It Could Happen Here Weekly 232

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

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hello, welcome to it could happen here. It's me today, James,
and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quentin,
who is a senior staff technologist at the EFF and
Colonel Panic who is a hacker. And we are going
to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is
coming our way, I guess, the end of privacy and
what you can do to stop it being the end

(00:49):
of privacy. So thanks for joining me, Bithee.

Speaker 4 (00:52):
Absolutely, Hey James, happy to be on the show again.
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, thanks for making the time. So I guess, like
in the case is somebody lives under a rock, we
should start breaking down some of the different surveillance mechanisms
that the state is building and maybe kettle panic. You
can kick us off with flock because that is the
one that has probably got the most attention recently, and

(01:17):
then Cooper, we can pick up on some of the
many other privacy violation tools.

Speaker 5 (01:24):
Certainly, you may notice all these cameras popping up around
your town. They're on a black pole. It's a black
camera with a solar panel, and these are what we
call flock cameras. They're really easy to spot, but they're
essentially ALPRs. They're automatic license plate readers. So this is
like a form of drag net surveillance where anytime you
drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate.

(01:46):
And they've expanded this to do other things like facial
recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed person detection
is another one which is really dodgy.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yeah, fascinating, but it just looks for people who are
acting distressed.

Speaker 5 (02:01):
Or I think it's a sound thing too, right.

Speaker 4 (02:05):
Oh, okay, yeah, I think it's it's pretty similar to
gunshot detection in the books for people shouting, people in
the heightened state of emotion, right, I mean, this could
really easily be a protest detector.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Right yeah, Or I meantine if that was a fucking peacock,
like you have peacocks get angry, they really sounds like
someone's dying or folks.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
So yeah, I mean false false positives are already a
huge issue for gunshot detections in general. Right, they can
go off for a balloon popping, they can go off
for fireworks.

Speaker 5 (02:35):
Yeah, and then just because you're in the area, you know,
you're now part of an investigation.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
So press, we should talk a little bit about some
of the other ones to keep it. Maybe we start
with facial recognition.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Yeah, yeah, facial recognition is all the rays these days.
A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this.
We've seen of course ICE with their mobile fortified tool
that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this
is so this is an app that runs on Android
phones that they can scan people with and you know, apparently,

(03:11):
according to them, get a fully one hundred percent accurate
identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial
recognition will tell you that that is not true, and
that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never one
hundred percent accurate, and in fact, there have been dozens
of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned

(03:34):
in charge because of incorrect facial recognition results. This has
also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There
was a woman in Oregon who ICE scanned her face,
and they scanned her twice. Both times it came up
with a different identity for this woman, and it turns
out that both of those identities, neither of them were

(03:55):
the correct identity for this woman.

Speaker 6 (03:58):
Jesus, but it's been using this as as a you know,
sort of judge jury and execution to determine whether to arrest, detain,
and possibly even deport somebody.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens if when
you come to the United States you're a migrant rate
is that they will collect a large amount of your
biometric data. But it seems to even with all of that,
the resolution that they have on the scan is actually
very poor.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
Yeah. Yeah, that's I mean, that's that is correct. Right.
So the way that this works, the databases that they have,
it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's
most likely checking against the like tsa database of biometric
scans that you do every time you take a flight,
of course, all of the at the border biometric scans,

(04:47):
the ingress and egress scans. Yeah, any sort of viset
information or anything like that. There's also the Clearview AI,
So even if you've never done any of these, there's
another app called clear View which is used by law
enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing. But
it's back end data is all of the photos that
have been posted online, so they're using data from social

(05:10):
media Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match
and determine who you are based on that sort of
publicly available data as well.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Great.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yeah, what a reassuring thing to hear.

Speaker 5 (05:23):
The high cost of the free service.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think
those are things that people have a very reasonable fear
of concern, with anger about however you want to put it. Yeah,
there is some stuff which I think perhaps we just
need to understand what it means, I guess, and maybe
we could start there and it coup. You've done a
lot with stingrays or cell phone sight simulators, with lots

(05:52):
of names for them.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of
years working on a project called ray Hunter, which is
a open so project to detect cell sized smitters or
stingrays or MC catchers, whatever you want to call them.
I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short,
the way it works is it's a little piece of

(06:13):
software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those
little things that you buy to get like Wi Fi
in various places from a cellular connection, and it looks
at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that
it's connected to, specifically the control traffic, not what you're doing,
but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting into
the towers. It looks for a number of suspicious things,

(06:34):
signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative
of MC catcher activity. So we've been running this for
a year. There's several hundred of these around the US,
if not a couple of thousand, but we don't have
exact numbers. There's a bunch of these all over the US.
We had a bunch of Minneapolis, people have been running
them in Chicago, in LA when that was going on.
People have been running them all over the country. Yeah,

(06:57):
and we have found some evidence of MC catchers, but
a lot less than we expected, or a lot less
than many people expected. I actually didn't expect to find many.
And specifically, we have not found any evidence of mccatchers
being used at protests. And I just stop for your
first second to explain what a sting ray or mccatcher is. Yeah,

(07:19):
this is a fake cell tower essentially that tricks your
phone into connecting to it so that your phone will
identify itself to the mccatcher. These are used for the
primary reason these are used for is to track down
a specific person. So like what we see in court
documents is that these are used to verify that somebody

(07:44):
is home before a police rate happens. Right. This is
what the vast majority of use for these is. That
is one use. The other potential use, and the one
we're actually more concerned about, is that these could be
used to identify who is in a specific area. You
can set one of these up outside, let's say, outside
of a mosque or outside of a protest an anarchist

(08:06):
meeting or a anti fascist meeting is regularly happening, right,
and identify the people who were in that meeting by
getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone
company and saying give us the subscriber information for these people,
and that is a far more concerning use, and we
are not seeing it so far with ray Hunter being

(08:27):
used for that. What we're seeing is uses that seem
to be more in line with the sort of manhunt
or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation,
which is also what we're seeing in cored documents.

Speaker 5 (08:39):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, it doesn't mean that they government cannot find out
that you were at a place or at a protest, right,
It just means that they're not using this mechanism of
doing that.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So people have asked us,
are what our theories are for about why we're not
seeing these a protest because for a lot for a
long time, there were a lot of activists that were
pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest, right,
or that maybe like you know, to use the old
there was the old co Intel pro language was like
the architects of co Intel pro wanted activists to feel

(09:16):
like there was a cop behind every bush and inside
every mailbox, right, And that was really the impression that
a lot of activists had about mccatchers, right, that they
were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that
they were just constantly being used, And it seems like
that's not the case. And I think there's a couple
reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about
a million dollars for an mccatcher contract, So these are

(09:38):
actually like fairly rare, and they're hard to operate. They
require a lot of technical knowledge, they require a lot
of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually
go do all this work if it's not necessary, right,
And it's a lot more expensive then using one of
the many other surveillance technologies they have flock facial recognition,

(10:02):
things like pen Link, which we can talk about in
a little bit, but other databases of location because our
phone advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location, right,
and there's a whole surveillance industry around that selling that
data to police. Also, the other big issue is that
there was a legal decision in twenty twenty, twenty nineteen.

(10:25):
I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers will need
to get on this in twenty nineteen called Carboner versus USA,
and the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to
access historical cell site location information, so this is where
people were located based on what cell towers they're connected to.
That police would need a warrant for that information. And

(10:48):
it seems like at that time a lot of law
enforcement agencies decided that that also extended to stingrays. Whereas
previously they had not been needing to get a warrant
to use their sting rays, it seems like a lot
of them thought, oh, okay, this seems like it probably
also applies to stingrays. Therefore, any case using sting rays
without a warrant, we'll get thrown out, and therefore we're

(11:10):
going to need to get a warrant to use this thing.

Speaker 7 (11:12):
It turns out having to get a warrant was too
high of a bar for most police agencies and made
them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
To and thought they could get a warrant for it.
But there's a lot of other things they don't have
to get a warrant for, so we think my theory
is that they are using these other technologies that are
easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get
a warrant, and saving the stingrays only for when they
are sure they can get a warrant and when they

(11:43):
cost and complexity is justified.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, that makes sense to the twenty eighteen June twenty second,
twenty eighteen, that supreme cool case.

Speaker 4 (11:52):
Thank you real time fact checking here on ICHH.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about PenLink and
like other data. I did hear recently that it's possible
that Iran had used commercially available location data to target
some of its strikes on US troops in the Middle East,
which is wild to consider.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
I had not heard that, but it's not surprising and
it is absolutely wild. Right. So yeah, So PenLink is
a company that actually previously had sold a lot of
software to help out with mccatchers. So interestingly they have
now pivoted to different types of surfails. So they a
few years ago acquired this company is Rael, a company

(12:34):
called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's
actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the
software in that was acquired by PenLink. In this sale,
there were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway,
there was a report on citizen Lab that's excellent. I
highly recommend it. But the short of it is that

(12:54):
PenLink has acquired two of their main products, one of
which is called Tangles and the other one is called Weblock.
Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators
to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links

(13:15):
between different people different organizations. Say like anybody who has
interacted with the Jean Brown gun Club, or anybody who
has interacted with the Socialist ra or anybody who has
mentioned the words Antifa. Right, you can go build a
dossier on that person, build the dossier on who their
friends are, what they're talking about. Scrape specific groups, any

(13:37):
sort of left leaning group, right, they can build a
dossier on that and who all the people are, who
their friends are. And then they have this tool called Weblock.
And what Weblock does is it is a near real
time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide.
And so how it works is police can circle a

(14:01):
specific area on a map and it will show information
about all of the phones that they know, you know
that we're in that area in some sort of time frame.
And I think that the data gets updated every twenty
four hours. So you're going to have about a twenty
four hour delay in that data piece. So you circle
an area just like with your finger, and you're going

(14:21):
to see who was there, you know, as of twenty
four hours ago and back to so you know, whatever
timebrame you said. You can then select any one of
those phones that were in that area and see information
about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information like
what what sort of age bracket that person's in, what

(14:42):
their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether
they're a parent, what their nationality is, et cetera, et cetera.
But you can also see a historical map of where
that person or where that device we should say, yeah,
has been right, and so you can see where they're,
where they spend their days, which is probably their work
or something like that, where they spend their nights, which

(15:04):
is probably their house, you know, where they spend sort
of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe
a lover's house, something like that. Right, But you can
see everywhere they've gone. You can see if they were
at a specific protest, you could see everybody who was
at a specific protest. You could do a lot of
different things with that, and we think that they get
that data from advertising networks. We know they get it

(15:26):
from apps on your phone, and basically those apps are
sending information to advertising networks which is then sold or
scraped by penleink to add to their database for this app,
and all of this is then sold to law enforcement,
so law enforcement can get this information and none of
it requires a warrant. Currently, a law enforcement does not

(15:49):
think they need a warrant to acquire this data, and
judges have upheld that so far.

Speaker 5 (15:54):
Yeah, so you're saying when you download an app and
you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and
then sold to third party.

Speaker 4 (16:03):
Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps, like
most didn't. We've been really strongly encouraging people to not
give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason
why that app should have location permissions. Right Like, on
my phone, the only app that has location permissions is
my maps app and my weather app, and that's because
I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them. Yeah,

(16:26):
but if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid,
like if I was heading through too something, I mean,
if I was heading to something that I didn't want
people to know I was there, I would turn my
phone off or at least put it on airplane mode, right. Yeah,
you know, short of that, you could turn off location
services entirely for your phone, right and give no app
your location. But yeah, it's our phones are snitches, man,

(16:49):
Our phones are snitches.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, that is the big take home is the big
snake you carry around in your pocket take everywhere with
you talking of its nitches. I can't think of a
way to fucking pivot this into adverts down some cerruss.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
Here's some things you can buy the snitch on you.

Speaker 8 (17:09):
Yeah, hey, buy these things.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
They'll give away information data, sell it to an is
Raeli company, will sell it back to the cops. All right,
we are back. I hope you bought something nice. I

(17:31):
want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting.
It gives people something they can understand a little more
about the web of surveillance around them. Right then they
could feel a little bit more informed. So let's talk
about it. Maybe, Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off,
you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't

(17:51):
know how you want to put it. You're behind some
of them.

Speaker 5 (17:53):
Yeah, certainly I came up with the idea for what
people are now calling we spy. It actually was are
initially called OUI spy. Its organizational unique identifier, which is
the first six characters of a Mac address. But it's art.
You know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it.
It has dual meanings we spy. But this actually kind

(18:16):
of was born from the war driving community, which is
old school driving around trying to find devices, just seeing
what's out there. And so essentially you have all these
devices that are transmitting around you, and it's totally fine
and totally legal to just receive passively, and so things

(18:37):
like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to
just drive around and just kind of see what devices
are in your area. And through this I came up
with a device that was based on remote ID stuff
prior to we spy that just detects drones and then
transmits it over meshtastic, or it detects a device and

(18:58):
transmits it over meshtastic. And then I was like, it'd
be really cool to have a device that if you
have a device that you want to know when comes
around you, it'll just BEP. And so I just took
a micro controller and drew out the design for this
thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the
firmwares that do a few different things. For instance, if

(19:20):
you if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove
by or something, you could put in the OUI for
that or the MAC address for a specific device, and
you can just tell you get alerts when devices are
around you, essentially, so that's where all that began.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, to explain how like this might help someone. Let's say,
like you just wanted to get an idea right of
the surveillance infrastructure that that you encountered in your daily life.
You haven't been going to city council meetings, you don't
know what that shit is. Your local newspaper is dead
now because everyone's local newspaper is dead now, right, so
there's no reporting on it. Like if they wanted to

(19:55):
get one of these devices, cruise around town and work
out like when they were being spied on, Look, what
kind of abilities would it give them?

Speaker 5 (20:03):
Certainly, so there's drone detection on this device, so you
can have it alert when drones are near, or have
it map via remote ID. But the biggest one I
think that has been the most important one is the
flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras then flock,
but this is the important one lately. So a lot

(20:24):
of people are out on you know, out doing war
driving and doing real time research and contributing to, you know,
adding to this database of flockcams signatures essentially, and it's
either Wi Fi or Bluetooth, and some of them are
over cellular too, but essentially this. I made a firmware
called flock you when you drive around, it just war

(20:45):
drives flockcams. And a good friend of mine did some
recent research and found out that if you put the
micro controller into Wi Fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flockcams.
So that firmware just came out a couple of days ago.
So constantly being added to. So if anyone has you know,

(21:05):
mac addresses OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to
raise us surveillance detection shit.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
Yeah, it allows people to then yet lit the crowdsce
or do do community based mapping of this stuff, right
to give people and like I know, I have friends
have reported on gunshot detection software like it won't surprise
people to find out which communities are the most surveiled
and which communities are the least surveiled. Right, But it

(21:36):
nonetheless it is important, Like that's an important function in
making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones, people might be thinking,
why why would I want to look for drones? Drones
are super cool. I just fly them around to see
the birds. Like, you can explain that drones might also
play a role in surveillance.

Speaker 5 (21:55):
Yeah, absolutely. I'm an avid drone flyer, so I developed
just for funzis, you know, and made a drawn detector,
and I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are
the PD unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's
really interesting to see and to see that they're flying,
you know, more regularly than any hobbyist.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah. Yeah, this has become a big part of late cups.
Used to have to send up a helicopter to look
at something from above, right, and they still do all
the time. Hear that shit over my house every day.
But they can also do it with it right now
for much less money. But you want to explain ray
hunter a little bit for people who are like suddenly
shocked by all of this and they want to turn

(22:38):
the car into a beeping machine.

Speaker 4 (22:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure I will do that. I
want to. I want to extol the virtues of we
spuy for for a little bit before that, though, Yeah,
I mean this is this is how I linked up
with Colonel Panics because I thought this was such a
really amazing project. And I think that it's it serves
a couple of purposes, right, I think that there's there
is one very practical purpose of like this can help

(23:03):
you map out the surveillance in your town, right, you can.
You can export the data from this and upload it
directly to block mapper, right, or there's some other site
that'll help you, like plot a route from point A
to point B avoiding flock cameras, which I think is
really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how

(23:25):
many flock cameras are in your town. Like people like
they they they are unobtrusive to a degree, right, Like
they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah, right,
but when you're like I was surprised by how much
it went off in my town, and then I look
up and I'm like, oh yeah, flog cameras, flock camera okay, right,
And It got me used to like spotting those cameras around, right,

(23:48):
And I think that it's a really it's a really
useful piece of propaganda work essentially in that in that
way to get people used to spotting these, to get
people thinking about, well, where are these? How many of
these are there in my town?

Speaker 9 (24:02):
Right?

Speaker 4 (24:03):
Like people are like, well, you could just go look
for them, Yeah, but people don't.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Right, You've got this ship to do. Yeah, Like, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (24:09):
But if I hear that from the from their you know,
really loud buzzer, right, I know that something is going on. Right,
it's more of a it's a little more jarring. It's
it's good in that way.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
Yeah, I see it. It's like a like a little
note Meandineville parrots at your shoulder. And when you're being
spied on, you're being spied on. You're being spied on
just constantly. Yeah, yeah, you realize the extent to which
that is happening.

Speaker 5 (24:33):
Surveillance coal mine canary essentially, And yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
It canary is better better enalogy.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
Right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (24:44):
Instead of every time you're lying and says that, it
just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (24:49):
The other thing that I think is is cool. I
know you I spy and and raigment. And why I
think these are good projects is it gives a lot
of people something to do right. Fascism can really make
people feel helpless, and it's overarching surveillance can really make
people feel helpless. And it's really easy for people to
fall into privacy nihilism and security nihilism right and just

(25:13):
be like, well, I'm gonna be watched constantly. There's nothing
I can do, so, you know, sprit, why do anything right?
And this gives people something to do, right. There's a
thing you can and Americans love buying a thing, right,
We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you
can go buy or build or set up or whatever. Right,
and go start pushing back, even just a little by little,

(25:37):
on the surveillance around you.

Speaker 8 (25:39):
Right.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers
the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other
things right. It becomes easier to go to your city
council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It
becomes easier to find and organize with other people in
your community, right, it becomes easier to start to you know,

(26:00):
think about direct action, you know, in that sense, it
becomes a bit of like propaganda indeed, right, Like we're
giving people the tool to get off their couch and
start to push back and start to fight back and
start to become a part of a community. Right. So
I think it's really important for that with ray Hunters.
So I already kind of described how it works, but

(26:20):
we had we had a few goals with ray hunter.
One was to figure out, you know, how often the
cell size simulators were being used in the US and
around the world. But but you know, I live I
live here, so this is my main focus, but specifically
how often they're being used to spy on protesters, right,
because we were getting this idea that a lot of

(26:41):
activists thought that they were everywhere, right, and I thought
that other things were a much bigger threat, right, Like,
I'm there are there are things that I'm more concerned about.
But also cel size simulators, stingrays are pretty mysterious, right, Like,
we don't we know the broad strokes of how they work,
but we don't know the technical details of what exploits
they are using to you know, essentially trick people's phones

(27:04):
into connecting to them. Right, So this was a this
was a chance to try to get some ground truth
information about that as well. Yeah, and we have succeeded
in that we have a bunch of recordings from around
the US of things that we think are quite likely
to be cell size similiators actively in use by law enforcement,

(27:25):
and move out some ideas about how they're working and
what they're doing, and the other goals that we wanted
to try to like calm down some of the fear
and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was
a threat model that they need to worry about and
give people more accurate threat models.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
Right.

Speaker 4 (27:44):
Yeah, and like also give people, you know, a modicum
of comfort.

Speaker 8 (27:47):
Right.

Speaker 4 (27:48):
This is not a self defense device, right, This is
actually like at the end of the day, this is
a data collect like not data collection. We're not collecting
your data, but this is this is a research project. Yeah,
we're collecting the data about like how often do we
think that we're actually seeing these Right. But it gives
people a modicum of comfort too, Right, because you have this,

(28:08):
you have Rayhunter with you, right, and if it doesn't
go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off,
you're like, Okay, you know, maybe this is not actually
a threat model that I need to worry so much about, right,
And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I
need to worry about? Oh? Probably things like PenLink. Probably
things like Celebrate and the cops arresting me and making
a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah, right,

(28:29):
probably other you know, facial recognition and other things like that,
which I think are the things that you should be
thinking about and worrying about. Yeah, that's been the point
of Rayhunter, and I think it's been successful in that sense.

Speaker 10 (28:41):
Right.

Speaker 4 (28:41):
But yeah, we really, I mean, we want we want
more people to install this, right, especially the next time
Ice lays siege to a city, right, we want to
have we want to have some there. You know, late
in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set
up where we then had like a couple hundred of
these on the ground of Minneapolis, and we didn't find
we did not find anything in Minneapolis that we follow

(29:03):
was conclusive evidence of an mccatcher. Well, Ice was there
laying siege to the city. Hopefully there is no next
time they lay siege to a city.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get,
you know, sort of a grand game set. I'm very
quickly to try to determine if they're using this form
of surveillance or not.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products
and services. If you buy them, that will probably result
in your data being collected, which will in turn be
sole perhaps to an Israeli company who'll say to the cops.

Speaker 4 (29:33):
Shamba would never sell my data.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
All right, we are back. I think that's really good
explanation of the value of these devices. The more you know,
the more you know. And this is a struggle that
I have on a daily basis at the moment. There
are so many things to be angry and scared about
right now. We don't need to invent shit that we
shouldn't be angry and scared about. We need to focus

(30:08):
on the things that are a real threat. And there
are things in this landscape which are a real threat.
And so I think it helps people to have that,
Like it's one thing to go on flog map or
whatever and be like, Okay, well they're there and there
and there it's another one to be like, well, shit,
in my going out to get a pizza with my friends,

(30:29):
I was spied upon five times, and I think that
that is very valuable. At the same time, nobody tried
to sell sites spoof and get my information that way.
I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit
about like how people can organize. San Diego has done
a spectacular job of signing a contract that it can't
stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stop

(30:50):
using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money
to a spying company, which is great. Because our city
is and run by the sea, it will continue to
be a shit show forever apparently. But like, let's assume
that other people have slightly more competent local government.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they said that.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
It's California politics is a shit show, But San Diego
is a fucking joke. Many examples of this.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the
FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our
Lord twenty twenty five, he got indicted by the FBI. So, like,
how stupid do you have to go out so I
have no legs to stand on. But also in California,
so it all tracks.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the great great times on the left coast.

Speaker 8 (31:34):
Yeah, let's talk about how people have.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Organized their communities against surveil. It's like just to like
paint a picture for folks here, right, Like, the flock
camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The
flock camera doesn't know if you came from another state
to obtain reproductive healthcare. The flock camera doesn't know if
you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for

(31:59):
your little baby. It captures all of that shit, right, Like,
there's a broad range of people in this country who
are fucking disgusted at that, people who we might not
be used to organizing with. But perhaps you guys could
like explain the how or if you're aware of instances
where people have organized against state survailan too, would be
cool to hear about that.

Speaker 5 (32:20):
Yeah. I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina,
at an event called nerd Nite, and nerd Night is
essentially it's a way to go to a bar without
just a bunch of drivel. You know, you go and
then somebody does three talks fifteen minutes each, and so
the host was kind enough to give me a twenty
five minute slot at the end to talk about flock

(32:44):
cameras in our city here, And it just so happened
to be happening before they tried to vote on a
real time intelligence center that centralized flock ax on and
all of our drawn data into one just like wall
of surveillance for the city. And so I did this
talk and a city council member showed up our toolest

(33:06):
city council member, Kim Roni. She showed up and dearing
the questions at the end, I was unsure because on
our portal here it said the APD says, you know,
we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim
Roni came up and confirmed that something like four thousand
agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them,

(33:27):
but they can request and we just hand it over.
So yeah, that's that's one thing that we learned at
that time. So this this prompted a big push that
was kind of happening for city council. So a lot
of folks that came to that talk came to city Council,
and I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board.
I mean, this is Appalachia here, nobody, nobody wants to

(33:47):
be surveilled in these hollers.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
You know. Yeah, this is one of those areas where
we can build really broad coalitions, like of people who
we might not agree on with on everything. Like this
is a wret to anyone who wants to do almost
anything apart from I guess just go show uping.

Speaker 5 (34:04):
One interesting point is that over one hundred people showed
up to city council. I'm you know, this is new
to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit,
and I seeded my time to another speaker, but over
one hundred people showed up, and then they pulled it
from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda, so
lots of folks left, but then some folks stucked around
for general comment and still got it out there. But

(34:27):
you know, we'll see what happens down the line. They
love to do that tactic.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
They did the same thing in Oakland when it was
up for When it was up on the agenda, they
said a ton of people showed up to discuss it,
and then they were like Oops, no, never mind, we're
gonna pull that from the agenda today. Yeah, it's such
a shady tactic, but no, I mean, at eff we've
seen we've seen similar things all over the country. You know,
a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts

(34:53):
recently because of community pressure. Right, this doesn't happen in
a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care, right They they
want to score easy political wins. Right block sells them
this as an easy political win. Right this they can
stop carjackings, right they can. They can find car thefts,
they can, they can do all these things that are popular.

(35:14):
Nobody likes being carjacked, nobody likes having their car stolen.
Right But when people show up to city council and
push back and fight against this, it makes it not
an easy political win, right, it makes it It makes
it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies.

Speaker 8 (35:30):
And it should be.

Speaker 4 (35:31):
Yeah, we shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen
to be outside, and like, look, I would love to
not have a car, right, but this is America. Like
everybody drives all the time. That is that is the
society we live in unfortunately. Yeah, and you shouldn't be
You shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society.

(35:55):
And like you said, I think we can build very
broad coalitions around this, right, and we can start to like, hey,
you know, remember how you know how mad you were
about flock, Like, yeah, wait till you find out about
these other surveillance technologies, right, Like, now, let's talk about
campaign finance and how how all these companies you don't
like are financing politicians? Right, Like you can you can

(36:18):
pull people to the left, and this is a good
way to start interacting with those people. Yeah, right, even
people on the right, even sort of our more you know,
the more libertarian folks.

Speaker 5 (36:29):
They hate them too.

Speaker 4 (36:30):
A lot of them have gone full Nazi, But the
ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right, like, should really
care about this stuff, right, and you can you know,
this can be away in with them as well.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need
to in it when else fuck them? Yeah, absolutely, But
I think this is a really good area to organize
because all of us stand to lose something. It's so
fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which like
someone is watching or could be watching. A million reasons
why people could be.

Speaker 9 (37:01):
Mad at that.

Speaker 5 (37:02):
There's plenty of room for abuse, you know there too,
And it's been documented, you know, a recent video with
Ben Jordans. I mean, you know, oh yeah, if you
give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to
vet people on this level, you know. And if you
give people who got you know, God likes surveillance power,
what are they going to end up doing? And there's

(37:23):
been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveiled
their ex partners and then consequently pulled that person over,
which is just insane.

Speaker 4 (37:32):
Yeah. No, they've used this to stop people, to surveill
current partners, ex partners. Like the idea that police would
never abuse their power is completely absurd and anybody who
is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yeah. And yet like like it is another the Dems
are like necessarily I mean, they're not on the side
of goods, especially in this area. But like it is
a big blue state thing, Like don't think that because
you live in California, this isn't happening. It is very
much happening.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
Right right, Yeah, I mean to talk about that real quick,
right like, we have I am blanking on the bill number,
but we have a law in California that prevents California
police agencies from sharing data from flock with from lices,
play regions in general, with outside agencies and with ICE.
And it still happens all the time. Police just willfully

(38:26):
ignore this law, you know, I mean, like we see
immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down
for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't
do that, we know that ICE. You know, people in
ICE have buddies in California law enforcement. They text them,
they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement texts,
runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or

(38:47):
crime or you know some other such nonsense. Yeah, and
then and then you know, sends the information back to ICE.

Speaker 5 (38:54):
Right It's we call that the good old boys system
down here.

Speaker 10 (38:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Yeah. And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people
from local law enforcement all across the country. And this
is part of why right like, it gives a workaround
SB fifty four is the California Values Act, which thank you,
thank you, you are welcome. That is my shit. There
has never been a prosecution under SP fifty four. As
far as I'm aware, this law exists, like largely to

(39:22):
make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are
some parts about transferring people who are in detention already,
But like these these systems give so many workarounds, right,
or like if the data belongs to the company and
not to the city, or if it's stored on a
service somewhere else, like, all of these things provide potential

(39:44):
work around. So I don't think I guess that because
your local city council member has tweeted about ice being bad,
that that means that your flock cameras are not being
used for that. It's very hard to ring fences.

Speaker 10 (39:59):
Shit.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, absolutely, If people want to learn more about this,
if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, if
they want to get a wee spy or mesh detect,
don't explain mesh de tech for people really quickly. We
didn't touch on that one.

Speaker 5 (40:12):
Yeah, mesh detect is essentially it's the first advice that
I made, and its primary function was to detect dron
remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any
drone over I believe it's five hundred grams has to
transmit pilot location and drone location in real time either
via ble or Wi Fi, which is pretty whack for like,

(40:35):
you know, yeah, amateur flyers that just want to fly around.
But that being said, it's a great ocent tool. So
I started with that, and essentially what this does is
mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over
mesh Tastic Laura networks. So you can set up a
for instance, set up a node way out somewhere and

(40:56):
then you can have it sends you a message down
the line when a dron comes by over mesh tastic,
or you can set it up somewhere and have it
say okay, there's a body cam down here or whatever device,
a tesla, an anything.

Speaker 8 (41:09):
You know.

Speaker 5 (41:09):
A lot of devices randomize their OUI these days, mostly phones,
but there's plenty that don't easily detectable. So send it
over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection.

Speaker 4 (41:20):
Essentially.

Speaker 3 (41:21):
So people wanted to get a wee spy to get
a mesh detect, how would they do? How they go
about it? What are the ways they could get on?

Speaker 4 (41:29):
Make one?

Speaker 5 (41:30):
Yeah, I have a website called kernel Panic dot tech
and it's co l O N e L. It's a
little bit of a play on words. But these devices,
like if you really need one of these things, hit
me up, we'll talk. But also it's just two wires,
you know, like you can take my design and just
reverse engineer it and copy it, and I put the
wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source,

(41:52):
so if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub, you can
take this and make it on your own. I've made
Home Assistant integration, so like if a UI pops up
around your house, you can just get an alert via
your smart home. You could just go on there, you know,
dev it out. If you see something that's that I
screwed up, just let me know and I'll fix it
or we'll collab. So it's all open source.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
How about ray Hunter.

Speaker 4 (42:16):
Yeah, so folks can go to Rayhunter dot e ff
dot org and that is our ray Hunter documentation, that's
our the ray Hunter book essentially, and there you can
find links on where to buy the hardware. We do
not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware
on eBay or Amazon. Sometimes. The Orbit is what people

(42:40):
use in the US primarily and like South America in
Europe and parts of Africa. There's a tp link device
that fits the bill better for those areas, and once
you buy the hardware, you can install the software on
it there. The hardware, unfortunately, is not open source because,
like I said, we didn't bull the hardware. We're just

(43:00):
purposing old hardware right when this when the project started,
you could buy the hardware for like ten or twenty bucks.
Now it's harder to find because of people have bought
out a lot of the supply and other other scalpers
have wised up to the fact that people are trying
to buy these. So unfortunately we've created a whole like
mini market. Uh, i'm a I'm a I'm a market maker.

(43:21):
Goddamn it. We've a hyper capitalist right here. But no,
there's like there's a whole you know, mini market of
people selling like already installed ray Hunters on eBay and stuff.
I don't recommend paying more than like forty or sixty
bucks for the hardware, but then, yeah, the software is free.
It's free, it's open source, right, it's on getthub. You

(43:42):
can go edit it right now. And you know, I
know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to
the show, And I just want to say, like, there's
so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right, Like we
keep kind of kind of mentioning that, like a lot
of police hardware is made by this company Axon, and
it has a very unique blue chooth signature that can
be easily detected.

Speaker 10 (44:02):
Right.

Speaker 4 (44:03):
There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can
do with coutsual balance. And the chip that the OUI
spy runs on, the ESP thirty two is this really
powerful little chip that only costs like six bucks if
you buy them wholesale, and it's got Wi Fi blue
shoes and a bunch of really cool capabilities you know
that you could use to make some really cool counter

(44:24):
surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the
tech minded folks to like think about this, Come look
at these projects, you know, Come, you know, write your
own code or make your own projects.

Speaker 11 (44:34):
Right.

Speaker 4 (44:34):
But like the quote from Hackers, and as your beautifully
designed PC board says, colonel, we can snoop onto them
as they snoop onto us, right exactly, we need to
spy back, right, and we need to raise the cost
of them spying on us, right, And that's like, sorry,
let mean that that makes me to another thing go off.
What's really cool about these products is like you can

(44:55):
build right hunters for about twenty bucks, right you could.
You could buy beautiful PC board and the already assembled
thing from Colonel for you know, a few dollars. I
don't know these priced off the time, it's I don't
want to say. Or you could build one for you know,
under twenty bucks, right yep, And you are then, for
you know, twenty or forty bucks, you are making useless

(45:19):
a surveillance tool and surveillance network which costs hundreds of
thousands to millions of dollars. Right The economics here are
on our side, yeah, right, Like this is just like
any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right Like, it costs millions
and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments
of the US to set up this surveillance economy, and

(45:40):
we can defeat it for you know, twenty or forty
bucks each, right, Like, we can do this a lot
longer than they can. They will go broke before we do.
And I think that that's really important, right, Like, like
the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on
our side. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
And it's also like it's cool to understand and make stuff.
I am very good at fixing things that work on
you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts right like that,
that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck. I can
fix my bicycle. I can fix Are you saying you
like ice in combustion?

Speaker 10 (46:16):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
In many ways, both ices will be the yeah, the
end of all of us. But I enjoy to fix one.
I like to look at it and go like uh
huh okay, this goes bang and then this goes up.
And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to
learn a new skill, especially like once you get into
your thirties, like it's good to learn shit. Yeah, and
this is approachable, especially like the guides for these are

(46:42):
very approachable even if you're not like a tech punk.
If this is your first time going on GitHub and
that there are people you can reach out to, like
real nice people. You won't get an AI tech support.
Someone will help you understand this shit, and that is cool.

Speaker 5 (46:57):
There's a platform called the M five stack that makes
it really easy. So like you get as a jaw
ESP thirty two, but M five stack makes it so
that like you don't even have to do soldering, and
they have dragon drop coating, so you can just plug
in sensors and things like you can make a drawing
detector out of one of those and already has like
a screen onboard, and so like it's super cheap and

(47:18):
you could just deb it out really hard and just
go for it.

Speaker 9 (47:21):
You know.

Speaker 5 (47:21):
It's it's easy for makers nowadays, Like like in the fifties, right,
you have to have an it's our military and industry
complex behind you to do this kind of stuff, right,
or a corporation, And now you can just just make
yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Yeah, And like you know, I was in Minnesota there
at the time when lots of ice and CBP agents
were two when they took a lot of people and
killed two people, And like one of the things that
was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone
was so locked in, like to include grandmothers, to include

(47:59):
a dude with a signed said, what would Ronald Reagan do? Like,
no one wanted those people in their town, right, And
that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not
everyone can be out on a street corner whistling a
whistle or driving around right. Some people that have HA
like a really powerful skill set, And if you are
someone who can't be out, you can still help create
these You can help code this stuff like it's beautiful

(48:22):
when our resistance takes the best from all of us
and then we are all better because of.

Speaker 4 (48:28):
That, absolutely beautifully said.

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites,
util aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.

Speaker 5 (48:39):
Take a peek at d flock dot emmy if you
want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet,
but you know they map in the flock cams. You
can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or
to find things you haven't seen. But other than that,
just Colonel paniccdot tech can definitely check out EFF. They
get a lot of good stuff going on and they've
been doing it since the early days.

Speaker 4 (49:00):
At I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys. Specifically,
that's at SSD dot ef dot org.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
We got it.

Speaker 4 (49:09):
We're the only continuously updated and long longest maintained security guys.
There's also the Activist Checklist, which is really great. Another
really great resource, the surveillance self defense guides are almost
like a textbook, like there's a lot of info there,
but if you just need the like quick and dirty
cliffs that it's version. Activist Checklist is really great for that, right,

(49:31):
and they're doing a good job keeping that up. A
lot of respect to them, and then yeah, I check
out you know Rayhunter dot eff dot org for Ray
Hunter stuff, Colonel Panic dot tech for his stuff. Since
he plugged my stuff, I guess the other thing that
I will plug is open Archive, which is a nonprofit
that I'm on the board of. They're making an app

(49:53):
called save which allows you to securely record, archive, and
verify videos of whatever you want, say, such as human
rights abuses or you know, police atrocities or things of
that nature. And so I recommend that project. Go check
them out. They're really good folks. If you're doing a
lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place

(50:16):
to go.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Fantastic nice. We thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker 5 (50:20):
That was great, Thank you for having us.

Speaker 10 (50:22):
Thank you. Counter terrorism, No, I prefer table terrorism.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Counter I hardly know word terrorism.

Speaker 10 (50:42):
Hi, this is it could happen here. Yeah, I'm Garrison Davis.
That's Robert Evans and.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
Not a lot to be proud of with that introduction.

Speaker 10 (50:50):
No, not much to be proud of. But there's also
not much to be proud of considering the twenty twenty
six White House counter Terrorism Strategy.

Speaker 8 (50:59):
That's right.

Speaker 10 (51:00):
So I think we put equal amount of work into
this as Sebastian Gorga.

Speaker 8 (51:04):
Did every year.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
The new counter terrorism list is It's My Dune, you know,
or whatever big movie's coming out this year.

Speaker 10 (51:12):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
I was excited.

Speaker 10 (51:13):
Yeah, I mean I was excited until I actually read it.
And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. And
it's a short one. This is very short. Actually, this
is just fourteen pages of actual text, about half the
length of previous comparable documents. Now, there's been a lot
of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released,

(51:37):
and we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's
first start by talking about how the document starts with
a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump, dated
May twenty twenty sixth. Trump lists counter terrorism accomplishments from
the first year of a second term, like mobilizing DHS
to remove illegal alien criminals in ghiest sympathizers to arresting

(52:02):
the isis K operative who planned the Abbey Gates suicide
bombing in Afghanistan, and rescuing over one hundred American hostages.
Speaking of Trump also says he secured the release of
the remaining October seventh hostages end quote began the process
of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven
for terrorism and extremism unquote, and that's through establishing Trump's

(52:23):
own Board of Peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight
Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt quote unquote devastating blows
to Iran, which Trump calls the world's number one state
sponsor of terror. Other actions Trump admin has taken include
designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and quote unquote deadly cartels as

(52:43):
terrorist organizations, with Trump boasting that he quote began using
the strength and power of the US military to stop
and destroy cartel operations. The example that he includes here
is when the US armed forces captured the quote unquote
narco terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. So Trump's opening

(53:07):
forward covers the majority of what this sixteen page total
strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote cartel's jihadists
or the governments who support them. Now, what Trump doesn't
actually write about in this forward is what most reporting
on the new counter terrorist strategy has focused on. The

(53:30):
later inclusion of left wing terrorism as one of the
nation's leading terror threats, and that's what we'll be mostly
talking about today. Good though we will cover the other
two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on now.
This strategy is the brainchild of White House counter Terrorisms

(53:52):
are Sebastian Gorka, a far right Hungarian commentator who briefly
served in Trump's first term. This new document states, quote,
a new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by
violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and
the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed.

(54:14):
We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that
make established ways of doing counter terrorism insufficient or obsolete.
This strategy lists three main types of terror groups the
US is currently facing narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy
Islamic terrorists, and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and

(54:39):
anti fascists. Now we'll get to the narco terrorist stuff later,
but let's start with that last line, which is clearly
clearly pulling from Trump's Antifa terrorism Executive Order as well
as the National Security Presdential and Mirandum Number seven, which
directed federal law enforcement to investigate potential crimes relating to
political violence and terrorism quote under the umbrella of self

(55:03):
described anti fascism. This is a pretty clear political weaponization
of the intelligence community apparatus, and the new counter terrorist
strategy doubles down on what ms M seven established writing quote.
In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national

(55:25):
counter terrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization
of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti American,
radically pro transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the
tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home,
identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa,

(55:46):
and use law enforcement to cripple them operationally before they
can name or kill the innocent. We will do the
same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments
undertaking lethal plots on US soil or against Americans anywhere quote.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any
Antifa groups killing Americans.

Speaker 8 (56:05):
They have one case. They have one case, not ANTIFA groups,
but yes.

Speaker 10 (56:09):
Oh they don't have cases of state sponsors backing ANTIVA,
but they do have one instance included a violent left
wing extremism, which we'll get to in a sec one
example across this like fourteen to sixteen page document. Now,
the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very
similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations

(56:33):
animating violent conduct. Included NSPM seven, anti Americanism, anti capitalism
to Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government,
extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility to those
who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
After this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote,

(56:55):
we are taking ideology and counter ideology very seriously now,
despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left wing extremism,
something that Biden never really did with right wing extremism
at least some documents.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Like this, no shocking.

Speaker 10 (57:13):
Despite that clear focus, this counter terrorism strategy claims that
counter terrorism operations will be executed quote unquote a politically
and actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the
Biden admin previously weaponized counter terrorism operations against innocent Americans
great stuff quote, as real threats were ignored or underplayed.

(57:36):
Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and
Conservatives committed by violent left wing extremists, including the assassination
of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.

Speaker 8 (57:49):
Unquote.

Speaker 10 (57:51):
This is the only example of quote unquote left wing
violence included in this entire document. Just this, just this
one killing now on executive disorder. We have reported on
a few instances where the Trump administration has tried to
weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as
being motivated by like anti Christian bias, even when the

(58:14):
people committing those attacks were themselves Christian, and for all
that we can tell, we're not religiously motivated against Christians.
But they tried to glom onto a few of these incidents.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination exactly.

Speaker 10 (58:29):
Right, Yeah, but they've tried tried to try to glom
onto these examples to build this narrative of like anti
Christian violence which is rising in the United States. And
as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't
have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack.
More on that later. After this new counter terrorism strategy dropped,
I did the thing that I assume anyone would do

(58:51):
and read through the past like three or four counter
terrorism strategies.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
Really, yeah, great stuff from the past ten years. Good work.

Speaker 10 (59:01):
Trump released one in twenty eighteen, and Biden's came out
in twenty twenty one. Now, the first mention of any
non Islamic terrorist group in Trump's twenty eighteen counter terrorism
strategy is the Nordic Resistance Movement quote, a prominent transnational
self described national socialist organization with anti Western views that

(59:22):
has conducted violent Attacksicans, Muslims, left wing groups, and others unquote.
This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on
Islamic terrorism, specifically ISIS and al Qaeda, but also briefly
mentions the Neo Nazi National Action Group in one paragraph
and in another reads quote, the United States has long
faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not

(59:45):
motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead motivated
by other forms of violent extremism such as racially motivated extremism,
animal rights extremism, environmental stremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia
extremism quot but that's really all has on non Islamic
extremism in what is a thirty four page document.

Speaker 8 (01:00:07):
By the time Biden.

Speaker 10 (01:00:08):
Got into office, White's premacist violence had risen dramatically and
the Biden had been released a domestic terrorism specific counter
terrorism strategy. This document, released in June twenty twenty one,
starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the
KKK during reconstruction to attacks on Black churches and synagogues

(01:00:28):
and the Al Paso shooting at the walmart. Then the
document covers what it calls anti government or anti authority
violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Congressional baseball
game shooting, and the recent January sixth attack. I'm going
to read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here

(01:00:49):
to compare quote. Today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of
violent ideological motivations. They also take on a variety of forms,
from loan actors to small groups of in formally aligned
individuals to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards the specific communities,
to violent self proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of
animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those

(01:01:14):
who promote the superiority of the white race, and militia
vilencxtremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.
These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence
towards the same segment or segments of the American community,
whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or other religious minorities,
women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals, or others. Their insistence

(01:01:38):
on violence can at times be explicit. It also can
at times be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted
in a perception of the superiority of the white race
that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent
notions of racial purity or cleansing. Now, Biden's strategy does
later specifically mention quote unquote, anarchist violence, though within the

(01:02:01):
broader context of anti government or anti authority extremism quote.
A significant component of today's threat includes self proclaimed militias
and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist
government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the US government
based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose
all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions which

(01:02:26):
they perceive as harmful to society. The document goes on
to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists and other groups that
resist or oppose legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by
the government. And this strategy also names a few single
issue ideologies which may motivate violence, like abortion, animal rights,

(01:02:47):
environmental issues, or involuntarily seliment violent extremism. But that little
section there is the closest that the Biden's strategy gets
to quote unquote left wing violence as Trump would call it.
But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on like
left right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the

(01:03:08):
exact motivating factor driving the violence. His document reads, quote,
the definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no
distinction based on political views right, left or center, and
neither should we unquote. Biden's ag Merk Garland would often
say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not

(01:03:29):
policing ideology, and quote unquote, violence not ideology was an
often repeated refrain during the Biden administration, and this is
something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI
investigated Stop Cop City under Biden, and a significant portion
of the domestic terror related charges while Biden was in office.

(01:03:51):
We're levied against Stop Coop City protesters by the State
of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies, and
almost all of whom we're charged with terrorism. We're not
actually charged with any specific violent crime.

Speaker 8 (01:04:05):
We'll talk more.

Speaker 10 (01:04:06):
About the partisan weaponization of terrorism or counter terrorism after
some ads.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Excellent and we're back.

Speaker 10 (01:04:30):
It's such a blast from the past. Like read through
all of these Biden counter terrorism manuals.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
Yeah, boy, back in those days. Yeah, it makes makes
me nostalgic.

Speaker 10 (01:04:40):
It's just a totally different world.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
Yep.

Speaker 10 (01:04:43):
Like it's unfathomable to like think of the federal government
now using this kind of language talk about like ethnic
cleansing being done by the white supremacist motivated terrorists. It's
it's like it's just a totally different, totally different ballgame now.
In Trump's A New Strategy, it states that under the
Biden admin, US officials quote used their significant powers to

(01:05:05):
politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored,
wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections unquote.

Speaker 8 (01:05:13):
Now.

Speaker 10 (01:05:14):
Under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism related
prosecutions following January sixth, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump
himself and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop
This Steal efforts. In twenty twenty two, the DOJ opened
a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations, and just

(01:05:34):
that year, one hundred million dollars of additional resources were
allocated to the DOJFBI, and DHS for countering domestic terrorism.

Speaker 3 (01:05:43):
Now.

Speaker 10 (01:05:43):
This increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks.
The Government Accountability Office reported that between twenty and ten
and twenty twenty one, domestic terrorism related investigations had grown
by three hundred and fifty six percent, with two hundred
and thirty one confirmed incidents. According to the DHS, in

(01:06:04):
just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI
domestic terrorists investigations more than doubled during this time period.
The intelligence community classified racially or ethnically motivated violence as
the most common type of attack. It's thirty five percent
of domestic terrorism, and this category also contributed to the
most debts. The second most common type of attack was

(01:06:25):
anti government or anti authority motivated violent extremism, with thirty
two percent of attacks, and that category covered a lot
of different things, including the malicious stuff as well as
the anarchist stuff. It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though, yeah. Now,
the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely
to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were

(01:06:47):
more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison,
Trump's new counter terrorism strategy does not contain a single
mention of racially or ethnically motivated by extremism, not one
which is like a which is astounding, right, even like
beyond beyond the clear partisan what weaponization like just from

(01:07:11):
a counter terrorism standpoint like this is this is bizarre,
This is this is quite quite a choice. The last
pillar of Biden's counter terrorist strategy was quote confronting long
term contributions to domestic terrorism, like racism, bigotry, religious or
ethnic hatred unquote. Meanwhile, Trump's new strategy says that the

(01:07:31):
fearsome powers of the US government must never be abused quote,
whether under the guise of de radicalization, protecting our democracy,
or any other pretext unquote. Great, which is I don't
even know how to respond to that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
Yeah, and what always yeah, Like what are you supposed
to say?

Speaker 10 (01:07:53):
I mean it. It demonstrates they're not actually interested in
combating what is the most lethal form of domestics no terrorism, No.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
And they never have been.

Speaker 8 (01:08:03):
Even in Trump's first term.

Speaker 10 (01:08:04):
At least they moved towards that as the threat was increasing,
But now they just have no interest whatsoever. And actually
like target deradicalization as an example of the fearsome powers
of the US government.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
Yeah, like the thing that never worked and like never
actually did anything. Is the big boogeyman for you guys.

Speaker 8 (01:08:24):
Okay, it's wild.

Speaker 10 (01:08:27):
The new strategy includes a few examples of US government overreach. Quote.
Our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community,
which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats,
or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a
political tool, whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional Mass

(01:08:47):
in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school
board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trumpet's associates. This
administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being
used politically against innocent Americans unquote. So that's the main
example of partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start
with this first one, targeting Catholics attending traditional Mass. This

(01:09:11):
refers to a twenty twenty three FBI memo from the
Richmond Field Office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent
extremists were displaying a growing interest in traditionalist Catholicism up
great and how trad Catholic extremist violence could be mitigated
by building connections within the church. Sure now, random Latin

(01:09:33):
Mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this
memo was discussing the quote unquote growing overlap between the
white nationalist movement and quote unquote radical traditionalist Catholics, and
how white supremacists may use trad cafe social media to
promote violence and recruit. This memo also made a distinction

(01:09:56):
from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer or Latin mass and
the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call
radical traditional Catholics what we would just call tradcats like colloquially.
After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have
scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
Sure, yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in
Cash Betell's era.

Speaker 10 (01:10:22):
I'm gonna go out a little bit of like a
tangent here because I wanted to get more information about
this Richmond Field Office memo and investigation. So it turns
out the FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest at a church,
and this church was not considered by the Vatican to
be in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it's
still Catholic affiliated. This priest refused to speak with the

(01:10:46):
FBI about communications he had with a parisher who was
a self described radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist, self described
who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a
special needs school. Are resistance against the government, learning how
to manufacture pipe bombs and using untraceable means to purchase
supplies to manufacture three D printed weapons. Posting about that

(01:11:09):
on this Catholic account.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Yeah, nothing sketchy.

Speaker 10 (01:11:11):
So this Nazi was actually previously arrested in twenty nineteen
after being overheard making comments about political violence while purchasing
a several AR fifteen style rifles, multiple high capacity magazines,
and large quantities of two two three ammunition, as well
as making online statements advocating civil war and the murder
of politicians. Now, after getting out of prison, this guy
started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The

(01:11:35):
FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief
systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to
commit violence. He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to
possessing a destructive device. So the FBI was looking into
this priest because this priest was not talking to them
about what the communications were with this Nazi, communications that

(01:11:57):
they know existed, and so they briefly looked into him.
This caused a massive backlash among the right. This is
where Marjorie Taylor Green was posting about defunding the FBI.
A lot of the dismantled FBI stuff coming from the
right was based on this incident of the FBI, you know,
targeting conservative churchgoers. Little side tangent there. The other main

(01:12:18):
example from the Trump counter terrorism strategy refers to parents
and school boards. This is in reference to a letter
from the National school Boards Association requesting federal intervention into
the harassment, threats and attacks against school boards in twenty
twenty one. And this letter read, in part quote, these
heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of

(01:12:40):
domestic terror and hate crimes unquote. After this letter was sent,
the ag Mayork Garland announced that the government was going
to look into these threats. This too, sparked a huge
backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating
parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later,
the National school Board Association apologized for some of the

(01:13:03):
language they included in this letter. So those are the
two man examples of this of this horrendous government overreach
and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans.

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Yeah, of course, I mean, it's just it's frustrating how
like reality doesn't matter at all here, But like what
is the point of even like going in and line
by line here's everything that's wrong with that. I don't
even know anymore.

Speaker 10 (01:13:28):
No, it's not a matter of convincing. It's often a
matter of just holding my sanity together, I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):
Yeah, yeah, No, No, it's important to like look at
it and to some extent document how bullshit it is.
But it's also just like it's incredibly frustrating to like
see this fucking tradcat priest get away with shit that
like people would go to prison for if the ideologies
were reversed.

Speaker 10 (01:13:49):
You know, yeah, sure you if you switch this stuff around,
you can imagine how the Trump administration would be handling it. Yeah,
a unitarian pastor righting planning some kind of attack with
like an Antifa supercilgier well.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Or just if you've got like a unitarian pastor or whatever,
like someone who is tangentially attached to someone left wing
who was like posting about carrying out an attack, like,
the level of backlash would be higher and would hurt
more people.

Speaker 10 (01:14:18):
No, horrendous, We've seen stuff like that happen. The sections
on left wing terrorism in this new strategy actually only
make up a few paragraphs of this sixteen page document.
So what is the rest of this counter terrorism strategy
really about? Then? The first priority is the quote neutralization

(01:14:39):
of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations un quote.
The primary threat is the so called narco terrorists previously mentioned,
And this term narco terrorists was invented in the eighties
by the President of Peru to describe attacks on the
police by drug traffickers, but since then the term has
come to mean a variety of things. In this new strategy,

(01:15:02):
Trump doesn't just consider drug trafficking as a means to
fund terrorist groups, but also implies that drug overdoses themselves
constitute a form of terrorism.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
Right.

Speaker 10 (01:15:14):
Quote. The borderless America created by the Biden administration was
so badly exploited by threat actors that during one twelve
month period, more Americans died as a result of illicit
drugs flooded into the country by the cartels than all
the US servicemen killed in combat since nineteen forty five. Unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
I just look at those numbers for cigarettes. Let's just
stand tobacco in. Let's just throw tobacco into the mix
sea that. Oh, does it dwarf every other drug related
death till combined? Yeah, it does.

Speaker 10 (01:15:45):
Obviously an absurd statement. Yeah, but I think It is
crucial to understanding how the administration is operating by understanding
that they consider drug overdoses to be terrorism. And that's
a big part of how they're able to do what
they're currently doing is by weaponizing terrorism as a category.
The strategy later considers illicit fentanyl and its core precursor

(01:16:08):
chemicals to be weapons of mass destruction. Sure right, this
is the same category of weapons as nuclear bombs. That
is how they categorize it. Technically, when the US government
uses the term terrorism, it's supposed to mean activities that
involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation
of the criminal laws of the United States or any state,

(01:16:28):
that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a
civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coersion, or to affect the conduct of the
government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. It's really that
that last half that constitutes the terrorism part that separates
terrorism from just any crime. It's the intent to intimidate

(01:16:49):
or coerce civilian populations or influence the government. But the
FBI defines international terrorism as quote violent criminal acts committed
by individuals and or groups who are inspired by or
associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations unquote. So if you
designate a group of foreign terrorist organization, that means that

(01:17:12):
what they are doing is terrorism. And that last bit
leads us to Trump's kind of core strategy to combat
drug trafficking, designating cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations,
which will quote make available additional intelligence authorities and denying
disrupt their financial streams and access to the United States unquote.

(01:17:34):
After the designation, Trump authorized quote dozens of strikes by
the Department of War against cartel drug boats, resulting in
a more than ninety percent decrease in maritime drug smuggling
into the United States unquote. Citation needed. Yeah, we will
get into the second priority of the counter terrorist strategy

(01:17:55):
after these ad breaks. All right, we are back for
our last section here. Let's start by talking about the
second priority of the counter terrorism strategy released last week.

(01:18:19):
The second is the targeting and destruction of Islamist terror groups,
especially Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and isis k.
Trump's new strategy blames continuing jie hottist plots against Americans
quote in part because of the failed forever war policies,
the empowerment of terror supporting regimes like Iran, and a

(01:18:42):
past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on unquote. So
how's that going? How's that going? I haven't I haven't
checked the news in about three months, Robert, can you
briefly fill me in?

Speaker 4 (01:18:55):
Good?

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):
No, no, no problems.

Speaker 10 (01:18:57):
It's flied.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
Everything's fine.

Speaker 10 (01:18:59):
Yeah, we solve all the failed forever war policies.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
We did no more forever wars. We've got a short war,
but it's one of our shortest garrison.

Speaker 10 (01:19:07):
Iran is in no way empowered.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
I can't. I can't tell you how short this war
is at the moment, you know, incredibly short war.

Speaker 10 (01:19:14):
Iran is an exercising economic influence over the whole world
right now.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
I know you think that this has albin a disaster,
but I'm going to put on a graph how long
World War II lasted next to how long this little
adventure in Iran has lasted, and you tell me if
it's a problem. Mmmmmm, Wow, one of those numbers is
bigger than the other.

Speaker 8 (01:19:32):
Yes, we're fine.

Speaker 10 (01:19:33):
It's wild. It's absolutely that shit that they have this
in here yeah, like, yeah, it's so funny, it's insane.
So the document talks about Islamist terrorism in Asia, Africa,
the Middle East, and Europe for over four pages. It
takes up a significant chunk of the strategy. These sections
of the document largely mirror Trump's National security strategy from

(01:19:56):
last year and talks about how quote unfed mass migration
in Europe has been the transmission belt for terrorists, and
discusses the need for quote honest conversations about Islamism and
how hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals.
The more these alien cultures grow and the longer current

(01:20:19):
European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed. As the
birthplace of Western culture and values. Europe must act now
to halt its willful decline unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
Sure.

Speaker 10 (01:20:31):
One of the more explicitly fascist sections of this strategy,
Trump's new CT strategy does discuss the integration of counter
cartel and counter terrorism efforts, saying it allows the US
to quote disrupt the shared networks, financing and logistical routes
used by both designated drug traffickers and Islamist terrorists unquote.

(01:20:54):
The main success story of this strategy is the capture
of Maduro quote, the illegitimate leader of Venezuela, a cartel
boss in league with terror sponsor Oroan and its terror
proxy Hezbolah un quote. We've talked about this strategy for
like thirty five minutes, and you may have noticed that
so far we've really just talked about identifying targets with

(01:21:18):
very little discussion actually on actual strategy on how to
counter these threats. That's because the document has very little
on actual strategy to counter these threats. It lays out
three steps for countering terrorism, identifying terror actors and plots
before they happen, cutting off their arms, funding and recruiting streams,

(01:21:40):
and ultimately destroy the established threat group. Methods for going
about this are quote a series of similar, high intensity
but short campaigns against jihadist groups love to see that happen,
as well as sanctions, shadow fleet, oil tanker interdiction, and
covert operations to disrupt funding and state sponsorship of terrorism.

(01:22:03):
That's it. That is really the bulk of like the
actual strategy of how to do this.

Speaker 2 (01:22:09):
Yeah, and that's the important thing to remember for all
that's scary about this, and for all, like the people
freaking out, and not to say if there's nothing to
be concerned about. This is the government saying this. They
have a lot of ability to fuck with. People certainly
should be concerned about this, but at the same time,
don't forget they don't know what they're doing or have
a real plan for most of what they're doing.

Speaker 8 (01:22:28):
No like this is.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
Hacked together, cobbled together, and executed by people who don't
know what they're doing and at least in one major case,
are drunk all the time.

Speaker 10 (01:22:36):
Now, it's pretty stunning to compare this to the twenty
twenty one BIND one, which is very, very complicated in
laying out actual strategy to dismantle domestic terrorist operations, and
this just this lacks a lot of a lot of
the same strategic outlook. Lastly, the strategy outlines current functional

(01:22:56):
aspects of the threat environment. That's the term at use
this functional aspects. These are like complicating factors. I'll go
through these line by line. New and evolving collaboration between
nation states and threat groups such as cartels, alliances between
established terror groups, exploitation of new weapons like drones by

(01:23:17):
cartels and jihttists, the remaining threat of terrorists acquiring and
using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, which President Trump has
rightly labeled the single greatest threat to this world unquote.
All of this stuff is like Bush era terrorism stuff,
Like this is all very outdated, not necessarily outdated, but

(01:23:38):
like it's not cutting edge. I guessed what is what
would be the more correct way of putting this, Like
you're just talking about drones now in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:23:47):
But another one of these quote unquote functional aspects is
quote new and deepening alliances between the far left and Islamists,
i e. The Red Green Alliance unquote. This really just
takes up a single line. They don't expound on this.
I'm pretty sure this would relate to like pro Palestine protests.

(01:24:09):
Do is this relates people on the far left either
supporting Hamas or just generally being pro Palestine or anti Israel.
That's what they're calling a Red Green Alliance.

Speaker 2 (01:24:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:24:20):
Yeah, yeah, it's just like a throwaway alive. But I
thought it's worth including just because of how odd it is,
Like it really stands out. It's at like the middle
to end of the document, way after they actually do
their like three paragraphs on left wing extremism. They just
kind of throw that in there as a new complicating factor. Yeah,
of course, So what does this all mean for the left?

(01:24:42):
Almost nothing in here that pertains to left isn't already
in National Security Potential Memorandum number seven. This new strategy
does not designate trans people as a class as terrorists,
nor does it categorize trans people as nihilistic violent extremists,
like some have previously reported, in essentially states like NSPM

(01:25:04):
seven that being extremely pro transgender can be a motivating
factor in carrying out terroristic violence, and the only example
provided is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which we still
don't have an illuminated motive for besides the suspect allegedly
expressing frustration at Kirk for spreading vaguely defined hate. The

(01:25:28):
strategy claims, quote, our counter terrorism powers will not be
used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us.
We will not permit the weaponization of America's unparalleled counter
terrorism capabilities for partisan purposes quote, despite clear political weaponization
and Gorka specifically specifically mentioning that we're going to be

(01:25:49):
countering ideology now. A way to kind of explain what's
going on here, Like think about racially motivated or ethnically
motivated violent extremism. Being racist isn't illegal, but if someone
threatens to shoot up a black church because they are racist,
then that qualifies as racially motivated bilent extremism. The Trump

(01:26:12):
administration is basically using the same mo against people with
left wing, anarchist or anti fascist views to either stop
crimes before they occur, or crack down harder on people
or groups who have committed crimes motivated by those ideologies.
The Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already directed to investigate

(01:26:34):
Antifa aligned groups and individuals quote engaged in acts of
political violence and intimidation, and that's been happening since at
least October of twenty twenty five. What's in this documents
already been in effect for a while, and we've already
seen some of the results of this in the federal
Prairie Land trial last February, following the shooting of a

(01:26:54):
cop outside an immigration detention facility in Texas last summer.
The government in that case used the specter of Antifa
to link a group of defendants together and argue for
ideological motive, and a federal jury convicted eight people of riot, conspiracy,
and material support to terrorists, even if each individual defendant

(01:27:15):
did not commit an act of violence. Yeah, So there's
cases like that, and then there's also cases against the SPLC, which,
while the government hasn't specifically said are part of their
anti antifa investigations, you can see some similar through lines there.

Speaker 8 (01:27:31):
Yeah, right, in a broad.

Speaker 10 (01:27:34):
Sense, that's how it relates to like current left wing activism. Right,
the sort of threats and risk that has existed really
ever since Trump took office, but especially after the Antifa
Terrorism Executive Order and National Security Postential memorid AM number
seven are still in effect. That is still the same
level of risk. This document doesn't introduce anything new.

Speaker 9 (01:27:54):
Now.

Speaker 10 (01:27:55):
Overall, what this strategy tries to do is connect all
of the ideological targets of this administration, right, put them
onto a map, intersecting each other. That's what it's doing
with this Red Green alliance. So it's trying to connect
all of these ideological targets while expounding on Trump's justification
for mass deportations of suspected cartel members, military strikes on

(01:28:16):
boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela, and
the ongoing war in the Middle East. That is really
most of what the document's trying to do is actually
build up the counter terrorism justification for all of Trump's
military actions. And that's one thing that has I guess
slightly frustrated me in people's discussion of this new strategy

(01:28:37):
that a lot of it's based on threats to left
wing activists in the United States, while not really focusing
on the bulk of the document, which is building the
justification for Trump's murderous military actions around the world. Right,
actions that are blowing up people in boats, bombing schools
in Iran, things that have like a sizable death count,

(01:28:58):
and the sort of logistical and theoretical framework that Trump
is building through this document does have really really devastating
lethal consequences, And I guess that's what I wanted to
focus on a little bit, a little bit more, rather
than just the targeting of left wing extremists.

Speaker 2 (01:29:15):
Yep, all right, well fun, I guess we'll see what
happens next.

Speaker 10 (01:29:19):
Yeah, I mean, we're gonna see them continue to carry
this out. Yeah, both domestically against left wing activists and overseas,
including like right now, right, this is what they're doing
in Iran, they're talking about Cuba. This strategy does not
grant them any new powers, but it does give us
a look into how they are thinking about regime change
and the Donro doctrid.

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):
Right, yeah, Jesus. It's also dumb.

Speaker 10 (01:29:41):
This US domination of the Western hemisphere. And I think
that's really the core of what's driving this document, is
the US domination of the Western hemisphere, rather than explicit
political persecution of ideological left wing enemies, which is of
course still a factor. It's still a thing to be
concerned about and monitoring and fighting back against.

Speaker 5 (01:30:02):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
Absolutely well, all right, guys, and that does it for
us today? Huh yeah, let's nobody elsewhere, all right, see
you around.

Speaker 9 (01:30:24):
Humanity is not a parasite, but the systems we collectively
uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on
us due to our interdependence as we rely on each
other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are, are,
how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain

(01:30:45):
their whole of course, through ideology, the sets of ideas
about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture,
et cetera. And to some extent they maintain their hold
through violence, and I believe we must break free from
this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating

(01:31:06):
with each other with nature, and I'll talk about those
ways at the end. By the way, hello and welcome.
It could happen here. I'm andrews Age Andrewism on YouTube,
and I'm joined today by.

Speaker 8 (01:31:20):
Mia Wong also here. Yeah, we're doing great interest, yepee.

Speaker 9 (01:31:28):
So I want to talk about parsism, the development of
paristism over time, as discussed in Samuel Milla McDonald's book Progress,
which I highly recommend quite an enjoyable read. So I
actually really first heard about that book years ago before
it was even out, and I had reached out and
I was like, oh, I would love to, you know,

(01:31:49):
get a copy as soon as it's available and talk
about it and stuff. And you know, I was at
that point in my life, I was really voraciously consuming
these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course
we know the flowers with these grand narratives. They have
limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these

(01:32:13):
narratives and understanding aspects and angles of our history. At
least when you take a critical approach to them, because
I mean history is, as the name implies, a story.
You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can
be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history,

(01:32:34):
and so progress offers one framework through its three eras
of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different
forms can co exist, forms can come and go. It
is in this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But
there are trends that we can observe. And so these

(01:32:55):
three phases that McDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress,
forms of parisitism, and agents of history. And I think
it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics
and ecology that intertwined to make up history. Obviously not

(01:33:15):
perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see
certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a
lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist adjacent approaches to
tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Pt.
Gal Loose had worship and power. JAMEC. Scott has against

(01:33:36):
the Green and in progress, although I don't think he
is anarchist anarchist a jacent in progress McDonald's starts with
the beginning of recorded civilization in three thousand BCE and
looks at the way that many early states developed from
a blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So, I

(01:34:00):
mean humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years
before recorded history, right, they spread across the globe. They
experimented with all kinds of different social, political, and economic
organizations that are now lost. The Time and the Dawn
of Everything by David Krieber and David wen Grew kind
of wrestles with some of this. In the early years

(01:34:20):
of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to
state development. From roughly three thousand BCE to fourteen hundred CE.
This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies
such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, meso America, and medieval Europe
saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this

(01:34:46):
phase Heaven in the book, not to co sign it
as an ideal, but to illustrate the prominence of religious
power in this time period. And me I know, even
hosting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming
has its uns people have nowadays about actually engaging with

(01:35:07):
what it means materially for the experience of domination in
our day to day lives.

Speaker 8 (01:35:14):
Yeah, well, and this some thing you can you can
look at sort of in that period is the emergence
of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes
as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems.
Greer talks about this, I think debt actually, where a
bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become

(01:35:36):
like credit, are these things that are developed in order
to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes,
and so you have the situation where, you know, the
things that are going to become the building blocks of
economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history
are developed in order to in order to fuel these
sort of hierarchical massive complexes where just staggering amounts of

(01:36:02):
resources are like fueled into into these sort of temple complexes.
And that's a you know, that's a thing that continues
to current present day.

Speaker 9 (01:36:11):
Indeed, you know, indeed we have we have temple complex
like what is temple complexes in the sense of megachurches nowadays.

Speaker 8 (01:36:19):
Yeah, it's like what is what is the megachurch, but
like the temple complex is force.

Speaker 9 (01:36:25):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. That's the thing, right, Like we
are seeing an echo of this historical time period even
in the present, because the idea of progress in this
time and in these places was about progressing toward a
higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods,
you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in

(01:36:48):
their proper place in that order. And so you had
the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture
which established this particular kind of order. And when disasters struck,
whether it be floods or drought, certain vasions, this was
a sign, a sign of the times perhaps.

Speaker 4 (01:37:08):
That the order was breaking down.

Speaker 9 (01:37:10):
And so it's really funny to me that, you know,
in this progressive account of the idea of progress that
McDonald's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of
progress have not entirely gone away. You know, they haven't
been replaced by the next era. They have just taken
on subtler forms, and sometimes not as subtler forms.

Speaker 8 (01:37:33):
Yeah, there's there's a concept that the journal Chwang uses
where I mean they're specifically talking about like the ways
that elements of like the Chinese, I guess you call
it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then
used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing
from biology called exceptati where something like evolutionarily that was

(01:37:54):
used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a
new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like finn
becomes hand like that. I'm a lot of great biologists,
but this is this kind of thing where like you
have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the
old notion of what progress was of like the sort
of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like excapated by

(01:38:18):
the next thing that's going to happen, and that's taken
by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing,
and we still have our sort of like versions of
it that have been taken through like countless numbers of
world systems.

Speaker 9 (01:38:30):
Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were
differences and how they would have i think approached religion
and thoughts of religion compared to how we do yep
psychologically in a time like that that they didn't really
have this more prominent psychocoulturally accepted secular line set that
we have today, where religion it could even be seen

(01:38:51):
as something separate from everything else. You know, for them,
religion was whole reality, worked the seasons, the hardest illness,
Victorian War. All of this was interpreted through a sacred lens.
People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or
at least thought about it in that lens, and they
understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy. On

(01:39:16):
a material basis, though, because I mean we do have
to think materially and not solely ideologically, these societies engage
in what McDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract
resources like food, labor, and land. And the agents of
this paris are city states, kingdoms, and empires. On the
city state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlends,

(01:39:40):
and on an empire level, their conquerringe neighbors, done for
either integration and taxation or tribute or slavery. But due
to the limits of the technology of the time, you know,
they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that
we do today, there were limits to how far an
empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits

(01:40:02):
and would often devolve power or fracture. Tensions would begin
to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority.
Belief systems came into conflict, and contact and intellectual traditions developed.
Over time, governance would get more bureaucratic, religions would face
reform due to challenges from within, and by the time

(01:40:25):
that we approached the late medieval period around the thirteen
hundreds and fourteen hundreds, at least from a europe focused
account or Old World focused account, the world is indeed
change it. Transition has begun from this heaven phase to
the next phase in McDonald's framework, as in the nation

(01:40:56):
phase from fourteen hundred to nineteen hundred, where we move
away from a world of cosmic order to a world
more distinctly human, a world of human order religion phasis,
of course, but authority has begun to move from the
heavens down to Earth, an earth that could be observed,
could be measured, navigated and controlled by human beings. And

(01:41:20):
so we see this in this time with the emergence
of the sciences and the emergence of newly minted political
theories and the idea of progress. In this time was
redefined as expanding knowledge, increase in efficiency, mastering the environment,
hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, advances and navigation and

(01:41:41):
so on, and consequently parasitism as a process becomes more disposed.
Extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by
maritime tree routes taken resources from different parts of the world,
including sugar, cotton, spices, metal, and labor, all flowing through

(01:42:02):
increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains. As
wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks the extraction of others,
you know, the rich is being built up in one
place because of the poverty being developed in another place.
As the agents of this time of the kingdoms and empires,

(01:42:25):
but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. And
to be clear, I'm not trying to say that these
are the sole agents history in any of these particular periods,
which is that they were significant. I don't want to
deny the role of you know, the politics from below
the rabble, as Graba sometimes refers to them, would have

(01:42:47):
also shaped the development of history.

Speaker 8 (01:42:50):
Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too. And there's
something you were talking about from the top. But as
with all of these sort of like really really broad
sweet books at history, this is capturing trends in a
few places in the worlds as they moved. There are
obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting

(01:43:13):
with all of these systems at the same time. The
entire world in like two thousand BC is not just
like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere right Like,
there's a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting
with each other from I mean, I can't even there's

(01:43:34):
just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms,
some of which are states, some of which are not.
But yeah, when you're doing a macrohistory like this, you
are looking at certain sets of thems and matching patterns
with them. But that also is not We're also not
saying here but that's literally everything that is happening on earth,
because it's not. Yeah, but yeah, just just want to
get that in for the people who are gonna get

(01:43:55):
very mad about this, which you are aware of the
presence of other narratives. We have we have we have
we have done our postmodernism training, we have done our
historical archaeological stuff. I just.

Speaker 9 (01:44:10):
Of course, of course, and like I was saying, they
had these other agents, but for this particular narrative of
focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and
the nation states. And in the nation states, we take
them for granted now, but they really were not always
a thing. You know, the idea of a group of
people with a shared identity, language, culture, and history being

(01:44:35):
artificially i would say, unified under a state. It has
to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know,
you didn't have this concept of France until France was built,
and the whole world has suffered as a result. You know. Yeah,
we didn't have this concept of Italy. You didn't have
this concept of of of Nigeria, you didn't have this concept.

(01:45:00):
These nation states had to be constructed.

Speaker 4 (01:45:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:45:05):
Even China, which is seen as like the sort of
archetypical example of this, Like we have a bunch of
records of people in the fifteen hundreds, and I think
even through the sixteen hundreds, like going and talking to
people in China and being like, yeah, you're in China
and the people are talking to are like, what the
fuck is China. What are you talking about? Like, we're
like under this ruler, who's under this ruler, who's under

(01:45:27):
this ruler? Who's like yeah, exactly, you know. So yeah,
these things have to be constructed, and they were constructed
a lot more recently than people.

Speaker 9 (01:45:35):
Think, and then to actually get people to identify with
them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.

Speaker 8 (01:45:41):
Yeah, and usually by you know, a process in which
I mean the only way to cause people to have
a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national
territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other.
So yeah, what of these? What of these? Also, like
the question of the national like the twentieth century national

(01:46:03):
liberation movements, this when you get like, for example, like
pan Arabism, it's like, okay, like whose national liberation is this?
Because sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or Yazidis.
It's you know, yeah. This is all of which is
to say what you were saying, which is this is
a violent and bloody process that is a lot more
recent that people understand.

Speaker 9 (01:46:23):
Absolutely, this time also saw a lot of revolutions bloody indeed,
you know, the rise and fall of old powers and
new powers. And this is also a phase. I think
they could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you
had this rise in side of ideas like liberty and rights,

(01:46:45):
and you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as
was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial
exploitation of people's and ecologies. We saw the dire event
of the sciences and scientific classifications, but you also saw
how that gave way to pseudo scientific justifications for inequality.

(01:47:09):
You know, the create chain of being, the idea of
the whit's being on top of everyone else. Yeah, you
saw a self determination for some and self determination not
so much for others. As by the time we reached
the eighteen hundreds, the piece of change was exceedingly traumatic
and volatile. Industrialization, urbanization, communication and transportation converged to compress

(01:47:35):
time and space. We see the booth of new ideas
and reformed relations, and by the time we reached the
early twentieth century a new phase is taken shape. We
are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning
from nineteen hundred to the present day. The system, the machine,
whatever you want to call it, is this fast, interconnected

(01:47:57):
set of systems that organize we live, produce, consume, and
even think. The system does not have you know, a
single king or figurehead that you can point to as
the big bad, despite I think people's efforts to try
and find a big bad. It's really a web of
processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global

(01:48:19):
markets and industrial and post industrial economies and mass communication
and the underground economy and all these different things chugging
along almost like it's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive
the alliteration and like to throw in out of poetry
every once in a while. So the idea of progress

(01:48:42):
becomes very economistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency.
Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's
the thing that people are worrying about when they're on
Fox Business or whatever, the Financial Times, whatever spaces of
dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually

(01:49:02):
all of people's needs being met. It's what's what's growth?
Looking like this quarta? How efficient how we exploit in
the planet.

Speaker 8 (01:49:10):
Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that.
The clip on CNBC that we played in the ED
a few weeks ago whenever this is coming out, where
the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out
a civilization. What does this mean for investors?

Speaker 9 (01:49:27):
Yeah, I saw that. I saw that.

Speaker 8 (01:49:31):
That's horrifying, haunting, haunting shit.

Speaker 9 (01:49:35):
The way that our economy has been built around these
metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea
of progress in this time tends toward the economistic, you know,
the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and
so on, and pastism in this system phase is as

(01:49:57):
the name implies, systemic quote directly from the book, contiguous
parstism had captured energy from additionous societies and native, wild
and domestic species. This is the parstism of the first phase.
Disparate parasitism, meanwhile, had captured energy from additionous societies, imperial subjects,

(01:50:18):
and both exotic wild and intensively domesticated species abroad. And
that's the second phase. And so the new form, networked
parstism captured energy from all of these as well, but
with the addition of ancient species of plant to animal
in the form of fossils, this enabled concrete energy capture

(01:50:38):
through increase in electrification, and then the digitization and extraction
and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense
populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system
were built in the nineteenth century, it was only the
twentieth century that it came to dominate end quote. So

(01:50:59):
this parst is is networked on another level. You know,
it flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels,
you know, cool oil, gas power, maintains the entire cont
It maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure, all of it.
A whole world, as we've seen, has been built around

(01:51:20):
these fossil fuels, and something as simple as blocking a
pay smalls straight can have a dire impact on the
entire world, much of which is yet to be felt.
Even as the strait has now been reopened, it has
not been reopened about to be seemingly. I mean, Israel

(01:51:44):
did viod. This is fire though, right, so it probably
will not be opened again.

Speaker 8 (01:51:48):
Yeah, I mean even before that it hadn't been reopened.
I don't know. I have no idea when this episode
is going to come out, So I am stating for
the record.

Speaker 9 (01:51:58):
Here Yeah, it's very hard to.

Speaker 8 (01:52:00):
Can't have it's impossible. It's like not impossible. It's extremely
difficult to figure out whether the strait is open on
an hour two hour basis.

Speaker 9 (01:52:08):
Yeah, Like that's fair.

Speaker 8 (01:52:10):
I don't know what the fuck it's gonna be, Like,
I don't know, Like maybe so maybe someone will have
like filled the straight in by the time this episode
comes out, Like who knows. Sorry, I just I've been
so straight pilled.

Speaker 9 (01:52:23):
That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess the
point I'm trying to make is even in any hypothetical
scenario where this strait is fully open, you're still going
to feel the impact of that brief period of closure.

Speaker 8 (01:52:35):
Yeah, for years.

Speaker 12 (01:52:38):
Yeah, this is dumb phased by the way.

Speaker 9 (01:52:50):
It's not just on the whole extraction of resources of
land of Libor. You also notice that it extracts our
attention as well, through the collection of data, through the
increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs

(01:53:11):
for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit.
And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's
merely borrowing from the future and from million year old ecosystems.
Eventually that debt is going to catch up on us.
In fact that it already has begun to catch up
on us. We're not in the when climate change happens

(01:53:33):
in the future. It is happening right now, and the
Nation States are carrying on business as usual and business
is booming. The agents of this parasitic phase do not care.
This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these
massive transnational entities, and what you'll notice about this period
is that they are the agents of this time, even

(01:53:55):
sometimes more than countries some of them, some of these
corporations have more power than entire countries, and to the
advantage of mass communication and coblization. We also saw ideological coalitions,
which could be seen as another agent in this phase.
You know that the government's institutions, media, tech giants, and
movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives

(01:54:18):
that determine what people be it workers, consumers, users, or
citizens believe it's normal, necessary, and it never tell. As
a person living in this time, it is very difficult
to see it. You know, you get used to a
certain system. It's you know, it's like water to fish.
If you abstract and tangible like, what are you talking

(01:54:39):
about this? There's nothing besides this can be the reaction
you get sometimes, and it is not on anyone individual
to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system, the
biggest picture. Nobody I think sees all the machinations of
the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know,
it sees you as part of its functioning. And to

(01:55:04):
kind of bring it to a close, what I want
people to take away from this is that you know
you can be and you are an agent in history. Now,
whether you are an agent of history that serves as
a cog in the machine or you are an agent
of history that serves as a wedge in the machine,

(01:55:24):
that's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth,
deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental stray, and atomization.
The twenty twenties have been a world bind of a
decade already and it's not even over yet.

Speaker 8 (01:55:43):
Oh God, so fore worry. Yeah, this decade sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:55:51):
It really does.

Speaker 9 (01:55:53):
But the system is not unassailable. Yes it can and
it does adapt to our eruptures, but it is a
lot more fragile than it puts forward, you know, to
borrow from I can't remember who said it, the concept
of paper tiger. It comes from Chinese mythology, a Chinese

(01:56:14):
military philosophy.

Speaker 8 (01:56:16):
Right, yeah, Like I know, Mao talks about it a lot.
I don't actually know where it's from.

Speaker 9 (01:56:21):
But yeah, yeah, but I say that to say that
it's a paper tiger, you know, a particularly study paper tiger,
but a paper tiger nonetheless.

Speaker 8 (01:56:32):
Yeah, And never have the people who are attempting to
write the paper tiger have like, never in the entire
like history of modern capitalism has it been written by
people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick,
Never have people who understand the system so poorly been
in charge of it, and they are, you know, they

(01:56:54):
are already kind of tearing it apart because they don't
understand it at all.

Speaker 9 (01:56:59):
Yeah. I think one of the one of these signs
of that was just the idea that you can kneecap
your country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other
country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen.
I mean, honestly, the US has not faced the consequences

(01:57:19):
that it should for the things that it has done
in this year alone, that's alone in a decade of history.

Speaker 4 (01:57:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:57:26):
But I mean when you saw the deconstruction of us AID, right,
which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having
swaying other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, and
also you know, intervening in the into the domestic politics
of other countries, to break that down like a bull
in a China shop, when that was really like one

(01:57:48):
of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal
world order float. It really, I think as an indication
of the incompetence with even mes Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:57:58):
And then even on top of that, I think think
even on an even larger scale, Right, the entire premise
for I mean, like the entire premise of the packs Americana, Right,
the entire premise of the post Wold War two American
order was that the US Navy would keep the world's
oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing,

(01:58:18):
and it worked exactly as long as the US never
actually had to fight a war over like the sea
lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And then we fought
the one war which would prove that we cannot in
fact secure the sea lanes. Global capital. Ipacal transformations are
happening in like the very structure of global capital because

(01:58:42):
these people think that like the idea of not using
your military power and then reaping the reaping the world
spanning like trillion trillion dollar rewards of this, like they
thought that shit was like girl, shit, Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:58:58):
I mean the whole the whole point of what I've
been thinking. Part of the point of investing in all
of this military might is so that you don't have
to use it. Yeah, it's just just try and scale
people into just bowing down the station your troops outside
the territory, and you're like, yeah, are you gonna really try.

Speaker 4 (01:59:15):
And challenge us?

Speaker 9 (01:59:16):
Yeah, And then you went and stomped all over with somebody,
and obvious they had to stand up and defend themselves.
And now everybody is seeing what it is, you know.

Speaker 8 (01:59:26):
Yeah, and it's a situation too where like yeah, like
Iran has always technically had the military power to like
control the strader of Moos, but they never did because
the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities.
So the only way you could possibly lose control of
the straight of from moos is if you bombed the
cities first, So all you had to do was not
do that and it would be fine.

Speaker 9 (01:59:47):
Yeah. But I mean the little girls in the school
were Hamasna, so oh god, yeah, it's just just a tragedy.

Speaker 8 (01:59:56):
God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves
in the balls because they just like wanted to go
kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is
an unfathomable horror. And also they so clearly have no
idea what the fuck they're doing that it makes a
lot of things possible.

Speaker 9 (02:00:14):
Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you
know what comes next. We're seeing, like, as you said,
epocal transformations just in this year alone. This phase will
be incurrently as defined by McDonald. It's not going to
last forever, you know, Unlike previous phases. However, this phase

(02:00:34):
has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hint
land that one can escape too. Yeah, and so what
comes next can be fragmentation, it can be some kind
of evolution or calcification, or it can be a social revolution.
And the more ones and the cogs and wedges in

(02:00:56):
this moment to actively decide in that. But I think
we can do without this parasitism. As MacDonald knowes, there
are other ways of relating with each other and with nature.
He borrows from the ecological language of commends, salistic and
mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other. For example,

(02:01:19):
we provide hives and protection, while bees pollic crops and
produce honey. And commends salistic relationships, one organism captures energy
from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other.
There's lots of animals and plants who make their home
among trees while neither harmon nor help in the tree itself,
although some of them do end up helping the tree

(02:01:40):
in more indirect ways. But finally, in parasitic relationships, which
is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world,
one organism that be in us has captured the energy
of another, or of multiple others to those others detriment
our system has put us in the position of essentially
be in mosquitoes on planet Is, and not in the

(02:02:05):
role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem,
but literally sucking more blood than the system consistin, and
so we have to shake things up, we have to
imbolden I think new forms of relations and what those
relations look like after you as usual, All power to

(02:02:26):
all the people, peace.

Speaker 8 (02:02:41):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where the
thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler
colony of the United States in the mask of humanity
is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind. I think calling
it a new gym crow is that title has already

(02:03:01):
been used for something else. But it's a return overtly
to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era.
So I'm your host, Mio Wong. Let's talk about what
is actually at issue here, and that is a recent
Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Kalay. On a sort

(02:03:23):
of micro level, this is about the question of can
Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it
had in its congressional map in twenty twenty four. Getting
to this map in the first place was a subject
of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the
point where there were two majority black districts in twenty

(02:03:46):
twenty four. On a macro level. What is that stake
here is canny state create an electoral map where they
spread all of the black voters across different districts in
order to make them a minority in every district, thus
making it impossible for black voters select the candidate if
they're choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because this

(02:04:11):
is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop.
Like this, specifically like this, this is one of the
very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough, this specific thing,
which is spread out the black vote across a whole
bunch of districts where everyone else is white, so that
black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This
is like one of the specific things it was designed

(02:04:32):
to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been
allowed to do this, and this has led to the
creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is
a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own.
It probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short,
short version of what a minority majority district is is

(02:04:53):
it's a district where the majority of voters are from
a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group
to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a
lot of these districts in the South, specifically to prevent
Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to
elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right,

(02:05:16):
is the constitutional right to elect a candidates of your
choosing if you are part of a minority group.

Speaker 5 (02:05:21):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:05:22):
This is why all of this stuff was passed in
the first place, because under what we call Jim Crow,
it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply
effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is
other non white people too, but like this is primarily
black people. It was it was very, very easy to
simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by

(02:05:46):
just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for
can never be elected. This is one of the basis
of Jim Crow over discrimination. The Supreme Court has decided no, actually,
what they decided is that if the Republican party that
controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing

(02:06:09):
we've been talking about, where they spread out all of
the specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts
so that black people can't elect a representative. In order
to challenge this as violation of your voting rights, you
have to prove definitively prove that the intent was racism
and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this

(02:06:31):
is the thing that's really at issue here, right, you
have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this
out of racism and not just because they want to
elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisan lee, which is amazingly
a thing that's legal to do in the United States
for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also you have

(02:06:51):
to be able to prove that they created this map
specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group.
And also you have to create a app that would
allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want, like,
for example, again making sure that Republicans have all the
seats in a state, but also would not be racist.

(02:07:13):
So you have to create a map for them that
would allow them to do this in order to prove
that there could be another map that achieves their goals
of like partisan jerrymandering, that isn't also racist. It's completely
unhinged legally. This is this is a shambles. We have
covered some downright like hideous nonsense on this show in

(02:07:35):
terms of Supreme Court decisions, right like that. This Supreme
Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in
like living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding
the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out
with this. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is

(02:07:56):
difficult to prove because there have been so many abhorrent ones.
Even just just from a pure legal perspective, this one
is so bad it defies belief. So, okay, One of
the main issues here is Section two of the Voting
Rights Act. I'm just going to read what it says, quote,

(02:08:16):
No voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting, or standard practice
or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state
or political subdivision in a manner which results keep that
in mind later, which results in a denial or abridgment
of the right of any citizen of the United States

(02:08:38):
to vote on account of race or color, or in
contravention of the guarantees set forth in section nineteen seventy
three B. So again I kind of emphasize this enough.
Right the way this is written is that it says
that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting, or
have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed
by the state or any other politicals of that results

(02:09:02):
in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens
vote and account of race.

Speaker 10 (02:09:05):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:09:06):
It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now
this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that,
Actually you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote
from a piece of Scotis blog by Edward Foley, who
has an extremely long title of the Charles b Ever
Sold in Florence Whitcomb Ever Sold share and constitutional law.

(02:09:30):
As the director of Election at Law at Ohio State University,
They're written a book on electoral law. He is a
constitutional law professor who specifically does election law. He is like,
by no means a leftist. He's coming into the right
of like Justice Jackson in her dissent in this case. Right,
but even he I'm going to quote what he writes

(02:09:51):
about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is
like a thing that you don't really get from like
legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going
to quote what he says about this quote. The ruling
purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section two, but
it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it
into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it

(02:10:12):
to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section
two is that the nineteen eighty two amendment to the
section's test creates a quote results test for determining whether
there is liability under the section, replacing the intent test
that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section two claims.

(02:10:33):
As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure
shall be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment
of the right of any citizen to vote on account
of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section two back
to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis. So
what happened here, right, To make this extremely clear, is

(02:10:54):
that Congress in nineteen eighty two had amended this. They
amended what this thing said, right, because Supreme Court had
been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that
you have to prove that like these people were like
mustache whirling saying the N word in fucking clan robes,
doing Nazi salutes. You have to like prove that they

(02:11:15):
intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason.
And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If
the result of it is racist, then you can't do it,
even if, like nominally what you're saying out loud is
that you're doing this for non racist reasons. If the
result is racism, then you have to not do it.

(02:11:36):
And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that, we're just like
flipping it back to an intent standard for no reason
other than I want to be able to do racism
and help the Republican Party win seats. The other thing
that fully talks about is the court is arguing that, like,
Congress can't draw from the fifteenth Amendment in order in
order to like have the Voting Brice Act work. In

(02:11:58):
the first place, I'm going to quote again, Yeah, the
Court in this decision did not need to consider the
question of congressional power to enforce the fifteenth Amendment. That is,
because the power of Congress to enact Section two with
the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case
could have been sustained not under the Fifteenth Amendment, but
under Article one, Section four of the Constitution. Congress has

(02:12:21):
full power under Article one, section four to enact laws
governing the quote, time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus,
Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for
congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration
of discriminatory attent, and not rely on the Fifteenth Amendment

(02:12:43):
at all. So, okay, what does this mean? Right? What
Alito is saying is that, like, oh well, actually, Congress
doesn't have the authority to like write the secution of
the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't have the authority to
do it under the fifteenth Amendment because it like oversteps
the rights of states to you know, run their own elections. Right,
So I'm gonna do a thing I did last time
with Fully's thing and just read the full Article one,

(02:13:04):
section four of the Constitution. By the way, when something
says like Article one, section four, you have to remember
that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got
rid of slavery, even like the first Amendment, right, the
freedom of speech, that's an amendment that's not in the
original text that had to be added onto it. And obviously,
we have something called the Bill of Rights that, like
you know, was like the first ten amendments that was

(02:13:25):
passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was
like put like a freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,
freedom of worship that was not in the original text
of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This
is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like,
fuck if this is going to be in the original thing, right,
So Article one, Section four, this is from like the

(02:13:45):
original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote,
the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators
and Representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the
legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time, by law,
make or alter such regulations, except as to the places

(02:14:05):
of choosing senators. So yes, obviously they can fucking do
the Voting Rights Amendment. They literally have the ability. Like
it says in section one, Congress may at any time,
by law make or alter such regulations. By such regulations
they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections.
They could just do this, right, So obviously they can

(02:14:28):
fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. It's just it's literally
just there in the custumation. It just says that it's
all like this, it's gibberish. It's like, oh my god,
you can just read the text of the Constitution and
it says you can do this. It's god, holy shit.
Even from the perspective of like if you treat the

(02:14:48):
law as real, this is just pure Calvin Ball shit,
Like I mean, it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know
what's real and not Calvin Ball. It's it's these products
and services. We are back. So okay, what has the

(02:15:16):
result of this been. It's been about two weeks since
the Court did this decision. The Court immediately followed this
up by allowing Alabama to jerrymander the shit out of
their upcoming election. They're doing this via again, the shadow docket,
which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you,
we're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision.

(02:15:37):
An unsigned, one paragraph thing from the court can just
dictate what the law is. It's great, it's amazing, and
by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about
a week after the original Screme Court decision. This shadow
dockett allows Alabama to put in place a map that
was already found to be explicitly racially motivated. Thing Alito

(02:16:01):
said in a decision that he wouldn't do right. Alito
says in a decision that he won't overturn a cases
that are like avert discrimination and b that he wouldn't
overturn this exact case. And then they did it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:17):
Anyways, It's like Jesus Christ'.

Speaker 8 (02:16:22):
Just like, oh my god. So the short version of
the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slat's story on
this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map
that would let them get rid of like both of
the congressional black congressional candidates in the states by jerrymandering
the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases
about this. In twenty twenty three, the Supreme Court said

(02:16:44):
that they couldn't do this and they had to make
fairer districts that didn't like violate the Voting Rights Act.
So this was three years ago. This, like the Supreme
Court said they had to do this. Here's some Slate quote. Alabama, however,
refused to comply with that order to get like they
got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to
do it. Quote, so the lower court imposed its own map,

(02:17:06):
featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot
at choosing their representative. The court also found that in
defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in
intentional racial discrimination, violating the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause
in addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday,
this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former

(02:17:28):
Confederate states now racing to eliminate black representatives from their
congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift
its bar, but it refused, so they filed an emergency
request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re jerrymander
black communities in light of this decision. Now, I cantdatmaicize enough.
This vote from when they were granted this position. This

(02:17:50):
vote is in like eight days, right, people had already
started voting for candidates and primaries, right, And Supreme Court
was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can. You can fucking
rejerry mander this thing eight days before the election. That's
absolutely fine. Even though again I can'da emphasize this enough
in the ruling, Alito specifically said in the majority opinion
that they wouldn't overturn this exact case, and then they

(02:18:13):
did it. It's mind boggling. It used to be, like
it really truly did. Used to be that if you
were going to do shit like this, you had to
like sort of like pretend that you were following some
kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You
can just fucking do Calvin bullshit. You can just literally
lie about what you're doing in your decisions and then

(02:18:37):
just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously,
you know, as slave points on. This has been pointed
out by a whole bunch of different outlets. The Supreme
Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states
that would have were trying to like make more democratic maps,
both in the sense of like not being racist and
also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though
it was three months before the election, the court was like, wow,

(02:19:00):
it's actually too soon, like it's too close the election
for you to be changing this stuff. But then also
now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like
eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear
about what's happening here is that the Court is trying
to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections
for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that
lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote.

(02:19:24):
And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the nineteen
sixty five Voting Rights Act was one of the major
achievements of the civil rights movement, right, It's like, one
of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the
movement was to have elections in which black people got
to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally

(02:19:46):
diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And
that's what's being done here, right, And this has been
pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind of
analysis of racial politics in the US. One of the
consistent themes of the sort of you know what you
would call, I guess like the era of black uprising, right,

(02:20:06):
the sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson. I thought,
I guess you could talk about the stuff in the
Bay before that, or roughly from Ferguson through twenty twenty
was that the US was not a democracy before the
nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act because the principle of
one person, one vote was not real because you could

(02:20:27):
simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group, and that was
the status quo of the South, and also like a
lot of other parts of the country too, was this
very overtibility of these people to you know, not only
just like this, this is one of the components of segregation. Right,
It's not just like imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right,

(02:20:52):
it's also you know, like it's preventing black people from voting.
And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling
has just effectively destroyed.

Speaker 7 (02:21:05):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:21:05):
It's the thing that made it possible to even sort of,
like in the loosest sense possible, called this country a democracy.
And it's gone. It's just gone. And now you know,
it's like, okay, like what fucking is this now? And
you know, I don't know, it's like it's it's an
even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state, this is

(02:21:29):
what the goal of the Republican Party has always been,
Like they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern
Republican politics forever. Right, it's you know, dating back to
you if you want to look at like what Trump
is and descendsful. We've talked about this at length on
the show. The thing that became the sort of religious
right was originally born out of like the school choice movement.

(02:21:49):
And the thing about the school choice movement was that
it was an anti integration thing. After losing their fight
to be able to have whites on these schools, a
bunch of these sort of right wingers were like, Okay, well,
we'll just do private schools where we can do that.
And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right, you know,
sort of both evangelicalism and sort of Bush administration and

(02:22:11):
trump Ism and Reagan too. Is this shit and this
has been what the Republicans have done when they've been
in power. Right, this is a lot a lot of
the Trump administration, like what they're doing, Like all of
the stuff about DEI, all this stuff about wokeness like
this is also a lot of what Dog is doing.
Was trying to make it so that black people like
couldn't work for the US government.

Speaker 4 (02:22:32):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:22:32):
It was a huge purge of black women from the
US government and you know, now we're seeing this on
the level of elections and on this level, what Republicans
are trying to do with these jerrymandered maps is remove
non white people and especially black people from Congress so
they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're

(02:22:54):
doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan. It's
just partisan jerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchised black vetters
because black vetters won't openly vote for the party of
white supremacy. And they're also claiming that like, not doing
this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people,
a thing that like is completely you know, just gibberish

(02:23:15):
world turned upside down nonsense. But if they can just
do that now because they're in power, because the court
will just let them do this shit. And so I
think in a way that really has not been conveyed
in the media in the discourse, like this is one
of the bleakest moments of this administration, right, you know,

(02:23:38):
on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right
on top of you know, just like the ethnic cleansing
of non white people from the US that ICE is doing,
They're what they're doing right now is attempting to end
multiracial democracy in the US. And obviously, politically, I have
my critiques of like electoral democracy as a concept, but

(02:23:59):
having it just revert back to only white people get
to decide who politicians are is something even worse than
what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic
shift in just literally what this country is towards something
that unbelievably an unfathomably weak state of pure white rule.

(02:24:25):
And the people who are talking about this think that
it can be reversed just by voting more, but no,
it can't. The whole point of this right is to
make sure that elections and you know, whatever the will
of the people is is incapable of actually affecting the
white supremacist state because not white people just don't get votes.

(02:24:48):
You can't just vote harder your way through all of
this shit. You have to actually do things. And you know,
if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society,
we're going to have to actually take action to combat
and actually resist the fact that this is like this
is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state. Now, yeah,

(02:25:13):
so this has been, it could happen here. I don't
have a non bleaque way to end this, but the
common refrain is, if you've ever asked yourself what you
would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And
I think you can also add to that right if
you've ever asked yourself what would you be doing during
Jim Crow, The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now,

(02:25:34):
And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's
time to move.

Speaker 2 (02:25:53):
Speaking of things that are on fire America, all right,
I did my job, Garrison. What are we doing? Are we?

Speaker 10 (02:26:00):
This is? It could happen here? Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, their crumbling world,
and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
joined by James Stout and Robert Evans YEP. This episode
recovering the week of May sixth through May thirteenth. YEP, James,
some small news items to open us up.

Speaker 3 (02:26:21):
My little grab bag of news stories. Yeah, the United
Kingdom parachute drop supplies and medical personnel into Tristan d'acuna
last weekend to respond to the hunt of virus outbreak.
A man had got off the cruise ship where the
outbreak began in April and returned to Tristan Ta Cuna,
where he resides. I think the cruise ship stopped Tristan

(02:26:42):
da Cuna this weekend. British paratroopers from the Pathfind a
platoon tandem jumped a doctor and a nurse onto the island,
along with supplies, including oxygen, which was critically low on
the island. The patient had reported symptoms two weeks after
disembarking the cruise ship, and they'd spent that time on

(02:27:02):
the island, and therefore there's a fairly high chance that
that they've interacted with other people. Right, the island has
no air strip. They was such a low supply of
oxygen that there obviously wasn't time for a boat to
get to Tristan Pakuna. So the UK conducted this fairly,
I mean extremely You sure this is the first time

(02:27:23):
the UK has ever done it. The island has a
populace around two hundred and twenty people and only two
medical professionals who are obviously exhausted after delivering care to
this person who's on oxygen for several weeks. Yeah, so
they jumped a couple more in there, fairly audacious response
to the hunt virus. Secondly, and I think we can

(02:27:44):
also agree of equal importance, Japanese snack food giant Cowbi
is switching to black and white packaging.

Speaker 2 (02:27:52):
For its ooh no, Garrison is loading a gun right now.

Speaker 10 (02:27:58):
This is a significant portion of my daily diet.

Speaker 3 (02:28:01):
Yeah, Garrison won't be able to make it through this.
One is going on hunger strike.

Speaker 2 (02:28:07):
They are wiring a crew detonator together. It looks like.

Speaker 10 (02:28:11):
I'm going to join orant an enter to this madness.

Speaker 4 (02:28:18):
That is.

Speaker 3 (02:28:18):
This is because ingredients used for the ink on its
normal colorful packages are hard to come by thanks to
the war with a run and thanks. Yeah. So if
you want, if you've got one of those little stickers
that says I did that, and you've got a packet
of black and white crisps, now you can combine the two.

Speaker 2 (02:28:34):
And your black and white layme ash ships.

Speaker 3 (02:28:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:28:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:28:38):
The one thing that gave us joy is gone. The
Nigerian military has once again carried out an air strike
on a market, killing at least one hundred civilians. Going
Damnasty International. The strike on the Tumfo market is the
second in a month to hit a market. The Nigerian
military claims the area was to hide out for bandits.

(02:29:00):
It has yet to acknowledge the civilian death toll. Government
in this area is more or less like only present
through its ability to project force like this, and I've
seen interviews as locals suggesting the town was under the
control of non state groups previously. People remember, the Nigerian
government has suggested that anyone doing business with the people
at targeting is also a legitimate target, which is how

(02:29:21):
it has justified dropping bombs on crowded markets like this.
CNN is claiming that the CIA facilitated a car bomb
in Sinaloa. The article seems to have sources in or
very familiar with the operations of Ground Branch. It also
alleges that the US government employees who were killed in

(02:29:41):
the car crash last month were members of Ground Branch.
More than the fact of this story, it doesn't shock
me that the CIA is killing people in weird ways
in different countries now that it's one of the things
that they do.

Speaker 2 (02:29:54):
That's like the CIA's job.

Speaker 3 (02:29:56):
Yeah, the fact that CNN, as a source CITI is
leaking Ground Branch operations, that is not usual for someone
in the CIA to be talking to someone at CNN. Well,
these operations are ongoing, right, and like, yeah, operations in
Mexico are exceptionally high risk for these kinds of folks,

(02:30:19):
Like in twenty twelve, some Mexican federal cops opened fire
on US government employees, presumably not acting on behalf of
the federal government.

Speaker 10 (02:30:27):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:30:27):
Obviously, it puts this mission at risk, which isn't like
this is already a high risk thing, but the fact
that somebody has felt the need to leak this CNN
is pretty remarkable.

Speaker 10 (02:30:38):
Speaking of potential CIA leaks, former director of the National
Counter Terrorisment Center, Joe Kent claimed on x the Everything
app that before the President launched the war in Iran, quote,
the US intell community, including CIA, was an agreement that
Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran would

(02:30:59):
target US base in the region and shut down the
straight of Horror moves if they were attacked by Israel
and the US en quote. The Supreme Court extended access
to remote prescription at melt delivery of the abortion pill
with pristone until Thursday, May fourteenth, which is the day
this episode releases. The night this episode releases around Thursday.

(02:31:22):
They're expected to make a shadow docket ruling on whether
Louisiana's ban on mail order abortion pills can go into
effect as the case continues through a lower court. A
golden statue of President Trump was unveiled at a Trump
resort in Miami last week. The statue was blessed by
evangelical pastor Mike Burns, who said, quote, let me be clear,

(02:31:46):
this is not a golden calf unquote.

Speaker 2 (02:31:50):
God, it's so hard. I like you went through everything,
you just like the little parade of horrors like you
do every week, and then you just drop that that
there's there's a priest blessing a golden statue.

Speaker 8 (02:32:02):
Past pastor.

Speaker 2 (02:32:04):
Sorry, you're right, pastor. And I know that like they
that he addressed in the moment, like the whole golden
cat it all, which just funnier that like he knew
I gotta say something like I got to make a comment.

Speaker 3 (02:32:18):
That's what got me that he felt that he needed
to address the golden calf in the room.

Speaker 10 (02:32:22):
Really genuinely funny, My, this is not a golden calf shirt.
As a lot of people ask few questions already answered
by the shirt. Oh fuck yeah, that's great, but yeah,
grim stuff yep So.

Speaker 3 (02:32:36):
A national survey of one thousand Americans by NewsGuard and
YouGov suggests that about half of people in the United
States he surveyed think each of the attempts on Donald
Trump's life was staged or they're not sure if it
was real. For the White House Correspondent dinner attempt and
the Butler Pennsylvania attempts, twenty four percent of those surveyed

(02:32:58):
thought the attempts were staked. Thirty two percent why not
sure in the White House Correspondents to dinner attempt, and
twenty nine percent for the Pennsylvania event. It's more than
half if you add them up.

Speaker 8 (02:33:11):
I'm not convinced.

Speaker 2 (02:33:13):
Super funny.

Speaker 3 (02:33:15):
I'll quote from the report here. Of the twelve percent
of Americans who said all three attempts were staged, fifty
five percent with Democrats, thirty eight percent were independents. It's
seven percent were Republicans, according to the report.

Speaker 10 (02:33:27):
Really interested in that seven percent? Yeah, what are they
getting out of that? I just I don't.

Speaker 8 (02:33:34):
Like, what way do they think? It was?

Speaker 3 (02:33:36):
Just like, hell, yeah, we're owning the Libs, We're stagings
what we did.

Speaker 8 (02:33:40):
Look at US go. I think it may just be like.

Speaker 2 (02:33:43):
Well, I voted for Trump because I wanted my taxes
to be lower.

Speaker 8 (02:33:46):
But I know he thinks that.

Speaker 10 (02:33:48):
Yeah, this is obviously worrying, and this, this trend is
something we've been talking about for years at this points.
Is why I've been kind of such a such a
hard ass about the about like the brul conspiracism that
is growing.

Speaker 2 (02:34:02):
I don't even to find it worrying anymore, Garrison. I
find it liberating that we're finally.

Speaker 10 (02:34:08):
Look at that we're finally free from the shackles of truth.

Speaker 2 (02:34:12):
Yeah, everyone's everyone's down on the muck together, nobody's nobody's
standing pretty anymore. Everybody's just wallowing like a filthy pig
and shit.

Speaker 3 (02:34:22):
That it's pretty much the status of the Yeah, the
US news market right now.

Speaker 2 (02:34:27):
Yeah, I'm fine with it.

Speaker 3 (02:34:29):
God, it's fucking bleak. It's so bleak. Like I just
I don't want to address like the factual elements of
each thing because there's no point, right, But like.

Speaker 2 (02:34:37):
No, we we should all know that's useless by now, right, Yeah,
just have we not gotten to a place free of
that yet?

Speaker 4 (02:34:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (02:34:46):
I know, I uh, I already don't know what to
say about that.

Speaker 10 (02:34:51):
I mean, there are like real issues here. A conspiratorial
base can be more easily recruited into a reactionary thought. Right,
this is the idea of the cultic you and we
can see a version of this happening with certain portions
of the left. Might engage with people like Tucker Carlsen
or Margie Taylor Green right now. But for me, kind
of the biggest issue with this is that it's a

(02:35:13):
refusal to understand or accept the particular moment that you
find yourself with them, like a resistance to the self
realization that you are living through history and that people
are active agents in history. It's an ahistorical rejection of
the fact that some people may look at some of
the actions that someone like Trump is doing, whether regarding

(02:35:34):
Ice or the war with Ron, and then choose to
act in response, or in the case of the Butler shooting,
the result of social disintegration or underregulation manifesting as someone's
violent nihilistic expression, similar to the mindset of like a
school shooter. My last issue relates kind of to the
second issue, like the ahistorical element, how these false flag

(02:35:57):
shooting conspiracy theories also prescribe Trump too much power by
not just turning him into this like invincible god, but
then also assuming that, like the US deep State is
capable and competent enough to stage major world events like
this like brainwash and groom patsies into doing these shootings,

(02:36:18):
and like this also obviously removes the agency and the
clearly defined history other people that do these own shootings. Right,
it rejects this Like, like I said, this relates to the
second thing. It rejects or refuses to understand the moment
that you're living in, and that people actually are active
agents of history. And like the people that do these
shootings have their own family and their own friends, They
have their own history that we can show and prove.

(02:36:39):
And assuming that all this is like fake, that like
the government has like manufactured this or somehow like turned
someone who is a normy kind of liberal suddenly into
like doing a shooting, or has like fake this backstory. Right,
it gives the government so much power. Right, it assumes
that the government has power like a magical wizard that
totally controls reality.

Speaker 2 (02:36:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:37:00):
Anyway, for our first main story today, let's talk about
turning Point USA. But first on Sunday, night in Seattle,
a nineteen year old transgender girl was murdered. She was
a student at University of Washington and was found with

(02:37:21):
stab wounds in the laundry room of an off campus
apartment that she lived in. No suspect has yet been identified.
While horrific in and of itself, turning point, USA was
scheduled to hold an anti trans debate event just days
later at the very campus this trans student attended. This

(02:37:44):
event was going to be hosted by a far right
anti trans lobbyist and influencer named Chloe Cole, a teen
transitioner who subsequently de transitioned a few years later following
an acid trip and then conversion to Christianity. Any such cases,
that's fascinating, Yeah, most normal Christian d transitioner.

Speaker 2 (02:38:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:38:08):
She made an appearance at Trump's last State of the
Union address when the president talked about restricting gender affirming
care minors. After the murder in Seattle, Cole and TPUSA
continued plugging their anti trans event online, prompting students to
plan a protest to quote unquote shut the event down,

(02:38:30):
calling to bring quote flags, drums, or anything to make
noise unquote. Then on Tuesday, the National Turning Point USA
organization decided to cancel the event, according to University Washington
spokesperson Victor Balta. Later that night, Tuesday night, Chloe Cole
announced the event was postponed because quote Antifa has assembled

(02:38:55):
a local militia in their own words unquote.

Speaker 2 (02:38:58):
Oh that's that's alarming.

Speaker 8 (02:39:01):
A militia now.

Speaker 10 (02:39:04):
I was not able to find an instance of Antifa
claiming to have assembled a quote unquote militia.

Speaker 2 (02:39:11):
Really, no photos of the militia, the documentation of the militia,
nor was this language.

Speaker 10 (02:39:17):
This this this claim of a militia in their own words,
nor was this language included in right wing reporting of
the planned protest. I cannot find a so horse fist.
I really looked like I went through Fox articles, post
millennial articles. There was nothing about Antifa using the word militia.
No one, no, no counter, no protester that I could

(02:39:38):
find was using the word militia now. Klokkol also claimed
that they were quote explicit threats on my life and
that the protest caused a quote level of attention our
security team and the local PD are frankly unprepared for unquote.
She shared an article from the Canadian far right outlet

(02:39:58):
the Post Millennial documenting threats against the TPUSA event. Threats
like one Twitter user in Canada saying that people should
shut down the event, like Milo Unopolis's Berkeley campus event
in twenty seventeen, writing quote, make them hurt for scheduling
this one other Twitter post with two likes red quote

(02:40:23):
Luckily the bricks in Red Square are easy to grab
this time of year. Okay, that's the evidence that Andy
No used to claim that quote. Far left extremists are
urging their comrades to carry out deadly violence on two posts,
just those two posts. That that was the post that

(02:40:44):
Chloe Cole was sharing via this Post Millennial article, that
that was the evidence for these deadly threats. Now, I
do think it's worth reiterating that to these people. They
also believe that just calling someone a fascist constitutes a
threat of violence, right, something they've been repeating a lot
since the death of Charlie Kurk, that just calling someone

(02:41:04):
a fascist constitutes a deadly threat. In Chloe Cole's video
announcing that the TPUSA event was, in her words, postponed,
she said that after charlie'ssassination quote speaking on a university
campus in twenty twenty six can come with deadly consequences.
But towards the end of the video, she stressed that quote,

(02:41:25):
this is not a win for Antifa because truth will
always win. I am not afraid of Antifa. That a
quote ragtag group of wanna be revolutionaries on cross sex
hormones won't scare her. The enemy is both strong and weak.

Speaker 3 (02:41:43):
Yeah, yeah, good for her.

Speaker 2 (02:41:45):
Yeah, okay, yeah, that's how these people work.

Speaker 8 (02:41:49):
Now.

Speaker 10 (02:41:50):
While I was watching Chloe Cole's video, something sprank to mind.
Last week, the White House released a new counter terrorism
strategy that named three major threat groups the country is
currently facing Narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists,
and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and anti fascists.

(02:42:12):
The document says that counter terrorism activities will quote prioritize
the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups
whose ideology is anti American, radically pro transgender, and anarchist unquote.
I did a full episode about this with Robert earlier
this week, if you want to check that out.

Speaker 5 (02:42:33):
Yep.

Speaker 10 (02:42:34):
But the left wing, transgender, anarchist antifa stuff mix up
just a handful of sentences in a sixteen page document
which is mostly focused on Islamic terrorism cartels and complaining
about the Biden administration. For a TLDR, there's nothing new
in this counter terrorism document pertaining to the left that

(02:42:55):
wasn't already in National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven. It
does not grant any new powers nor designate trans people
as terrorists. Like NSMP seven, it essentially states that being
quote unquote extremely pro transgender can be a motivating factor

(02:43:15):
in carrying out terroristic violence or threats. Since last October,
joint Terrorism task forces across the country had been directed
to investigate ANTIFA aligned groups and individuals quote engaged in
acts of political violence and intimidation. This new document is
just describing things that are already happening while building Trump's

(02:43:36):
justification for military strikes on suspected drug boats in the
Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela, and the ongoing war
in the Middle East. But in the wake of this
new strategy being released, I wonder if tpusay's canceling of
the event and Chloe Cole's language in the announcement might

(02:43:57):
also be designed to coax Trump's FEDS into going after
radical transgender ANTIFA terrorists, whether that may be individuals who
possibly sent threats online that I just couldn't see, or
just made semi questionable posts on Twitter dot com, or
who simply spread the protest flyer online, or the protest

(02:44:21):
organizers themselves. Yeah, I think that is something to keep
in mind. This new counter terrorist strategy, it mostly serves
as a chilling effect for speech and for organizing. Like
I said, it doesn't actually grant new powers, but it
can scare people into thinking that the Trump administration is
designating a whole class of people as terrorists and stuff

(02:44:43):
like this, you know protests. Right, that is one thing
that they can investigate. Your threats online, That is something
that they can investigate, right, That is what they are
actually looking into. They're not just investigating random trans people
as terrorists. They will be looking into you know, threats
or questionable hosts made on social media. Right, those are
the things they actually can look into. And I think

(02:45:05):
some of Chloe Cole's language about the quote unquote deadly
threats she received, stuff like that could be used bunch
of up administration as a pretext to investigate people. Yeah,
whether or not those threats even were real. Right, I
did not see anything that I think constitutes a deadly
threat based on the post millennials reporting, but her saying
that might be enough for a local FBI field office

(02:45:27):
to want to investigate, you know, student activists at this university.

Speaker 2 (02:45:31):
Right, right, Yeah, I think that makes sense.

Speaker 10 (02:45:34):
So that's what I wanted to talk about here.

Speaker 2 (02:45:36):
This is by far the thing I'm seeing people freak
out about the most right now is like overall the
idea that like they've just declared it, you know, a
terrorism of violent terrorism to be trans or to be
anarchist or to be you know, any of the things
like anti capitalists mentioned in that in that document. Yeah,
And what I'm actually seeing on the ground so far

(02:45:57):
is very much the same kind of prosecutions that they've
been doing and the same kinds of like messaging that
they've been making. And I think that, like you're right
on the money, this is something to pay attention to,
Like does this get a response? Is there an actual
like investigation? Do we wind up see someone get indicted
for a Twitter post? Or you know, if someone made

(02:46:19):
a threat that we're not privy to, do they get
indicted for that, like or do we see something that
does look more like a witch hunt where they're going
after like a protest organizer. That'll tell us a lot
about kind of what's coming in the immediate future. But
right now, I don't see anything different than what they've
been doing, which is kind of like incompetently and haphazardly

(02:46:40):
flailing at everything, sort of vaguely lefty.

Speaker 8 (02:46:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:46:44):
And you know, I think including this in a document
like the counter Terrism strategy, you know, also serves as
a chilling effect. Right, This is this is to scare
people they're trying to into not doing anything, right, That
is a part of their strategy.

Speaker 5 (02:46:56):
Yep.

Speaker 10 (02:46:57):
But you know they have investigated people for making death
threats four years right, the Biden administration and and their
FBI is.

Speaker 2 (02:47:04):
Able to make death threats, by the way, if their
actual threats that is illegal.

Speaker 10 (02:47:08):
Yeah, The FBI under Biden investigatives top Cop City, the
charges against the protesters at Prairie Land started. That the
investigation started before ns MP seven was even you know, released, Right,
This is not new, but it is something to to
keep an eye on, yeah, to see if they're if
their scope is actually changing.

Speaker 5 (02:47:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:47:30):
You know what else is changing in scope our sponsors,
are they not really no same ship?

Speaker 3 (02:47:39):
Yeah, and we are back and we are back to
talking about the war in Ron. So I want to
start off with President Trump's extremely a vocal criticism of

(02:48:04):
Curtish groups. One can assume in Iran that it doesn't
necessarily seem that his criticism is limited to Curtis's groups
in Iran. Let's play the clip the.

Speaker 11 (02:48:15):
Level of ferocity for protests. You know, the people are
watching that they want to go out on the streets.
They have no weapons, they have no guns. We thought
the Curds were going to give us weapons, but the
Curds disappointed us.

Speaker 5 (02:48:28):
The couras take take take.

Speaker 11 (02:48:30):
They have a great reputation in Congress. Congress is oh
they fight so hard. They fight hard when they get paid.
So I'm very disappointed in the Curds. But they were
given I said it wasn't going to work. By the way,
I just have to say it. I disagreed with what
they did.

Speaker 9 (02:48:46):
They gave it.

Speaker 11 (02:48:47):
I said they'll never get there, and I was right.
I like to be right in this case.

Speaker 5 (02:48:51):
Too bad. But we sent some guns with.

Speaker 11 (02:48:55):
Ammunition and they were supposed to be delivered, but they
kept it. I said, they're gonna keep it. But what
do I know, I've only been noticed.

Speaker 5 (02:49:04):
What do I know?

Speaker 3 (02:49:06):
Yeah, fascinating his Dia coda asking him about this.

Speaker 8 (02:49:14):
Thank you so much, mister person.

Speaker 13 (02:49:16):
Mister Preson yesterday said you gave the courts arms, but
they took it for themselves. US military officials says that
the Kurds have noticeived on arms on the Kurtish political
parties are denying to sing on armis wrong.

Speaker 10 (02:49:31):
So that the officials, the officials are wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:49:33):
Yes, yeah, well there's the Kurds could be so many things,
like they just said that officials. I'm assuming the KDP
and the p u K is WHI they're referring to.
But that's just like the two big parties in Iraq,
which isn't even all of the Courtish parties in Iraq. Like, yeah,
not to mention all of the different armed groups and
the But I have no idea who he sent guns to,

(02:49:54):
and I don't know that he does.

Speaker 3 (02:49:55):
Yeah, or if he did, he seems pretty confident that
he did.

Speaker 9 (02:50:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:50:00):
Yeah, this is like the opposite of Iran Contra, with
the president saying like these.

Speaker 8 (02:50:06):
Synth them guns, I'm running guns. I was running.

Speaker 2 (02:50:09):
Guns, and everyone else is like, we have no fucking
clue what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (02:50:13):
Yeah, so I'm guessing this refers to his previous theory
that they had supplied guns to Iranian courtage groups in January.
It's the time where they were a large scale protests
in Iran that those Iranian courtage groups were expected to
deliver to presumably Persian protesters, presumably in large cities such
as Tehran. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump himself

(02:50:35):
personally vetoed this exact plan in January, after receiving pressure
from Turkey to do so. There were some und backs
to January, but small arms, as we've said before, would
not really have tipped the balance here. Ram's army police
besiege the IGC, as we've seen since February, can survive
assault from the US and Israel. It's not going to

(02:50:56):
be toppled by a bunch of people with aks. They
would have bombed the whole city, so they had to.
We covered this at a time in our episode about
it with Gordayin, but most of the Curtiss groups I've
spoken to don't have responses at this time. But the
PAK that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party sent me this comment
regarding the protest in January. Quote from the end of

(02:51:17):
December twenty twenty five through approximately January twentieth, twenty twenty six,
the Iranian regime committed an unprecedented massacre across the Ilam,
Kamanchan and Lauristan. The mobilized hashtal Chaby militias into Persian
cities and deployed a massive military presence into our territories.
In order to defend our citizens, we targeted the outposts
and military basis where these forces were stationed. We confirmed that, yes,

(02:51:39):
we carried out these operations. So what they're confirming there
is that they carried our operations, not where the weapons
came from, right, but we saw those operations in January.
Pull at Yan put at Yan, famous I guess for
being a founding member of the epigae or of Fuendecard,
an SDF commander. He's also an author in the politicians,

(02:52:00):
did make a statement which I thought was interesting. I'm
going to read it at least a good amount of
it because I think it's worth it. Quote. The Kurds
are not mercenaries, Kurdish blood is not cheap, and the
lives of Kurdish youth are not for sale. The Kurds
are fighting for their freedom, dignity, and political rights, not
to serve the temporary agendas of regional or international powers
without any clear outcome for the Kurdish people themselves. At
the same time, the Curds have repeatedly shown their willingness

(02:52:22):
to cooperate in fighting terrorism, extremism, and instability in the
Middle East. Kurdish forces played a central role in the
defeat of ISIS and contributed greatly to regional security, but
cooperation must be based on mutual respect, clarity, and long
term political understanding. I do not know the acurity of
the recent claims regarding weapons are literally sent to protesters
inside it Ran. If such operations truly existed, then the

(02:52:43):
American side should clearly explain which group, force, or individuals
receive those weapons. A nation of tens of millions of
people should not be collectively accused through vague and unverified statements. Yeah,
it's pretty good.

Speaker 10 (02:52:55):
It sounds reasonable.

Speaker 2 (02:52:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds like a really reasonable thing.

Speaker 3 (02:53:00):
It does seem that Trump has some personal animus against
the goods.

Speaker 2 (02:53:05):
I wonder if what he's referring to is that like
a year or so ago the last time they sent
over more weapons. If he sent some message more recently
being like hey, could you send some of those guns
that we already gave you over to rebels in Iran?
And they were like no, no, what do you mean?

(02:53:26):
And he's pissed. I wonder if that's what he's pissed about.

Speaker 3 (02:53:29):
Yeah, it's so hard for me to say. Is he
talking about the SDF. Is he talking about groups in
southern Kadistan? They did, Yeah, he asked him to like
pass Malone. I have never seen large numbers of Americans
supplied weapons among the Rojilazzi groups.

Speaker 2 (02:53:48):
No, although they do. Some of their aks come from
the US. If you look at like what's sent out
a bunch of and like body armor, a lot of
like what the SDF like, the armor they have came
from Americans. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:53:59):
Yeah, and with the highest speed SDF guys, you'll see
like mphors but even like night vision, like yat the
anti terror forces in the SDF, you'll see. But like
on on the Iranian side, I have not seen that.
And it's he's repeated this several times ever quite a
long period of time. It seems to be something he

(02:54:20):
genuinely believes, but I have seen no evidence aside from
his claims to support it. It doesn't matter, But it
does matter in the sense that Trump clearly is personally
mad at Kurdish groups and does not seem to be
interested in supporting their aspirations for autonomy, which is disappointing.

(02:54:42):
But I guess I don't know why. Maybe because he
feels that he alone to take credit for the defeat
of the Islamic State, like I can't. I can't quite
work out what to cause this, other than maybe he
perceives them to have slighted him by not giving weapons
that we don't know anything about. Yeah, let's talk a
little bit about the broader situation in Iran. I don't
want to make this true social review. I know I've

(02:55:05):
read Trump's truth in the past. I have reached a
point where I can't do that anymore.

Speaker 8 (02:55:11):
That's fair, Yeah, like I can't.

Speaker 3 (02:55:15):
People are dying, right, they bombed a girls school, Like
this is serious and horrible, and it's really hard to
bring the gravity that needs to be brought to this
and also read out the absolutely bonker stuff that gets posted.
And Trump described a missile strike on Iran as a
love tap. Yeah, this past week. So I'm just gonna

(02:55:36):
not gonna do that this week. I am going to
say that both sides have repeatedly and openly violated the ceasefire,
which Trump describes to reporters and dr Oz as being
on quote massive life support. Meanwhile, Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammed
Galibath has said quote around forces are ready to deliver
a well deserved response to any aggression. Mistake and strategy

(02:55:59):
and mistaken decision will always lead to mistaken results. The
whole world has already figured this out. We have prepared
for all options. They will be surprised. This comes as
Trump calls Iran's peace demands quote a piece of garbage
and quote a stupid proposal. Iranian demands allegedly included an
end to Israeli aggression in Lebanon and sovereignty overit straight

(02:56:21):
at home moves. Trump has also alleged that they walked
back an agreement to surrender and rich Ranian. We've also
found that ran has retained a large number of their
missiles and their launch capacity this week. It's also been
reported by Jim Laporter, who is one of the few
people still doing decer reporting at CBS that Pakistan has
provided safe haven for Iranian aircraft, shielding them from US strikes. Allegedly,

(02:56:44):
some civilian aircraft were also sheltered in Afghanistan, but then
had to be moved when Pakistan began bombing Afghanistan in March.
Iran has friends everywhere, I guess. The United States sent
a ballistic missile submarine to Gibraltar this week. These higher
class submarines to provide the survivable element of the nuclear triad,
or the most survival element of the nuclear triad.

Speaker 2 (02:57:07):
You can't strike a nuclear submarine before it gets a
chance to strike. It's it's basically impossible.

Speaker 8 (02:57:13):
Yeah, that's that's the reason that they exist.

Speaker 2 (02:57:16):
Guarantees that you will get to do your thing.

Speaker 3 (02:57:18):
Yeah, for mutually assured destruction reasons. It's not super normal
to announce their presence in places I don't think, but
the Navy did this week.

Speaker 9 (02:57:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:57:27):
I mean it can't be. It depends on the situation,
depending on going is a little weird, yes.

Speaker 8 (02:57:33):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:57:34):
The Pentagon seems to be planning to rename the war
in Iran Operation Sledgehammer. This seems to be an attempt
at end run around the nineteen seventy three War Powers revolution.
They claimed already where we spoke about this last week,
the claiming epic fury is over now and that this
is a new and distinct operation. In a congressional hearing,

(02:57:57):
Hexceth denied that they needed authorized use of military force.
Let's play the clip.

Speaker 14 (02:58:03):
It doesn't appear that hostilities have ended, and so the
question to you is whether or not the administration has
has considered or had intended to seek an authorization of
use of military force from the Congress.

Speaker 4 (02:58:24):
Senator, our view is that should the President make the
decision to recommence, that we would have all the authorities
necessary to do so.

Speaker 8 (02:58:31):
Do you think that it.

Speaker 14 (02:58:32):
Would be helpful to the president if it was made
clear that, in fact, the Congress did allow did provide
an au MF.

Speaker 4 (02:58:44):
I think the president our view is that he has
all the authorities he needs under Article two to execute.

Speaker 14 (02:58:50):
Thank mis Chairman.

Speaker 3 (02:58:52):
That's more or less he's saying they didn't need Congress,
which is great. Yeah. Access face pointed questioning from the
House and Senate creation to defend subcommittees, He repeatedly batted
away questions about munitions depletion and suggested that it wasn't
appropriate to answer them in public on the record like this.

Speaker 8 (02:59:10):
Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (02:59:13):
He also did not directly confront the cost of the war,
which is now approaching thirty billion, instead saying, quote, what
is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon? And
the fact that this president has been willing to make
a historic and courageous choice to confront that it comes
with cost, and we recognize that kind of an exercise
in an evasion on excess part there apart from his

(02:59:33):
pretty emphactic statement that he didn't think that they needed
any permission from Congress to continue with this war. So
we will be back next week to keep you updated
on what might be operations sledge Hammer.

Speaker 2 (02:59:47):
Great great stuff, very exciting. So on May twelfth, twenty
twenty six, the former mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang,
pled guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a
foreign government and is being sentenced in the near future

(03:00:09):
for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. People
have taken this news normally the foreign government is China.
I did a quick little bit of googling before coming
around here and found some fun headlines, one of them
in the Lion California mayor pleads guilty to serving Communist China.
And that article was written by John Ransom, who's a

(03:00:32):
senior contributor at The Lion and also has written for
The Epic Times, which itself is like the agent of
a foreign power effective. Yeah, the WCBM had a headline
this democrat mayor just came clean about working for communist China.

Speaker 8 (03:00:50):
She could come clean.

Speaker 2 (03:00:51):
Clean, she pled guilty and for that, you know. And
then from the House Committee on China's website, mulinar warrants
of CCP influence after California mayor charged in foreign influence plot.
These charges highlight the very real threat of the Chinese
Communist Party's attempts to influence are free and open society. Well,
it denies freedom and liberty for the Chinese people. The

(03:01:13):
CCP is actively working to subvert our institutions and divide
us against one another. In this case, an elected mayor
acted at the direction of CCP handlers, coordinated with Chinese
intelligence linked individuals, and used a local news platform to
spread CCP propaganda. And so let's talk about that. How
much of this is true? Right?

Speaker 9 (03:01:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:01:32):
I mean technically, yeah, Like that's that's kind of what happened,
except for the part where they were like coordinating to
drive Americans apart from each other and create unrest and whatnot.
That's not what the purpose of this thing that Eileen
got wrapped up in was. She and her former fiance,

(03:01:52):
a fellow named Son who got sentenced before she did.
Mike's son, are accused of basically having run like content
farms at the behest of Chinese government officials, Like they
were putting out articles on like the alleged genocide in Zinjang,
denying like the Chinese government had done anything wrong there

(03:02:13):
there was any genocide at all in the region, and
so it's kind of like propaganda stuff like that they
were serving as like a fire hose of propaganda. Per
the Justice Department. In June of twenty twenty one, a
PRC official contacted Wang and other individuals via the we
chat encryptid messaging application with pre written news articles, including
a PRC official written essay in the Los Angeles Times

(03:02:35):
that stated China's stance on the Zinjang issue. There is
no genocide in Zinjang. There is no such thing as
forced labor in any production activity, including cotton production, spreading
such rumors due to fame, China destroys Zinjang safety and stability,
weakened local economy, and suppressed China's development. Minutes later, when
posted the article on her own website and responded to
the PRC official with a link to the article on

(03:02:55):
her website, the others in the group did the same.
The PRC official responded, so fast, thank you everyone, and
this is bad. Genocide denials bad. The spreading slop content
on behalf of a foreign government is like bad. It
is important to note that this is not like spying
or sabotage in any meaningful way. She's not acting to

(03:03:16):
like try to damage the United States. She's acting as
like an unregistered pr agent for the Chinese government, or
at least that's what she had done up to this
point in her life, and like everything that she was
doing was legal if she had disclosed who she was
working for, which I think is also an important thing
to note because sh like this happens all the time

(03:03:39):
in the media, Like we all see, there's tons of
content that is the result one way or the other
of some government's influence operation, and for the majority of
the time when it happens, nobody gets tripped up, you know,
either because they have friends in power or because they
don't quite cross a line. And I lead in her
friends were not very savvy about what they were doing. Yeah,

(03:04:01):
but they were also not operating on a very large level,
like this is not a big operation. One of the
notes in this charging document is that Eileen sent this
Chinese government official at screenshot showing that the article had
been viewed fifteen one hundred and twenty eight times through
her site, which is like, not, we're not talking like
big deal influence ops here. We're not talking like sweeping

(03:04:24):
powers over like public opinion. Now, perhaps that's what they
hoped Eileen would kind of rise to over time. She
didn't seem to be like a kind of rising star
in local government in southern California. She got endorsed by
some prominent Democratic Party officials, and she was still in
touch with her Chinese government handlers at this time. This

(03:04:45):
whole period in which she's like being charged for working
as an agent of the Chinese government is like twenty
twenty through at least twenty twenty two. So yeah, this
is like, you know, a bad thing, and it's good
that this got found out and that she's not continued
to be the mayor of Arcadia. But also this is
not like the scary thing that the right wing press

(03:05:07):
is making it out to you. She was not here
to like subvert the US so that it could be
invaded or destroyed. She was there to try to stop
people on the internet from being mean to the Chinese government.
Like that was the primary use that they had with her.
It's just not that like actually scariest story or anything.
It's just a kind of thing that happens. This lady
happened to become mayor of a small down basically, which

(03:05:28):
is wild. It's crazy if that happened. But like this
is going on all the time.

Speaker 3 (03:05:33):
Yeah, I think, yeah, people have lost their minds about
this one in a way that like.

Speaker 2 (03:05:39):
It's a perfect California city, like it's a southern California town,
and it's a government female spy like a course of course.

Speaker 10 (03:05:51):
There's a lot of stuff. Back when Eric Swalwell was
still a relevant human being, there was some attacks on
him for associating with a quote Chinese female spy man
ten years ago, and that was like one of the
lines of attack against him. Sure because like someone someone
he had like relations with in like twenty fourteen, what

(03:06:11):
was alleged or found to be a working as a
spy for the Chinese government. It's interesting that they're doing
this type of stuff at like the exact same time
that Trump just got just like it is like arriving
in China.

Speaker 2 (03:06:22):
Yeah right now, yeah, yeah, it's really great timing.

Speaker 3 (03:06:25):
Yeah, curious timing there. But I'm guessing she took them leave.
This has been a period of some time, right, like
her fiance.

Speaker 2 (03:06:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, because first first her former fiance got busted,
and then she was like, I didn't do anything wrong,
and then it became clear that she very much had. Yeah, right,
so there was this was like a thing that yeah,
this has been going on for a little while. It
just sort of once she pled guilty, then you could
do the article like California mayor pleads guilty to working
for the Chinese government.

Speaker 10 (03:06:52):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just funny timing. Yeah,
speaking of timing, here are some ads. Great, yay, okay,

(03:07:14):
we are back for one of our last main stories.
Let's talk about Virginia and the redistricting efforts. Last week,
in a four to three ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court
blocked the voter approved redistricting map that passed in April
with almost fifty two percent of the vote. The court

(03:07:37):
found the process used to advance the referendum violated the
state constitution. According to Virginia's constitution, the legislature has to
vote twice to pass any proposed constitutional amendment before it
gets put on the ballot for Virginia voters, but these
two General Assembly votes must be separated by a state

(03:08:01):
general election. The first General Assembly vote for this redistricting
amendment passed in October twenty twenty five, before the November
general election, and the second vote to approve the referendum
happened next January, so a few months ago. The Republican
challengers to the new voting map argued that because early

(03:08:23):
voting had already begun, the General Assembly's first vote in
October did not actually occur before a general election, and
that was the grounds the State Supreme Court used to
block the voter approved amendment. The four judge majority ruled
the intervening election requirement was violated because the general election

(03:08:47):
quote began on September nineteenth, twenty twenty five, and just
ended on election day November fourth, yeah I.

Speaker 3 (03:08:57):
Feel like you're kind of outside the spirit of what
they were going for that one.

Speaker 10 (03:09:00):
But no, this on the face sounds quite absurd.

Speaker 3 (03:09:03):
It's one of those things that is technically correct, but
at the same time.

Speaker 10 (03:09:06):
Well, and there's some complicating factors because of Trump's own
attempts to restrict early voting or deem early voting like
not constitutionally like appropriate, or like it defies the federal
government's definition of the word election. And so now you
have some groups in Virginia who are trying to pass
this amendment, Democrat groups who are using kind of similar

(03:09:28):
rhetoric as Trump. We'll get to that in a sec
So Justice de Arthur Helsey wrote to the majority opinion, saying, quote,
this violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum
vote and renders it null and void. Early Virginia voters
unknowingly forfeited they're constitutionally protected opportunity to vote for or

(03:09:51):
against delegates who favor or disfavor amending the constitution by
not anticipating a legislative vote on a constitutional amendment four
days before the last day of voting, unquote. So the
court said that the reason why they have this to
vote requirement across two different general assemblies is to give

(03:10:13):
voters enough time to not just support or not support
a constitutional amendment on the ballot, but then also vote
for state lawmakers who will either approve or not approve
the constitutional amendment in the legislature itself. Right, So that's
what they're saying. It's like this, this process of having
these two votes is to ensure that voters have a

(03:10:34):
say both in who they put into office as well
as on the ballot. And they're saying that this process
was violated because early voting had already commenced by the
time that the legislature actually voted on this proposed amendment.
Chief Justice Cleo. Powell wrote in the dissent that the
majority quote broadened the meaning of the word election as

(03:10:57):
used in the Virginia Constitution to include the early voting period.
This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and
federal law define an election. By extending elections in the
Commonwealth of Virginia beyond a single day, the Majorities formulation
would directly conflict with the federal mandate that elections for
federal officials be held on a single day, so under

(03:11:20):
the Supreme Court of Virginia's new ruling, the district map
drawn in twenty twenty one must be used for the
upcoming election this November. The midterms, the new map would
have won Democrats four more House seats, but considering this
ruling by the state Supreme Court, Dems are now eight

(03:11:40):
seats down in the national redistricting battle, which the latest
gutting of the Voting Rights Act will only make worse.

Speaker 4 (03:11:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:11:51):
Over this past weekend, Virginia Democrats Hakeem Jeffries and Governor
Abigail Skpenberger held discussions on what to do about this ruling.
Times reported that Virginia Democrats expressed determination to win two
or three of the Republican held seats even with the
current map, but also discussed a few long shot options

(03:12:12):
to change the ruling or push forward the map anyway.
One of the more extreme measures debated was the possibility
of replacing the entire Virginia Supreme Court by lowering the
mandatory retirement age from seventy five to fifty four and
then having a new court rehear the case.

Speaker 3 (03:12:32):
Sounds great, Let's do it in between now and novemb.

Speaker 10 (03:12:36):
So it seems the Democrats decided against this path ultimately
in part because the state Department of Elections deadline for
congressional maps is May twelfth, which is a day before
we're recording. Yeah, they kind of ran out of time
on this. It's also unclear if they really would have
had the bravery to pull such an extreme maneuver, right,

(03:12:58):
something that may be the correct thing to do and
maybe something they should just do anyway, if they have
the power to fully replace their Supreme Court, why not.
Because the Democrats are currently in a majority of control
of the state legislature right now, why not do this anyway?
To a certain extent, Also, Abigail Stanberger can only serve
one term, so you know, you're not going to lose

(03:13:20):
much political capital by pulling a kind of insane move
like this. But it's not going to happen at least
right now. Yeah, nope, Virginia State Senate Majority Leader Scott
Sortiville told The New Republic quote, as a practical matter,
the move would not be capable of being implemented given
the time frame. Now, despite that May twelfth deadline. On Monday,

(03:13:45):
Virginia Attorney General j Jones and Democratic State lawmakers filed
an emergency appeal asking the US Supreme Court to put
the state Supreme Court order on hold for the upcoming
midterm election, arguing that the state court based their ruling
on misreading the federal definition of election and by adopting

(03:14:06):
its own definition, the state Supreme Court infringed on the
state legislature's power to regulate federal elections quote. By forcing
the Commonwealth to conduct its congressional elections using districts different
from those adopted by the General Assembly pursuant to a
constitutional amendment that people just ratified, the Supreme Court of
Virginia has deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their

(03:14:28):
right to the lawfully enacted congressional districtsuot. This case will
be initially decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles
the emergency appeals from states covered by the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals, but the US Supreme Court may argue
that they don't have the authority to intervene because the

(03:14:49):
Virginia Supreme Court ruling cites state law, not federal law.
And The New Republic also reported that state Senate majority
leader Scott Saureville confirmed even if the Supreme Court gives
them a good ruling, that ruling could be unlikely to
impact this upcoming election cycle due to this May twelfth deadline.

Speaker 3 (03:15:11):
I guess it's just what we're saying that, like the
nature of this midterm will be very important for the
way you get to vote in America going forward.

Speaker 2 (03:15:21):
Yeah, I mean they're they're pulling out all the stops,
like they're throwing any kind of plausible deniability in the trash,
because this is the get it the lose it moment
for the right, you know, Like that's very much how
they're looking at this.

Speaker 3 (03:15:35):
Yeah, this is a locking in forever we'll see.

Speaker 5 (03:15:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:15:39):
A few years ago, Ohio pushed through unconstitutional maps, but
maps that were deemed unconstitutional by state courts. Yeah, one
federal court did authorize them to use these maps in
like an interim period and they're still using them. And
in a piece by the Nation, they mentioned this option
was said that they would need to have the backing

(03:16:00):
of the state Board of Electors, and Virginia might not
have that. There's lots of people on the Democratic side
that are much more rule followy than a lot of
the Republicans, as we have seen now Virginia may be
able to still pass this redistricting map in the future
by spreading out the process over a bigger period of

(03:16:21):
time to not create this confusion about the early voting period.
But the map will not be able to go into
effect before the midterms, but it still may be able
to go into effect in the future. I do think
it's also worth noting that the same day that Virginia
filed this appeal with the Supreme Court, the US Supreme
Court also paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one
of two majority black districts before the midterm elections by

(03:16:41):
overturning a lower court order that blocked the use of
a Republican backed map from twenty twenty three. So the
Supreme Court is currently weighing in on not exactly the same,
similar similar things in other states.

Speaker 3 (03:16:56):
That was because it was basically pointing to it Sluisiana
rule and saying like, we've ruled on this, Yes, this
is right.

Speaker 10 (03:17:02):
This was following the Louisiana ruling.

Speaker 3 (03:17:04):
Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense. You know, great videos
Democratic Process Voting Rights Act.

Speaker 8 (03:17:13):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (03:17:15):
So, there's an increasing movement in the United States, both
at the state and the federal level to repeal gas taxes.
So in the United States, there's federal gas taxes that
that everybody pays. The current federal gas tax rate is
about eighteen point three cents per gallon for gasoline and
gas a hall, which is the actual official name of

(03:17:37):
fuel mixed with unleaded gas that's like unleaded and ethanol
together is actually just called gas a hall.

Speaker 3 (03:17:42):
Okay, I never knew that. What, Yes, what I Loveny would.

Speaker 2 (03:17:45):
Yeah, they couldn't think of anything better. And then twenty
four point three cents per gallon for diesel fuel, right,
And then some states have their their own like Oregon
has its own like gas taxes California senty does at
both levels. Like the federal gas tax is there in
short because it helps to pay for the roads, right,
Like that's that's why we need a federal gas tax

(03:18:07):
is because it funds what's called the Highway Trust Fund
or the HTF, which is a big part of like
what keeps our interstate infrastructure functional. And then state level
gas taxes are often also like supporting like state local roads, right.
And so Trump has talked about temporarily repealing the gas

(03:18:28):
tax for like a couple of months, there have been
Democratic proposals that are very similar. Graham Platner, who's about
to be a Congressman from Maine, it's a Democratic nominee. Yeah,
who's currently the nominee but is almost certainly going to win.

Speaker 3 (03:18:44):
The presumptive nominee I think.

Speaker 2 (03:18:45):
Has expressed support for ending the gas tax outright, and
his basic plan was something like, you have wealthy corporations
pay the money that the gas tax is currently going to,
and you put that burden onto you know, corporations instead
of people. Not uncommon, by the way, for the gas
tax to be temporarily repealed. During the early months of

(03:19:06):
the most recent escalation of the Russian invasion into Ukraine
and the Biden administration back in twenty twenty two, Biden
temporarily paused the federal gas tax. Right, So this is
the thing that happens. It's just always a bad idea
because it's the reason why you see people in the
left and right make suggestions like this repeal state or
federal gas taxes is because it's really easy. It's an

(03:19:28):
easy way to say, like I'm looking out for you,
I'm trying to take care of regular people. Gas is
too darn expensive already, We've got to do everything we
can to make your life easier. The problem is the
Highway Trust Fund, which is absolutely critical for our roads
being functional, is already always running at a deficit. In
twenty twenty four, it was a deficit of about thirteen

(03:19:48):
billion dollars. The main reason for this is that, like transportation,
infrastructure is aging every single year and falling behind. And
at the same time, that gas tax is not like
peg to inflation or anything, so it has not been
keeping pace with the actual needs of the Trust Fund.
So anyway, we're already in a really bad situation with

(03:20:10):
the HTF. Every time we pause these taxes, it gets
much worse. And I'm worried right now that it was
reasonable it may sound and say something like, well we
should just have the rich pay for that. You're never
going to have any kind of like move that does
both of those things at once. They're going to start
by repealing the gas tax, and then they'll never get

(03:20:32):
around to replacing it with anything, and then the roads
will just be bad forever. I think this is a
bad idea, and I think you should be a little
wary of politicians doing this because it's an easy way
to get a win. But that said, damn near everybody
is so how wary can you actually be? It's just
a really irresponsible, bad idea that has a lot of

(03:20:54):
bipartisan support.

Speaker 13 (03:20:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (03:20:56):
Really, Ever since the no tax on Tips things, there's
been this wave of of you know, people have called
this like slopulist policies or like things that are that
are that are you know, populist in framing, but have
certain like economic problems or or get dispersed in weird ways.
You knows. Me has talked about some specifics around the
no tax on Tips policy, but there's there's there's been

(03:21:17):
like a wave of these, you know, small targeted tax
cuts on on on on various little things to kind
of lift lift the financial burden that Americans are facing,
you know, the better ones, you know, the ones like
like like Platinum Strategy, which has a part of his
plan increasing taxes on billionaires and oil corporations. But these

(03:21:39):
sorts of taxes are just like little band aid solutions
and that are almost like consolation prizes for not being
able to just raise the corporate tax rate or income
tax brackets. Right, And it's it's like we're adopting these
consolation taxes for this presumed impossibility just actually raising taxes
to the level of you know, if you look at

(03:22:00):
the United States in like the nineteen fifties, super super high,
super high level of taxes that actually funded social services.
And you know one thing that could be frustrating about
these these sorts of more like slopulist tax angles is
it you know, it undermines the vital role of taxes
to actually fund social services.

Speaker 2 (03:22:18):
Yep.

Speaker 10 (03:22:19):
Now should more of those taxes be funded by corporations
and billionaires?

Speaker 8 (03:22:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (03:22:23):
Absolutely, Yeah, But I think that should be the focus
rather than these little itty bitty kind of you know,
cutting away at the corners of like small, small targeted
taxes that are that are again like us used as
like you know, consolation prizes, rather than actually addressing the
pretty significant, you know, tax reforms that need to happen
in this country.

Speaker 2 (03:22:44):
And it's it's just dangerous in part because it acts
as if what the gas tax is there to fund
is optional, is not like necessary, like, well, we don't
really need this, so we'll pause this whenever like things
get bad because we don't need them. But will you
do like our society is reliant upon the maintenance of
that fund, and we shouldn't act like it's Yeah, this

(03:23:07):
is very frustrating to me.

Speaker 3 (03:23:08):
Yeah, you can see why the gas tax and particularus
appealing right now. Right now, Yes, people are struggling, like
it is literally seven dollars a gallon in pods of California.

Speaker 2 (03:23:19):
Oh, it's fucking nuts.

Speaker 3 (03:23:21):
Like people who like a lot of people who struggle
to make it are really struggling to make it now. Yeah,
why our society is set up means it's very hard
for people to exist without a car. So you're like, yes,
the populist appeal is obvious, and.

Speaker 2 (03:23:34):
As is always the case with this sort of thing,
the fact that it has an appeal is based on
ignorance because when roads are poorly maintained, it hosts regular
people huge amounts of money, and the damage it does
to their car far more than the gas tax costs them.
This has been established. This is not like I think
we have to wonder about. There have been studies into this,
like you pay more money when the roads are bad

(03:23:55):
because your car gets fucked up.

Speaker 3 (03:23:57):
Yeah, and it's reasonable for people to say, well, a
country has enough money, you can't we unfunck the roads,
and yes, not charge me a lot of money. Unfortunately,
we just spent thirty billion fucking invading Iran, so no
we can't.

Speaker 2 (03:24:10):
Oh yeah, you have to not do some of the
other things that we're doing.

Speaker 3 (03:24:14):
Yeah that it's not up for grabs in the current
political atmosphere, right, and even your d you're like mainstream Democrats, Yeah,
aren't going to ride for that.

Speaker 10 (03:24:25):
No, I mean it requires pressure against mainstream Democrats and
obviously the Republican establishment as well. Right, Like, part of
Plantner's plan is a fifty percent per barrel windfall tax
on big oil profits, which would be significant, but there
will be a lot of pushback against this, including among
the democratic establishment, and that might require getting rid of
a whole bunch of these democratic establishment figures who are

(03:24:47):
currently occupying seats of power.

Speaker 2 (03:24:50):
Yeah. Yeah, well everyone think about that.

Speaker 3 (03:24:54):
On that hopeful note, on that optimist how to do
it note?

Speaker 10 (03:25:00):
Where can people send us a news related tips chase?

Speaker 3 (03:25:05):
They can do that by emailing cool Zone tips at
proton dot me. If you want to keep it a
little bit more encrypted, you can do it from a
proton email address so it doesn't bother you to go
ahead and send it. If you have a marketing email,
you can not send it. Trying not to be so
rude to the marketing people.

Speaker 10 (03:25:24):
No, I think part of part of those anarchists that
left being and streamers' threats might be against the marketing corporations.
If James keeps a keeps threatening again at the end of.

Speaker 3 (03:25:34):
This episode, anyone to prison, I'll just blog advocating violence.
I'm just gonna block your email. Okay, Well, well, I
will make sure that we never hear from you again.
It won't just be me blocking it, it will be
all of us here at cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (03:25:49):
We reported the news, you reported the news.

Speaker 5 (03:25:53):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:25:59):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 8 (03:26:05):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 10 (03:26:07):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com for check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2 (03:26:18):
You can now find sources where it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 10 (03:26:22):
Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

The MeatEater Podcast

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}It Could Happen Here Weekly 232