it like twenty twelve, twenty fourteen, Again
this was years ago, but twenty twelve maybe twenty fourteen,

(01:29:18):
At some point there were protests la Huadimbus if you
know them, during Lazwuardimbas. There were protests for Venezuela whatever.

Speaker 6 (01:29:27):
And I remember that I had.

Speaker 7 (01:29:29):
Many Palestinian, like Palestinian Venezuelan classmates, and they were protesting both, right,
So they had Palestinian flags and they had Venezuelan flags,
and they were protesting for both peoples. So you know,
that's like an example whenever people say like try to divide,
and you know sayy like oh, like the Maludu is

(01:29:50):
like pro Palestine whatever. I think of my friends in
school where they were like, no, actually, we're Palestinian Venezuelans
and we don't like what's going on in either place.
So because we do have a very big Middle Eastern population, again,
many Palestinians, many Lebanese people who are not unaware of

(01:30:11):
what has been going on in the Middle East, right,
So that's also something to be added to the conversation,
is you know when we talk about these things like
they're not isolated, and precisely because we're not isolated, that's
why we should, like you said, like be more in
support of the people rather.

Speaker 6 (01:30:27):
Than the states.

Speaker 5 (01:30:27):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:30:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:30:28):
I wanted to bring up like that little bit of
like that little memory that I had because I just
remember the image of it, of my friends doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:37):
So yeah, it's very similar in a sense, I guess to, like,
I think a lot about how the Assad regime used
Palestinian people, right, like it would constantly talk about fucking
solidarity with Palestine, and it had all these tanks and
all these guns and all these planes and bombs, and
it turned them all on its certain people. Niah. It
didn't use its state power to liberate Palestine, it would

(01:31:00):
have been destroyed by the idea of the data, I imagine,
but it used it to stake powered to kill its
own people. Yeah, it is so frustrating that we saw
that happen and the world still allows people to tokenize
the Palestinian people right and to use them as a
shield definitely against the oppression of their own people. I

(01:31:21):
think a lot of people will be thinking or listening
and being like, well, I haven't really heard from Venezuelan voices,
or I mean they might not know any people from Venezuela.
Where can people do more to listen if they want
to as they approach this issue in so much as
people are still approaching it because half the US media's

(01:31:41):
forgotten about Venezuela already.

Speaker 7 (01:31:43):
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on, for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:31:47):
Yeah, but.

Speaker 7 (01:31:49):
I want to say, like, this might be a little
bit annoying, but learn Spanish, right, if you're going to
ask it for a specific group of people, at least
learn the language you know so that you actually know
what people talking about. Right, not everybody speaks English. Not
everybody's gonna speak your language. So if you're actually gonna
take advocacy for Venezuelas seriously, then you should learn the

(01:32:10):
language straight up so that you it's easier for you
to get into these conversations. See what local activists are saying,
see what the news are saying, like see even what
our leaders are saying.

Speaker 6 (01:32:23):
Right. So I think that's one of the first things.
I think. Another thing, I mean, there are.

Speaker 7 (01:32:28):
Some like English language Instagram accounts who are like posting things, yeah,
but I think the biggest thing is to be for
the people.

Speaker 6 (01:32:39):
And what do I mean by that?

Speaker 7 (01:32:41):
Everyone wants to claim that they are for the people,
but very few people.

Speaker 6 (01:32:45):
Actually are for the people, right.

Speaker 7 (01:32:48):
So what happens is they might hear like, I don't know,
a Venezuela in person saying, oh thank you USA for
taking out maluro do whatever you want want whatever. They
might hear like the typical magrasolanos, you know, and you
might hear all of these perspectives that are really coming

(01:33:08):
from not a place of them being fascist or whatever,
but coming from a trauma. So I think that if
you want to inform yourself. You need to develop the
ability to think critically about what's going on and be
able to understand who are these people and why do
they have this perspective? Right, So they have this perspective

(01:33:29):
not because they were slave owners back in Venezuela, not
because they're white, some of them are not white. It's
not because they are like pro fascism or they necessarily
love the US, right, but it's coming from a place
of trauma.

Speaker 6 (01:33:45):
And why do they have that trauma?

Speaker 7 (01:33:47):
Well, they have that trauma because all of the abuses
that were committed, like to the Venezuelan people, were on
behalf of this quote unquote socialism, right, So yeah, they
were committed in the name of of the left whatever.
So that's why all of a sudden they claim to
be very right wing, although if you speak to them,
you might ask them, well, what do you want to

(01:34:08):
see in your country and you're like, well, this doesn't
sound very pro capitalism to me. But I guess the
ability to understand these people instead of calling them like
CIA agents, fascists, like they're stupid, they're idiots, don't listen
to them. The diasporas just full of like massad agents whatever,
you want to call them, right, like I've seen every

(01:34:29):
athol in the book, like any excuse in the book, like.

Speaker 6 (01:34:31):
To not listen to these people.

Speaker 7 (01:34:33):
Yeah, but I think this is to listen to these
people and try to understand and again think critically. Okay, well,
I understand that maybe what they are saying is not
necessarily great, because I also understand that the US has
done this, this and this, and that they are coming
from a place of trauma that perhaps they do know

(01:34:53):
what the US is history. But again, they're just desperate.
But let's get to the bottom of this. What is
their root con the crisis in Venezuela. Right, So why
do they have all these like crazy ideas?

Speaker 6 (01:35:06):
Why are they so crazy?

Speaker 7 (01:35:08):
So because of everything that they've endured in Venezuela. So
don't try to focus on like the shallow part of
it all, like try to go to the deeper end
and that way you will truly understand what is going on.

Speaker 5 (01:35:22):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:35:23):
Not to ignore these people or just like dismiss them
as a B or C or like a CIA fascist whatever.

Speaker 6 (01:35:29):
They're not fascists.

Speaker 7 (01:35:30):
They're just people who are traumatized, and it's really important
for you to understand their trauma in order to address
the issues that actually concern them and to actually have
communication with these people and include them in your advocacy,
and who knows, maybe you'll be able to convert some
to your side to right, which I think that's been
one of the most critical mistakes that many people on

(01:35:53):
the left have made, is that, you know, we have
all these Venezuelans who again claim to be right wing.
And to a second, why say they claim to be
but they claim to be right wing, And again it's
not just because of the mad Madula and Chavist regime.
It's not just because all of the abuses committed to
them were in the name of socialism, but it is

(01:36:13):
also because the international left has reacted so negatively towards
our cause that you know, many Venezuelans decided to say, hey,
you know what, I'm right wing or I'm moderate, or
you know what, I love the US now because all
the people who are anti West are pro the regime
that is killing my people, right right, So what's that

(01:36:35):
What that is doing is like actually pushing these people
even further when you call you know, these like.

Speaker 6 (01:36:41):
Magaslos, because.

Speaker 7 (01:36:44):
When you call them like Ashist or whatever, or Cia,
you're just pushing them even further, and at the end
that sucks like for us because then we're going to
be the ones We're going to be politically confused, and
god knows that's going to lead us to some crazy places.

Speaker 6 (01:36:57):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:36:58):
So I think the first thing is actually having empathy
towards people and using your ability to think critically and
hearing people out who maybe you were told not to
listen to and thinking, Okay, well, I don't agree with
what you're saying on the surface, but I understand what

(01:37:18):
your roote concern is. Therefore, I think we should talk
about this and I can understand that in order to
inform myself what is truly happening to these people that
are making them believe these crazy things like Trump has
fave us, right.

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
Yeah, I think that's like really important to remember that
you might come across from Venezuela and who might be
advocating for oh, someone from Iran or someone from one
of these other places you might be like advocating for intervention. Yeah,
and like it's ever really important not to be like, Okay,
this person goes in the mag of box for me,
because like there are Venezuelan people who are going to

(01:37:53):
go in that box, right, But like, we have a
good deal of people who like they're obviously not going
to be opposed to migration in they themselves some migrants exactly.
That doesn't always apply. There's the famous video of the
Turkish guy complaining about migrants as he enters the United States.

Speaker 6 (01:38:08):
Like, oh, yeah, I mean, of course, I guess you're
trying to.

Speaker 1 (01:38:11):
Say, yeah, yeah, Like there are people whose views on
like the world and the way it should be might
not be that different from yours, and like we only
find out by engaging with each other in good faith
and like as people, not as tropes. Yeah, which I
think is in a huge part of the problem. I
do think the language barrier is an issue. So many

(01:38:32):
people on the left want to talk about places but
not talk to the people and can't. Yeah, and then
we only see a small subset of discourse translated into English.

Speaker 7 (01:38:43):
I mean that's kind of what I mean by like,
you know, everyone wants to be for the people, but
very few people actually are because being for the people
takes a lot of effort, because you need to learn languages,
you need to visit places, you need to talk to
people who you might on the surface disagree with you
might have to think about what they tell you in
order to come to a conclusion yourself about what's actually

(01:39:03):
going on and how you can actually support these people
while not compromising your own beliefs and your own knowledge
and experiences. Right, So that takes much work. So that's
what I meant by that, Like very few, yeah, for
the people in that sense where they engage and actually
go and try to talk to us. And I think
that's the best way of being informed of any issue,

(01:39:25):
is just talking to the people.

Speaker 6 (01:39:28):
But it takes a lot of work. It takes a
lot of work.

Speaker 1 (01:39:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But that's what solidarity is like, it's
putting in the work to take care of each other exactly.
It's been a failure of the non campus left that
we have not done more. We have not reached out
to more people in Venezuela, that we've not used our platforms,
so we've not shared their voices, that we haven't done
more to push back on this idea that like the

(01:39:54):
only options to Venezuela are neoliberal neo imperialism, or maybe
neoliberal so is what we do anymore, but American imperialism
or like this anti imperialism of idiots? Is there anything
you'd like to plug? Do you like people to find
you on the internet or some other stuff you'd like
to direct people to. Maybe they can call you a

(01:40:16):
mossad or cia or whatever.

Speaker 6 (01:40:19):
Yeah, you can find me on my Instagram account.

Speaker 7 (01:40:22):
It's E dot M dot A r I n Okay,
so just like my name deconstructing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
can send it to you later.

Speaker 4 (01:40:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:40:34):
Trying to think of like what else to say, but
I mean, yeah, like going back a little bit, I
just wanted to clarify this because I brought up a
few times. But what I was saying, you know, like
looking at is Maga solanos and what I mean by
like their quote unquote right or not actually right wing,

(01:40:54):
like if you speak to them. And there's a really
good video that the Sky made but it's in Spanish
talking about this. But what I mean is many people
who are magasolanos. You ask them what do you want
to see in Venezuela, And what they want is affordable housing,
affordable healthcare, clean water, proper environmental policies. They don't want

(01:41:19):
any more abuses committed to the indigenous communities, particular those
in the Araco Minerooco. So you ask these people what
they want, and this is what they want, right, So
when they just say that they're right wing, they say
that they're right wing simply because they are traumatized from,
you know, this apparently socialist regime which was anything but

(01:41:40):
and people on the left sort of, you know, just
supporting that regime and isolating them and treating them like
absolute crap. So they're traumatized by both of those things,
and that's why they claim to be in this position.
But if you actually talk to them, that is not
the case. Keep that in mind, because it's funny to

(01:42:00):
me when many people say, oh, you guys just believe propaganda.
That's why you're pro Trump, and that's why your right wing,
because you consumed the CIA propaganda. You guys are blinded
by propaganda, when in reality.

Speaker 6 (01:42:15):
What that doing is that is taking away.

Speaker 7 (01:42:17):
The accountability that many on the left should maybe you know,
maybe think about, because it hasn't just been CIA propaganda, like,
it's also just leftists acting like assholes, Like that's something
that has also pushed many Venezuelans away from the left.
It's not just the CIA spreading propaganda it's also that

(01:42:39):
the Left has acted horribly with Venezuelans, and that has
also pushed people away. And I think if we're able
to solve that issue, If I think if the Left
is able to see Venezuelans as human beings and to
have a different approach, such as you know, with you
know what we've talked about earlier, I think we're going
to be able to have a better conversation and have

(01:43:00):
a better relationship between these two communities and actually get
somewhere productive.

Speaker 6 (01:43:06):
But I just wanted to bring that up because I am.

Speaker 7 (01:43:08):
So tired of seeing people saying it's all CIA propaganda
and not really thinking, well, actually, we have also done
some pretty bad things and that's why these people kind
of have taken a dislike to us. So yeah, I
think I think that's pretty much it. Like, in conclusion,
just here hear us out. We're human, and we're not

(01:43:32):
the perfect victims. We're not a monolith. We were human. Yes,
so we should be spoken to as humans and thought
about as humans, not as some chess piece in this
political game. Just include us into the conversation, I think
is the most important thing anyone listening to this should

(01:43:56):
take away.

Speaker 1 (01:43:57):
Yeah, I think it's a really good place. Thank you
so much for sharing some of that time with us.

Speaker 7 (01:44:01):
No, thank you so much for giving me the space
to talk. I mean, it's very necessary, as you might imagine,
for our voices to be heard and be put out there.
Because I'm lucky enough to be multi lingual, I try
to do my best and speak in other languages so
other people understand what's going on in our minds and

(01:44:24):
in our communities. So I am very grateful that you're
able to have me here and to actually listen. It's
not something many people do, so I really do valuate great.

Speaker 1 (01:44:36):
Thank you, great.

Speaker 3 (01:44:54):
Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.

Speaker 8 (01:44:56):
I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I'm joined today
by a very special Michael Edison Hayden.

Speaker 3 (01:45:01):
Hi, how's it going, Thanks for being here.

Speaker 8 (01:45:04):
You may know Mike from his work as an investigative
journalist and an expert on far right extremism. He currently
co hosts Posting Through It, a weekly news podcast with
fellow veteran of the far right beat, Jared Holt. But
today we're talking about his new book, Strange People on
the Hill, How Extremism tore apart a small American town.
It comes out April seventh, twenty twenty six, but you

(01:45:25):
can go ahead and pre order it now anywhere you
buy books, and make sure you ask for it at
your local library and your local independent bookstore.

Speaker 3 (01:45:32):
Mike, thanks so much for coming on. I'm excited to
talk about this.

Speaker 5 (01:45:35):
Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:45:37):
I was worried that I wasn't gonna have time to
read the whole book. I mean, you talk about this
a lot in the book, right, the stresses of covering
this beat. But I sat down to read it and
I read it in one sitting. It is very compelling. Wow,
But it's not the book I thought it was, you know.
So when your publicists sent this to me, I thought, oh, phenomenal.
This is a book about Peter Brimlow and the racism

(01:45:57):
Castle in West Virginia. I would love to read a
book about Peter Brimlow and the races in Castle.

Speaker 3 (01:46:01):
And it's not really is it?

Speaker 8 (01:46:04):
Like the Brimlows are the strange people on the hill
and they sort of stay on the hill.

Speaker 5 (01:46:10):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:46:10):
You have a couple of encounters with them in the book,
But for the most part, it's a book about the town.

Speaker 5 (01:46:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's about the town. And I'm glad that
you mentioned that. I really didn't want to write a
book that was about these villains that have been, you know,
populating our culture for the last ten plus years that
just seem to get unlimited traction on social media. There's
nothing wrong with talking about them, and there's nothing certainly

(01:46:39):
reporting on them, because I did my share of that,
you know, day in and day out when I was
with SBLC, for instance. I think that all that is important,
and there's different ways to do it and do it effectively.
But I think for a book, I wanted to focus
more on what these people and this culture that is
surrounding them is doing to every people.

Speaker 4 (01:47:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:47:01):
I was just I was so startled by what it
wasn't and then so engrossed by what it was. But
just quickly for the listeners, tell us what the book
is not about. Tell us who Peter Brimlow is and
v dare and how they ended up with a castle.

Speaker 5 (01:47:14):
Yeah, well it's not totally without him. I mean we
do get a bit of information about it. Yeah, we
meet him. Peter kind of came up as a financial reporter.
That's the short way of understanding, you know, how he
became America's most influential white nationalist. That's what SPOC labeled him,

(01:47:36):
which has covered obviously in the book. And he became
obsessed with immigration, and in particular heart Seller, which brought
in tons of people from the developing world. My mother
came to the country in sixty eight, for example, that
was like a you know, three years after Heartseller, and

(01:47:57):
I wouldn't have been born if not married a white guy,
and etcetera, etcetera. She came from Egypt. So he became
obsessed with this and kind of in the way that
I know, you know a lot about these the way
some of these minds work, Molly, but in the way
that some people get obsessed with environmentalism, and then they
kind of expand that concern to sort of say, well,

(01:48:19):
there's too many people, right, there's too many people. There's
too many people. Well there's too many brown people. That's
what's destroying the environment. And then they become you know,
sort of white nationalists minded or anti grand immigrant minded.
In Briml's case, I really think it was like a
financial thing, just like this is putting all these different
strains and whatever, and then it became the financial became
less of a concern, and the actual anti immigrant thing

(01:48:42):
became bigger and bigger for him. In nineteen ninety five,
he publishes Alienation, which is a book that was actually
praised by people like David Frum, you know, the very
same guy who's high hatting about Trump every day. It
was considered socially acceptable, and then over time I think
people realize that the book had a very racist undercurrent,

(01:49:03):
and it became beloved by Nazis, white nationalists, etc.

Speaker 8 (01:49:07):
I think if people like David Frum had been honest
with themselves, it was there all along.

Speaker 3 (01:49:11):
It was not a subtle undercurrent.

Speaker 5 (01:49:13):
Fun A side about David From which is that I
did put it in the investigation into Stephen Miller's private emails.
Miller shared posts by From on more than one occasion
about like sort of anti Islam posts, which I think
is interesting.

Speaker 8 (01:49:28):
And I think what these people disagree most about is
how loud you're supposed to say the quiet part.

Speaker 5 (01:49:33):
Yeah, No, I really do think that that's true. So,
you know, when Peter became more of a contentious figure,
he founded Videir, which is a nonprofit that lasted for
about quarter century.

Speaker 3 (01:49:47):
Recently died recently double that's.

Speaker 5 (01:49:49):
Covered in the book. It dies over the course of
the narrative, and it was hugely influential, usually influential and
changing the GOP. And at the time when W. Bush
was president, Brimlow was railing against the GOP to change,
to move in this nativist direction, and eventually they listen

(01:50:10):
to him.

Speaker 8 (01:50:11):
And so the book sort of starts with, you know,
twenty nineteen, right, and Peter and his wife, Lydia Brimlow
have purchased this gigantic castle in the small town of
Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

Speaker 6 (01:50:22):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:50:23):
I guess it's not shake It's a medium sized castle.
I don't know what the scale for castles is. And
so you become interested in their purchase of this castle,
and you go to this town and you meet the
people of Berkeley Springs, the people who are indifferent to
their presence, the people who are organizing against their presence.
And it's this really sort of engrossing story of just

(01:50:44):
small town drama, this interpersonal drama of these like small
business owners.

Speaker 3 (01:50:49):
And the castle is.

Speaker 8 (01:50:50):
Always there in the background, right, the strange people are
up on the hill. But it's a story about this
small town struggle.

Speaker 5 (01:50:58):
Yeah, I think we should just talk about the castle
real quick, because it's beautiful, and I think that's a
key thing. I hope when you read it you were like, oh,
I want to go to Berkeley Springs now, which is
I've had more than one person who read the book.

Speaker 3 (01:51:10):
Tell me that I'm going to wait till they leave.

Speaker 5 (01:51:14):
I've also heard that too, But you know, I know
the people who are there who despise the Brimlows and
their ideology, and I wanted to make sure that they
didn't feel let down by the book, that they felt
like at least honored to a degree because I really
want them to be able to recover their business. Their
business have suffered since Brimlows took over. But just a
quick thing on this castle. It is absolutely beautiful. It

(01:51:37):
should be like a national park or something. It has
that feel. It was built in eighteen eighty by a
guy named Samuel Taylor Suit who made it for a
very very young young girl. I think she's like seventeen
or something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:51:53):
It's fitting that Brimlow bought it for his much younger wife.

Speaker 5 (01:51:55):
Yes, that's true. Yeah, there's a lot of like spiritual
kind of woo woo stuff in Berkeley Springs, and there's
a lot of you know, superstition, and a lot of
people really think that they are carrying on like some
sort of ghost like thing would carry over from this relationship.
But he made the castle for her, and he died
and she took over and went bankrupt, and there was

(01:52:17):
also allegedly a murder or something like that took place there.
And then there's like this kind of turnover from people
one generation of the next trying to keep the castle going.
It's always more expensive than it's worth. It's beautiful, it
overlooks the entire town. The town is tiny, gorgeous, looks
like a great place to go on vacation. And if
you imagine, like for Berkeley Springs, the Empire State Building,

(01:52:39):
Statue of Liberty Times Square rolled into one, that's what
the castle is. It's so tiny, and this is the
main landmark. This is the thing that everybody goes to
and they go hiking around there and all this stuff.
So this is a tourist town that attracts a lot
of LGBQ people from places like Washington, d C. Baltimore,
a lot of liberals and all of a sudden you

(01:53:01):
have this again SPOC labeled white nationalist, anti immigrant, nativist,
whatever you want to call them. Couple buys this castle, right,
they decide to buy it. And the way they found
it is because Lydia Brimlow, who is thirty seven years
younger than Peter herself and started with him and when
she was twenty or something like that and he was

(01:53:23):
nearly sixty.

Speaker 3 (01:53:24):
Right, she was an intern at the Heritage Foundation when
they met.

Speaker 5 (01:53:28):
Intriguing, Yeah, Heritage and it's interesting, weird in any case,
she finds it on Zillow. And you remember this period
very well, I know, But in twenty eighteen or so,
it became very very difficult for these folks to stage events, right.

Speaker 8 (01:53:47):
For you know, for unknown reasons, not because they kept
killing people.

Speaker 5 (01:53:52):
I don't want to like derail this podcast by bringing
up Jason Kessler, but Jason Kessler, who we both know
very well well, who is who secured the permit for
the Unite the Right event, who has been at different
times obsessed with both of us, I think were like
in his top in his top ap all list, Jason
you know, was readily associated with VIDIA because of his

(01:54:14):
contributions to the site and people knew that, and that
may put even more pressure because the're like, well, this
Charlottesville guy, right, they unite the right guy is Assai.
So VIDIA couldn't stage any events. They were very worried
about counter demonstrators. I think that the counter demonstrators from
that first Maga era really put the fear of God
into some of these people. They didn't they were they
were scared shitless of anti racist, anti fascists, and all

(01:54:38):
of a sudden, you got a castle on Zilo a
million point four and it's got stone walls all over it,
and hey, we can hold our conferences here. And so
that's how they got it. They ended up getting it
for that reason And what happens to the town afterwards is,
I think is a minor tragedy in our culture that

(01:54:58):
hasn't been paid attention to enough.

Speaker 8 (01:55:00):
Yeah, it is this sort of microcosm of what happened
to America, right, Like, we don't all have a racism
castle in our town, but sort of the way this
castle bears down on this little town kind of mirrors
the way the influx of these extreme right wing ideas
into the GOP, into the administration that governs all of
us kind of is bearing down on us.

Speaker 5 (01:55:22):
Yeah, it's very smart. I think that's true. I think
that is one of the reasons that the story spoke
to me so much that I wanted to pursue it
for so long. Is it really felt like what everybody
was going through in the town and readers will learn this.
Imagine business owners who are catering to many liberals there
and stuck in Morgan County, which is seventy five percent

(01:55:45):
Trump and ninety percent white, and they're panicking because they
need to keep people going in. The press goes a
long way in Berkeley Springs, so it's a little place.
They don't know how to push back. Someone buys private property.
What can you do? But they start to organize and
try to figure out a way to urge Brimlow to
leave or to make it so difficult for him that

(01:56:05):
he leaves. And yes, it is absolutely a symbolism for
what everybody's going through. And there are people all over
the country in places red states where you might find
people who you wouldn't expect kind of protesting against TESLA
or something like that. And it could be kind of corny,
these type of people who like corny online and easily ignored.

(01:56:28):
They're all over the country feeling that exact dread that
you're talking about, where something very like above them is
bearing down and pushing values that don't align with theirs.

Speaker 8 (01:56:38):
Right, it's such a specific story about Berkeley Springs, but
at the same time, this could be almost any talent.

Speaker 4 (01:56:44):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:56:45):
I'm sure you followed the story of what happened in Enid,
Oklahoma when the identity of europe a guy got on
their city council and it was this very local, small
town struggle with these very specific local personalities butting heads.
But the story's playing out in small towns all over
America because everyone has, you know, if not a racism castle,
everyone has a local racist who's making life hard for everyone.

Speaker 5 (01:57:08):
Yeah, I mean they're sending right now, to use claviculars
phrase the Yeah, I mean think about North Idaho, for example.
I don't get a story for them, for about from
other Jones, and you know they they have a long
history with white supremacy, and it's certainly dead red far
right part of the country. But you have like anti

(01:57:32):
Semites like Dave Riley, it's right, Rebecca Hargraves and those
people encroaching on their everyday politics. Right, they're trying to
change the politics. They're trying to integrate themselves, you know,
coming from outside basically to take over, right.

Speaker 8 (01:57:49):
I mean it's the same thing, is what happened in
West Virginia, is that these white supremacists are moving to
these places because they have a perception about what it
will be like when they get there, that oh, everyone
who's will agree with me because they're mostly white.

Speaker 3 (01:58:02):
That's why Dave Riley moved Idaho.

Speaker 5 (01:58:04):
Yeah, when Peter Brimlow first moved to the Castle, he
would repeatedly I think he would do it when people
reach out for comment and be like, you know, Morgan
County is seventy five percent voted for Trump. It's ninety
percent white. It's you who have the problem, not us.
And if you're looking for a more optimistic thing here,
I've gotten good reviews for the reviews that I've gotten,

(01:58:26):
but they keep using like disturbing, like this is so scary.
Like I think for us it's not as much because
we've been living in it for in a more intimate way. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:58:36):
I found it encouraging, Yes, because because you met these people.

Speaker 8 (01:58:40):
Who were doing their best in this, like bizarre, fucked
up situation, like they didn't ask for a weird old
British Nazi to buy.

Speaker 5 (01:58:47):
The castle exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:58:48):
They're doing their best, and I think that's beautiful.

Speaker 5 (01:58:50):
I think I think if you try to tune out
the reality that we're all going through right now and
just focus on, you know, your own private world old
it can be scary because you're letting in Peter Brimlow
and your chair head while you read the book and
you're you're you're seeing neighbors kind of turning on one another,
and you're seeing me go through a mental health crisis

(01:59:12):
to the book. I mean, there's these are things that
for for a normy that maybe a little bit you know,
you may like the book, but you may be final
little disturbing. But for people like us who have kind
of really been through stuff in this and seeing it
up close on a regular basis, Look, what I like
about the book is it's it's rare to like say,
I'm going to praise some white people here, but like

(01:59:34):
it's white people saying that they don't want to be
represented by these values, right, And I think that for me,
as somebody who comes on outsider, I like, look, so
normal in New York. I'm just I'm just swarthy, but
they are there there. I look like Osama bin Laden
and uh.

Speaker 8 (01:59:53):
Environment, I don't think you pass as white as you
do in New York.

Speaker 5 (01:59:57):
It's very different. Yeah, And I say, like, you know,
you see them, I mean they they have a choice
to just kind of say like, actually, yeah, we're you know,
Peter Brimlow is standing up for my rights. He's standing
up for me. He's speaking for me. But a lot
of people are not saying a.

Speaker 8 (02:00:14):
Guy who thinks a twenty eight hundred dollars political donation
is a small amount, that's not the average West Virginian's
idea of a small amount.

Speaker 5 (02:00:21):
Yes, that is a good thing to pull out. Yes,
you know. The other thing is the people who ultimately
in the book tend to defend Brimlow or align with him,
because basically the town is becomes completely divided, maybe irrevocably,
so hopefully they'll come together one day. And it's still

(02:00:42):
I think the tensions are still quite bad. Yeah, it's
still happening. Even though Fidier dies at the end, the
Brimo still live there. The people who do it are
not like, yes, we believe full throated in the Great
Replacement conspiracy theory. We think that the Great Replacement that like,
you know that thinking about more extreme things that Brimlow

(02:01:02):
has said.

Speaker 8 (02:01:03):
No, they're just people who see a nice white man
and his nice white wife and they were nice to me.
And I don't understand why you're making life so hard.

Speaker 5 (02:01:12):
Yeah, I mean, Vidier has published apology about mass shooters' intentions.

Speaker 8 (02:01:17):
Basically right, But so many of these these brimloa defenders
are just they're not saying what he said is okay,
or I believe what he said. They're saying he was
nice to me. Why are you making such a big
deal out of this?

Speaker 5 (02:01:28):
Yeah, I will clarify that. But they haven't said, yes,
mass shootings are good. They have condemned that, but they've
also said that like this writing makes sense, right, and
they're like when during the Tops Supermarket shooting in Buffalo
in twenty twenty two, that's something I highlight in the book,
Vder publishes something that's like actually, like, look look how
the Great Replacement has changed Buffalo. That was their response

(02:01:52):
to ten black people getting shot.

Speaker 4 (02:01:56):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:01:56):
So Peter Bridle is very litigious, so we do have
to be very specific here in say, Peter Bremlow did
not say it is good that Peyton Dendron shot up
that supermarket. What he did say is if the Great
Replacement weren't happening.

Speaker 5 (02:02:08):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's look, and I think that
going back to the people in the town, I don't
think that they at every point be like that is good,
that what he's saying here is good, the Great Replacements,
I'm fully on board with it. What they buy into
is this profound friend enemy distinction that now hovers over

(02:02:31):
our entire country, right where it's just sort of people
who are friends of Maga and Trump are on one side,
and then anybody who's at is my enemy.

Speaker 3 (02:02:43):
And these more extreme talking points are sort of creeping
into that space and they're not stopping it.

Speaker 6 (02:02:49):
You know.

Speaker 5 (02:02:50):
Of course it's two sided. Of course, there's like that
that comes from the liberal left or wherever you want
to whatever you want to call it. But I think
in the case of the Bremlas, it's not the specifics.
I remember asking one guy in the book whose name
is Charlie Currier, and he owns a you know, a
sort of a craft's shop at the corner of Berkeley

(02:03:12):
Springs Park, and it's right next to another main character
of the book, Trey Johansson, who is you know, kind
of almost the most important person. And I asked Charlie.
I was like, you know, so you met the Brimlows,
you hung out with them. What was that like for
Christmas and stuff like that? And I was like, well,
how do you feel about the great replacement stuff? How

(02:03:32):
do you feel about like the stuff he writes? And
what he said was he's a writer. He's a writer
like you. He's a journalist just like you. He's the
same as you. There's no difference. And he was very defensive.
Yis you know, I think that framing is very useful
for understanding why we can't seem to snap out of
this current condition that we're in. When you're inside that bubble,

(02:03:54):
that's the logic that works. It's like, this is the
guy on our side. You know, we're defending the guy
on our side. Right, that's a psychosis that kind of
overshadows the entire narrative.

Speaker 8 (02:04:15):
Right, So this story in this town plays out against
the backdrop of the wider world. Right, So you know,
your first visit to Berkeley Springs was right as COVID
is starting, right, it's the last time you left your
New York apartment before lockdown.

Speaker 3 (02:04:29):
You're in Berkeley Springs.

Speaker 8 (02:04:30):
And as the story progresses, we see the twenty twenty uprising,
and there's like a little BLM rally in this tiny town.
And then there's j six, and there's October seventh. There's
the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and these big events
in the world, and then there's these smaller events in
the town, but interwoven with this sort of personal memoir,
right that the world is in turmoil and so is

(02:04:51):
your life. Yeah, and all these threads sort of weaved together.

Speaker 5 (02:04:55):
Yeah, that's true regarding the events in the world and
in the town. I'm glad you brought that up. One
thing I wanted to do with the book that I
don't see done enough is just to understand that, like
everything that we see, all these like viral trends and
all this stuff filters down into everyday life. And I
think when news is breaking or trends are happening, we

(02:05:20):
only look at the news and the trends like that,
and we rarely look at the impacts on our neighborhood.
Whereas you know, if you do a movie that's said
in the eighties, you will see like the event a
little bit more about like at the kitchen table, what
the family is going through as something happens nationally, right
or so and so's it's almost like we need time
to process. But this has a very clear time period,

(02:05:42):
which is the period right before COVID to the twenty
twenty four election, and it's enough in the past now
that I think we can look at how these things
affected regular people in this in this town, because every
time you're seeing viral videos about black Lives matter, that's
impacting the way people act there. So you may get
a like five white people go stand on a street
corner there with some signs after George Floyd's death, and

(02:06:05):
that's like a huge deal in that town because it's
like people are shocked by it or they want to
they want to they want to harass those people after that.
So that was one factor. And as yeah, and as
for as for myself, it also overlaps like probably the
darkest time in my life. And that's not totally unrelated
to Berkeley Springs in the sense that, like, you know,

(02:06:26):
stuff at SPLC was like really really bad at the
beginning of the book. Then they're not there in the
second half, and my mental health was was just not
in a great place. I had spent, as you know,
a lot of time with these guys, and I know
you personally have dealt with a lot of threats and really,
I mean as a woman, I mean you're dealing with

(02:06:49):
I imagine it's even scarier because.

Speaker 3 (02:06:52):
It's grosser anyway, is yeah, that's grosser for sure.

Speaker 5 (02:06:56):
And I mean you're dealing with I mean, I can't
even imagine the mentality of someone of the who are
messaging you and what their their private lives are like.
So yeah, so yeah, I mean I had gone through
it for a while on my end. One example that is,
in twenty twenty one, I took my son to the
batting cage and afterwards we went to seven eleven and

(02:07:17):
I got a call from a number in North Carolina
and then it was an FBI agent and he's like, hey,
I just want to you know, as a courtesy, you
want to let you know that we have somebody who's
like talking about assassinating you, and you know, do you
have any questions?

Speaker 3 (02:07:33):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (02:07:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (02:07:34):
I was like I do, but like my eight year
old is like slurping on a you know, a cherry
slurpee in the back seat.

Speaker 8 (02:07:41):
That duty to warn thing is kind of a double
edged sword, right, because they do have this legal obligation
to inform you that there's a credible threat on your life,
but like they're not going to give you enough information
to make you feel empowered by knowing this information.

Speaker 3 (02:07:52):
So it's like maybe I would rather just not know.

Speaker 5 (02:07:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:07:55):
Oh, it was like, literally, if there's something I can
do to mitigate this, can I just not know?

Speaker 5 (02:07:59):
Yeah? It was hard. It was hard. That is I
think one of the things that the normy person would
find deeply disturbing in the book. But like, yeah, I
was dealing with that stuff all the time. I would
get like, you know, I'd get people sending me photos
of Alan Berg's shooting in the driveway. I don't know
if you're familiar with that, but like he was the
talk radio host who was killed by the numbers of the.

Speaker 3 (02:08:19):
Order, killed by David Lane.

Speaker 5 (02:08:21):
Yeah, and I would get that all the time. I
must spent like months of just getting that from like
random numbers and all this stuff.

Speaker 8 (02:08:28):
Sometimes, like a group of guys will get very into
a particular image, and I can imagine the kind of
guy that is very into the image of Alan Berg's corpse.

Speaker 3 (02:08:36):
And it's not a nice guy.

Speaker 5 (02:08:37):
I mean, it's it's taboo. It has like a pornographic
quality to it.

Speaker 8 (02:08:41):
But it harkens to a very specific era of the movement,
like I can imagine there's a particular man who gravitates
towards that specifically.

Speaker 5 (02:08:49):
Yeah, and I mean, like I remember getting threatened by Bowers,
the guy who shot up like because I was on
GAB all the time, as you know, to a fault,
I think, but like you know, I got a lot
of stories out of it and sources. But yeah, because
I was always dealing with those guys, and I was
always posting on air and you know, trying to stir
things up and see what it could shake loose for

(02:09:10):
a story. And yeah, Bowers was just some kind of
idle thing. And so when the Tree of Life shooting happened,
when he went out and said, you know, screw your optics,
I'm going in right right, yeah, and I was like,
I know this guy, that one dingo he So this
was this was very traumatic for me. I've been holding

(02:09:32):
pretty firm on this. I had a lot of manic
tendencies in the sense of like I could just work constantly,
and you just work around the clock, work late at night,
constantly doing investigative reporting. And I was on a mission
because I was so angry about what had happened. You know,
you're the right, That's what that really triggered me. I
had before then, I had been really open to pursuing

(02:09:52):
at as a crime reporter or on climate change. These
were the kind of things that were like I had
written features of previously. But it was it was after
you night the ride, I got folks, and I really
was like, I'm going to put all my abilities into
trying to create trouble for these guys, and you did.

Speaker 4 (02:10:10):
Yeah, I did.

Speaker 5 (02:10:11):
And then when they pushed back, I guess I wasn't
mentally prepared for how scary it could be, and it
was lots of stuff. Then I went through a separation
with my wife, which is fine, we're great friends, you know,
but that was like another factor. And then also the
SBLC thing, which we can talk about, but the main

(02:10:33):
thing is that I reached a breaking point. I was
I was happened to be in Berkeley Springs with some
of the sources from the book when I had to
go home and go to a syche ward and I
went for three weeks and I got diagnosed with bipolar there,
which was a very useful diagnosis.

Speaker 8 (02:10:50):
It makes it makes a big difference because especially it's bipolar.
If you're just taking an eight depressants, like you're gonna
be up shit creek.

Speaker 5 (02:10:56):
Oh yeah, well, the anti sup press is really screwed
up my stomach and also made me like even more
manic and stuff like that.

Speaker 8 (02:11:02):
But the book is is a very frank, very very honest,
very personal and maybe this is why people found the
book to be, you know, disturbing, because it is a
very frank discussion of what it means to be the
person who is for so many years in the thick
of it, you know, not doing sort of objective detached reporting,
but getting in there and mixing it up with these

(02:11:22):
guys like really, you know, skin in the game, committed
to the cause, doing investigative journalism in these spaces, and
I mean, I think we both are guilty of this.
Over the years on this beat, there is this tendency
to sort of you know, exchange war stories like oh,
you know, I got this terrible threat.

Speaker 3 (02:11:39):
I got this terrible threat.

Speaker 8 (02:11:40):
You laugh it off, and it's like, you know, it's
this sort of fact of life that you brush off,
and you know, everyone says, oh, you're so brave, I
could never do that, and you say, oh, it's not
a big deal.

Speaker 3 (02:11:50):
I deal with it all the time.

Speaker 5 (02:11:51):
Yeah, they say that for sure.

Speaker 8 (02:11:52):
But then you go home and it is a big deal.
And people are not is honest about that as they
could be. I mean, in part because admitting that it
hurts you makes them double down. If they know they
got you, they're going to keep digging in that spot.
But like we don't talk enough about the fact that
this destroys us. Yeah, for sure, it's a very honest.
Look at what happens when you bought him out on that.

Speaker 5 (02:12:14):
And it's so much worse than just threats. I mean,
you're constantly concerned that somebody is going to use law
fair against you and try to.

Speaker 3 (02:12:22):
Hurt your family and you have children.

Speaker 5 (02:12:24):
Yeah, of course, you know, and I am extremely anal
about legal stuff, Like I'm just like hyper like I
don't you know, I don't play games I like And
so that's just an example. It's like we published when
I was with s BOC. We published the identity of
Matt Gebert, who is the state department official. I remember

(02:12:44):
that guy.

Speaker 3 (02:12:45):
I was actually going to bring him up.

Speaker 8 (02:12:46):
I was going to bring up Matt Gibert in terms
of the number of guys who've moved to West Virginia
because they think it's only white.

Speaker 5 (02:12:53):
Yeah, we'll get there in a second. But I just say,
like before I published that story, even though I'd been
through a million lawyers and like every I mean, we
just went through everything and stuff like that. I bought
a pack of cigarettes, which I never do, you know,
I don't want to get into my stomach thing too deeply.
But it was not working. It was not working it
all that day. It was August seventh, twenty nineteen, and
I was like, literally I was I was clammy. I

(02:13:16):
was sweating. I had never seen his face. He kept
all of his pictures offline. But I had the goods.
I knew I had everything. But yet at the same
this is one doubt. It's like, what if it's not
him because I don't have the face match forget threats.
That level of stress of just you know, it's just
like I checked everything, right, I like you think think
about the you're trying to leave the house for a

(02:13:37):
long trip or something like that, and it's like you
know that thought, Oh yeah, like did I leave the
gas stove on when I was you know, when I
was boiling something for my kids or whatever? Like that's
the way it feels, right. It's like a sort of
you like you memorize the entire investigative feature and you're
like going through it and there's like, oh, oh, you
know that was that right? Did I check that? And
I'm like, yes, I did.

Speaker 3 (02:13:57):
Oh, I know, I know that.

Speaker 8 (02:13:58):
I know that feeling exacty drives my husband crazy when
I say things like I'd rather get shot than be
wrong in public.

Speaker 5 (02:14:03):
Yeah, no, it's true, it's true. Like I don't I
don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to be wrong.
And also you don't want to give these people a
chance for anything. And you mentioned Brimlow is very litigious.

Speaker 3 (02:14:14):
Not usually very successfully.

Speaker 5 (02:14:15):
No, no ease. But that doesn't matter, No, it doesn't matter. Yeah,
but it's stressful to report on him because of that
because he just he will use it as a tactic
and stuff like that. And I gave I also gave
the Brimlos I should point out many, many opportunities to
talk to me and more detail about everything, and they
didn't want to.

Speaker 8 (02:14:33):
But you do speak to him several times in the book, Yeah,
I do, I do much to his displeasure.

Speaker 5 (02:14:38):
Well, I was just to say like, yeah, I mean
all that really led up to me going to the
psych word and that and the SBOC thing, which is
basically my relationship with SBLC is like I was probably
the most well known person there apology because I've had
a social media presence and I was doing a lot
of spokespersonal work, So I was like on TV a
bunch and stuff like that.

Speaker 8 (02:14:59):
So whenever someone's at the organization, they're going to take
it out on you.

Speaker 5 (02:15:02):
Yeah, And really, for a good part of the early
years there after Heidi left, we didn't even have a
director of the intelligence project, so you know, I would
just get thrown into a lot of TV radio stuff
like that. And you know, they treated me great. I
mean they had got my pay raise multiple times and
promoted and stuff like that, and I kept breaking investigative stories.

(02:15:24):
And then when we started to have problems where were
they started to limit our ability to publish stories. They
really became very risk averse.

Speaker 8 (02:15:34):
Which is so contrary to my image of what this
institution is for. Yeah, both like functionally and morally. Yeah,
as a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Los Center,
you didn't have mental health coverage. You couldn't see a
real therapist. Yeah, that's horrific. That's a human rights abuse
to make you look at gabble. They had not get

(02:15:54):
you with therapists.

Speaker 5 (02:15:56):
They were giving us like the app stuff, which is
not going to cut it.

Speaker 3 (02:16:00):
You need like a five hundred dollars an hour.

Speaker 5 (02:16:02):
Yeah, New York analyst was a psychiatrist, you know in
some okay, like you know, somebody good.

Speaker 3 (02:16:06):
But they should be covering that.

Speaker 5 (02:16:07):
Yeah, no they were not. And there's just a whole
bunch of stuff. There were a bunch of safety issues,
no doubt, anna case, my dear colleagues, still my colleague,
even though I'm not there anymore. You know, she went
to go callver Ameron and Tennessee and like a bunch
of proud boys like basically chased her down.

Speaker 2 (02:16:24):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:16:24):
There was no security plan. There was a woman named
Susan Cork was the Intelligence project director at that time,
and she was just you know, how to lunch. She
just didn't do anything. As far as I could tell.

Speaker 8 (02:16:34):
Things like what happened to Hannah, Like stuff like that
happens to me. I expect that I'm out there by myself.
I have no plan.

Speaker 3 (02:16:39):
It's just me. I have no plan.

Speaker 8 (02:16:41):
It was so startling to me to hear that, like
Hannah is out there operating without a net too.

Speaker 3 (02:16:47):
There was no plan for her safety.

Speaker 5 (02:16:48):
Yeah, there was nothing. And so one of the first
things I did was I helped Shepherd a grievance about this,
and it was effective because I think that got Cork
put on like a performance of improvement plan. And then
after that everything changed at work. I went from betting
the favored person to being repeatedly at target of what

(02:17:11):
did you do? Why did you do this? Like it
was really, I mean to add on the already stressful
situation that I was in. It was just like your
tone in a meeting. And then there was the thing
about that was there was like a verbal warning or
something that was they actually bothered to write out, which
was quite stupid. If you're doing a verbal warning, you
shouldn't put it in print. And sure enough we found

(02:17:33):
in there that like all the dialogue that was in
there was completely fabricated and made.

Speaker 3 (02:17:38):
Up, and so for the listener.

Speaker 8 (02:17:39):
So discussed in the book a little bit is the
fact that at the Southern Poverty Lossenter was engaging in
union investing. Yes, that's right, so you know you were
dealing with retaliation for union activity in the workplace.

Speaker 5 (02:17:50):
Retaliation for union activity. It was really bad. It happened
a second time after that when I was covering the
trial Doug Mackie character we can save for another day,
for another day, and it was really bad, and the
stress was really getting to me, and I had a
panic attack which I've never had before while I was

(02:18:10):
in the shower. And I told them about that, And
Susan Cork and the person above her, his name is
and Beeson. I told him about that. And then they
responded by turning around and disciplining me again, almost like
to say, like we've got them on the ropes now,
let's really like make them quit.

Speaker 3 (02:18:30):
Say eighty a violation.

Speaker 5 (02:18:31):
Yeah, And every time we do this, we'd summon the
union and we'd make it as hairy for them as
possible to do what they're doing. But there's limits to
what you can do. Really, when they want to try
to do these sort of things. They pushed it as
far as they wanted to go, which is after the
summer of twenty twenty three there was a Hamas attack
on Israel, and you know, I have Arabs in my family.

(02:18:52):
I have my on my mother's side, including Palestinians. You know,
I was distraught about this whole situation. It was adding
another thing on top of it, and watching the retaliation,
which became a genocide very quickly, did not improve my mood. Obviously.
It was very stressful to see that stuff. And Hannah

(02:19:13):
invited me to sign a thing about you know, it
was just sort of like asking writers to sign on
Israel's and apartheid state, you know, calling for a ceasefire.

Speaker 3 (02:19:25):
Writers for the seasfire. Yeah, I remember, and.

Speaker 5 (02:19:28):
Free Beacon familiar with that wonderful politician.

Speaker 8 (02:19:32):
It still comes up in the first few pages of
your Google results.

Speaker 5 (02:19:35):
Thank you for noting. Yeah, I know, but this the.

Speaker 3 (02:19:37):
Book should push it back.

Speaker 5 (02:19:38):
The book Free Beacon like came out with this thing
and it was like SPLC spokesperson, you know, blames Israel
for Hamas violence or something.

Speaker 8 (02:19:49):
Like that, and just that the audacity to accuse you
of anti Semitism for signing this letter, you know, supporting
a ceasefire. I've read that letter. It's it's it's not
an anti Semitic letter. It's is calling it what it
is and just asking for a cea spire, right, and
you have spent a decade writing about anti Semitic violence.

Speaker 5 (02:20:08):
Well, there's there's tons of there's there's tons of anti
Zionist Jews on there. I mean, there's probably more than
anything else. But you know, when this, when this came out,
I was really pissed. Obviously it had a racist undertone.
I mean, Hannah was mentioned, but it was mostly about me.
And then there instead of a picture of me, they
used they used like one of those pictures of Moss

(02:20:28):
looking like Cobra from G I. Joe and with like
a rocket launcher and.

Speaker 8 (02:20:32):
Right, implying that you, as as a man of Arab descent,
are an anti Semitic terrorist.

Speaker 3 (02:20:36):
Yeah, basically, and and good faith stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:20:38):
Adding to I would say, this is also complex because
you know, my family basically fled because of threats from
Islamic terrorism, right, so this is even more like, you know,
to align me with that necessarily is not my not ideal,
even though I'm in like, you know, I'm sure I
have a very more more nuanced idea of what hellas
is than that author. The point is, it's just, I mean,

(02:20:58):
it's just basically to do that and then rather than
SBOC like cares so much about social justice and racism.

Speaker 8 (02:21:05):
Rather than seize the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the
psychosis that the ADL has descended into, as you know,
because those two organizations sort of exist in the same space,
they're often used in the same sentence, and the ADL
has really lost a lot of credibility in the last
few years.

Speaker 5 (02:21:19):
I don't think they have any credibility because of those.

Speaker 8 (02:21:21):
So instead of differentiating themselves from that, they chose to
discipline you.

Speaker 5 (02:21:27):
Yeah, they did. And it was that was when I,
like I said, mental health was like all the factors
that we've just discussed mentioned And then I was happened
to be in Berkeley Springs when I reached a point
where I was like, you know, I was suicidal and
trigger warning for people. I apologize, but that's the truth,

(02:21:47):
and came back and had to spend the sort of
Christmas break period there where I lost you know, they
ultimately terminated me. It was a Title seven violation in
terms of discrimination to what happened effort. And then when
people found out what happened, the union started to write
things to you know, to management. There was all this

(02:22:08):
internal dialogue happening while I was in a psych word
with like no access to anything, and almost everybody in
my line of managers was pushed out and given buyouts
allegedly Quirk this woman and Beeson and now the CEO is.

Speaker 3 (02:22:24):
They exposed themselves to some serious liability there.

Speaker 5 (02:22:27):
Yeah, they got off easy in many ways. Yeah, they
disposed of me, but I threatened suit with a lawyer,
wonderful lawyer who she was great Jewish woman from New
York and as tough as nails. And yeah, I mean
I got a good settlement out of it, which is,
you know, I would have preferred just to be able
to just continue doing my job.

Speaker 3 (02:22:48):
Though it's heartbreaking to remember that.

Speaker 8 (02:22:50):
You know, even these progressive nonprofits that are fighting for
what we believe, they're using you up and spitting you
out to Yeah, oh sure they're doing union busting. They're
firing you for having a mental crisis. They're opposed to
you exercising your free speech off the clock, the kinds
of things you just you don't want to see from
an organization like the SPLC.

Speaker 5 (02:23:08):
Yeah, they had to retract my termination and assign into
a layoff. And then you know, I had to retract
labor claims I had made, which would have gone nowhere
as soon as the Trump administration took over. Anyway, that's heartbreaking,
which I saw coming in twenty twenty four to a degree.
So yeah, like that happened. And then bringing it back

(02:23:31):
to Berkeley Springs, I was told not to go anywhere,
but I needed to keep working on the book. So
it was like a week after I got out of
the hospital, I came back down there, and then the
folks who I had been working with since twenty twenty
when the Brimlas first arrived, they kind of took me
in and nursed me back to health. So that's why
it's I feel like unified in the narrative, and we're

(02:23:53):
able to explore what happened to me psychologically, and what
happened is and them psychologically as this other stuff is happening.

Speaker 8 (02:24:09):
See, I guess I understand why some of the reviewers
call it disturbing, but that sort of full circle that
sort of personal closure.

Speaker 5 (02:24:15):
You know.

Speaker 8 (02:24:16):
Obviously things weren't ideal, right, you lost your job, but
I don't know, things came full circle and the people
that you went there to write about took care of you,
and you, I don't know, you all.

Speaker 3 (02:24:26):
Continue along your way as the world falls apart.

Speaker 5 (02:24:29):
I don't think that they come all cross as like
perfect either. I mean, like that's what I'm really hopeful for. No.

Speaker 3 (02:24:34):
I mean they're all complicated people.

Speaker 5 (02:24:36):
You know. I wanted to avoid like the sort of
wishy washy utopian like I'm an ally you know, and
it's like, yeah, actually the people who are allies have
all kinds of issue that marital problems. Maybe some of
them are like behave badly in one thing or whatever,
all people trying to live. It's really a question of
what this particular ideology that has been foisted upon us

(02:25:01):
very rapidly by the likes of Steve Bannon and Brimlow
and others. Right, it was a collective push to take
the existing right wing mom star and set it in
this direction. What this is doing to us.

Speaker 8 (02:25:18):
It's a very intimate look at what that is like
for individual people. You know, we were all experiencing having
right wing violence foisted upon us from above. But this
is I don't know, there were these like small moments
of like physical intimacy, like when you're you're at the
castle for the party and you know you and Peter
Brimlow are exchanging like this lighthearted moment, and you reach

(02:25:39):
out and you put your hand on his shoulder. Instinctively,
when you're sharing laughter with someone, you put out, you
put your hand on his shoulder and like, you know,
recoiled immediately and didn't know why you had done that.
But this like tiny moment of physical intimacy that you
know this was a person, or the transgender mushroom farmer
Lisa Marie who sought out Lydia Brimlow at church and
shook her hand during the Right of Peace, Like I

(02:26:00):
would have loved to have seen that.

Speaker 5 (02:26:02):
She's so cool, by the way, you should have her
on She's awesome, she sounds amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:26:08):
I would love to meet Lisa Marie.

Speaker 5 (02:26:10):
Well, I'll tell you about her in a second. But yeah,
I mean, yeah, I mean Brimlo is behaving in a
very I mean he has like an infuncular kind of
vibe like in person when he's not angry with you.
And I'm sure that for people who know him in
a friendly way in the movement that he's he's fun.

Speaker 3 (02:26:29):
You know, he likes to drink room temperature Vanka.

Speaker 5 (02:26:32):
He is always just talking like this, so he sounds
like he's always had her for your drinks. Probably he
has that British way of just some kind of dry
remark about things going to pot. Like, you know, I'm
sure it's fun for people who know him, and you know,
you're in that space and any kind of party thing
or whatever you can let go for a second. And

(02:26:54):
for a second I felt not that, like I felt like, oh,
this is my friend or any It is more than I'm.

Speaker 8 (02:26:59):
Just talking exactly. You know, people really bristle it that
you know, you're humanizing him. Well, yeah, because he's human.
Humanizing doesn't mean excusing or you know, coming to appreciate
it anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:27:09):
It just means like he's human.

Speaker 8 (02:27:10):
So for most of the book, the strange people on
the hill are removed on the hill, but when you
encounter them, there is this very human intimacy to these encounters.

Speaker 5 (02:27:21):
And not only that, everybody has a rough go in
this book, including that getting.

Speaker 3 (02:27:26):
Raked over the coals by Letitia James.

Speaker 5 (02:27:28):
Well, over the course of this that there if you
follow their their arc and their arcs throughout the book,
but one particular arc, it starts with them really thinking
they've got it, like this is like this like high
point of Vider's existence. They have a castle. They have
a home base that they can use in perpetuity after
Brimla leaves, the movement can flourish and grow. This is

(02:27:51):
like this is it. They got a castle.

Speaker 8 (02:27:53):
I mean, it would be the perfect place for white
nationalists meet up. They haven't really used it that way
that much, like every now and again, but like this,
this is.

Speaker 5 (02:28:00):
The best situation they've ever had, Like they're great. And
they've also just coming off of getting a whole bunch
of dark money donations from two people we don't know
who they are, but it's like, you know, four point
five mil in like one year through donors Trust, and
they're writing really high. And then by the end from
the Letitia James investigation, it had not turned into a

(02:28:22):
lawsuit yet by that point, under the pressure of that
and just under the pressure of just everybody around them,
you know, not wanting them to be there, they decided
to dial down VideA altogether, and it still exists in
the sense of like the Twitter accounts still exists, and
Brimo is still writing on substack. Some of it is

(02:28:43):
a legal thing to try to, you know, get them
out of the way of Letitia James. But you know
they're really broken down. I mean, the videos that they
published about their closing, I mean, it's just a laundry
list of things that add up to a defeat. I
don't think they would disagree with that that they felt
defeated by the end. And the people who were in

(02:29:03):
the town, who are so nice and sweet and wonderful
and all this, they're laughing as you would right as
everyone talked about like when Trump dies and everybody's like, oh,
I'm going to do this when Trump dies and all
that stuff. Right, it's just liberation from that thing. But
ultimately it's a really like if you just look at
the Brimlows, it is, you know, it is a brutal
fall by the end of the book.

Speaker 8 (02:29:23):
Yeah, I mean ten years ago they were poised to
be on top of the world and their ideas remain ascendant,
but he himself has really fallen. Now he just has
the flooded basement of his little racism castle.

Speaker 5 (02:29:35):
Well, there's no there's no solidarity on their side. I just,
oh god, that's what I saying.

Speaker 3 (02:29:40):
Oh, that's one thing they will never happen.

Speaker 4 (02:29:42):
I mean, you get.

Speaker 5 (02:29:43):
Somebody who annoys me, who is a sort of anti fascist,
anti racist, who like annoys the shit out of me,
but they they wind up like, you know, being targeted
by somebody. I'm like, okay, well.

Speaker 3 (02:29:55):
You're not going to gloat about their downfall.

Speaker 5 (02:29:57):
But not only that, but it's like now it's time
to like, you know, support them. You know, that's the
way I feel.

Speaker 8 (02:30:02):
And they just don't do that. They don't do that
for each other. They hate each other.

Speaker 5 (02:30:06):
They're always malignant narcissists because it's always about cloying to
the top, right, it's always trying to get power over
other people.

Speaker 8 (02:30:13):
I mean, everybody wants to be the crab at the
top of the bucket, but you're still crabbing a goddamn bucket.

Speaker 5 (02:30:17):
There's two strains of maga. I know, mega is a
very broad term, and like one of them is really
this kind of grift focused, kind of cryptoweb three aligned aspect.
We're just AI and this and like a small number
of people, like fifteen percent will go hoard a bunch
of like fake coins or whatever things polymarket, like odds

(02:30:40):
or whatever. They're all hoarding information to kind of beat
people in polymarket. And then the suckers they you know whatever,
the o the rest of it, the bigger percentage of
seventy five percent followers, they're taking their money and that's MAGA.
That's a big part of bag. And then the other
part is less concerned with money, although money is a
part of it. Is just ascending and pushing down from

(02:31:03):
a power power space, right, Like you just like to
be in a place where they can have power over
other people, and usually other people being designated by not
looking like them or not behaving like them, or not
having the same kind of boyfriend's girlfriends whatever than them.

Speaker 8 (02:31:20):
It's like, I mean, I couldn't be happier that Peter
Brimlow is going to end his career on the bottom
of the heap he was trying to climb.

Speaker 5 (02:31:26):
Yeah, you know, yeah, and they'll be the I guarantee you,
they'll be more of an effort from us to define
his legacy than from them, because they don't care.

Speaker 3 (02:31:35):
They don't care, No they they will, they'll use you
up and forget you.

Speaker 5 (02:31:39):
Yeah, they don't care. We will. We will spend more
time on him than so we. I mean, we're talking
about him right now. We have I have a host
of podcast where we talk about these guys all the time, right,
so it's a gro always bringing up new guys. I
think we're doing a We're doing a full BIOEP on
Steven Miller soon. You know, they don't do that. They
don't care, They're not like, here's the reason Steven's great.

Speaker 8 (02:31:58):
Like no, I mean, Jason Kessel disappeared from the internet
a year ago and they don't talk about him anymore.

Speaker 3 (02:32:02):
Oh, it's like he never existed.

Speaker 5 (02:32:05):
Yeah, I mean, but you know what, I hope he
stays off that, you know what I mean. I try
to find some forgiveness in my heart. You know, maybe
it's the Catholic upbringing, whatever, but I try to find
some even though he literally who knows what he did
that was related to threats I received because he wrote
stuff about me.

Speaker 8 (02:32:23):
I mean, I think that that series he put on
vdare that included information about you and your family certainly
didn't help.

Speaker 5 (02:32:28):
Yeah, for sure. But you know, if he stays offline
and he stays like this, Like I hope that he's
getting some help.

Speaker 8 (02:32:37):
That's all anyone ever asked. I mean, that's all I
was ever asking for from these guys. I'm not even
holding out hope that you change your heart.

Speaker 3 (02:32:44):
I just want you to stop doing stuff.

Speaker 8 (02:32:46):
About it, yes, I mean, just stop trying to make
everything worse.

Speaker 5 (02:32:50):
Yes, yeah. Really, Like I mean, but if he's out
there and he's like, I'm just gonna, like, you know,
keep it quiet. And I have a hard time imagining
that guy like any kind of change of heart. But
it would be great if he just stayed, just stayed
at everything and just lived his life. And you know, privately,

(02:33:10):
I would I would feel some tiny crumb of respect for.

Speaker 8 (02:33:14):
That God willing, God willing, and maybe, uh maybe Peter
Brimlo will log off forever eventually too.

Speaker 5 (02:33:22):
Well, yeah, I mean based upon the age that that's yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:33:27):
Well he's gonna he's going to do it, permanent log
off eventually, permanent.

Speaker 5 (02:33:31):
Log off eventually. I've heard all kinds of gossip about
from people in Berkeley Springs that Lydia really doesn't want
to be associated with the white nationalist movement and really
doesn't want us to be associated with the movement in general,
just if you want to give it another term that
they might use, like dissid and write or whatever. She's

(02:33:52):
I think, I don't know this for a fact that
she would never tell me directly. Think about Lydia Bremlo.
You're twenty years old. It's very rich. White husband comes
by his old for you. He's like fifty seven, and
he's recently lost his wife Brimola lost his first wife
to cancer. And you're in the kind of heritage seeing

(02:34:15):
your kind of conservative yourself and.

Speaker 3 (02:34:17):
This guy conservative.

Speaker 1 (02:34:19):
This is this is.

Speaker 5 (02:34:20):
Happening around a time in which alien nation is still
kind of acceptable.

Speaker 3 (02:34:25):
I mean, at least in the heritage front set.

Speaker 5 (02:34:27):
Sure, yeah, on the right it was kind of acceptable.
But even you know, even if it's acceptable, the worst
you could say about it. He's kind of a bad boy,
like a bad you know, he's got right so it's
sort of like, ooh, edgy, he's like an edgy bad boy,
and you kind of get indoctrinated into the movement that way,
and you're in a marriage like I don't know, Like

(02:34:47):
when I was like twenty something, I don't know, I
didn't know what the hell was going on. So you're
in this marriage with this dude, and you have kids now,
and you've seen the other side of it, the hell
of it up close all the time, people shutting down
the website. People there were hackers. There's all kinds of
things that they're dealing with constantly. Everyone is telling you,

(02:35:08):
everyone other than people in the movement are finding ways.
Whenever they get a chance to speak to you, they're
telling you, you know, go fuck yourself. We hate this, right,
we hate you. We don't like this stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:35:19):
It's got to be discouraging.

Speaker 5 (02:35:20):
I mean for years and then now all of a sudden,
you're turning forty and you've got kids and you're looking
at this. I mean, I personally would want to like
just get as far away from it as possible. I mean,
it just seems like it's just a depressing just you know.

Speaker 8 (02:35:34):
Yeah, like I said, that's all I want for these
people is that they stop doing harm in the world.
And you know, if they have a change of heart,
that's wonderful. Don't tell us about it. Yeah, just just
log off, Just go be normal, Go get a real job,
stop being a Nazi. Just just go just go be
a guy in the world.

Speaker 5 (02:35:52):
Yeah, I would really like that. I think they're kind
of entering now a sort of post Nazi phase.

Speaker 8 (02:36:00):
I mean, because they don't they don't have to be
edgy anymore. They're the mainstream Republican politics.

Speaker 5 (02:36:04):
Now you can be just you can just be a
gracist Nazi at all the time. And that's why it's
starting to mutate into like these like whole looks maxing
and like you know, which is like in cell but
like we're not insuls anymore, we hammer our face whatever,
you know. I just think that they're now so they
think they're such part of the culture, and it would
be it'll be very interesting for me to see if

(02:36:26):
there is a huge change after this, if we see
sort of the Trump regime kind of fall, have a
really hard fall, and some of this really starts to
break up. What will happen and when people like look
back at some of the stuff that's happening over the
past like a few years, even as there's been this
tremendous explosion. If you look at the time from when
the book ended, which is again on the election day,

(02:36:49):
the day after the election, I'm twenty twenty four, I mean.

Speaker 3 (02:36:51):
What a moment to end things.

Speaker 5 (02:36:53):
Yeah, but if you look at that from there to now,
you see like that was almost like an endpoint before
this new culture that we're in now, where you have
the shootings in Minneapolis and it's just the outright violence,
the blown up boats, all this stuff. I'm very curious
to see our culture, if our culture can heal a

(02:37:13):
little bit, how this stuff will be viewed. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:37:16):
I mean, it is, like you said, it ends before
the story is over. But I think, you know, as
a portrait of that four year period in that town,
I mean, it's fascinating. It is I think applicable to
the world outside of Berkeley Springs, but it is a
very intimate look at what it means for a weird,
old racist blogger to move into the castle that looms

(02:37:38):
above your coffee shop. Absolutely, I don't want to keep
you forever, but I just want to remind the listener
Strange People on the Hill, how extremism tore a part
of small American town by Michael Edison Hayden comes out April.

Speaker 3 (02:37:51):
Seventh, Yeah, April seventh, April seventh.

Speaker 8 (02:37:54):
You can pre order it now wherever books are sold,
or you could just go to a bookstore on April
seventh and pick a copy up. I'm going to go
ahead and contact my local anarchist bookstore to make sure
they have an order in for it, and I recommend
you do the.

Speaker 5 (02:38:05):
Same anarchist bookstore.

Speaker 3 (02:38:06):
Better don't buy it on Amazon. I mean you can,
but don't.

Speaker 8 (02:38:10):
Yeah, and tell your local library that you want them
to buy a copy, because that matters too, and that
gets this book into more people's hands, because not everybody
can afford to buy a book. So yeah, requested at
your local independent bookstore and your library if you can.

Speaker 5 (02:38:23):
Yeah. I heard from friends that like at random places
in Illinois and whatever that they can find the book
at their local library. They we'll be able to get it.
So that's great. Please ask for it and yeah, and
enjoy it. I think it'll have. My hope is it
has long tail. There's some word of mouth about the era.
So something to read, something to read not just now,

(02:38:44):
but also in the future. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:38:45):
It is a fascinating picture of a particular moment in
time that has broader lessons I think.

Speaker 3 (02:38:52):
But my thanks so much for coming on. Where can
people find you online?

Speaker 5 (02:38:55):
Thank you? You're even cooler in person.

Speaker 3 (02:38:58):
I just don't thank you.

Speaker 5 (02:39:00):
Where can find me online? I'm in Blue Sky? What
the hell is? What's I hate? The Blue Sky handles?
That was the one thing that you know, people complain
about Blue Sky and it's like for me, it's like,
what do you even want? Dude, Like, you know, all
this stuff is so bad, right, like, what do you
even want? It's Michael E. Hayden dot b s K
Y dot social s O C I A L. I'm

(02:39:21):
still technically on Twitter at Michael E. Hayden, where I've
always been. You know, when I was writing the book
and I was recovering from the mental health thing, I
wasn't online at all for all twenty twenty four and
so my nice that greatered my my ex engagement. In
any case, I don't like being on there too much
just for anything other than research.

Speaker 3 (02:39:40):
And people can find you every week on posting through
Jared Hall.

Speaker 5 (02:39:43):
Oh that's true. Yeah, just you know, just do that.
You can listen to us talk about all kinds of things.
We're talking about cospital, We're talking about the ai fruits
that we keep finding on our on our feeds now,
all kinds of topics.

Speaker 3 (02:40:00):
Fruits.

Speaker 8 (02:40:02):
Oh, Mike, thank you so much and again by the book.
You're gonna love it.

Speaker 5 (02:40:06):
Thanks Molly, thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (02:40:08):
By book.

Speaker 2 (02:40:22):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and this is it could
happen Here a podcast about well what's happening. And on
March thirtieth, twenty twenty six, which is the day that
I started sitting down to write the episode that you're
listening to right now, Reuter's published an article announcing the
arrival of another twenty five hundred United States Marines in

(02:40:43):
the Middle East as the Trump administration quote considers options
for Iran operations. As you all know, Operation Epic Fury.
It's not that I call it, but its name was
launched a little over a month ago, with the administration
insists and expected duration of four to six weeks, and
we're coming up to the end of that timeline. Trump

(02:41:04):
announced the day I record this March thirty first, that
he's expecting combat operations to end in two weeks or less.
So we'll see what happens tomorrow. They're supposed to be
a speech by the President on Iran, so we'll know
more then, But relevant reporting indicates the Trump administration is
at least seriously weighing the feasibility of sending marines in

(02:41:26):
to take and hold Iranian territory, namely Karg Island and
potentially other islands in the Strait of Hormos, most of
which are inhabited and all of which are heavily defended.
If they go through with this, we might be about
to watch in real time one of the most consequential
disasters in military history, a modern day Gallipoli, in which
hundreds or thousands of American soldiers and billions in materiel

(02:41:50):
get chewed up in an unsustainable and unwinnable war of attrition.
There's no real way for the average American to know
what kind of stockpile our military maintains the most advanced munitions.
We're talking precision guided missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile,
but also the interceptor missiles used by our various missile batteries.
Estimates suggests the US has already expended about one thousand

(02:42:12):
Tomahawks in a month of combat operations, which would be
around a third, maybe a little less, of the total stockpile.
That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that our
present stockpile of Tomahawks was built up over more than
a decade We're only capable of making about one hundred
and fifty a year at present levels, which means our
military already burned through around seven years worth of these things,

(02:42:35):
maybe more, because in twenty twenty five, the US to
finish budget included something like fifty six Tomahawks, even though
our largely ineffectual war against the Houthis had already depleted
the stockpile. This is a story that you'll hear over
and over again in this episode. The US military is
actually quite bad at knowing and asking for what it
will need, and even worse at predicting accurately what it's

(02:42:58):
going to need in the immediate future. Each Tomahawk costs
them around three point six million dollars to produce, and
these are the only long range offensive weapons mounted by
our naval destroyers. Per a source interviewed by Military Watch magazine, quote,
without intervention, the Pentagon may be left out of ammunition. Now,
Tomahawks aren't the only things the US military is low on.

(02:43:20):
For that same article, inventories of anti ballistic missiles and
GBU fifty seven bunker buster bombs are estimated to have
been almost totally spent, while being significantly more costly to replace.
We just don't have granular data on the size of
US interceptor missile stockpiles or supply of stuff like Patriot missiles,
but we do have a pretty good understanding of how

(02:43:41):
badly our regional allies have depleted their stockpiles of these
defensive tools. Bahrain is estimated to have expended eighty seven
percent of their Patriot missiles, the UAE and Kuwait are
up to seventy five percent, and Qatar is at like
forty percent. Experts estimate that Iran has gone through or
lost via airstrike roughly a third of their ballistic missile stockpile.

(02:44:03):
This may or may not be accurate, and if it's inaccurate,
it may or may not be inaccurate in either direction.
Our intel and Israel's intel is often very spotty when
it comes to stuff like this. A good illustration of
this would be the fact that on March twentieth, Iran
fired two ICBMs at Diego Garcia, an island in the
Indian Ocean that hosts a joint US UK air and

(02:44:26):
naval base. Neither missile did any damage, but that wasn't
really the point. The launch of these missiles was a
message from the Iranian regime to the US one. Previously,
Iran had limited itself to only striking targets within twelve
hundred and forty miles of its own borders with ballistic missiles.
Diego Garcia is roughly twenty three hundred miles away. Many

(02:44:47):
US analysts had treated for years twelve hundred and forty
miles as if it represented an actual hard limit on
Iran's striking capability based on what their missiles could reach,
as opposed to what it really was, which is a
political decision made by Iranian leaders to limit the scope
of conflicts. When the Trump administration launched an unprovoked series
of joint strikes on Iran, killing a supreme leader in

(02:45:09):
many senior officials, we violated one of the unstated agreements
that had held for over decades of conflict. The president's
supporters and major hawks on Iran argued that these self
imposed limits were allowing Iran's leadership to support terrorism abroad
with impunity. The strike on Diego Garcia proved that military
analysts had been wrong about the top range of Iran's

(02:45:30):
best ballistic missiles, but it also served as a statement
from Iran's new leaders. You've taken the gloves off and
thrown out the rule book. Now we have two. Hudson
Institute's senior fellow, Khan Kosopoglu, published an analysis that made
this same basic argument.

Speaker 5 (02:45:46):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:45:46):
A strike profile extending into the Indian Ocean demonstrates not
merely extended range, but Iran's deliberate abandonment of strategic ambiguity.
Iran is no longer signaling restraint. It is signaling reach,
and doing so under live war fighting conditions. It also
more subtly signaled something else. US planners didn't know as
much as they thought they did about Iran's capabilities. This

(02:46:09):
has been evident since the war began, despite Trump's claims
to have totally annihilated Iran's offensive capability. On March twenty seventh,
a combined missile and drone attack at Prince Sultan Air
Base in Saudi Arabia injuring more than ten US soldiers,
too seriously in damaging several aircraft. One of these, which
we have pictures of, was an E three a wax

(02:46:30):
aka the planes with those huge radar dishes on top,
and at least one a Wax was destroyed. The Air
Force only has sixteen of these, and only about half
our mission capable at any given time. The Army also
maintains a fleet of E three's. I found an article
in Air and Space Forces Magazine by Chris Gordon and
Stephen Lassi, who interviewed Heather Penny. She's a former F

(02:46:50):
sixteen pilot and current director of the Air Force Academy's
Institute for Aerospace Studies. Penny said, quote, the loss of
this E three is incredibly problematic and how crucial these
battle managers are to everything from airspace deconfliction, aircraft deconfliction, targeting,
and providing other lethal effects that the entire force needs
for the battlespace. E threes provide an irreplaceable service on

(02:47:13):
the battlefield. They act as both airborne radar stations and
air traffic control towers, spotting threats up to two hundred
and fifty miles away, and providing crucial early warning to
forces in combat about incoming threats, particularly missiles and drones, drones,
really about anything else. In other words, the E three
is really really useful if you're say, planning to have

(02:47:34):
troops land on islands in a narrow strait surrounded by
hostile forces who can shoot at you from the mainland. Now,
the A wax themselves aren't technically irreplaceable, but they aren't
easy to replace, especially on short notice. Each one costs
between seven hundred million and a billion dollars, and we
don't like, we don't like make them anymore. A wax

(02:47:54):
are old. The average age of our remaining fleet is
forty five per irrelevant article colin Task and Purpose magazine.
Nobody makes spare parts for the E three's TF thirty
three engines anymore, which takes a toll on maintenance. In
twenty twenty two, General Mark Kelly, then the head of
Air Combat Command, told reporters we basically have thirty one
airplanes in hospice care, the most expensive care there is,

(02:48:16):
and we need to get into the maternity business and
out of hospices. That's a weird metaphor for a plane
designed to help you fight wars, but we'll move past
that and into some ads and we're back. So when

(02:48:40):
we left off, I'd mentioned how in twenty twenty two,
Mark Kelly, then the head of Air Combat Command, was like,
we've only got about thirty one of these A wax
and they're at hospice care, and we need to like
make some new a wax that are modern and aren't
falling apart, and have engines being produced. Unfortunately for our military,
but fortunately for.

Speaker 1 (02:48:59):
Not our military.

Speaker 2 (02:49:00):
The Pentagon voted against getting into the maternity business last year.
The E seven Wedgetail, which is in service currently in
the Royal Australian Air Force, was meant to replace the
E three's for the US Air Force, and the first
of twenty six new craft were supposed to arrive from
Boeing in twenty twenty seven, but the project was killed
last summer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued it was quote

(02:49:22):
sort of late, more expensive and gold plated. Plus Pete
warned it might not survive a war with China. Heg
Seth's plan was to just have the military use satellites
for all their airborne tracking needs, and if we had
to have, you know, a plane doing some of that,
we could just have Navy E two D Hawkeyes as
a temporary replacement. Now, most of my listeners are not

(02:49:44):
Air Force generals, and either of them I but I've
read stuff guys who know that kind of thing have written,
and I'll tell you this it's a bad fucking idea,
or it's widely agreed by the experts to be a
bad fucking idea. For one thing, the E seven, which
is what we would have been replacing our E threes with,
has already proven itself in combat. The AUSSI sent Theirs

(02:50:04):
over to a rock during the fighting against ISIS, and
per task and purpose it quote was so reliable that
whenever American F twenty two fighters were in theater, the
US Air Force asked the AUSSIS to support the US jets.
Sixteen retired US Air Force four star generals took the
unprecedented step of writing a letter to Congress and begging
them to reverse Exseth's decision. They're reasoning why boils down

(02:50:26):
to this, satellites aren't ready to track airborne targets, and
the Hawkeye is too small for the job. Congress ultimately
reversed course, but it's uncertain when, if ever new E
seven's will arrive, certainly not in time for whatever the
Trump administration is going to do next. In the meantime,
the Air Force is down roughly ten percent or more

(02:50:47):
of its functional fleet of a wax, and we don't
even have boots on the ground anywhere. Now, what I
think happened here, What I think is behind all of
these bad decisions, and this is not something I can verify.
This is opinion is that a waks aren't sexy. They're
not like a cool weapon system. They don't kill people directly.
They facilitate other soldiers and sailors and airmen from killing

(02:51:09):
people using other weapons systems. But you can't threaten somebody
with just an a whack. They're not like scary, and
you can't show one blowing something up on the news
because they don't do that. So I don't think it
was a priority for Hegseth or anyone else in his administration,
because they're all fucking twelve year olds. Previous administrations and
let me be fair here, it's not like they were

(02:51:30):
any more forward thinking. Had kind of looked at our
aging fleet and said, eh, good enough, it's not like
anyone we're fighting as a better alternative, Right, who cares.
It's the same kind of story we just heard with
the Tomawks. Right, what the military was already doing was
good enough to scrape by in the conflicts it was
already fighting, and nobody involved in starting the next conflict

(02:51:50):
was interested in making sure that the military was prepared
ahead of time. Now, I recognize all this talk about
failures to produce war material in sufficient quantity may make
it sound like I'm complaining that our air force isn't
buying enough weaponry and that I'm urging us to spend
more money producing arms and ammunitions, And that is not
my intent. I want exactly the opposite. What I'm trying

(02:52:11):
to do is to highlight how utterly unprepared our administration
is for the conflict they started, and how that failure
to prepare has made a major military disaster for US forces,
not just foreseeable, but likely if the administration makes the
decision to send in ground forces or in some other
way significantly escalate the pace of our operations against Iran. Now,

(02:52:34):
the mainstream media has done an okay job of reporting
on the ammunition shortages that I've discussed, But what I
don't think has been a hammered at home enough is
that both are expenditure of advanced ammunitions and the loss
of multiple aircraft due to Iranian strikes are a kind
of attrition, and they are really serious kind of attrition. Now,
you may be more familiar with a term attrition as

(02:52:54):
it applies to human casualties in a war or battle,
but to an extent, the attrition of interceptor missiles and
hard to replace special purpose vehicles like a wax does
a lot more to damage US war fighting capability than
human losses. A good example of this came in March
sixth of this year, after Ronstruck and PERCNN apparently destroyed
the radar system for a THAD missile battery in Jordan.

(02:53:17):
BAD stands for Terminal high Altitude Area Defense. These are
our absolute best, most effective anti missile defense systems. Each
battery costs more than a billion dollars, and each missile
a fire costs like twelve point six million dollars. These
are part of why you don't have healthcare. Now we
know another series of strikes in the UAE quote hit

(02:53:39):
buildings housing similar radar systems to the THAD battery in Jordan.
It's unclear if these were damaged or how badly they
might have been damaged, and it's going to remain unclear
because the workings of these systems are extremely classified. As
of twenty twenty five, the United States Z ownes and operates
a grand total of eight THAD batteries, so at least
one of eight is now out of commission and two

(02:54:01):
more may have suffered some degree of damage A month
into this conflict. That is not the kind of attrition
you want to see prior to actually putting boots on
the ground. Now, US military spokespeople will point out, whenever asked,
that the vast majority of Iranian missiles and drones are
being intercepted, and that Iran is currently firing few of
these munitions than they did at the outbreak of hostilities.

(02:54:23):
And what you're supposed to conclude from that is that
they're running out because we are doing a better job
of attritting them than they are doing of atreating us.
And I can't tell you who's actually coming off worse
in this fight. I certainly don't have good insight into
the levels of Iran stockpiles of the weapons systems that
they're using. However, there is reason to doubt that the

(02:54:45):
United States is coming off the better in this conflict.
Ari Cicirel is an analyst for the Jewish Institute for
National Security of America or JENSA, and he told Fox
News quote, overall high missile and drone interception rates have
been important, but only tell part of the story. A
On came into this war with a deliberate plan to
dismantle the architecture that makes those strikes possible. It has

(02:55:05):
struck energy infrastructure to upset markets and used cluster munitions
to achieve higher hit rates. Because we simply lack good
data on this stuff, I can't tell you perfectly how
our rate of interceptions has changed from day one to
day thirty, but there is evidence in a few different
places that in late March, the rate of successful drone
attacks on our regional allies like the UAE increased. In

(02:55:26):
other words, more drones were getting through or being launched.
But I think getting through is the more supported conclusion,
and they're getting through because our defenses have gotten or
the defenses of our allies have gotten less effective. The
Genser report also notes that Israeli officials have stopped intercepting
some cluster munition attacks in order to preserve ammunition, basically

(02:55:47):
not shooting down the cluster munitions that don't look like
they're going to hit anything or anyone, because they don't
have the ammunition to stop everything. Now, I don't doubt
that iron is also feeling somewhat pinched, and the munition department.
It would be kind of weird if they weren't both
due to how many they fired and how many have
been destroyed via air strikes. But the question isn't are
they suffering attrition too? It's are they better able to

(02:56:10):
maintain the rate of attrition they're suffering than we are?
And while I can't answer that question in absolute terms,
I think the answer is probably yes. Iran's ballistic missiles
generally cost a few hundred thousand dollars each that interceptor
missiles cost, as I said, around thirteen million dollars. Shaheed
drones cost like thirty thousand dollars to make and are

(02:56:31):
often stopped by munitions that cost millions to make and
are hard to replace. It's also worth noting that the
reduction in the total number of missiles fired by Iran
is not just due to the fact that they run
through some of their stockpileots at least partly a strategic decision,
as even Fox News admits quote. Iran has adapted its
tactics accordingly, shifting from large barrages to smaller, more frequent

(02:56:53):
attacks designed to maintain constant pressure. While gradually draining defensive resources.
These persistent salvos, even if limited in so, force defenders
to remain on high alert and continue expending interceptors, accelerating
the depletion of already finite stockpiles. Now, there's an important
point made towards the end of that paragraph. Persistent attacks
forced defenders to remain on high alert. This is true,

(02:57:16):
and it also brings us to another underdiscussed aspect of attrition,
the energy and time of the soldiers our administration expects
to fight this war for them, And we'll talk about
that after another brace of ads.

Speaker 1 (02:57:40):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (02:57:42):
Too often, people who want to wargame out how the
US will perform in a given conflict just focus on
the theoretical capabilities of the vehicles and weapons systems we own.
And in its class aircraft carrier has this many planes
and so it can unleash this amount of firepower on
a target and this amount of time. And that's a
bad way to predict combat performance because it ignores the

(02:58:02):
human element. The USS Gerald R Ford a Gerald R
Ford class aircraft carrier is what's commonly known as a supercarrier.
It can travel for twenty five years before its nuclear
reactors need refueling, and it has a complement of more
than forty five hundred men and women. It is a
small city at sea, and I've talked in the past
about how hard these things are to actually sink. During

(02:58:23):
the Ford's deployment to fight the Hoothies, there were viral
rumors stoked by AIMS information that it had been seriously
damaged or even destroyed by a Hoothy ballistic missile strike.
Now I pointed out at the time that this was fanciful.
The defense systems on a boat like this cost billions
and provide excellent, proven protection against most missiles, drones, and aircraft.

(02:58:43):
It's likely to encounter. The entire naval battlegroup it travels
with exists to protect and enhance the carrier's capabilities, and
even if it were stripped of all those things, these
boats are just so damn tough to fucking sink. In
two thousand and five, the US Navy conducted a live
fire test to sink retired Kitty Hawk class supercarrier. Per
an article in Forbes, the carrier endured nearly a month

(02:59:05):
of intense weaponized testing and was finally scuttled via internal
explosive charges. It should be added that the warship had
been decommissioned nearly a decade earlier and was in poor
material condition. There were also no damage control efforts to
save the ship. In February of this year, just days
before his own death, Iran's former Supreme Leader Iatola ali
Hameni threatened the US carriers operating in the Persian Gulf

(02:59:28):
in a post on Twitter because it's fucking twenty twenty
six quote the Americans constantly say that they've sent a
warship towards Iran. Of course, a warship is a dangerous
piece of military hardware. However, more dangerous than that warship
is the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom.

Speaker 1 (02:59:43):
Of the sea.

Speaker 2 (02:59:45):
Now kind of unclear exactly what he was talking about.
Maybe it's some sort of secret weapon that the Iranians
have that we don't know about, But we do know
that Iranian negotiators are currently talking with the People's Republic
of China about purchasing CM three H two supersonic missiles.
These were developed by Chinese military planners to fly low
and fast, avoiding most of the layered defenses a boat
like the Ford and joys their carrier killer missiles, or

(03:00:08):
at least that's the idea. Beijing also has a line
of land based carrier killer missiles, because if you think
you might wind up in a war with the United States,
it probably booves you to think about how you would
kill an aircraft carrier. Now, again, Iran doesn't have any
of these weapons systems yet, at least not to our knowledge.
But this war of choice by the United States didn't

(03:00:31):
come as a complete surprise. The Iranian military and the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have been preparing to fight this
war for quite some time. Those preparations have included the
construction of multiple fake aircraft carriers, which their forces have
sunk in a variety of wargames exercises. The most recent
of these occurred in twenty twenty. The Prophet Muhammed fourteen

(03:00:52):
exercise was meant to prepare for an attack on a
Nimitz class carrier, and ironically, Iran made it too easy
to sink, which caused it to go down while it
was being towed in an inconvenient location that temporarily blocked
a canal. And that should act as a warning that
just as American military planners and analysts fuck up constantly,
so two to their Iranian counterparts, and we shouldn't assume

(03:01:13):
our guys are a bunch of hegseth looking chuckle fucks.
While Iran's Pentagon equivalent is staffed entirely by hard eyed professionals.
Every military has dipshit officers and has to deal with
bad calls made by people with political power that function
up for everyone. What you should take from this, though,
is that Iran is a country with a large, comparatively
well funded and prepared military. They regularly invent and sell

(03:01:37):
weapons systems that are utilized around the world, and they've
been obsessively planning to kill an aircraft carrier for years
and now that doesn't mean they're going to sink one.
In fact, I still think that's pretty close to impossible,
at least with the technology we know they have. But
they don't need to sink one to render it inoperable.
Just hitting the top of it could be enough to
do serious damage that would render it combat and capable

(03:02:00):
for an extended period of time. And to back me
up on that point, a few weeks ago, while it
was actively engaged in combat operations against Iranian forces, a
fire started on board the Jerry Ford. It began in
the laundry room, or at least in an area related
to the vast laundry system that a vehicle like this
has kind of a little unclear exactly what happened. According

(03:02:23):
to the New York Times, though the fire alone took
thirty hours to put out. Now, the Navy disputes this,
that the ship was burning for more than a day,
but they provided no reason anyone should actually trust them.
Here I found an article published in the National Interest
by Peter Soussio. He writes that quote the fire caused
far greater damage than was initially reported, with one sailor

(03:02:45):
medically evacuated from the ship and two hundred more treated
for smoke inhalation. I'm not surprised that the Navy wanted
to hide the extent of the damage its biggest warship
suffered due to a laundry fire. But this reinforces how
unreliable the Navy is as an ongoing source in these matters.
Soussio notes, quote, there remained conflicting accounts of the fire
in the media, and the Pentagon seemingly attempted to downplay

(03:03:08):
the severity of the fire in the immediate aftermath, leading
to later confusion. What we do know is that the Ford,
a small city on the sea, lost all ability to
launder clothing, betting, and anything else. This caused an immediate
hygiene issue aboard and a logistic nightmare for the Navy,
which had to fly in clean clothing at terrific expense.

(03:03:28):
Saying a supercarrier was taken out of commission by a
laundry fire sounds silly, but you can't keep a town
of forty five hundred people going if no one can
do the laundry. The fire seems to have also done
extensive damage to crew living quarters, which forced a thousand
mattresses to be flown in while the crew slept. Well,
wherever they were sleeping, it wasn't in their bunks. Now

(03:03:50):
we don't know how the fire started again, but unconfirmed
reports have blamed sabotage by members of the Gerald Ford's crew.
I can't tell you if this is true were not,
but if it is, it would not be the first
time something like this happened. In twenty twelve, a civilian
contractor started a fire aboard the USS Miami and attacked
submarine because he wanted to leave work early. The fire

(03:04:13):
cost four hundred million dollars in damage and led to
the vessel being decommissioned. Two years later, the contractor was
sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Nabal sabotage was an
even bigger business during the latter stages of the war
in Vietnam. In December of nineteen seventy two, Jeffrey Allison,
a nineteen year old sailor from Oakland, was sentenced to
five years in prison for lighting a fire aboard an

(03:04:34):
aircraft carrier, the USS Forestall that same year, a sailor
aboard the USS Ranger, another supercarrier, delayed its deployment to
the Pacific by three months by allegedly sticking a paint
scraper in the main reduction gear, which disabled an engine.
Per an article in the Alameda Post, the Navy's official
history of the Ranger confirms that sabotage was becoming more

(03:04:55):
popular as the war in Vietnam became more unpopular. Sabotage
happens every all day. A crewman serving aboard another carrier
based in Alameda, the Oriskany, was quoted as saying, now
these sailors, the folks sabotaging their own warships in the
later stages of the Vietnam War were part of the
so called SOS movement, a protest campaign launched and sustained

(03:05:17):
entirely by sailors angry at being forced to participate in
the war against Vietnam. The movement gained its name from
an active protest in nineteen seventy one, when forty sailors
stood on the flight deck of their returning aircraft carrier
and spelled out SOS with their bodies again. I don't
know if sabotage caused the fire on the Gerald Ford,
and neither it is anyone else, but there are good

(03:05:38):
reasons to believe it did. As Senator Mark Warner, vice
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in late March,
the Ford and its crew have been pushed to the
brink after nearly a year at sea normal deployment for
sailors on before it is like six months. Come April,
it will break the record for the longest post Vietnam
carrier deployment two hundred and ninety four days. Crew members

(03:05:59):
have been told their deployment will likely be extended to May,
at which point they'll have been at sea for an
entire year.

Speaker 5 (03:06:05):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:06:06):
I don't want to really expect anyone to pour out
their sympathy for sailors on a warship that has helped
to kill a minimum of fifteen hundred Iranians so far,
including two hundred children. But you don't need to feel
bad for all the lost birthdays and weddings and missed
funerals to understand the deleterious effect that this has on morale.
Fighting spirit has adjust a buzzword. When soldiers are exhausted
and pissed off, they're likely to fuck things up. And

(03:06:28):
I'm not just talking about grand acts of sabotage when
it was still off the coast of Venezuela earlier. In
this deployment, the Ford suffered massive recurrent issues with its
plumbing system, which was ripped off a design used in
cruise ships and works very badly. I can't exaggerate how
bad the sewage systems on the Ford work. They are
broken fucking constantly, and per the Alameda Post, some crew

(03:06:50):
members may be intentionally exacerbating problems with defective toilets aboard
the ship by flushing t shirts and other objects, as
documented in an email from the ship's engineering department, obtained
by ebr our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed
by sailors on a daily basis. That March twenty twenty
five email stated, my whole maintenance technicians are currently working
nineteen hours a day right now to keep up with

(03:07:11):
the demand. It's a lot of flushed shirts. Now, what
I'm building to is that there's a perfectly good chance
this fire didn't even start as an act of sabotage,
but because somebody fucked up, maybe because they were exhausted,
maybe because they've just been running the machines too long.
The laundry is always going all this thing's underway, and
if it's going for months longer, the normal shit like

(03:07:32):
lint is going to build up. In fact, I want
to read a quote from that article in the National Interest.
If the ducks haven't been cleaned out properly, it is
easy for small lint particles to catch fire, potentially leading
to a larger blaze, not unlike a house fire caused
by lint build up. So again, this fire was certainly
not enough to sink the gerald Ford. It didn't destroy it,

(03:07:53):
but it did enough damage that it became combat and
effective or at least you could argue that's the case.
You know, obviously we replace it with a different carrier group.
There's not just not a carrier now, but the ford
was not originally scheduled to leave, and left as a
result of the fire in order to undergo repairs. That

(03:08:14):
gets it something very important, very relevant to the question
of how a higher intensity war, one involving ground troops
against Iran would go, because while Iran may or may
not be able to sync a carrier, they certainly have
the tools to potentially hit one, starting a fire or
just damaging the deck badly enough to render it combat ineffective.
And if these deployment cycles keep getting extended, if sailors

(03:08:36):
are kept at a high operational tempo for days or
weeks or months at a time, people will start fucking up.
And some of those fuck ups have a chance, as
we've already seen, to remove the ship from being combat capable,
or to remove other ships from being combat capable.

Speaker 4 (03:08:51):
If you're talking from.

Speaker 2 (03:08:52):
Perspective US marines trying to hold onto an island surrounded
by enemies, this is a really scary thing. The fact
that your source of air support might not be able
to function because somebody fucks up or sabotages it, there's
a fire, it gets hit. You know, these boats are
not sinkable, but in certain ways they're a lot more
fragile than people are used to thinking of them as being.

(03:09:16):
Aircraft carriers have been gods of the sea for so long.
I think it really is something people ought to pay
attention to. The fact that this simple laundry fire took
the Jerry Ford out of the theater matters. The longer
the US keeps fighting, and the longer we keep our
ships deployed chasing Donald Trump's dreams, the higher the odds
that something else goes wrong. Yet, whether it's just exhausted

(03:09:38):
soldiers screwing up, angry sailors sabotaging things to protest an
unpopular war, or a damned lucky shot, the Pentagon is
continuing to roll those dice every day, and I guess
we'll see what happens next. That's all I've got for
you right now, everybody. Hopefully we're not invading the islands
with ground troops by the time this episode comes out,
but we might be.

Speaker 3 (03:10:14):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
and joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This episode,
we are covering the week of March twenty fifth to
April first.

Speaker 1 (03:10:30):
And so we're all gonna do silly things that aren't
really news. No, we're not going to do it when
I love it when outlets do that.

Speaker 3 (03:10:38):
This comes out Friday. This comes out Friday, it's over.
It's done.

Speaker 1 (03:10:42):
Normal Fish of April Day. For all those French people
out there now.

Speaker 3 (03:10:45):
With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, I know everyone's going
to get tired of election news, but there is some
very impertant voting that needs to happen in these next
few weeks because it could happen here. Show called Behind
the Bastards and James's excellent series Migrating to America have

(03:11:06):
been nominated for Webby Awards. You know the Emmys. Yeah,
they're like those, except they're for the Internet. But they're
just as serious.

Speaker 1 (03:11:17):
More serious.

Speaker 3 (03:11:18):
Some people are saying, the Internet's obviously is more real
than television.

Speaker 4 (03:11:21):
No one watches TV anymore.

Speaker 1 (03:11:22):
Yeah, it's like the Emmy's people who want boom is people.

Speaker 3 (03:11:25):
Are saying, so this is This is obviously very exciting
and voting lasts until April sixteenth. There will be links
in the show notes to vote for the three nominations
that we have here at Coolson Media. Migrating to America
is nominated for the Limited Series and Specials Podcast Documentary category.

(03:11:51):
Find the Bastards is the podcast features for experimental and Innovation,
and it Could Happen Here is also nominated under the
Limited Series category under News and Politics. It's kind of
confusing to navigate the website because there's just so many categories,
but those three links will be there below and we
will continue to be talking about what is arguably the

(03:12:13):
most important election of our lifetimes in these next few weeks.

Speaker 1 (03:12:17):
Yeah, Pokemon, go to those links and vote for us.

Speaker 3 (03:12:21):
Even if you see that you know we might be ahead,
stay in line, you cannot leave. We will not let
trump Land by ms now come on steal our spot
as number one. So stop the steal. Do not let
trump Land win. Vote it could happen here April sixteenth,
up until the sixteenth mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (03:12:41):
Very often vote early, ft off, vote with your spvery
man address.

Speaker 4 (03:12:46):
Look, vote vote very, really, vote often. The great slogan
of my of my home state of Illinois.

Speaker 3 (03:12:53):
Everyone take this liberal direct action very seriously. Let's start
with some actual news. Getting serious here. Christy Nome's husband
was outed as what I'm gonna call a sissy cross
dresser with an interest in quote unquote bimbofication. Gnome as
governor signed a joint state letter attacking trans writes there's

(03:13:13):
so much gendered angst among these conservatives, projection, etc.

Speaker 1 (03:13:18):
Et cetera.

Speaker 3 (03:13:19):
Representatives for Nome released a statement after this news dropped,
quote Missnome, which is interesting. Quote Missnome is devastated. The
family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy
and prayers at this time.

Speaker 1 (03:13:35):
Yeah cool.

Speaker 4 (03:13:35):
I think I think we need to we need to
expand the right to arm bears to the right to
arm dogs. This is my final statement on this matter.

Speaker 1 (03:13:43):
Yeah, it's not a great month for the Nomes after
she joined this Shield of America's task force, which so
far has existed for less than a month and already
bombed the wrong country once.

Speaker 4 (03:13:56):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (03:13:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:14:00):
In other important news, four hundred and thirteen thousand, seven
hundred and ninety three KitKat bars were stolen in transit
from Italy to Poland.

Speaker 1 (03:14:11):
Okay, when you get that statistic, is that four hundred
and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and ninety three four finger
bars or is that one hundred thousand and you're counting
each finger separately.

Speaker 3 (03:14:23):
No, it's each packaged bar, including some of the new
limited edition Formula one and Chunky bars.

Speaker 1 (03:14:30):
Oh that's been a thing in the UK for like
twenty years, KitKat.

Speaker 3 (03:14:34):
This is a new version. This is a new version,
according to a press release from KitKat. Okay, So if
you want to argue with KitKat.

Speaker 1 (03:14:42):
I think what you're seeing is is called cool Britannia.
It's a phenomenon by which British culture is slowly taken
over the world.

Speaker 3 (03:14:50):
This is twelve tons of KitKat bars that were stolen.
Their whereabouts are currently unknown. An on duty Secret Service
agent assigned to Biden shot himself while at the Philadelphia
airport last week. Look, the lines are bad, but come on,
it's not that bad. This was a negligick discharge while
the agent was traveling through the airport in an unmarked car.

Speaker 4 (03:15:12):
Jill Biden was not in the immediate area at the
time of the shooting.

Speaker 3 (03:15:15):
Last weekend, Trump signed an executive order to start paying
TSA agents. As the Senate and House failed to agree
on a DHS funding bill, Congress has adjourned for two
weeks as the shutdown continues to set new records for
the longest in any federal agency's history. Quick update here,
literally as we were recording, House Republicans caved and agreed

(03:15:39):
to the Senate bill to fund DHS except for ICE
and CBP, which Republicans will be trying to fund later
in a reconciliation bill. But as of Wednesday afternoon, it
looks like Congress has finally reached a funding package for
the rest of DHS. Politico has reported that acting ICE

(03:16:00):
director Todd Lyons has been hospitalized at least twice for
stress related issues. Oh my god, while working to implement
Trump's immigration policy.

Speaker 1 (03:16:11):
I think it's specifically like because they're shouting him for
not hitting the targets.

Speaker 3 (03:16:15):
Right, because Stephen Miller has been calling lions yelling at him,
quote unquote, yelling about not hitting.

Speaker 4 (03:16:22):
Certain immigration targets.

Speaker 3 (03:16:23):
Yes, and Trump has yet to endorse, still still yet
to endorse anyone in the Texas run off. Between John
Cornyn and Ken Paxton. Early reports indicated Trump would back
corn In the incumbent, but recently Paxton has been seen
meeting with Trump at Mora Lago and what have been
reported as quote unquote positive meetings.

Speaker 1 (03:16:42):
A Russian oil tanker has dogged in Cuba after the
United States allowed it to break the blockade on the island.
As we reported last week, it's been a massive shortage
of oil in Cuba. This will alleviate that slightly.

Speaker 4 (03:16:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:16:55):
A US marine, probably former US marine now if not
very shortly to be former US marine, has been charged
with federal offensive after allegedly selling millions of rounds of ammunition,
including one which isn't normally available for civilian purchase, and
javelins in Arizona. Javelin, yeah, yeah, just for those those

(03:17:20):
who are not familiar javelin, I'm not talking about like
a spear here, I'm talking about a guided anti tank missile.

Speaker 7 (03:17:26):
Oh shit.

Speaker 4 (03:17:27):
Yeah. Who was he trying to sell it to?

Speaker 1 (03:17:32):
So he selled them to two people who acted as brokers,
are two unindicted co conspirators, and then they sold them
to other people and an undercover agent was able to
purchase some of The ammunition guy's name is Andrew paul
A Marius. He was indicted by grand jury this week.
He was an ammunition tech at Pendleton, but he brought

(03:17:53):
them to Arizona to sell. And at this time about
two million rounds are are not recovered. Great, it's not
clear if they are still javelins in circulation. Basically what
they don't know where the javelins are.

Speaker 3 (03:18:08):
They lost.

Speaker 1 (03:18:10):
They recovered a javelin, they don't know if they recovered all.

Speaker 4 (03:18:13):
The java So potentially there are just anti tank rockets
out there.

Speaker 3 (03:18:19):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, they're with the Kitkats.

Speaker 4 (03:18:22):
That's it's a joint operation.

Speaker 1 (03:18:25):
Maybe that's how they stop that large Kitcat truck they hit,
hit the vehicle with javelt in the Yeah, it's one
of those growth operations. You know, you get one javelin,
you strike a KitKat vehicle, you sell the Kitcats. Now
you got two javelins. You hit the mars bar vehicle. Right,
this is capitalism in action.

Speaker 5 (03:18:43):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (03:18:44):
And then let's let's return to Arizona where normal things happen.
Also in Arizona, a grand jury has indicted a man
for material support for a foreign terrorist organization after he
allegedly sold weapons that he intended to provide to the
CJND and CDs Cartel Halis gonoeve Hen Rathion and cart Lissinola,

(03:19:06):
so two of the larger Mexican cartels. Right, these are
two groups that were listed as ftos by the Trump
administration very early on last year. Lawrence Gray, sixty five
was a federal firearms licensee. He owned a shop called
Grips by Larry. He sold fancy grips for nineteen elevens.
He was already facing a raft of weapons charges after

(03:19:28):
selling a fifty caliber barrett A semi auto belfed and
of course a thirty eight Super nineteen eleven pistol to
a confidential informant. The thirty eight Super nineteen eleven pistol Well,
the reason I say, of course, is because any time
people get busted for illegal weapons sales in the Southwest,
there always seems to be a thirty eight Super nineteen

(03:19:49):
eleven involved. That they're very much like a status gun
in organized crime in Mexico because certain calibers are less
available there, thirty eight Super is pretty most like uniquely
associated with with that market. Like it always seems that
that pops up in busts and he was selling fancy grips,
some of which had symbology, which sometimes is used by
organized crime groups in Mexico. Anyway, this is the first

(03:20:12):
time I've seen a material support for terrorism charge for
one of these cartels who were recently designated as ftos,
so that was interesting to me. Finally, Israel has passed
a law allowing the death penalty for murder that it
uses a phrase quote with the intent of rejecting the
existence of the state of Israel. It appears to be

(03:20:33):
a binary system of punishment.

Speaker 6 (03:20:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:20:35):
It seems that the death penalty is only going to
pertain to Palestinian people here. Yeah, it's worth noting that
the Palestinians the West Bank tried in military courts and
they face a very high conviction rate. Often people will admit,
I think we can safety say that they admit under
duress in conditions it would not generally be considered applicable
with justice.

Speaker 5 (03:20:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:20:57):
This is I mean, this is the cinepart egal system
on top of everything else. Right, Israel previously haven't had
the death penalty other than for certain war crimes, which
is in and of itself quite amusing. Given the stuff
we will talk about later in this very episode.

Speaker 4 (03:21:12):
One of the really bleak things about this is, oh, God, Benvier,
who's been who's the Minister of National Security, the unbelievably
unhinged right winger who's been campaigning for this law, has
been going around with a bunch of parliamentary factions wearing
yellow noose pins. Yeah, this is their thing and in

(03:21:33):
support of this. So it's really truly cannot be clearer
what this is about.

Speaker 1 (03:21:38):
Yeah, No, that's there, like their version of the market,
I guess, like their branding of their movement is this
noos pin.

Speaker 4 (03:21:46):
Yeah, well it's it's. It's, it's it's it's specifically, it's
the thing that they've replaced the like the ribbon they
were wearing for the hostages has now just been replaced
with the noose with the nows. Yeah, where Jesus Christ.
There's one more little thing I'd like to mention.

Speaker 3 (03:22:03):
There was a Daily Mail article that went viral only
the best news coming from the Daily Mail that carried
the headline quote bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did
not match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson.

Speaker 4 (03:22:18):
God, so.

Speaker 3 (03:22:22):
This article is reporting on emotion filed by the defense,
characterizing findings that are still yet to be fully resolved
from the ATF. This does not mean that a different
gun was used. What it means is that the ATF
was maybe unable to positively match the bullet fragments to

(03:22:46):
the gun, Which does not mean that this was a
negative match. This did not come from that gun, but
that the fragments could not be positively linked to the
gun against his emotion filed by the defense doing what
they need to do, which is legally defend this man like.

Speaker 4 (03:23:01):
That is that is their job, and that is that
is what they are doing.

Speaker 3 (03:23:06):
The characterization of this motion by the Daily Mail is
designed to drive clickbait, and it's being used to encourage
this sort of conspiracy around the charliekirk shooting, that there
was this like other currently unknown shooter possibives foreign ties.
That's it's a very very popular thing right now on

(03:23:27):
the internet.

Speaker 1 (03:23:28):
The Grassy Mall theory of Charlie kirkshit.

Speaker 3 (03:23:30):
Yes, that basically like a MASAD agent was hiding somewhere
and Tyler Robinson is a patsy. Tyler Robinson obviously innocent
until proven guilty. This is going to get settled in court.
But the characterization of the early findings by the ATF
through the Daily Mail was a bit misleading.

Speaker 1 (03:23:48):
Yeah, they daily fail.

Speaker 4 (03:23:49):
And also I think it's worth mentioning that like this
kind of bullet matching stuff is just as a forensic science,
and this is true of a lot of the sort
of forensic sciences that are used in used in courts.
Like I think Robert has talked on Behind the Bastard's
about like a bunch of like the fire pattern stuff.
This is kind of in the same category as that,
in that it's not very good even to begin with.

(03:24:14):
And so what we have here is a bad mischaracterization
of a report of like an incomplete analysis from a
not very good piece of forensic technology that's being used
to do conspiracy because it makes money.

Speaker 3 (03:24:30):
Yeah, we will certainly follow this case as it actually
riches trial, as there will.

Speaker 4 (03:24:34):
Be many interesting things that come out through the course
of that trial.

Speaker 1 (03:24:38):
All right, So let's begin by talking about immigration with this.
Brad Land more or less broke this right on his
social media accounts. The United States Department of Justice, via
the United States Attorneys obviously New York has admitted that
it was misguided by ICE attorneys in asserting that they
could detain migrants in immigration court. There was a memo

(03:24:59):
right and guidance memo that they relied on. The memo
they now say should have applied to other courts, but
not to the Executive Office of Immigration Review. The declaration
came in New York court suit filed by the ACLU
on behalf of advocacy groups which had challenged at courthouse arrests.
That's been happening for about a year hours I'm sure
most people are aware. In the filing, the USDOJ said

(03:25:21):
quote this error, however, was not caused by a lack
of diligence and care by the undersigned attorneys. The undersigned
was specifically informed by ICE that the twenty twenty five
ICE guidance applied to immigration courthouse arrests. In addition, we
discussed and obtained the approval of assigned ICE Council before
filing every brief in this case and making any oral
representations to the Court and the plaintiffs. We also transmitted

(03:25:45):
copies of the Court's orders, transcript to the September second,
twenty twenty five oral argument and plaintiff's filings to ICE
Council throughout its litigation. Based on our discussions with ICE today,
this regrettable error appears to have occurred because of agency
attorney error. Is what you've got. There is a US
attorney basically saying, like, not my fault, ICE attorney's fault.

(03:26:06):
Relatively unusual statement. Right, Like, obviously we've seen them attempts
to kind of split the executive branch before in these
legal filings. Right, we saw, we saw this happen in
some of those cases in Minnesota, and then the judge
rejected that.

Speaker 5 (03:26:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:26:23):
The ACLU, in a letter of response, noted the wide
reaching consequences here, and it's asked for fourteen days to
consider what to do next and file in motion. The
memo in question. Right, this ICE guidance memo said the
quote civil immigration enforcement actions in or near court houses
when they have credible information that leads them to believe
the targeted aliens alien brackets s IS or will be

(03:26:45):
present in a specific location. It said those were permissible.

Speaker 5 (03:26:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:26:49):
DHS, however, has said that there will not be a
change in their policy going forward. It's unlikely that they
will stop until they are told by a court to
do so. Right. So what it seems here is that
the Ice attorney has for some reason reconsidered, perhaps because

(03:27:10):
of this ongoing case in New York, what they had
said there, and now attempted to walk back something that
they have been doing for a year. This will not
change the fact that people who have probably been arrested
in those courthouses. I have no doubt many of them
have already been deported from the United States. Right, many
more of them will have suffered material damage if they
have not been deported, because they will have been detained

(03:27:31):
in horrific conditions. Right, We've seen more photos today from
inside immigration attention. Immigrated detention has always been horrific. It
continues to be horrific. We can't make those people whole
again in a meaningful way. But what it means going forward,
we will keep reporting on another deportation story. I want
to talk about a deportation flight on Monday landed in Mianma.

(03:27:53):
The flight also stopped in Thailand, and it is the
fifth such deportation flight that I'm aware of. I know
of two that were announced. These have not been previously reported,
but in March of twenty twenty five, while at the
time was a state administration council. The Banmar minitary dictatorship
is going through the process of changing its clothes and
pretending to be a civilian government right now, that doesn't

(03:28:14):
matter for this story. In the second of March twenty
twenty five, the illegitimate government of Myanmar announced that it
had received two individual deporties, one on each flight. In
April and May of that year, they received more. So
we now believe that twenty two people had been deported
up to this Monday, and more people, it appears from
this flight, have been deported on Monday. The last deportation

(03:28:38):
flight resulted in the deporties being detained and tortured by
Miaan Mar's brutal military intelligence. The flight was a bordered
jet owned by Journey Aviation and it returned via Sydney
to the United States of America. The United States has
been trying to counsel the temporary Protective status for Burmese
people for some time, but even with a TPS, it's
worth noting that people some people have been convicted of

(03:28:58):
crimes and the exceptions can still be deported, The Hunter
said in a press release last year. Quote the MEMMA
government is cooperating with the relevant US federal entities in
verifying and accepting deportees to Mianma. This and some other
things a Trump administration have done. They've tried to characterize
it a de facto recognition of their right to rule
the country. Yeah, very clearly, the reason that they're talking

(03:29:22):
about these deportations is because they're flexing that. Hey, the
US government is talking to us downstream effectory ed. I
think the world is largely not taking that seriously, but
nonetheless they are using that, whether it's for external or
internal signaling. The last time has happened according to Miama.
Now the deporties were taken straight to the on Tarpi
Interrogation Center, and last time it was mostly ethnically Karenne

(03:29:47):
or Chin people. So these are not people. It's a
majority ethnicity, right, The majority ethnicity. The ethnicity that comprises
most of the armed forces is or certainly most of
the high ranks of the armed forces are Bama people.
If people want to listen to more about me and
my Robert and I have made two very extensive series
about that, we will link to. Talking of torture, here

(03:30:07):
are some advertisements which are like torture for your ears.

Speaker 4 (03:30:23):
Some people actually like torture.

Speaker 1 (03:30:26):
Just to clarify Garrison, I don't think this is the
kind that people like.

Speaker 3 (03:30:31):
Some people might like those ads. There is a huge
industry of watching vintage advertising on YouTube, just like like
edits together of like old ads.

Speaker 4 (03:30:40):
People love that stuff.

Speaker 3 (03:30:42):
Weird, weird nostalgic capitalism.

Speaker 4 (03:30:44):
Brain.

Speaker 1 (03:30:45):
It is funny to look at the old ads. When
I was doing my archival research, I'd find like nineteen
twenties and nineteen thirties ads and you're like, oh, what
you're selling is drugs, but so.

Speaker 5 (03:30:54):
True, so true.

Speaker 4 (03:30:57):
Yeah, it's like the two kinds of early eineteen hundreds
ads are drugs and you should buy this because it
has a swastika on it.

Speaker 1 (03:31:05):
So yeah, yeah, it's just like some form of racism
in marketing.

Speaker 4 (03:31:09):
Well, what's favored racist in like nineteen oh five? I
mean kind of yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:31:13):
And guys, it's a Buddhist simple original. Guys.

Speaker 4 (03:31:15):
It's fine.

Speaker 3 (03:31:17):
Let's return to our name's sake and discuss two executive orders.
As the voting restriction bill dubbed the Save America Act,
continues to stall in Congress, Trump has attempted to take
matters into his own hands by signing a new executive
order quote ensuring Citizenship of Verification and Integrity in federal elections.

(03:31:39):
This order directs DHS, USCIS and the Social Security Administration
to create a quote state citizenship list of individuals confirmed
to be United States citizens who will be above the
age of eighteen at the time of an upcoming federal
election and who maintain a residence in the subject state.

(03:32:01):
And this citizenship list will then be used to compare
to state voter rules. The list will be derived from
quote Federal citizenship and Naturalization records, Social Security Administration records,
the DHS Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements data, and other
relevant federal databases. Unquote James, do you want to talk

(03:32:25):
about this idea of having like a list of citizens,
because this is I think something we've we've mentioned before.
How there to this point hasn't really been like a
single list of US citizens.

Speaker 1 (03:32:37):
Yeah, because you can obtain United States citizenships through a
number of means, right, Yeah, So these would exist in
different agencies, and generally there has been like a hostility,
a well founded like hostility to to this kind of
overarching government like in out list, right, not least because
they will screw it up monumentally.

Speaker 3 (03:33:00):
Have devastating consequences that affect not just your ability to vote, but,
as we have seen through the past year of ice enforcement,
your ability to remain in the United States.

Speaker 1 (03:33:10):
Yeah, yeah, and just every part of everyday life. Right, Yeah,
not at least to add that, like one of the
one of the ways you can obtain United States citizenship
is through being in a enrolled tribal citizen. I don't
know if that consulting tribal citizenship worlds don't.

Speaker 3 (03:33:26):
There was nothing about that in the order. I legitimately
do not think the people who are pushing this understand
that that's a thing. Yeah, they don't think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's not It's not a group of people who they
care about.

Speaker 5 (03:33:36):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:33:37):
Earlier today, during the Supreme Court oral arguments on birthright citizenship,
which which Trump attended for ninety minutes and then and
then left because he wasn't happy with the way it
was going, Gorsich asked the Seasons Solicitor General if he
thinks Native Americans are birthright citizens under their test, to
which these listener general replied, I think so, and then

(03:34:00):
said I'll have to think that.

Speaker 4 (03:34:02):
Through Oh my fucking god.

Speaker 3 (03:34:06):
He later indicated that they probably would. But this just
shows that they aren't really like thinking about all these
sorts of things. It's not necessarily like, in that case,
trying to be intentionally harmful. It shows just that they're
they're not even like thinking of these sorts of things
that could have really really devastating effects if implemented. Yeah, yeah,
which is like an odd part of the Trump administration

(03:34:27):
has like not everything bad they're doing is necessarily has
every single specific implementation pathway in mind. Yeah, but when
implemented is like still is still devastating to people's lives.

Speaker 4 (03:34:41):
I want to say one thing about the birth lay
clazenship thing. Josh Chafitz, who's a professor of law at
Georgetown Law Law on Politics, had a very good point
about this, which I think is worth making, which is, like,
part of what's going on here is that the trumpministration
is trying to carve out like a specific thing called
birth right citizenship. That's like a thing that you get

(03:35:01):
if you have two immigrant parents. But birtht right citizenship
is a citizenship that every single person in the US has. Yeah,
it's everyone's there's No, there's no distinction. There's not like
a different kind of citizenship you get if you have
two immigrant parents versus if you have like parents that
were like born in the US. Right, Like it's all
one thing. Every single person in the United States has

(03:35:22):
the same kind of citizenship. But the moment you start
trying to like hack apart different people citizenship, right, you
try to you try to like you know, like like
make there be like classes of of how you're a
citizen through like this whole birthright citizenship complaint that they're
doing right, and to be like, oh, well, just these
people who were like born to immigrants are birthright citizens right.

(03:35:44):
That's one of the ways you start getting into these
like fucking hideous issues of like okay, are people with
tribal membership like you know, residencies like citizens right. It's
like all of the stuff is like downstream with this
effect to like cut citizenship of parts that needs to
just be resisted, like from the fundamental thing of there
is not a different category of people called the big
birthrates citizens. That's every single person in the US.

Speaker 1 (03:36:06):
Yeah, unless they naturalized, right, Unless you're a naturalized citizen.

Speaker 4 (03:36:09):
Yeah, And what's naturalized? Yeah? Yeah, and even then you're
still just a citizen.

Speaker 1 (03:36:13):
Then you become a citizen. You just go into the
citizen bucket.

Speaker 4 (03:36:15):
There's one. Then you are now citizen.

Speaker 5 (03:36:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:36:17):
Yeah, and the moment you cut that apart, like it's terrible,
terrible things happen.

Speaker 1 (03:36:22):
Yeah, twenty twenty four and made the episode as Robert
and Sophie in which we discuss potential at tax on
citizenship and potential ways of Trump, and we get into
the birth right citizenship and the we get into where
it comes from and the fact that this is not
an issue about which there has been legal debate. You
will now see articles being like the debate about birth

(03:36:42):
right citizenship. That is, people pulling things out of their
ass to create two sides on an issue which has
been settled for quite literally decades, if not centuries. No, yeah,
I will probably try and do something else on birth
right citizenship. The reason I haven't done a lot is
because there isn't a great deal to say. Yeah, like,
birth right citizenship is a thing in the United States.
It has been a thing in the United States for

(03:37:02):
a very long time.

Speaker 4 (03:37:03):
It's just in the Constitution just says that.

Speaker 1 (03:37:05):
It just says that, yeah, there are some people who
want to take it away, and it's specifically like we
did that after we ended chattel slavery, right like for
a very good reason. Yeah, and pushing back on the
things we did after we ended chattel slavery is is
bad actually, But yeah, I will maybe I'll do another
episode because I know we've picked up a lot of
new listeners since then.

Speaker 5 (03:37:27):
Now.

Speaker 3 (03:37:27):
Trump's new executive Order on citizens a verification for elections
also states, quote, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish
procedures to allow individuals to access their individual records, as
well as to update or correct them in advance of elections.

Speaker 4 (03:37:45):
Unquote.

Speaker 3 (03:37:46):
Unclear how this is going to work, if it even
is gonna work. It's still not clear that this executive
order will actually be implemented as written because of potential
constitutional violations. But you know, this would be in an
attempt to add some of the pretty big issues that
we're saying about. Someone may be a citizen and not
show up as a citizen in these databases for a

(03:38:08):
number of reasons, whether it's because they were naturalized or
even in some cases where granted citizenship through one of
their parents after being in the sole legal custody of
that parent who is a US citizen before this individual
is eighteen. This is called the Childhood Citizenship Act of
two thousand, which makes a permanent resident become a citizen

(03:38:32):
if they're living with a US citizen parent and things
like that. Citizenship kind of rolls over from permanent residency
without ever actually having to become naturalized, and getting that
added to any kind of database doesn't really happen by itself.
You have to then apply for proof of citizenship like
a passport or a certificate. So there's all these sorts

(03:38:53):
of weird instances where someone is a citizen, but it
may not show up in these sorts of records, including
social security records.

Speaker 1 (03:39:00):
I should just clarify that not all tribal members are
necessarily US citizens, but tribal membership document can sometimes be used,
like Garrison was saying, right, as a way to prove
United States citizenship. Just more than one hundred years now
since the Indian Citizenship Act of nineteen twenty four, right,
there may still be people alive today who were made
citizens by that act, but would not have any particular

(03:39:23):
documentation that's personal to them.

Speaker 3 (03:39:24):
To show that the Executive order also writes that the
Attorney General will investigate and prosecute state officials, local officials, individuals,
and public or private entities who issue federal ballots to
individuals not eligible to vote, or aid an a bet
the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots to those
ineligible to vote.

Speaker 1 (03:39:45):
That's what we call a chilling effect.

Speaker 3 (03:39:47):
The second half of the order takes on vote by
mail by instructing the Postmaster General to initiate a proposed
rule making that requires states to submit lists of voters
who will be provided mail in or absencee ballots at
least sixty days before an election, and that the USPS
shall not transmit any ballots for anyone not on this

(03:40:09):
state citizenship list. Now, all of this is intended to
take effect before the midterm elections, with the DHS instructed
to establish the infrastructure necessary to compile, maintain, and transmit
the state citizenship list within ninety days. Though this executive
order may very well be blocked by courts for being
an unconstitutional breach of presidential power, the followut of this

(03:40:31):
will be determined in the next few weeks as states
and legal entities prepare lawsuits. Let's talk about one other
executive order. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that a
key section of the executive order quote ending taxpayer subsitization
of biased media, is unconstitutional. In this order, Trump instructed

(03:40:53):
all federal agencies to cut funding to PBS and NPR.
The judge in this case wrote that the President can
credits reporting from such outlets and fund programs that promote
specific perspectives and impose limits on federal grants, but under
the First Amendment, the government cannot use the power of
the purse to quote, punish or suppress disfavored expression by others,

(03:41:15):
writing that both the Supreme Court and the DC Circuit
Court have repeatedly observed that one quote may not deny
a benefit to a person on the basis that infringes
his constitutionally protected freedom of speech, even if he has
no entitlement to that benefit unquote. The judge rights that
the executive order quote does not define or regulate the

(03:41:35):
content of government speech or ensure compliance with the federal program,
nor does it set neutral and germane criteria that apply
to all applicants for a federal grant program. Instead, it
singles out to two speakers and on the basis of
their speech bars them from all federally funded programs. It
does so, moreover, without regard to whether the federal funds
are used to pay for the nationwide interconnection systems, which

(03:41:57):
serve as the technological backbone of public radio and NIME television,
to provide safety and security for journalists working in war zones,
to support the Emergency Broadcast system, or to produce or
distribute music, children's or other educational programming or documentaries unquote. Now,
besides setting a good legal precedent, this ruling won't have
much in terms of immediate effects because the Corporation for

(03:42:19):
Public Broadcasting was dissolved last month after being defunded by
the Republican controlled Congress. That's not being reversed, but this
ruling could make it less difficult for PBS and NPR
to receive money in the future, either from Congress or
some federal agencies.

Speaker 4 (03:42:37):
What's that sound, Oh?

Speaker 1 (03:42:38):
No, someone desecrating the legacy of the Clash by singing
there were a song with different lyrics.

Speaker 9 (03:42:58):
Rights.

Speaker 1 (03:43:01):
Seriously, though I'm still angry to.

Speaker 4 (03:43:04):
Be a fair to buy entrance music, the Clash desecrated
themselves by making that song.

Speaker 1 (03:43:10):
Yeah, with the moment they released that song. Yeah, Joe
Strammer cried when they played that song during Desert Storm,
and if he was alive today he would be crying again.

Speaker 4 (03:43:19):
Yeah. So, okay, we actually do have tariff news, which
the first tariff news in a while. But when we
last spoke about the Supreme Court nullifying the Liberation Day
terroriffs and a significant chunk of the tariffs that Trump
had been putting into effect, we said that there wasn't
a plan really to get tariff free funds out and

(03:43:40):
that it really hadn't been addressed other than by dissenting
Supreme Court members. We are sort of starting to see
what that looks like after a series of rulings from
trade courts. Right now, it is a fiasco. So the
government has set up a portal through which you can

(03:44:01):
get relief now after it was sort of after it
was sort of forced to by the courts. The implementation
of this has been delayed several times because the government
didn't have time to actually get it out. A bunch
of the portal is not built yet. The government is
claiming that it is going to take more time to
build a whole bunch of it. Yeah, I bet now

(03:44:22):
This is a catastrophe because they're they're dealing with about
one hundred and a bit over one hundred and sixty
six billion dollars of tariff money. But they have to
pay back plus interest.

Speaker 1 (03:44:32):
It's interest, that's funny.

Speaker 4 (03:44:34):
Yeah, plus interest. This is the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (03:44:36):
Right, they have to do interest on all of this,
which is a nightmare.

Speaker 1 (03:44:39):
It's the interest of crewing while they bungle setting up
this quest based site or whatever.

Speaker 4 (03:44:43):
Yeah, it's still going every second. The interesting thing is
ticking on this. So I'm going to quote here from
Bloomberg Brandon Lord, executive director of the Trade Program's Directory
of the Customers Agency, who are the people who are
sort of running all this is also part of why
it's such a disaster because there's like seventeen different agencies
that are like working on this, right, So some of

(03:45:05):
it's like the Trade Program Director, like at the Customs Agency,
but there's also just there's different parts of the Customs
and Customs and Border Patrol that's dealing with all of
this stuff. Quote wrote that more than twenty six thousand
importers who paid one hundred and twenty billion dollars in
the challenge terrorists were registered to receive electronic refunds. So far,

(03:45:26):
the government has said that payments could take up to
forty five days to review. I would bet that it
takes longer than that, because again, the portal hasn't been written,
hasn't been like made yet. But partnerspate are still being built.
I'm sure those doge guys are on. I'm sure the
veriest thing up running in no time. I'm sure they
vibe code their way to a perfectly functioning portal. It's

(03:45:48):
gonna be so good. And and again I kind of
beside how much fatastrophe this is. The government has said
in court that they're portals set up for two thirds
of the Mouney, Right, there's still another third that they're like, yeah,
I don't know, we're working on it. Who knows when
it's gonna happen. So there's just again like a third
of the hundred sixty six billion dollars that they don't

(03:46:08):
even plan to refund. Amazing. Now, now this is not
even the messiest part of this, right. There's a very
good piece in the conversation from Peter R. Krabb, who's
the professor of finance and economics at Northwestern Nazarene and University,
and also Alison and Graham Larson, who's assistant professor of

(03:46:28):
criminal Justice at the same university, and they point out
that it's not actually as simple as okay, you have
a you have a item on your balance sheet that
is the tariff payments for these companies because for example,
you know, okay, so if you were doing like FedEx,
for example, they use right, FedEx has like a number
right because they just they passed the cost directly on

(03:46:49):
to the consumers. However, Costco didn't do that. Costco shifted
the cost around internally. So it's actually very complicated for
them to figure out how much money they like be
paid on these terrafts because it was spread a bunch
of around a whole bunch of stuff. They also like
changed the way that they were structuring deliveries and stuff internally,
and there were so there are a whole bunch of

(03:47:10):
different lawsuits from these companies to try to get their
tariff money back because a lot of these were going
on before the actual formal refund process was started. So
this is like this is another rolling catastrophe. There's also
consumer lawsuits of consumers people who bought shit who want
refunds for the teriffs because they were forced to pay
the costs of it. Now, because this is the United

(03:47:31):
States of America, there's another layer of this, which is
there are a whole bunch of companies where there are
there are these investment firms who have come in and said, hey,
we will buy the rights to your tariff money for
a fraction of the money, and we will guarantee that
you get this money now, and then we will pay
ourselves with the tariff money that we got back. So

(03:47:52):
now you have investment firms who are buying up pools
of this tariff money. And I bet, from spending a
bunch of time last week week in the trenches of
the two thousand and eight financial collapse, Molly, I bet
they're gonna start selling securities fixed off of these pools
of tariff money. So this, oh my head ache. This
is great.

Speaker 3 (03:48:12):
What's what I gotta say?

Speaker 4 (03:48:14):
I'm on the tariffy on? Oh, it's so good.

Speaker 3 (03:48:20):
Well, I'm just excited to receive my refund from all
of the Jay fashion I ordered from Japan, which I'm
sure I'll be personally receiving thanks to this.

Speaker 4 (03:48:29):
Hey, you know, here's here's the thing. Here's the thing.
The one truly beautiful part of the US legal system
is that you can sue someone for twenty dollars of damages.
That number has never been changed. It is the one
truly beautiful part of the United States of America is
that you, Garrison David almost certainly could sue the government

(03:48:51):
for that money. That's funny. Yeah, I'm not doing that
shit too, which work.

Speaker 1 (03:48:56):
No, So the gofundmeling for garrisons comes to you, lawyer.

Speaker 4 (03:49:00):
If someone takes a forty dollars bill from you, you
can go fucking see them in court. It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (03:49:09):
Just tag Garrison at I write okaybsky dot app yeah,
and they just say, Hi, I am a constitutional lawyer.
I would like to represent you in court. Read the
twenty dollars thank you?

Speaker 10 (03:49:21):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (03:49:21):
Oh and by the way, by the way, the one
last thing I want to notice, on a somewhat serious note,
is that this entire catastrophe is just for one specific
set of authority that Trump was using to put tariffs
into place. There are a whole bunch of other ones
that he's been doing now that will also get challenged,
that will have their own refund processes where we will
go through this.

Speaker 3 (03:49:40):
Entire mess again with different things.

Speaker 4 (03:49:43):
So it's great, great things happening for international trade as
we Yeah, increase the price of fucking oil to like
two hundred dollars a barrel, and I don't know, finally
get our Calvin and Hobbes eight dollar gasoline. It's great. Well,
long live the cycler.

Speaker 5 (03:50:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:50:02):
The national price of gathleen is now at four bucks,
I think.

Speaker 3 (03:50:06):
And that's why they call him the affordability President.

Speaker 4 (03:50:09):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (03:50:09):
Yes, anyone checks on the egg prices though, because that's
how we do things now.

Speaker 3 (03:50:14):
Expensive a shit, expensive shit James, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:50:17):
Yeah, not cheap.

Speaker 1 (03:50:19):
Let me divert new listeners to are a famous Chickens
episode circa twenty twenty three and which we can learn
more about keeping poultry at home. Talking of catastrophes, I

(03:50:44):
would like to continue to talk about the war on Iran.
The President truthed this week that he was prepared to
attack desalination and power plants in Iran if the state
did not comply with his demands. Jesus in his truth,
he said, I will skip remarking on capitalization, as is
our house style, because as well as these would take

(03:51:06):
half an hour. The United States of America is in
serious discussions with a new and more reasonable regime to
end our military operations in Iran. Great progress has been made,
but if for any reason a deal that's not shortly reached,
which it probably will be, and if the Hormu Strait
is not immediately open for business, we will conclude a
lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating

(03:51:27):
all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Khag Island.
Probably all this is sick desalinization plants, which we have
purposely not yet touched. This will be a retribution for
our many soldiers and for others that Iran has butchered
and killed over the old regime's forty seven year reign

(03:51:47):
of terror. Thank you for your attention to this matter,
President Donald J. Trump, as a reporter NBC pointed out,
targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime.

Speaker 9 (03:51:58):
Under international law, Striking civilian infrastructure like that is generally prohibited.
Why is the President threatening what would amount to potentially
a war crime with the US military. How do you
square that with the administration repeatedly saying that the US.

Speaker 10 (03:52:11):
Does not target civilian look the President has made it
quite clear to the Iranian regime at this moment in time,
as evidenced by the statement that you just read, that
their best move is to make a deal or else.
The United States Armed Forces has capabilities beyond their wildest imagination,
and the President is not afraid to use them. That's
not what I said, Garrett, And you're saying the word

(03:52:33):
potential for a reason, because I'm sure sure some experts
are telling you that in your ear to try to
ask me that question. Of course, this administration in the
United States Armed Forces will always act within the confines
of the law. But with respect to achieving the full
objectives of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is going to
move forward unabated, and he expects the Iranian regime to

(03:52:55):
make a deal with the administration.

Speaker 1 (03:52:57):
It should be noted Iran has said that it is
not negotiating directly with the United States then negotiating through
a third party. What is largely missing from this discussion
is that Israel has been doing this stuff already. Obviously,
Israel has not limited its war crimes to its bombing
of Iran. Right it has been on a war crimes

(03:53:18):
freeze for several years, and that is an extension of
a war crime speed that he has been arguably on
for several decades. Israel attack to desalinate some plant on
the seventh of March, very briefly, the Israeli press attempted
to report that the UAE had done this. The UAE
had to issue a statement essentially saying like, we would
never attack the people of Iran, while we disagree with

(03:53:40):
the state of Iran, while that you've been like outwhoked
by the UAE, but them saying like it's no way
to attack the Iranian regime to force Iranian people to
die for lack of water is a perfectly reasonable and
just statement.

Speaker 5 (03:53:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:53:53):
Officially, both the IDF and the US government have denied
this strike, but the combination of like several factors include
duding this incredibly rapid disinformation campaign strongly point to this
being an id F joint Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:54:05):
Also who else, like what what are you too? Bobbed it?

Speaker 1 (03:54:08):
Like what are you what are you going to do career?

Speaker 5 (03:54:13):
Lately?

Speaker 1 (03:54:13):
Yeah, there have been there have been attempt to several
attempts over the last month to to to suggest that
like other golf states have done things when when they're
politically inconvenient. This, as far as I'm concerned, very very
likely to be an IDF situation. This point is something
that we've talked about for more than a month now,

(03:54:33):
but I just want to make it really clear that
the US and Israel very clearly have very different goals
in it run. I think that sometimes we see this
this very puerile analysis has taken hold on the left
in the United States right, which suggests that Israel is
entirely driving the bus here, that they cajoled the United
States into doing this war, and they're telling the United

(03:54:54):
States what to do, when and where and how. I
think that's a very juvenile way of understanding this. In
the United States have wanted war with Iran for decades.
Trump talked about it in his first term. Trump also
still clearly Harbor's resentment for Obama quote unquote getting bin
Laden and wants a sort of similar commander in chief win.

(03:55:17):
His confidence was significantly bolstered after the Venezuela operation, and
he thought he could affect a regime change here quickly
and then extract tribute from a client's day, as he
appears to be doing from Delca and Venezuela now. This
has not worked so far in Iran. Israel, on the
other hand, has continued with his own campaign, which is

(03:55:38):
an extension of what we have seen it doing in Gaza,
what we are seeing it doing in Lebanon, which seems
to be to cripple any state in the region, any
population in the region that opposed it. Right, but it
genuinely seems that its goal here is to leave itself
sort of the only functioning quality in the region and
to destroy any other armed actor with very little concern

(03:56:01):
for the loss of innocent life. The United States in
the last week has lost significant aviation resources after Iranian
ballistic missiles struck and air based into Saudi Arabia. They
damaged at least one E three A wax aircraft and
then a handful of KT one thirty five air to
wear refueling aircraft. This is not in a significant loss.

(03:56:22):
This is half a billion dollars of aviation wiped out
in a single strike. And these are not aeroplanes that
the United States has a large number of.

Speaker 5 (03:56:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:56:31):
Iran also hit aquated tanker this week, A drone seed
to have hit it off the coast of Dubai. It
caught fire. There was potential for an oil spill, but
what I'm seeing at the time where accordingly this is
has not been once so far, Yeah, exactly. I mean
every war is an ecological disaster, but this one could
re a particularly remarkable one. And then I just do

(03:56:52):
briefly want to mention the economic impacts. Of course, it
will be very hard to be living on this planet
right now and not noticee economic impacts. But the Republic
of the Marshall Islands has declared a state of emergency
and begun fuel rationing that they're strictly limiting the use
of government vehicles. I have reached out to the government
to presidency. You can hear my reporting from Republic of

(03:57:15):
the Martial Islands, including the interview with the then president
in twenty twenty three. That's another series that we've made
here on it could happen here that I'm going to
see if we can get someone from the RMI on
for an interview, because I think some of these small
island nations right where everything has to be shipped in
the cost of fuel can make things extremely difficult for

(03:57:35):
people just trying to eke out an existence there in
a place that the United States nuked despite never raising
the word and anger against us.

Speaker 3 (03:57:43):
Finally, our last few stories this episode starting with a
Tale of Two Bombing Plots American classic Truly the American
tradition that just won't die. My brother and sister have
been indicted after allegedly planting and improvised exposit device outside
of McDill Air Force Space in Tampa, Florida, on March tenth,

(03:58:05):
before fleeing to China two days later. After planting the bomb,
the brother allegedly alerted officials by calling nine to one
to one, but the explosive went undiscovered for nearly a week.

Speaker 4 (03:58:16):
It did not detonate.

Speaker 5 (03:58:18):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (03:58:18):
The sister was arrested after returning from China, and she's
charged with evidence tampering and being an accessory after the fact.
Prosecutors alleged that she helped clean and sell the car
used to plant the bomb and asked chat GPT how
to obtain a Chinese visa and transfer properties in her
brother's name, and searched for Chinese schools for her brother

(03:58:40):
to attend. Her brother is still suspected to be in China.

Speaker 4 (03:58:45):
Look, I am stunned that these people didn't accidentally blow
themselves up.

Speaker 3 (03:58:49):
Well, The reason why is because it's actually very hard
to build a bob.

Speaker 4 (03:58:53):
Yeah, oh yeah, I guess, I guess we'll because when
you're trying to build a bomb, there's three outcomes, right,
there's one you failed to build a bomb. You either
succeed to build a bomb, or fail to build a
bomb and it blows you up, or you successully build
a bomb and cecily building a bomb is like that hard,
and it's you're pretty likely to blow yourself up or

(03:59:14):
fail to build a bomb. So I guess, I guess
I never got to the threshold a bomb building where
it would blow themselves up because they just didn't produce
it viable device.

Speaker 3 (03:59:24):
In this next bombing plot, the suspect did actually construct
what could be considered a bomb. Oh good Lord, that
could have been used in what's being reported on as
an assassination plot. Last Thursday, a New Jersey man, Alexander
Heifler was arrested as a part of a plot to
firebomb the home of pro Palestinian activists Ner Dean Kiswani

(03:59:50):
Jesus Christ. Alexander Hiffler is a member of the JDL
six one three Brotherhood, a new offshoot of the terrorist group,
the Jewish Fence League, which has been active at Palestine
protests in New York the past few years. This is
a Zionist extremist group that has been designated in the

(04:00:11):
past by the FBI as extremist group. According to the
criminal complaint, Heifler was in a group video call with
an undercover officer last February in which he asked about
receiving training quote for how to use the instruments that
were not knives, guns, or crossbows for quote unquote self defense.
That's an odd, odd phrasing in the complaint, cross not okay,

(04:00:36):
things that aren't those things okay, great things happening here,
and Heifler later specifically mentioned that he was looking for
somewhere to throw molotovs.

Speaker 4 (04:00:47):
Oh boy.

Speaker 3 (04:00:48):
The undercover sent Heifler a message via an encrypted messaging application, stating, Hey,
let's talk about that in person. Don't say that on here.
Heifler responded, don't use the M word. Copy that the
M word, apparently being molotov. Incredible operational security happening year.

(04:01:09):
The next day, the two met in person. Heifler told
the undercover that molotovs were easy to make and they
discussed targeting the home of pro Palestinian activist Nerden Kiswani.
Heifler talked about needing to obtain fake license plates and
told the undercover that he had an escape plan to
flee the country. At the end of April, Mayor Zoramumdani
clarified online that Heifler intended to flee to Israel. Great

(04:01:34):
to quote Heifler in their criminal complaint quote, I'm thinking, like,
if we wanted to go after Kiswani, we have Kiswani's address,
so it's like that that would be easier if you'd
be more comfortable with that. Drive down to Kiswani's home,
middle of April, no IDs, no phones, in and out
unquote Great. A few weeks later they met up again

(04:01:55):
and drove to Kiswani's home to conduct surveillance. Hifler told
the under cover that he had done tests with a
molotov and a DNA kit from a pharmacy, and because
his DNA showed up on the test, they should wear
gloves during the attack. A real genius at work.

Speaker 5 (04:02:11):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (04:02:13):
The plan was to build twelve molotovs and throw several
at the home and two at cars parked outside. Heifler
mentioned having an address they could hide out before he
would then flee to Israel. On March twenty sixth, they
met at Heifler's home to start making the molotovs, and
after the assembly, law enforcement searched the home and Heifler

(04:02:34):
was arrested and has since been charged with unlawful possession
and making of a destructive device. Great stuff. I very
glad they didn't pull this off.

Speaker 4 (04:02:43):
And also, Jesus Christ, you know something like this.

Speaker 3 (04:02:46):
It is interesting that this was a joint with the FBI,
that the current FBI was was doing like a sort
of sting operation like this with the Jewish Defense League.

Speaker 4 (04:02:57):
Is interesting.

Speaker 3 (04:02:58):
That is that is something that I think people may
not have expected. The undercover was part of the furthering
of this plan in some ways.

Speaker 5 (04:03:07):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (04:03:08):
We don't know if this guy would have done this
exact attack if not planned with the undercover. But this
guy was very very clearly willing and able to hurt
and possibly kill this pro Palestinian activist, a very prominent
one at that. Lastly, let's talk about Pink News and
the Idaho bathroom bill.

Speaker 4 (04:03:30):
Oh my fucking god, yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:03:32):
So. Earlier this week, I released an episode and an
accompanying article online on what I've dubbed the trans panic
clickbait economy. My reporting goes through a series of misleading
viral claims about the attacks on trans people from the
Trump administration and Red States that have been recently flooding
the zone and overwhelming the senses with an endless stream
of forecast to doom. These viral claims are usually based

(04:03:55):
on some irresponsible reporting designed to drive in an engagement
rather than inform about the very real dangerous trans people
are facing. This kind of clickbait treats every horrific potentiality
as an inevitable eventuality, undermining our capacity to accurately assess
risk and effectively dedicate resources to oppose pressing threats. One

(04:04:15):
of the key outlets profiting from the panic clickbait economy
right now has been Pink News in LGBTQ news outlet,
which we learned last month is pivoting to a quote
unquote reporter free newsroom.

Speaker 4 (04:04:30):
Incredible and just We're one of the most Aurelian things
I've ever heard. Just holy fuck, just just on a
base level of like, just oh, my reporter free newsgroup.

Speaker 3 (04:04:43):
Because of this change, one of the one of the
journalists there, I've already quit, with four others possibly being
laid off shortly. The sort of editorial department of pink
News is now being taken over by their social media
content creation wing and some of like the editorial staff,
which are repackaging press releases and stealing the work of

(04:05:04):
other journalists, including some other journalists who may be engaging
in this sort of misleading reporting attempting to drive their
own engagement. Then pink News is using that framing to
drive their own engagement. That's why this sort of panic
economy is a whole economy. It feeds on itself.

Speaker 5 (04:05:19):
Now.

Speaker 3 (04:05:20):
On March thirtieth, pink News published an article that went
viral online that claimed Kentucky was quote to pass a
bill that would declare trans people mentally ill unquote, as
well as prohibiting trans people from teaching in schools. But
a report from an actual Kentucky based journalist named Olivia
Croft for the outlet Queer Kentucky clarified that no such

(04:05:44):
bill was going to pass. The push for a bill
declaring trans people as mentally ill was by a single
Republican state senator named Gex Williams Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (04:05:55):
So yeah, pause there.

Speaker 3 (04:05:58):
Williams and Gex could not even accomplish the first step
in the legislative process, getting the Senate committee assignment for
this prospective bill. Gex then tried to turn his failed
bill into a floor amendment slapped onto a separate bill
that was expected to pass, but such an amendment still
requires a vote on approval separate from the vote to

(04:06:21):
pass the bill itself. Olivia Croth reported that this amendment
does not have such support from other legislators and that
GEX was expected to withdraw his amendment for breaking Senate
rules on piggybacking failed bills onto different bills as an amendment.
And even if this amendment somehow got through, the bill
would then need to be sent back to the state
House for approval and would spark a huge fight that

(04:06:43):
the legislature does not have time for because the legislative
season is now wrapping up. So after this article from
pink news was fact checked by this really good journalist
doing doing important reporting in Kentucky, pink News then deleted
this article and the viral posts plugging it.

Speaker 4 (04:07:01):
But any corrections to.

Speaker 3 (04:07:03):
This false story do not spread nearly as far as
the initial panic inducing claim. And like that's crucial here
because the night that this article went out on pink News,
literally my entire feed was full of dozens and dozens
and dozens people all quote tweeting this pink News story
and the fact check and the fact that pink news

(04:07:23):
deleted this is not going to get spread in that
same way now. Misleading stories like this distract from the
very real attacks Republicans are waging in red states. Yeah,
one of which one of a few was on Monday,
the governor of Idaho signed a new bill into law
that criminalizes trans people using the bathroom that matches their gender,

(04:07:44):
including bathrooms in private businesses. A first defense would be
a misdemeanor with punishable by up to a year in prison.
Second offense within five years would be a felony, punishable
by up to five years in prison. And this would
be prison housed based on quote unquote biological sex at birth,
which leads to abuse of trans inmates. This is the

(04:08:05):
most extreme bathroom bill that this nation has seen so far,
the most restrictive affecting private businesses.

Speaker 4 (04:08:11):
And this is sort of very very intense criminal punishment. Yeah,
and It's also worth noting in ways there are very
ple trans people are also just criminalized at an extremely
high rate, and these felony charges would count for Idaho's
three strikes law, which is a fucking nightmare. This and
we also got the Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday which

(04:08:33):
applies a significantly stricter level of scrutiny to any like
ban on conversion therapy, which is probably going to end
up killing a whole bunch of conversion therapy bans across
the country, which, by the way, eight to one ruling,
so a bunch of liberal justices also fucking agreed with this. Yeah,
I like that shit is like actually happening. And then

(04:08:54):
meanwhile we have this like haddock slop bullshit that people
are using to get money, and it's incredibly frustrated.

Speaker 3 (04:09:01):
Yeah, it makes it harder to actually evaluate the news
as it's happening and trust certain news from certain sources,
because we all know that these attacks are real, Like,
there are real attacks going on that are really bad,
but we do need to focus on the ones that
actually are real. As opposed to a single state senator's
amendment to a bill which is never going to pass,

(04:09:21):
taking up all of the oxygen one night. Meanwhile, literally
that same day, a bill like this Idaho bathroom bill
is being signed by the governor.

Speaker 4 (04:09:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:09:30):
Well, on that note, I think that does it for
us here at it could happen here.

Speaker 4 (04:09:35):
Put a transgirl on your couch, I guess, especially also
now trans people from Idaho who are going to be
fleeing and presumably believe very large numbers and great and good.

Speaker 3 (04:09:47):
We reported the news.

Speaker 1 (04:09:50):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (04:09:57):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 3 (04:10:03):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8 (04:10:16):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 3 (04:10:20):
Thanks for listening.

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