It Could Happen Here Weekly 243

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

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

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hello everyone, I'm welcome to di could Happen Here. My
name is Dan el Kerd, and I'm a researcher and
analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by
Edia Yub, who is a Palstinian Lebanese writer and researcher
as well as a podcaster with the podcast The Fire
These Times and from the Periphery Media Collective. And today
he's speaking to us about the recent agreement between Lebanon

(00:49):
and Israel related to Israel's continued occupation of the southern
part of Lebanon and continued bombardment. So he's going to
talk to us about what the agreement says, why there
are so many problems and concerns related to disagreement and
how it fits into the broader regional war against Iran.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
Adia.

Speaker 5 (01:09):
Thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 6 (01:09):
Us, Hi, thank you for having me again.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
So today we're going to be discussing, as I mentioned
in the intro, the agreement between Lebanon and Israel, the Framework,
which has been quite controversial. So I wanted to just
give you an opportunity to give a brief explainer. What
is this agreement.

Speaker 7 (01:28):
So it's technically like it tried lands, the framework in
the sense that it includes legally anyway, the US, Israel,
and Lebanon. Ostensibly, like what it says it does is
that it proposes some kind of future in which Lebanon
and Israel, which have been in the factor state of
war for basically forever, to no longer be in that

(01:48):
the factor state of war. The problem, which probably won't
surprise like the audience of this podcast, the problem is
sort of in the details, like what is it that
Lebanon has signed. If you look on the website itself,
it's on the American government's website, there are fourteen points.

Speaker 6 (02:05):
It's roughly on thousand.

Speaker 7 (02:06):
I don't know, three hundred words or so, and already
you see what's absent, which is the terms like withdraworld
and of occupation any of that. There's basically no stipulation
whatsoever that the Israelis have to leave Lebanon, and you'll
have people who support the zero sell. Well, technically that's
not true, because it says here in number two, Government

(02:27):
of Israel and Government of Lebanon commit to reciprocal sequence
process with clear conditions, whereby the LAF, which is the
Lebanese Armed Forces, whether he's store effective sovereign authority over
all of Lebanes's territory. And here is the grub Um
quoting pending the verified disarmament of non state armed groups
and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the idea of the

(02:49):
defense forces to progressively redeploy out of Lebanin's territory.

Speaker 6 (02:53):
What it essentially says, and the various.

Speaker 7 (02:57):
Points we don't have to go through all of them
essentially confirm this time time again is that Israel will
get to define, will get to decide when an area
that Israel is occupying, as in the Debanese territory that
Israel is occupying, when.

Speaker 6 (03:11):
That area is officially disarmed.

Speaker 7 (03:14):
When it is no longer a quote on quote security
thread the Debinese state has no say in the matter.
There's no independent, like un type mechanism that would determine that.
It's just Israel that gets to define that. And what
they're currently they're currently doing, which is what the Lebanese
government has agreed to, which is part of the controversy
that we'll get into, is that they're creating these two

(03:36):
so called pilot zones, which are among it in the
territory that is THEAD is currently occupying in Lebanon, in
which they will allow the LAF, the Debinese owned forces
to progressively assert its I'm putting this in quotation. You
can't see it like assert is a sovereign territorial control.
But and here again is the kind of the devil
in the detail. The Lebanese army cannot actually enforce anything

(03:59):
that would still be the authority of the Israeli army,
which again is the one that is currently illegally occupying
southern Lebanon. So yeah, we can get into more of
the details, but that's sort of in a nutshell why
it's so bad.

Speaker 6 (04:11):
But I can get into more why it's bad as well.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
Oh yeah, we'd like to talk about all the bad,
So before we get into like all the bad Where
does Hasbola play into any of this?

Speaker 6 (04:21):
Well, unsurprisingly, Hasbella opposes this.

Speaker 7 (04:24):
In fact, I don't think a majority of the political
parties currently in the Libanese parliament support this, if I'm
not mistaken, which is one of the reasons why I
don't think this particular agreement, which is the latest of
so many agreements between the Americans, Israelis and the Delibanese,
at least at the official level, I don't see this
lasting very long. Hezbolla has immediately said that this is

(04:44):
a humiliation, it's surrendered its defeat, which is not that unusual.
That's sort of how they've been talking about these negotiations
for since they started. Really and it declared them declared
this agreement null and void, which they cannot get more
more stit forward than that. Their main ally in parliament
i e. The Amal movement has also come out to

(05:05):
oppose this, which is a big deal because that's the
speaker of parliament. Lebanon is ruled by this kind of troika,
so he's one or one out of three, which is
a big problem for the other two. And yeah, I
kind of genuinely don't see this lasting, but I am
also worried about what can come next.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
I mean, the fact that Israel is again the unilateral
you know, judge jury executioner here exactly obviously is a
very big problem. But what other issues do you foresee
with disagreement.

Speaker 7 (05:33):
I worry that the Lebanese government, in at first having
some I think understandable concerns over Iran's rule and Lebanon,
and we can get into that, has sort of I
don't know how you would describe it, maybe over corrected
and gone a bit too anti Iran, which in and
of itself I.

Speaker 6 (05:51):
Wouldn't necessarily oppose.

Speaker 7 (05:53):
I'm not a fan of the Islamic Republic, to put
it mildly, and I've always opposed has Balaf as long
as I can remember. But the timing of doing what
they've been doing, and I can get into it now,
has been I think, very to put it charitably, very puzzling,
but I think also like very very short sighted and
frankly rectless and dangerous. This is all while Israel is

(06:14):
bombing Lebanon. I should say, if this was any context
where there was no active war, I wouldn't have as
big of an issue with it. But they've declared the
Ionian ambassador to Lebanon to be persona non grata. They've
taken down photos of the Aetola by the road to
the airport and replaced it with lubnan Aulan, which is
like Lebanon. First, they've deported like members of the IOGC,

(06:37):
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and done a bunch of other
even like rhetorical things like the president would go on
Twitter and say like Elon get out and stuff like that.
The president of Lebanon, which again I have one thousand
and one issues with the Iranian role in Lebanon, and
including my issue with Hazbola, but there's only one country

(06:57):
that is currently actually occupying Lebanon military and actually bombing
Lebanon militarily with its military I mean, and that country
is not Iran. So the priorities of the government in
wanting to distance itself from Hasbola's actions, which I should
say have been controversial from the beginning because Hesbolla took
a unionatural decision to enter the war against Israel, a

(07:19):
decision that was not made with like the rest of
Lebanon's approval. So it's been like controversial from the start.
And that's what I meant by like the charitable interpretation
is that the Lebanese government sort of overcorrected and instead,
by attempting, supposedly to distance itself from Iran, what has
actually done is made us even more dependent on the

(07:40):
United States than we used to be before.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Right, So that's where the things you're describing under normal
circumstances to be like, yeah, like why is I run
so embedded in a lot of these different countries in
the region, and why does it have such an interventionist role?
But you're saying it's reckless in this context where the
Lebanese government is basically making itself more more at the
mercy of actors like the United States and Israel by proxy.

Speaker 7 (08:05):
Yeah, as of now, like and I really tried my
best to look for some leverage that Lebanon might have,
but as of now, I don't actually see any leverage
that Lebanon has.

Speaker 6 (08:14):
It's basically we hope for the best.

Speaker 7 (08:16):
Like I wish I could put it differently, but it
essentially is under the hope that, like the Trump administration
instared of Ntanyahu, that it might fall you know, force
day israelis to either withdraw from Lebanon, or to adverely
stop the bombing or whatnot, which I've seen no evidence of.
And as of now, every time a so called ceasefire
has been signed that even has bottle like Grito, the

(08:37):
only thing that it's done is that Hezbollah would not
respond to Israeli bombings. So the Israeli bombings have been
constant throughout this entire thing. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, since
the agreement was signed, they've continued.

Speaker 6 (08:48):
They haven't stopped.

Speaker 7 (08:50):
As of time of recording, over four th two hundred
Lebanese have been killed since the beginning of this latest war,
so not even since the beginning since twenty twenty three,
but twenty twenty six alone, because Israel does not discriminate
and how they bomb. So to give you the example
of those two so called pilot zones, are they even
inhabitable as of now?

Speaker 6 (09:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (09:11):
Because of the fifty four towns and villages Lebanese towns
and villages that the Israelis militarily occupy, at least forty
six of them that we know of, are either partially
or entirely demolished.

Speaker 6 (09:23):
So what are those security zones?

Speaker 7 (09:25):
What does that even mean, you know, but again it
is the entire problem now is that they get to
decide all of that. And again with all of my
issues with Iran, the agreement that the Lebanese have signed
with the Israelis, I think is objectively worse than the
MEMORANDUV understanding that the Iranians signed with the Americans that
actually also included Lebanon, because at least in that AMYU

(09:46):
and thatment of understanding, it included the sentence territorial integrity
and sovereignty of Lebanon, as well as the call for seasfire,
which was a nightmare for Nataniahu.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Let's talk about Iran more specifically for a moment. I mean,
Lebanon has taken out, the ambassador has made all of
these kind of rhetorical shifts away from the Iranian regime.
Obviously display for the US and for Israel. But Iran,
how has it responded, How has the government responded, and
how does this agreement relate to the MLU that Iran

(10:28):
signed with the United States.

Speaker 7 (10:30):
So it's quite complicated because the MoU was signed just
about a week or so before. So the deal between
the Ionians and the Americans was signed roughly a Dean
or agreed upon. I don't know if they signed these
things roughly a week before this one, the one between
Israel and Lebanon via America that hypotheitle one, as they
call it. One interpretation that I've seen is that by

(10:52):
going directly to Lebanon, America actually managed to bypass these
kind of bullet points that Iran was putting forward. So
like let's say Iran is saying, what lebt there should
be ceasefire in Lebanon and that there should be like
territorial integrity and sovereignty. In the meantime, the Lebanese state
is saying to Iran, like, you do not negotiate on
our behalf. So the Americans go to Lebanon directly, or

(11:14):
rather Lebanon goes to the American and they superseded, they
supersede this and they do negotiation, or they they get
the Lebanese to sign this latest agreement directly, which of
course does not include Iran anyway. So the main difference
is between the MoU between America and Iran and the
agreement between let's say Israel and Lebanon, is that Israel

(11:36):
had no parts whatsoever in the MoU, and if it
had come to pass. If the Iranians had basically gotten
what they were asking for, the Americans would have been forced,
at least legally, to pressure the Israelis to leave Lebanon
all together. No ifs and bots, no negotiated exit whatever
that means, no making up pilot zones, none of that stuff.

(11:57):
It would just be you've been doing this occupation illegally.
You need to leave, as simple as that. That's been
the Iranian position, which is not a position that most
Lebanies would disagree with, because it is.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Just the fact, right, And it's interesting, I mean, obviously
we don't want to speculate, but it is interesting that
Iran made the ceasefire in Lebanon so kind of central
to a lot of their demands, right, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (12:21):
It's not that surprising to me, I think, because they
see this as saving has Bottler, so like it's it's
like it's almost like an easy thing to do.

Speaker 6 (12:29):
It doesn't cost them anything. In a sense.

Speaker 7 (12:32):
It would have cause put pressure on the Israelis, which
they're happy to do since Israel and America started the
war against Iran in the first place, and it would
you know, give some kind of breathing space for their
main ally in Lebanon, which is has Botler. Yeah, So
any and of itself, I don't think it's surprising that
they included it. Maybe they knew that Lebanon would have
rejected officially given the position of the Lebanese government you

(12:56):
know thus far, and I can't know for sure, but yeah,
and in of itself, it doesn't surprise me that they
went for this because one other thing I should say
that they were proposing in that MoU is a so
called deconfliction cell, the details of which are not entirely
clear to me yet and at this point may never
happen anyway. But the way it's been interpreted that I
saw is that it would see its influence in Lebanon historied.

(13:20):
So there's also like a self interest in all of that,
but not in a militarily occupying way. So for me,
it's not that the option has been either an amazing
option or a bad option. It's more like either we
get the Iran option, which is not ideal but self functional,
or a catastrophic option, which is the one that we
actually got with these RAA.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
Its right, And I mean we've had some episodes about Iran.
I've hosted a few people about Iran, and I think
it bears repeating that their strategy, their ability to kind
of withstand even this level of severe warfare in the
latest escalation, has depended on their allies in the region

(14:01):
and kind of the diffusion of Iranian power to nonstate
actors essentially. So, what was the public reaction to the
Lebanese government signing this agreement? The Lebanese public reaction, to
be clear, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (14:16):
The most immediate reaction on this hit has been by
of course, by Hesballa, and it's ally mL in which
they you know, they burned stuff down, they yelled, they
threw stuff at the cops and stuff like that. The
Secretary General of Hasballa, as I said, has declared did
not avoid and so on. As for the rest of
the country, there hasn't been any kind of mobilization against it,
but they shouldn't be interpreted as consent. It's more, I think,

(14:38):
in my view that the Lebanese population as a whole
has been exhausted by nearly three years of war now
and there is an appetite for kind of diplomacy. In fact,
there's been a pole, a nation white pole that was
just released a few days ago that says that roughly
fifty four percent of the population support the plomacy versus
thirty five percent that support armed resistance. Now the fift

(15:00):
and that support the plomacy, which is you know, not
just over half. It's not because they believe this is
the best option. It's more that they believe I think,
this is my interpretation. It's more that I think most
people genuinely believe that there are no other options. So
it's more like, I think a reflection of how desperate
the situation is more than anything else. It should not
be confused with any kind of like warming up towards Israel.

(15:21):
And that sample, which again was Nationloyd, eighty seven percent
of people in Lebanon identified Israel as their main enemy
versus fifty one percent that identified America and thirty eighty
percent that identified Iran.

Speaker 6 (15:35):
And this is a cost sects.

Speaker 7 (15:36):
So usually when you see the reporting, you could be
led to believe that it's only Shiahs and Lebanon that
opposed Israel, but actually it is really a cost sect
that Israel is a deeply unpopular state in Lebanon, which
is not surprising because it's been bombing Lebanon for on
and off of decades now, right.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
You've written about this for nine seven two mag you
have another article coming out, I'm sure, or it's already out.
I'm not sure, but I will definitely link it in
the show notes by the time this episode airs. Is
there anything you feel like we missed and that listeners
should know.

Speaker 6 (16:04):
It's very difficult to know where things are heading in
terms of the security situation in Lebanon. I would argue
that kind of.

Speaker 7 (16:10):
The specter of a civil war, whatever that actually looks like,
is never too far away, and hasn't been too far
away for a while now. I don't think it's likely
in the traditional sense of like multiple armed actors in
the near future, largely because I think the population is
really exhausted.

Speaker 6 (16:28):
But there israelly.

Speaker 7 (16:29):
War on Lebanon has created kind of this fault line
that's very very difficult, I think to overcome now. And
it's not again a fault line between pro isiin and
anti Israel. Both sides of this fault line are technically
anti Israel. It's more of like what the priority should
be for the Lebanese states and sense for a lot
of people who are from southern Lebanon that is currently

(16:51):
as we're speaking, still being bombed. It is giving the
sense that the rest of the country is abandoning them,
and the sort of grievances is quite literally what gave
us has Buddler in the first place. Hazbola was created
in the mid eighties. This was a couple of years
to three years after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon
really started, which was not even the first one. It

(17:11):
was the second one. It was just the biggest one.
It would last for eighteen years. And in those eighteen years,
this obscure group that did not really exist grew in
popularity because they were the most effective one, thanks to
the fact that Iran was backing them until they became
the fact of king makers of Lebanese politics for a
couple of decades after that. So here it is not

(17:34):
even that I feel that history will just repeat itself
and whatnot. It's more that there doesn't seem to be
any actual path forward that proposes any alternative to people
from southern Lebanon, which is roughly a fifth of the
country in terms of both sides, more or less in population.
More or less, those people have nowhere else to go.

(17:54):
They will go back to their homes when they can.
They go back to their lands if their homes are destroyed,
and they will try and rebuild as they have done
already in the past, if not once, sometimes more than once.

Speaker 6 (18:04):
And if there isn't.

Speaker 7 (18:05):
A solution for them, that is just a fair solution
that brings them justice, that stops the Israeli bombings and
permanently forces the Israelis out of Lebanon. There's going to
be some force somewhere that's going to find a way
to appeal to that population, and if they're not offered
an alternative, they will seek that alternative, which again is

(18:26):
the history has well in the first place. So as
much as I oppose has Bola for very Lebanese reasons,
and as the Lebanese myself because of the Secanism and
authoritaranism and so on, that's a completely separate question for me.
Then the right of people who are under military occupation
to resist that military occupation, because that is actually a

(18:48):
right that's guaranteed under international law. And I'm really worried
as now, and I'm not just speaking for myself here,
that's virtually everyone I know that the situation is getting
to the point where essentially the Libanese state is hoping
that the Americans would just pressure the Israelis, and the
way it's been happening as of now is that they
would pressure them here and they're a bit but not much,

(19:11):
and then the rest of the time they just let
them do whatever they want with American text money. Of course,
if they don't actually force the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon,
it can create like a whole different political beast in
a sense that would be even more violent.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
I think we're specifically talking about Lebanon, but this is
the case in so many contexts in the region, is
that when the conflicts are unresolved, when the violence is unresolved,
then it'll only perpetuate more violence. Everyone I know has
been warning about that in every context in Palestine, in Lebanon.

(19:48):
So it's extremely depressing.

Speaker 5 (19:51):
But thank you so.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Much for sharing your insights with us, and I will
link Alia's work in the show notes, and yeah, help
you all stay safe.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
Thanks Denna.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Welcome back to It could Happen here.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
I'm Robert Evans.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
This is a podcast about things falling apart, and that's
happening in a lot of places right now. But not
every place also has things regularly unfortunately falling from the sky.
But that's life in Ukraine for a lot of people,
including our guests today, every single day, because they're still
under invasion from the Russian Federation, which I guess we're

(20:37):
still calling it the Federation. Romeo Kokreatsky, Welcome back to
the show.

Speaker 8 (20:42):
How are you doing?

Speaker 2 (20:43):
I mean, I know it's not great, so I don't
know why I'm asking.

Speaker 4 (20:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me back on. It's been a while.

Speaker 9 (20:51):
Yeah, yeah, like you mentioned it, it's not great, especially
for me personally. My neighborhood's been targeted by ballistics twice
in the past two weeks, one of which hit a
improperly stored munitions dump and blew up half the neighborhood.

Speaker 4 (21:06):
So that's that's been fun to deal with.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
I mean, we have other stuff to talk about, but
I do want to just kind of talk about what
life has been like like in terms of dealing with that.
I mean, thank god you have not been hit, neither
has your home, but like on a day to day basis,
how are y'all enduring? You know, so many years passed
when this escalated.

Speaker 9 (21:28):
Most recently, honestly, I had thought, prior to half my
neighborhood being blown up that I basically gotten numb to
the bombing.

Speaker 4 (21:37):
Yeah, turns out that's not true. Yeah, that makes sense.
Turns out I was just completely lying to myself. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (21:42):
I have mortal dread pretty much all the time. Every night,
I am desperately checking every single monitoring channel I have
access to and praying that the Russians aren't going to
shoot us. And if they do shoot us, I then
have to think, Hey, should I wake my wife and
sun up? Should we go down to the shelter? Is
there any point We live in the fifteenth floor, so

(22:04):
we'd have to walk. What if a missile hits while
we're in the stairwell?

Speaker 4 (22:08):
Yeah. And it's a little tiring. It's a little tiring.

Speaker 9 (22:13):
Yeah, to constantly live your life with the feeling that
you may die at any goddamn moment.

Speaker 4 (22:20):
I'm not even in the military.

Speaker 9 (22:22):
Yeah, I am pretty much constantly afraid for my life
and of course the life of my family and friends.
Every morning after a mass attack, I have to call
or text every single journalist who works for me make
sure that they're still alive. Yeah, And so far, everything's
been clear, everything's been clear for five years, but you

(22:43):
really have to wonder how long can can one's luck last.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, it's like you were talking about, you know, the
moment you start to feel like, you know, maybe I've hardened,
or maybe like I've gotten past the point that this
can affect me. Is the moment where something, you know, happens.
I feel so awful that like the constant state of
like panic, fear, arousal that everyone has to be in
over there because they're just shooting missiles and your home

(23:09):
every day is just it's hideous.

Speaker 4 (23:11):
Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 9 (23:13):
I haven't left the country since the start of the
full scale Yeah, And to be quite honest, I'm not
sure how I would do once this threat is no
longer above my head. It's it's hard to imagine going
to sleep and not wondering whether I'm going to wake
up in the next like the next morning. It sounds
a little absurd, but then I think someone about three

(23:35):
hundred kilometers away has made a decision to lob multi
hundred kilogram warheads at the general area of where I
live within two to three kilometers.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
That is not a largery No, No, it really isn't.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
No, I mean ballistic missiles you know, often can go thousands. Like,
that's so easy to build something that you could just
fire blindly into a city.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
This point.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
That's why war looks like this for most of the
people involved in it, right Like, for all the movies
are about the guys like kicking indoors and shit on
the front lines. The vast majority of everyone's experience of
war is shit falling on you from the fucking sky
or exploding in traffic or something like that, right Like,
that's the reality. I'm fucking sorry, man.

Speaker 9 (24:20):
Yeah, And in Kiev, honestly, we don't even have as
bad Yeah here, son, they're just doing a human sofariti.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
They've been doing that, yeah, I don't know, like six
months now.

Speaker 9 (24:31):
The front line is right over basically the river, and
they the Russians, just send drones to hunt people in
the streets just for fun, you know, funzies for the lulls.
So as bad as I have to here, sometimes I
read the stories I'm publishing and I'm like, man, thank god,
I don't live in that place.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
Think I don't know anyone from met City.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Everything becomes so relative after a while. I mean, it's
the only way to stay sane.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
Even though your.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Sheer situation is objectively unreasonable and impossible, you kind of
naturally just look over to whoever's got it worse, I mean,
which says something beautiful. I guess if you'll let it.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
But you know, I guess that's one way of looking
at it.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Fuck man, I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (25:12):
I know.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
I brought you on today to talk about some of
the political changes that have been pretty massive that have
just just hit the Ukrainian government as the result of
the sacking of Mikaylo Federov. But that also feels like
we should talk about that some I just I don't know.
Talking to you reminds me of how much I even

(25:34):
let myself overhear focus on war in terms.

Speaker 8 (25:38):
Of stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Right, these like moves by governments and moves by forces,
which by default means excizing the majority of what's happening
from your mind, because in some times, I mean, sometimes
it's just too big to think about otherwise.

Speaker 4 (25:50):
Right, But like it's no, that's exactly right.

Speaker 9 (25:53):
Yeah, whenever there's any sort of domestic, local intrigue, I
am just overjoyed.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
I'm excited. Again's something.

Speaker 9 (26:01):
I know a lot of people wanted to be war
correspondents and like be there in the trenches. And I
have a lot of friends. My buddy Dylan Burns. I
saw a clip of him just getting shelled last week summer.
I think, come Zepparisia front. Yeah, that wasn't what I
wanted to do. I became a journalist because I love politics.

(26:22):
The envy, the pettiness thing goes all the little like
garbage bullshit that makes up the experience of human politics.
That's what calls to me in my dark, little shriveled heart.
So whenever I have the chance to engage in just
domestic political bullshit, I feel overjoyed.

Speaker 4 (26:40):
That is fantastic.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Well good, okay, Well let's talk about some domestic political
bullshit because there's been a wild train of it in
the last couple of days. I'm just gonna let you
go after starting this off. But like kind of what
prompted this is On July fifteenth of this year, Vladimir Zolensky,
the Ukrainian president, fired or dismissed MIKHAILI. Federov, who was

(27:02):
the Minister of Defensive Ukraine and Federov he'd been the
president's social media marketer initially. Right like that, back during
he was when he was campaigning, way before his involvement
in the military, if I'm remembering correctly.

Speaker 9 (27:15):
Yeah, he was a not just social media he was
the young it guy. He was the it right, all
the IT infrastructure from SMM, from social media to the
actual physical infrastructure itself, that was all Federoff.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
He was like the it dude for the vi Lenski administration.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah, and he's only had the position for about six months.
He was appointed in January, but it's been an incredibly
popular six months.

Speaker 4 (27:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
He is widely popular in Ukraine. There were large protests
following his dismissal, and he got a lot of credit
for his use of drone warfare and particularly some of
the promises he was making. And some people would say
some of the promises that he fulfilled about drone warfare, right,
And one of the issues that he had as he
kind of clashed, as I understand it with an older

(28:03):
General Sirski, who was much more of a conventional weapons gain.
I think like the big fight that Spurtlus came over
like a fight over munitions, right, Federoff was canceling an
order of artillery shells or something like that, and it
kind of embodied the greater conflict between them.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
It seems like, yeah, that's basically right.

Speaker 9 (28:22):
Federoff prior to taking the Missary Defense position, like I said,
he was the it guy, and he had the Minister
of Digital Transformation because we have a whole ministry set
up to digitize our government and we've got the DA
app and a couple of good results from it. So
he had a relatively high level popularity compared to the
typical Ukrainian official coming into the MOD position, and he

(28:47):
became popular, or I guess his popularity grew not so
much because he was doing drones. Like the transformation to
drones occurred pretty much from the start of the right, Yes,
every single union, and it has been ordering and begging
and getting drones however they can since literally.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
The folk scale started.

Speaker 9 (29:07):
However, what Federal promised to do and what he did,
which is what won him a lot of accolades with
the common soldier, is he said we would actually get
you drones instead of you know, you having to go
through fifteen layers of bureaucracy procurement to maybe sign up
for a list where you might get delivered something in
four months somewhere we'll set up a simple direct system

(29:30):
where you can request the equipment you want and you'll
get it. Well, it's not quite as simple. He develops
some gamification crap which you can get into later.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
I'm not yeah, I'm not a fan.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
It is really interesting, but yeah, yeah, he's tried some
really fascinating stuff.

Speaker 9 (29:45):
Yeah, he's tried a lot of things and it has worked. Yeah,
people have started getting drones. Like I know guys in
the front who had complained previously that they were unable
to get equipment even though they're posted, they're deployed, they
have a mission and commands just like, oh, we don't
know where your drone is. That started to be resolved. However,

(30:06):
in order to do this you need money. Right to
buy drones, you need money, So the Ministry Defense controls
the actual monetary flows. They have to actually sign off
on whatever the request from the General Staff or the military.

Speaker 4 (30:20):
Is to purchase this or that equipment.

Speaker 9 (30:22):
System the way it typically works because the Ministry Defense
is a civilian institution and the military is obviously a
military institution. Typically speaking, in wartime, civilians are intended to
defer to military expertise. Right, So if the army goes,
we need I don't know, one hundred thousand and one
to fifty five millimeters shells. The Ministry of Defense is

(30:45):
not really supposed to say you know what, nah, we
think you need this. Instead, this is the kind of
the crux of the conflict here is that federal off
seeing these requests from Serski. Like you said, he's a
very conventional guy, a very conventional Soviet general. He grew

(31:06):
up in Moscow, went to the Moscow Read Army Academy.
To be quite honest, he's pretty much a Soviet general
through and through.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
My understanding is he is a reputation for accepting pretty
gnarly casualties. Yeah, fair or unfair, he's gotten that reputation.
I'm not like an expert on his record.

Speaker 9 (31:23):
Yeah, absolutely, yes, he has that reputation. And like you,
I'm not a military guy, yeah, a non army expert.
I've never studied strategy or tactics aside from meme posting,
So I have no idea how you know true or
not true? It is obviously you can look at the
lost records of the units that Sirski said to personally favored,

(31:44):
and he can see that they are higher but are
they hired because they are simply being used more often.
Like it's a war, there are going to be casualties.
There are simply no way to remove that fact. Or
are they higher because his commanders are incompetent in throwing.

Speaker 4 (31:58):
Away human meat.

Speaker 9 (32:00):
You know, you've got people that'll say one way, you've
got people to say the other way. But regardless, Serski
would continue to request these kind of conventional munitions, and
according to Serski's version, at least Federoff will just completely
ignore this and by whatever he wanted the ministry by,
typically this was drones. There was a funny meme I
saw of Sierski complaining to Federoff, with the text reading,

(32:24):
the buzzing of your stupid drones are hurting the infantry
to advance. To give you a sense of how Ukrainians viewed.

Speaker 8 (32:32):
This, Oh man, that's beautiful.

Speaker 4 (32:36):
I really love that, meaning really that's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
That's going in a history book.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
From the feder Off side.

Speaker 9 (32:55):
What they say the conflict is, which, knowing how you
Kraine works, I tend to believe them, is that in
Federalf's attempts to move these cash flows from buying conventional
munitions to buying drones.

Speaker 4 (33:12):
He started stepping on a lot.

Speaker 9 (33:14):
Of toes in the General Staff because this is Ukraine,
because this is defense procurement. If you want to buy
something from a domestic supplier, the chances are that supplier
is owned somehow via cl company connected to some general
or some highly placed military officials.

Speaker 4 (33:31):
That's just the nature of the game. Obviously.

Speaker 9 (33:35):
Let's say if the General Staff requests one hundred thousand
shells and they source half of it from the Ukrainian firm,
there's a good chance that there's a lot of generals
that are going to be building themselves in Uvilla after this. If, however,
you don't put that order in and instead buy, you know,
drones from the five hundred or one thousand different garage manufacturers,

(33:56):
which is how the drone industry works here. That money
is not going into people's pockets, and those people get upset.
Those people start complaining that you are not a team player,
that they can't work with you, that you don't listen
to them, they stopped taking your coals, etc. Which is
exactly what we saw in the conflict between Federoff and

(34:17):
Serski on the reporting of it. So that's that's basically
the gist of it is Federoff try to use his
own judgment and stepped on people's toes, redirected money, and
Sierski and the general staff were not fans.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
I doubt Sirski cared really all that much.

Speaker 9 (34:34):
However, he needs to keep everyone happy, and the officer
class is very heavily he involved in this creating military salaries.
Even officer salaries are not great.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
No, and there's a lot of corruption and procurement, and
a lot of allegations of corruption and procurement, which is
not something any military doesn't have to be honest. But yeah,
that makes sense.

Speaker 9 (34:56):
So finally he gets to the point where Serski he
went to Zelenski and said, look, you have to get
rid of this guy.

Speaker 4 (35:03):
I can't work with him.

Speaker 9 (35:04):
Then Federoff separately went to Zelenski and said, look, you
have to get rid of this guy.

Speaker 4 (35:08):
I can't work with him.

Speaker 9 (35:10):
And then Zelenski goes to a private meeting with his
party in Parliament and says, hey, well, they both said
they can't work with each other, and I kind of
need them to work with each other, so I should
fire them both. But I can't fire Sirski yet, so
instead I'll fire Federoff and that's what kicked off this
whole shebang.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
How much do you buy? Because The Times had a
piece recently that was kind of, I mean, quoting some
insiders alleging that this was partly to do with Zelensky
being jealous of federov popularity. And I've heard I've heard
rumors of that before that has not seemed to be
like the most I don't know, believable answer. So I
was kind of surprised to see the Times give so
much credence to it. But I mean, do you feel

(35:51):
like that's credible? Is that something you hear a lot?
Or is that where's that coming from?

Speaker 9 (35:55):
I guess, I mean I have considered this a lot,
because it has been something saying, yeah, when Valari's Illusioni
was made to step down as top general and he
was replaced by Sirski, A lot of the kind of
speculation why this move was made was because Illusioni was
very quickly becoming the most popular political figure, public figure

(36:19):
in Ukraine. And then we saw Budhanav krol Badanov, the
head of military intelligence who is now Zelenski's chief of staff,
when his star was rising and Zelenski had to fire
your mock. He took the country's top spy basically and
put him as chief of staff. Now you don't hear

(36:39):
about Padanov at all except for some unflattering rumors on
anonymous telegram channels. So there is kind of a pattern
you can see with Zelensky seemingly defusing popular people around
him so they are no longer in a position where

(36:59):
they can be so popular. And in solutionies case, he
recently announced that whenever we do have presidential elections, he
does plan to stand in them. Right, so he has
in fact directly declared he will be politically opposing Zelenski whenever.

Speaker 4 (37:15):
We get back to normal politics.

Speaker 9 (37:17):
So how do I say this? I am a cynical bastard.
I will believe the worst about anyone, especially a ego
driven TV star slash politician. It is not difficult for
me in my citizens oh God, to look at a
man and say, huh, you know what, he probably doesn't
like being out shown on the stage. At the same time,

(37:39):
I like to hope that Zelenski has the understanding that
we're fighting a full scale war and that his ego
is unnecessary and detrimental to the war.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
Effort.

Speaker 9 (37:50):
But but the truth of the matter is I have
no idea. It certainly can be construed that way.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
Let's say that.

Speaker 9 (37:57):
I don't think construing events that that way is unfair
to Zelenski. I think that's it's a reasonable interpretation. Yeah,
based on the actions that he's taken, and based on
you know, the rumors and so on that come out
of the office the President.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, I mean that that makes sense what you're saying.
I don't have trouble believing that.

Speaker 10 (38:15):
Now.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
One of the things I have noticed is I've kind
of read it into Federov and I'm wondering, and this
is we're kind of our veering into some military theory here.
But it is something that concerns me when I kind
of look at some of the allegations about what he believes.
And I'm not sure if this is entirely fair to him,
but it seems like his critics within the Ukrainian military
seem to believe that he basically is a believer that

(38:37):
drones and robotics can handle a huge amount of the
fighting load, right, and that this is like a major
solution to the manpower crisis, to the extent that is
sometimes accused of believing that they can handle much more
of the load than is really realistic. In a way
that sometimes sounds similar to me to what some people
said about like air force generals and kind of the

(38:57):
post World War two period where there's this big understanding
and all we need is air power. That seems to
be like the allegations against federof that he's saying, all
we need is drone power and robotics, and we can
kind of use that to fill in every gap, and
there's a very reasonable critique that that's not sufficient. Now,
I don't know if that's fully fair to feder Off,
but it seems to be like that's how he's being characterized,
certainly by his opponents.

Speaker 4 (39:19):
Having listened to.

Speaker 9 (39:20):
Him speak, I'll say that the characterization is a little
bit off, Like he might honestly believe that drones and
robotics have to completely replace human warfare, but it's not
like he lives in a fantasy world where he understands
that that's the possibility that we can implement right now, right.
It's more that he faces the banal mathematical fact that
we cannot match Russia.

Speaker 4 (39:42):
We are a much smaller country. It is mathematically impossible, right.
Add into that the general unpopularity of mobilization, the whole
palsification stuff, the fact that no one trusts our aging
Soviet officer class to value their life or contrab utan
they are drafted or joined the military. That together leads

(40:05):
Federoff to the I think pretty obvious conclusion that the
only possible thing we can do to even start to
match Russia in manpower is heavily embraced robotics. Now, I
do want to say a couple of things. Federoff is
a libertarian in the American sense, right. And he's very young.
He's thirty five, He's he's literally my age, Jesus.

Speaker 9 (40:26):
And this was back I think twenty seventeen or eighteen
he ran as part of we had a tiny libertarian
movement called the five to ten Party, which their idea
was a flat five percent vat tax, flat ten percent
something else I mean, in stupid libertarian shit. I didn't
ever pay much attention to it because I always ask

(40:47):
them how old their girlfriend is and if they need
to use the garciat is my paying libertarians there?

Speaker 4 (40:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 9 (40:53):
And again, so he may very well believe that this
is the case that humans needed taking out of what's
the military euphemism, humans have to be taken out of.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
The kill chain, right right, removed from the kill chain. Yeah,
I love the term kill chain.

Speaker 9 (41:09):
He made very well believe that he is good personal
friends with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palenteer. That's very
obviously the omni surveillance courts were headed by the devil himself,
Peter Teel, so there's a lot of red flags.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
One of the first staymans he made after getting sacked
was that he's been already gotten a bunch of offers
from different Silicon Valley companies. Someone close to him said that,
not that he that he hasn't taken.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
No, no, he said that.

Speaker 9 (41:36):
During the briefing, I was listening and it was him. Yeah,
Alex Karp has already called me and offered me a job.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Oh he said, Alex Karp. Okay, great, yeah, great. I'm
just remembering from a news article, are right now that said.
I wanted to be fair to him because one thing
he also gets a lot of credit for is over
the last six months, which was not in his position
for long. But it's been a reasonably good six months
compared to some of the pre couple of years. Right,
the front is stabilized in a lot of areas, and

(42:03):
there's been an incredibly successful campaign to damage Rush's oil
refining capacity that's taken out out a quarter of it, right,
and those are seen part of why he's so popular.
I would imagine there's a debate as to how much
credit does he deserve for both of those things. Both
of those things have happened right over the last six months.

Speaker 4 (42:19):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 (42:20):
And the hope was that if he was allowed to
complete his reform, so the next big thing that he
had planned to focus on was ground robotics, ground drones.
The hope was that if he had actually been able
to implement plans, we would see the same kind of
sea change away from human soldiery, human infantry into robotics soldiers,

(42:44):
just as we saw drones replace the sniper team, the
artillery team, the mortar team. You know, so many of
these kind of fundamental roles that we thought a modern
military monitoring mines, armed military needs. Turns out you could
replace all of them with drones. We don't know if
that's going to be true for groundrones, but that was
going to be his next project, and it definitely helped.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
Bolster his standing.

Speaker 9 (43:10):
Let's say, when he goes, well, first off, I'm getting
you the drones, and second off, we don't need to
throw away Ukrainian lives on worthless, neat assaults to win
back half a kilometer of territory. We can use easily
replaceable robotics instead.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Now that's a very hard thing to argue with, I mean,
especially given how it's functioned. You know, it is worth
kind of noting that he was brought in as well
to solve the manpower crisis, and that that that certainly

(43:48):
has not been solved, although you know, he was in
there for six months. But like that still continues to
be a significant issue, even with the advent of a
lot more robotic fighter, which is, you know, proven successful
in certain areas of the front, certainly, but it continues
to be a pretty contentious and mobile front in some

(44:08):
areas as well.

Speaker 4 (44:10):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 (44:11):
And the fact is we still have I don't know,
maybe let's say another ten to fifteen years to reach
the terminator feature where you just you don't need human infantry.
It is a liability if you have flesh and blood
guys on the battlefield. We're not quite there yet. You
still do need flesh and blood meet zat humans to
do things, so molization is obviously a thing. But I

(44:36):
gotta say, every single Minister of Defense we've had since
the start of the full scale has had the brief
of reforming mobilization, so he is hardly the first guy
to fail at right, the general staff was given the
brief of reforming mobilizations. Zelenski himself said that the office
of the President has the brief of performing mulization veeder Off.

(44:58):
During his kind of exit press conference that he gave
after being fired, he said this a very interesting thing.
He said that in order to do mobilization form in Ukraine,
we need a new social contract. The fundamental social contract
between Ukrainians and the state is seen by the average
Ukrainian to be broken because of the continuous and constant

(45:22):
corruption scandals, because of the seeming you know, Soviet indifference
and callousness towards human life. All of these factors make
the Ukrainian populace not especially want to die for the state.
It's not that we don't want to die for Ukraine,
but no one wants to die for the Ukrainian state,

(45:44):
and this is the fundamental issue. And until that is addressed,
there is there is no solution for mobilization except for
greater repression, right like round people up even more, use
greater force. That's the only thing you can possibly do.
There is no soft handle to fix that. It's not
even really a question of money, because if you think

(46:08):
that once you're drafted, they're gonna throw you in the
back of a van, drive into the mill force, stick
you there for two weeks, not teach you anything, yell
and beat you, then drive you to the zero line
and leave you there. That's what the average Ukrainian men
man thinks is going to happen to them if they're drafted.
And the fact is we have lots of stories exactly

(46:28):
like that, so it's not exactly an unfounded fear. And
until that's addressed, until the Ukrainian state can you know,
plausibly tell the Ukrainian people, look, we care about your lives.
We are doing this because we are doing this to survive,
not because some general wants an extra badge or an
extra villa or something. And at that point mobilization reform

(46:49):
can't start. But without that change, you're not gonna see anything.
No amount of bureaucratic wrangling or raising salaries is going
to result in any kind of mobilization.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Bump, Well, man, is there anything else you wanted to
get to today. I think that was a really good
point to make.

Speaker 9 (47:07):
I'll say this that we did see that the protests
did pay off, So I think that's the one aspect
of this we haven't talked about.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a very good point.

Speaker 9 (47:17):
Why he is actually doing this, or why he is
actually taking steps to remove Serski is because of the protests.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
So we didn't even get to that so much because
that just happened hours before we recorded this. But he
has announced that Serski is now being removed. Right, yes, yes, yes,
just happened. Sorry, it was.

Speaker 9 (47:36):
Always going through case once Serski's name was out in public.
The country's top general cannot be this controversial. He cannot
be the guy everyone is talking about derogatorily in a
national or you just you need to have the trust
of both the people and the troops. And Serski once
this scandal had reached the level it was clear that
he no longer had the Jews to continue. But again,

(47:58):
the reasons Lunky made these changes is because of the protests.

Speaker 4 (48:02):
So we learned about Federov's.

Speaker 9 (48:04):
Dismissal like late at night, I want to say, in
the fifteenth, and then that evening a couple of uh
I think it was one ex volunteer, one ex soldier
posted that we everyone should gather out on Twitter, I think,
and then that that game steam and that was the
start of the kind of five day protests. I don't
know if they're going to continue today now that Serski

(48:25):
has been replaced, but they've been happening every single day
this week.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
And again people came out first to kind.

Speaker 9 (48:33):
Of keep to protest Federalf's removal, to say, hey, keep Federov.
Then it became clear that Federalf himself had refused to
continue to work with his Zelenski team. He pretty much
told Zlenski that I don't want any job. I wanted
the job that I had, but since you made that
no longer possible, I don't want to work for you.
Once that dynamic became clear, the protests shifted more towards

(48:55):
trying to get Serski fired. Were to get him to
resign than to get feder Off back in office, which
is unlikely to.

Speaker 4 (49:02):
Happen, but the protests have been.

Speaker 9 (49:05):
First off, they occurred not just in Kiev, but pretty
much in every major city, even the frontline cities, even
in Zupperisia, in Harkiev. One of my journalists was in
Harkyev and did a report from their protest, and these
are people who are getting air bombed during the day
and they're gathering in the center of their city in protesting.
The scale of it, the speed of it in the

(49:25):
general societal agreement is really what what gave these protests
their statem. The same with the pro Nabu protests that
we saw a couple of years backer last year, the
same kind of dynamic, same kind of protesting class. Let's
say it's younger people, you know, from eighteen to like thirty,

(49:47):
typically more liberal, more progressive. However, we come out in
protest not for I mean, sometimes we do come out
for gay rights, but currently it's more to correct our
government's person all choices than anything else.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Right, Yeah, I mean, I guess it is positive that
it matters still, you know, which is certainly in some
ways a legacy still lingering of the Midon right is
that the government's not going to ignore that.

Speaker 4 (50:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (50:16):
Yeah, I wouldn't just say it's positive. I'd be quite honest,
I cannot think of a single other democratic country on
the planet that is as responsive to the undifferentiated, random
cries of the masses.

Speaker 8 (50:28):
Then there's this huge negative to that.

Speaker 9 (50:31):
Yeah, I mean I say it like this, and it
might sound like I'm saying this derogatorily, but I'm not. No,
I think, quite frankly, pretty much all liberal democratic nations
in the twenty first century have almost completely abandoned the
democratic part. Either people vote for local parties that simply
don't matter, and all the decisions are made in board

(50:52):
rooms that they have less than zero impact in. They
got on protest and nothing happens except some kids get
beaten up by cops and then nothing fundamentally changes that.
That is not true in Ukraine. We have seen multiple
times where protesters go out with a concrete call and
the government heeds that call. It doesn't simply ignore us,
it doesn't just beat us up. It's fundamentally democratic in

(51:14):
a way that I have not seen any other country
in the world replicate so far.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Yeah, that is very much worth continuing the note and acknowledge. Although,
as you said, a mixed bag because the voice of
the people is not always correct about aspects of strategy
and governance, as a lot of.

Speaker 8 (51:33):
Places have learnt.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Yeah, exactly, all right man, Well, do you want to
plug anything before you come out here? Tell people where
they can find you.

Speaker 4 (51:40):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (51:41):
I am the managing editor of The New Voice of Ukraine,
which is Ukraine's best and premier English language daily u site.
You can read us at English nv dot UA really
easy to remember, that's English nvt UA and listen to
Ukraine Without Hype, which is a podcast from myself and
my colleague Anthony Bartaway, and you can find us wherever

(52:05):
podcasts are listened to.

Speaker 4 (52:07):
Just search Ukraine without Hype. Awesome.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Well, thank you all for listening, Thank you Romeo for
showing up again, and we'll be back tomorrow with something else.

Speaker 8 (52:28):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the show. My name is James.
We're starting Gangs. I've forgot to press the record button
and I am very lucky to be joined by Wendy
Frye and we're going to talk about a piece that
Wendy did for cow Matters about the FEDS DHS buying
detention centers in California. Hi Wendy, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 (52:48):
Hi, James, thanks for having me.

Speaker 8 (52:49):
Yeah, okay, so let's begin I suppose by summarizing this article. Well,
link to it, right, and I think everyone should read it.
It's a really good piece of reporting. But can you
explain what is happening here with these two detention centers?

Speaker 5 (53:02):
Sure? Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 11 (53:03):
So.

Speaker 5 (53:04):
Last week, course of it, one of the largest private
prison companies in the country in the nation, a publicly
traded company, announced that they had sold two of their
properties to the Department of Homeland Security for a billion
and a half dollars. And those two facilities are two
of the largest immigration detention facilities in California. O time

(53:26):
mesa detention center in San Diego County that has a
capacity of just a little under two thousand beds. And
then the other one is the newly opened California City
Facility up in Kern County, and that one's just a
little bit bigger with a capacity of twenty five hundred beds.
And we learned the details about the sale through this
filing with the Security Exchange Commission. Like I said, because

(53:47):
it's a publicly traded company, they have to make some
of the information about this deal public. And we learned
that the federal government paid seven hundred and thirty nine
million I think for O time MESA, and then the
other one was I think about seven hundred and thirty
million for California City. And we've done some additional reporting
too since that article came out, and we just last Friday,

(54:08):
we're talking with the San Diego County appraiser, the assessor's
office and current county found out that the last appraise
value on these properties was about a quarter of what
the federal government paid for them. So the last appraise
value I think about one hundred and sixty million for
O type MESA. I don't have the exact number, but
around that. So they paid, you know, maybe four times.

(54:30):
And of course the praise value we have to take
it sort of with a grain of salt because it's
not the market value. But it would be very hard
to figure out what the market value is on a
property like this because there just aren't very many of them.
Both places are these huge, brawling federal prisons that don't
get sold very often, so it's hard to figure out
what the market value is. But those are the last
appraise value.

Speaker 8 (54:49):
Yeah, sure, not much, not much. Your market for giant prisons,
I suppose best.

Speaker 5 (54:54):
Guess, yeah, none much to compare it to as far
as the sale, right, And on the federal government side,
on course of excit, they said that this whole thing
went through a very rigorous process of governmental review and
that everything is above board there.

Speaker 8 (55:07):
Yeah, so of course they'll say that. Yeah. So these facilities, like,
they spend a lot of money on them, right, and
they have a lot of money right now, they're sitting
on a giant pile of money. Actually, before before we
talk about what they spent on them, people will remember
when President Biden came into power, him saying he was
going to end private prisons, right, so we should just,
I guess, begin by explaining how that didn't include immigration

(55:31):
detention and how these places have like as you say,
they haven't just continued, but in the last two years,
I guess they're trying to expand immigration detention capacity, right, right.

Speaker 5 (55:40):
Yes, So in California, particularly California, state officials have tried
to ban private prison companies from operating within the state
of California, and the Ninth Circuit didn't uphold that. Like
the California Pass, the law Governor news and signed it.
It went ended up in court. GEO Group and Course
of BIC, the two largest private and companies. We're fighting

(56:01):
against this and they they they won. The ninth Circuit
upheld that California can't fan these facilities from operating. But
they have pushed back a lot, and California lawmakers are
trying to write a series and pass a series of
laws that would require you know, more of the tax
revenue from these companies to be you know, absorbed by

(56:23):
the state and distance in avized. Basically financially disincentivized these
private prison companies from operating, and that is one of
the reasons why DHS, in a statement that they put out,
Jason Sweeney with ICE told me, you know, it's financially infeasible.
It's become too burdensome from their point of view for
the private prison companies to operate in California because of

(56:44):
all the oversight and because of all the you know, pushback,
the California officials have tried to do and have done
as much as I can basically.

Speaker 8 (56:53):
On let's talk about this new attempt to grow detention capacity,
right because they're previous totem was these warehouses where we
spoke to some folks in social circle on this show,
such a circle Georgia a while ago about that. So,
can you give people who haven't been following this little
synopsis of why they've moved away from the putting human

(57:14):
beings in warehouses models?

Speaker 4 (57:16):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (57:16):
So the spending bill, the federal spending bill that President
Trump signed last year, included just the insanely unprecedented amount
of money for immigration enforcement, like more than even the
entire budget of the entire federal prison system. Right. It
includes about forty five billion dollars just for detention capacity alone.

(57:38):
So they poured a ton that, like you said, they're
sitting on just this huge pile of cash that they
have to spend. They have to do something with that money.
The plan at the beginning of the year were, as
you mentioned these warehouses, right, that they wanted to from
their perspective, sort of more intelligently design the both the

(57:58):
tension capacity and the deportation machine. I think I'm not
one hundred percent sure which dhf's officials said this. I
think it was Tom Holman in Phoenix, but it could
have been another THHS official, But basically they said they
wanted to design the quote Amazon Prime for humans. So
like they want to make this as fast and as
efficient as possible. They want to have a capacity to

(58:21):
stay up to one hundred thousand people on any given day.
And they have a ton of cash, cash that they've
never even seen before, right, So buying up this billion
and a half dollars of real estate in California is
feasible to them, and they've signaled that owning it rather
than leasing it or having Corsivic run it is more
beneficial to them in not having to comply with the oversight.

(58:44):
The different inspections and laws that California officials have tried
to put into place that allows, for example, inspectors with
the California's Attorney General's office, and there was a twenty
twenty four law the California past that would allow local
health inspect inspectors to go in and do a health inspection.
San Diego County is the only place where they've actually
tried to do that, and the private company pushed back,

(59:07):
so they've said, do you just have said in their
statement that you know, owning this and rather than another
entity owning it gives them the upper hand as far
as avoiding some of this oversight and the federal courts
have upheld that.

Speaker 8 (59:21):
Actually, right, So let's dig into that a little bit.

Speaker 10 (59:25):
Right.

Speaker 8 (59:25):
A lot of people have started paying attention to immigration
detention approximately halfway through January in twenty twenty five, right, right,
And if you had been paying attention before in California,
you would have known that thousands of people were detained
without food, water, or shelter in the open air for months,
not like an individual duration stay was at most like

(59:47):
a week, but that the practice continued in Hercumba, YEP
in Hukumba and then Sidro. Yeah, in at least three
places in Hakkumba. I believe there were also other oad
sites that we didn't find, mut at least I didn't
know about. And then that also happened in Arizona as well,
But at that point in time, there was not a

(01:00:10):
great deal of an inspection by the county. I saw
a Office of the Immigration Detention on Bardsman person once
their visit didn't seem to result in any changes. But
like has California committed on why they suddenly care about
the I guess the conditions migrants are detained in When
they didn't seem to care in a way that mattered

(01:00:31):
three years ago.

Speaker 5 (01:00:32):
Right, they certainly weren't coming out in statements and pushing
back as hard as we have seen them push back
against the Trump administration. That's true, And I have asked,
like top California officials that. In an interview I did
with the California Attorney General Robbonta, I did ask any.
I was like, this is my really hard question for you,
is you know it didn't seem like you were pushing

(01:00:55):
back in this same way when you know there were
babies sheltering and porter right.

Speaker 8 (01:01:00):
Oh yeah. One night in September, I remember a lady
breastfeeding a baby. The baby was shivering, which, like it
there's not a good sign with babies are shivering. And
like I was warming up milk in the camping stove
in my truck and my friend was cycling toddlers in
and out of like a little warming station they built.
Like I've been through the Darien Gap and that's still

(01:01:21):
some of the worst ship that I've ever seen.

Speaker 5 (01:01:23):
It was horrific, Right, I remember thinking like where is
the un like, where is like the Red Cross? Like
this is a humanitarian crisis out here. Yeah, And it
was in such a remote area it was, so it
lacks so much visibility, both from the media and you know,
public officials, and so we did talk about that at
one point, and Bonto's response was, you know, we had

(01:01:45):
a working relationship with the Biden administration that wasn't controversial
or wasn't adversarial in the way that our relationship is
with the Trump administration, and so we could work on
that stuff behind the scenes. Now I know you were
out there. Anybody who was out there would say, no,
do you really ever saw the results of that collaboration
or that work, right, And you know, it is a

(01:02:06):
concern for sure that it does seem like California politicians
do get more bang for their buck in opposing the
immigration policies that the Trump administration. When it's important to
note that a lot of this infrastructure, including especially a
lot of the AI infrastructure that are being used to
survey people who are against these policies, and the palanteer

(01:02:26):
the AI technologies that is being used right now to
find people and detain them without making the headlines and
in quite a high profile way as we saw last year.
All that was put into place by the Biden administration,
right yea, And so it is important to note that
for sure, that a lot of these systems that now
the Trump administration is able to utilize were handed to.

Speaker 8 (01:02:48):
Them, detained the idea that we have a midterm election
and the presidential election and they are conducted in a
way that we kind of are accustomed to with elections,
and the results are respected. Let's imagine we have a

(01:03:11):
Democrat in twenty twenty eight to do the master. The
FEDS will still own these two giant detention centers. Right.
The way that immigration, in my experience works is like
it only seems to move in one direction. I guess,
like this is why this is such a concern.

Speaker 5 (01:03:30):
They're seeing themselves. DHS is saying themselves that this is
a deliberate strategy to make their detention build out more
permanent and harder to roll back with the changing political wins, right,
and so they're acknowledging that that that's what they're trying
to do.

Speaker 8 (01:03:46):
That's not great. Yeah, yeah, that's a yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:03:48):
So it's from their own mouths, right, So.

Speaker 8 (01:03:51):
Yeah, deeply concerning. I wonder though, like previously they've had
a practice of moving people out of San Diego County.
I guess the practices are on would there is like
a number of incidents that I'm aware of where they've
moved people away from their lawyer in San Diego County
right to a detention facifity like Dilly or somewhere in
Texas or something like that. I guess I would make

(01:04:13):
that impossibly it did the same as it was before.
It'll just be from a federal prison to a private prison.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
Maybe.

Speaker 5 (01:04:18):
Well, it's a less favorable federal jurisdiction right a district,
so in San Diego, I would say probably it's a
more favorable outcome to go before a federal district judge
in San Diego for a possible habeas petition and to
flow down the process as far as being deported, right,
I think that that probably happens faster in a federal

(01:04:39):
district in Texas than it would here.

Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:04:42):
Yeah, I have heard a lot from families about family
members being moved out to you know, these very remote
I mean, there's been an effort for a long time
to make sure that these facilities are set up in
very remote areas out of California and in other parts
of the country, in remote areas that are hard for advocations.
It's hard for attorneys, hard for journalists like me to

(01:05:03):
get to to report what's going on in them. You know,
it's like six hours to get to California City as
a drive back made way more times than I want
to now at this point, right, So you know, it
does it does impact the amount of resources that people
can be connected to. It is the biggest expense that
ICE has is moving people around the country. I remember

(01:05:24):
Senator Padilla did say, like it seems sort of illogical
the way they're moving, Like they're moving people from California
out to California while they're moving people in other places
into California, And it seems illogical the way they're moving
people around. But the impact of that, I don't know
what their purpose or their intention is of doing that,
but the impact of is it really disorients people. Right,

(01:05:44):
It's like where am I?

Speaker 4 (01:05:46):
What am I doing? What are the rules here?

Speaker 5 (01:05:47):
How do I get my phone card set up? It
takes them days where they're kind of pushed back on
their heels trying to figure out what the system and
the guards and the new place where they go. And then,
like I said, it's only makes it harder for people
when they get moved around to these different facilities, and
it's something that we're definitely seeing happen a lot more.
Definitely hearing it from a lot of families in LA

(01:06:10):
of concern about people being moved way out to California City,
which is like in the middle of the Mohabi Desert, right,
it's hard for families to get out there.

Speaker 8 (01:06:17):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's a big Kern County I think, right,
but it's a height from anywhere from any major population
center in California. It's a long drive.

Speaker 5 (01:06:26):
Yeah, it's like an hour and forty minutes from like
the farthest eastern community in LA, like Cheerlea. They have
an office in like eastern LA, And I think it
was like an hour and twenty to an hour and
forty to get to that office from California City. So
it's just just remote. It's in the middle of nowhere,
you know.

Speaker 10 (01:06:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:06:43):
And if you think about where would I put a
place that's in the middle of nowhere where it have
the least amount of oversight, right, like that that's the place,
Like that's definitely where you would pick.

Speaker 8 (01:06:53):
Yeah, definitely, combat like Auto Mesa detention center, very very
bad things about what happens there, but like it is
relatively close, people can get to it. There are almost
always people there, like outside if someone is released, or
people protesting what's happening there. Like you say, like it's
hard even to do things like for someone to get
money on their on their phone card or like someone

(01:07:14):
I've reported on many times on the show was detained
at Dilly and like it's difficult to work out how
to like put money on their commentsary so they can
buy food because the food they get is absolutely awful,
and things like this. And then every time you move
that that's different again, right, like.

Speaker 5 (01:07:27):
It's I was talking to an individual in Al Salvador
and they were saying that, you know, they were moved
around maybe nine times before they were deported, and each
time they got to the different facility was like where
am I and who who are kind of the leaders
in this in this place, or like who do I
talk to because I need to get I need to

(01:07:48):
get this worked out. And sometimes they wouldn't even be
able to get the phone cards set up before the
next time they got loaded back on a bus to
go somewhere else. Yeah, so even let their family know
where they are and That's why it's so concerning that
ICE is going around opening facilities. Like we had one
facility open I think also in Current County. It's like
right next to Golden State Annex, so it's like kind
of part of that property. But they didn't tell anybody, right, Like,

(01:08:11):
nobody knew that this facility was opened until we reported
on it opening. And you know, if you're a family
member and you're looking on that ice detainer, you're trying
to find your family member. If we have these you know,
almost almost like black site ice detention facilities opening up
that nobody knows are running, how are you going to
find your family member if it's not even listed there
in the facilities, right. I mean, there's been a lot

(01:08:33):
of reporting about how sometimes people are disappearing into these systems.
But that's one of the reasons why California has tried
to set these laws to say, like you have to
give the public a certain amount of notice before you
open a new facility, so that people are aware that
it's coming and they can have an opportunity to, you know,
say go to the California City Council meeting and make
their opposition known. But we've seen both ice and the

(01:08:56):
private detention companies have in some cases been able to
find noise around those rules.

Speaker 8 (01:09:02):
Yeah, one of I guess the interesting things that we
have seen in the last maybe six months even maybe
somewhere there, mostly this year, right, it is like communities
coming together to oppose these things and data centers, right,
or like across a wide swath of American politics, Like
a lot of the folks organizing in social circle and

(01:09:22):
not people who I think would generally identify as progressive politically,
but they were opposed to all the local consequences as
well as the abuses that happen in these detention centers.
Like it's definitely getting harder, I guess for them to
build from scratch detention centers, right.

Speaker 5 (01:09:40):
That's correct. I mean some of these when at the
beginning of the year, when they had the warehouse plan
and they were planning some of these mega detention centers,
which like they were trying to hold you know, ten
or twelve thousand people, which is crazy more than rikers,
right right, Yeah, like the largest would be the largest
facility anywhere, and you know they were talking about even
make their own wastewater treatment plants, bringing in their own

(01:10:03):
services because the cities where the local municipalities wouldn't be
able to handle the influx of people, of employees, of
you know, the roads, all the all the different services.
And so I think that's one of the things that
people are realizing is that these properties have an impact
outside of just the people that they're detaining, right, They
have an impact, a ripple effect on the entire community.

(01:10:26):
And I think people are becoming aware of that now.

Speaker 8 (01:10:29):
Yeah, definitely, And it seems like, yeah, they're trying to
do other things, and they saw some of those warehouses
a loss as well, but it doesn't matter in the
grand scheme of how much money they have.

Speaker 5 (01:10:39):
They have to get rid of forty five billion dollars,
so they really aren't aren't aren't stressing the loss is
you know, it's a weird problem to have, but they
feel like they have to spend this forty five billion
or its kind of like use it or lose it
if they don't buy the next by I think it's
three years that they have, so I think we will
see them buying more property use for sure. I think

(01:11:02):
they really have their eye on at Alanto. I said
a script that like scans the sec to like automatically
alert me if any of those companies sell anything, Right, No.

Speaker 8 (01:11:11):
Cool.

Speaker 5 (01:11:12):
The other thing to keep in mind too about this is,
you know, the federal government doesn't pay local and state taxes,
so where they go into these small cash strap cities
like California City and say, hey, you're going to get
two million dollars a year in tax revenue from this
facility opening. And that's kind of how they convince or
like they try to win over the local politicians with hey,

(01:11:34):
we need this money, we need this facility to lower
our water bills and stuff like that. But none of
that is going to It's like a bait and switch. Right,
They're not going to be getting that two million dollar
tax revenue anymore because, you know, other than the income
tax of the employers, maybe that might but yeah, so
that's another you know part of it.

Speaker 8 (01:11:51):
Yeah, Yeah, bait and switch is a good way to
describe it. Like people think they're getting one thing and
they end up getting another thing. You talked about the employees, like,
when these facilities change hands, will it then be like

(01:12:13):
federal employees or will they still be staffed by cor Civic.

Speaker 5 (01:12:18):
Yeah, So that's the interesting thing is the federal government
is going to own the real estate, but Corsivic has
said in its SEC filings that it expects it thinks
that it's going to be keeping those contracts to continue
operating the facilities. So the contract for California City runs
through August twenty twenty seven. The one for Otai Mesa

(01:12:39):
is supposed to end in twenty twenty nine, but there's
an option to extend it another five years. And my
impression is that ICE is quite happy with the way
Corcivic is running these facilities and Geogroup is running these facilities,
so that would mean the same guards, the same medical directors,
the same kind of operations and day to day at

(01:13:00):
both facilities, and they plan on keeping their existing management GRONTO.

Speaker 10 (01:13:04):
Now.

Speaker 5 (01:13:04):
They they acknowledge in the SEC filing that there's no
guarantee that they get to keep it, but that's it
sounds like that's the deal that they've worked out and
negotiated with the federal government.

Speaker 8 (01:13:14):
Sure like even when they've done these like they stood
up that one camp, East Montana they call it, which
is still run by a contractor, even though it's on
Department and Defense land and the conditions there are atrocious
from what we saw with the Inspector General report, and
it doesn't seem to be a concern.

Speaker 5 (01:13:32):
Yeah, that's someone outside of Belpasso.

Speaker 8 (01:13:34):
Yeah, Bliss, I've seen it.

Speaker 5 (01:13:36):
The tent camp oh okay out the side of Purt Place. Yeah,
the white timp camp. Yeah yeah, you know, it seems
like they're violating their own rules, right when they have
these rules, they have these set of standards that they
have set up. And that's the first thing courcivic or
GEO will say is like, hey, we follow all the
federal standards that are set up for us, right for
digens standards.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Ye.

Speaker 5 (01:13:55):
But it seemed, especially with that one, that you're mentioning
that they violated all their own standards and sending that
place up.

Speaker 8 (01:14:02):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean that place is particularly egregious, like
even among immigration detention facilities. Some of the stuff, and
that Inspected General's report was genuinely shocking, and I thought
I'd lost a capatty to be shocked by this stuff.
But yeah, there's lots of terrible things have happened, Like
I think you reported on the Mongolian person right who
was who used sign language and was detained for I

(01:14:22):
think months without an interpreter, if I'm remembering correctly.

Speaker 5 (01:14:26):
Right, Yeah, he had never gotten a chance to even
tell his story on how he had crossed the border
because CBP had like really confused his story. He was
telling them about his sister and they thought that that
it was his daughter, and they were using like a
I don't know AI some kind of online translation thing
that was not even close to what his actual story was.

(01:14:48):
And yeah, he spent months without able to tell anybody
what happened to him. And you know, finally, yeah, after
we did our story, Like finally, the ice attorney was
trying to set up like a relay team of translation,
but the federal judge was just said, like, doesn't he
have a right to participate in his own proceedings? Like
does it isn't he shouldn't he be an active participant

(01:15:10):
in the proceedings against him, right, yeah, and not just
a bystander in that. And then so then he the
judge rule that they had to get him and interpreter,
and I guess they decided it was too hard to
do that, because they let him out fairly quickly after
that ruling. But yeah, I mean some of the conditions
that we've heard about I mean, obviously, I think everybody's heard,
like the overcrowding, really severe lack of access to medical care,

(01:15:32):
the horrific food. We've been hearing about how bad the
food is for decades now in there, you know, smelling
moldy waters particular problem in California City, and just somethings
just like kind of the revaliation that people face for
if they try to bring an issue up or if
they try to you know, advocate for somebody else they
feel like oftentimes they tell us that they feel like,

(01:15:56):
you know, they get sort of retaliated against for that,
you know already is one of the one of the
most egregious violations that we've ever heard of, of, like
the hunger strike. The hunger strikers all got dragged out
and according to them, you know, beat up or handled
very roughly and then take into Texas and for sped
with a tube down their nose. Right Like, Yeah, there's

(01:16:16):
definitely been some very egregious things that have happened inside
these detention centers, and that's why it's so important for
people to be able to you know, especially the congress
members or and the local state inspectors. It's very important
for somebody to be able to get in there and
see what the conditions are like inside.

Speaker 8 (01:16:33):
Yeah, this court case doesn't matter anymore, like with this
new development, right, the court case at least it match
is in other detention facilities, but not in outime Mesa,
specifically in San Diego County.

Speaker 5 (01:16:42):
Yeah, it's kind of remain to be seen. I think,
like I said, the federal courts have upheld that state
can't overstep their authority, and like step on federal authority
to carry out immigration of course might right.

Speaker 4 (01:16:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:16:54):
I think that those health inspectors they already have done
their health inspections, so they already did one, and their
report I think is coming out at the end of July,
so there will be that. But and then I think
my understanding is In Diego County plans to fight.

Speaker 8 (01:17:07):
It's what I thought they were going to appeel it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:17:08):
Yeah, they're going to try to pluss the issue in
court to see if they can continue going in there
and doing their inspections. But like I said, you know,
the courts haven't tended to rule that way, and deadjust thinks,
like we know from their own statement that they think
that this will sort of put an end to the
different inspections and oversight stuff that the state and the
local officials want to do.

Speaker 8 (01:17:31):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty bleak, pretty big outlook for
immigration detention, which was not really a great outlook to
begin with.

Speaker 5 (01:17:39):
I guess yeah, But it's not come one hundred percent decided,
like it still has an open question. Whether these inspection
laws will survive the beederal ownership or not remains to
be seen, I think, right.

Speaker 8 (01:17:49):
Yeah, you said that they had plans for other locations.
I'm guessing they have plans to Geogroup locations as well.
Do you think this is their plan going forward to
try and acquire all of the ease private immigration. They
have the money too, I assume yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:18:04):
I think everything points to yes on that. I think
Courseivic said in their statement that they are already in
talks with ICE about selling more of their facilities. Geogroup
has said on earnings calls that they would like to
sell their facilities, and like you mentioned, you know, DHS
definitely has the money thanks to that massive appropriation from

(01:18:26):
the federal government, so you know, really they've already said
that it's kind of their preference to outright own them
rather than lease them or have a private company operate
them in California. Yeah, so yeah, I think we will
see more of it, and I'm definitely, you know, trying
to monitor it as much as possible to see when
that happens.

Speaker 8 (01:18:45):
I wonder if this also changes the legal environment for
people who are either protesting or like they're in a
sort of mutual aid capacity for the migrant trillip. Sometimes
people can hear migrant shouting from inside, and they can
hear them like asking for someone to put money on
their phone, cut or what have you, or just describing
their condition to relating them. Will it being a federal

(01:19:06):
owned facility? Do you think that changes? Like because it's
legal to stand outside a thing, right, but if it's
a fed facility, maybe it's even harder.

Speaker 5 (01:19:14):
Yes, I do think it will change. I do think
we'll see the federal government trying to crack down harder
on protesters that come, you know, in no ten ways
that they had the people. We're putting information about how
they were being held in bottles and throwing the bottles
over the gate toy. I do think for sure that
the federal government will operate differently now that it's federal property.

(01:19:36):
Another thing that's very interesting. You know, they already hold
people who are not immigrant dtees in California City, So
they have a section of that facility that are like
people who are in the custody of the US marshals already.
So there are already people in there who aren't immigrants.
I wonder if we might see more of an effort
to detain more people in these facilities who are not immigrants, right, Yeah, yeah,

(01:20:00):
because they have promises made to Courcivic and Geogroup that
they are going to try to give them a certain
population of detees per day, right, right, So that's another
part that remains to be seen.

Speaker 8 (01:20:12):
Yeah, that's also super concerning.

Speaker 5 (01:20:14):
Yeah, it really is super concerning of where it could
all go, right, Like especially you see you know the
federal government calling protesters domestic terrorists and stuff like that.
It is really concerning.

Speaker 8 (01:20:26):
Yeah, And we saw that in like as in Minneapolis
in late January, and the same thing happens there. Right,
they have their federal building it's called the Whipple Building,
and like they do immigration detention there. But then there
was also where people who were detained for protesting against
that immigration those immigration accents were taken right, they used

(01:20:47):
the same facility, and like there's a certain kind of
menace to that, right, Like it's.

Speaker 5 (01:20:52):
Really alarming where it could go if you think.

Speaker 8 (01:20:54):
About it, right, Yeah, it's really uh, really concerning. Like
this is one of those things that's at a little
people can do much about.

Speaker 4 (01:21:02):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:21:02):
It's a like willing seller willing buyer kind of situation
where unfortunately, like there's pretty few means for address. Like
I hope California is successful with being able to inspect them,
at least that would be something. And I know there
are lots of really good groups doing work to keep
people out of detention, to help with habeasts, to improve

(01:21:22):
conditions in detention, et cetera. So like people can help
out those groups that they want to. Yet it does
seem like this is a particularly kind of bleak area
of immigration enforcement right now.

Speaker 5 (01:21:35):
Right and especially since you know, one of the first
things that Trump did is shut down the mechanisms that
people can appeal or report. Like, you know, when you
have a complaint about something that's happened to you within
immigration attention, you complain about it either to the Offices
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. There's another DHS and both

(01:21:57):
of those have been shut down right now, are not
funded right now, So those mechanisms with which you can
get any oversight from within the federal government right now
are not operating.

Speaker 8 (01:22:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's o idea the other one.

Speaker 5 (01:22:09):
Yeah, that might be it. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 8 (01:22:11):
Yeah, I've seen them precisely once, Wendy. If people want
to follow your work, you've done lots of good stuff
on California. Cal matt is just some really good reporting.
You had great reporting about the operation return to Sender,
for example, back when that was shocking.

Speaker 5 (01:22:26):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 8 (01:22:28):
How can people find you?

Speaker 5 (01:22:30):
Yeah, that's great. So all our stories are there on
calmatters dot org. Thank you for that. And then our
Operation Return to Center documentary is on YouTube, so you
can find that there. We did a lot of work
to show kind of what Bovino was saying and what
was actually happening on the ground. So that's a really
good one to watch.

Speaker 8 (01:22:48):
Yeah, and you guys publish also in Spanish, right, yes,
we do.

Speaker 5 (01:22:52):
More recently we started translating more of our stories into
Spanish so that folks who want to read it and
Spanish can find that there too.

Speaker 8 (01:23:00):
Yeah that's great. That's super nice.

Speaker 5 (01:23:02):
And I speak flu in Spanish. If people need to
contact me in Spanish, I can communicate there.

Speaker 8 (01:23:07):
Too, nice yep, And there's a contact link for you
on the website and getting if people want to talk
to you about some of this stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:23:12):
Right, absolutely, or yeah, I can just share my email
for sure. It's Wendy atclmatters dot org. And I am
always hoping to hear from people so we can do
more end up the recording about what's going on inside
these facilities. So thank you so much for that opportunity
to share that.

Speaker 8 (01:23:26):
Yeah, Coose, thanks for for doing this and taking time
to talk to us anytime.

Speaker 10 (01:23:42):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. For
the past few weeks on Executive Disorder and some regular
episodes of this show, most notably the DSA Red Scare,
I've been covering the ongoing battle for the future of
the Democratic Party, spurred on by a recent wave of
elect victories by DSA in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and most notably

(01:24:04):
New York City, where last month the DSA doubled their
block of Socialists in office. This episode is another installment
in this informal series, and this time we are going
straight to the source by talking with the co chair
of the New York City Chapter of DSA, Grace Mauser,
in an interview where we talked about everything from the

(01:24:26):
chapter's electoral strategy to their theory of power, and what
organizers can learn from New York City DSA's recent string
of success. So, without further ado, here is my interview
with Grace Mauser, co chair of NYC DSA. To start

(01:24:46):
on like the most like broad picture aspect, what is
the Democratic Socialist of America If people are not super
familiar with like what the organization actually is or what
the point of the organization.

Speaker 11 (01:24:59):
Is, thanks so much for having me. So DSA. Democratic
Socialists of America is a political organization. Legally, we're a nonprofit.
We're five to one C four, which enables us to
engage in a lot of different types of campaigns, including
electoral campaigns. But also we're very involved in labor work,

(01:25:23):
and we often partner with unions and with brink and
file workers for both internal union reform purposes and external demands.
We do issue based campaigns. For example, in New York City,
our Immigrant Justice Working Group ran a very successful effort
to conduct Know Your Rights trainings earlier this year that

(01:25:45):
trained over five thousand people in the city. So we
do a lot of different types of things, including social
things we have like book clubs and softball leagues and
things like that.

Speaker 10 (01:25:57):
The run Club is a very formidable political group in
the city.

Speaker 11 (01:26:01):
The run Club is very popular. It's true, it's true.
They've really taken off. And how we are structured is
that there's a national DSA so national organization, and then
there are I believe over two hundred chapters all across
the country. New York City is by far the largest,

(01:26:24):
I think for more than twice as large as the
next bigest, which is LA And the chapters engage in
localized work, but then we also try to have participation
from chapters on national campaigns and questions. I would say,
we're you know, we're not a party, not usually Americans

(01:26:45):
that some people are call some party or think we're
a party. We don't have a ballot line, but we
do run people in primary elections, usually in Democratic primaries,
because we want our members to select and endorsed candidates
that they think will represent not only their interests with
the interests of a broader working class space. And then

(01:27:09):
we want people who are elected to actually collaborate with
DSA and other outside organizations in a real and serious
way that the Democratic Party simply does not encourage and
sometimes even even tries to stop.

Speaker 10 (01:27:27):
So obviously, within the name of DSA, there's democratic socialism
and socialism kind of broadly, what does DSA mean by socialism?
I mean, I've seen multiple articles specifically in the Atlantic,
really really concerned about what socialism means and the quote
unquote Trotskyist tactics that Dsay's is employing. There's been a

(01:27:50):
whole of whole bunch of media coverage being scared of,
you know, communism and socialism. But what does like DSA
mean by socialism?

Speaker 11 (01:28:00):
ESSAY is what we call a big tent organization. There
are a lot of different ideologies that are members embrace.
Some people are more social democrats that you might find
to be the standard in some European countries. Some people
identify as communists, for example. So what we need by

(01:28:21):
socialism we try to make really concrete and demand base.
We're looking at things like universal health care, passing bills
like Medicare for All. We are trying to make housing
more affordable by expanding the role of government in the
housing market through things like what's around Mamdani just help

(01:28:43):
do freezing the rent.

Speaker 12 (01:28:45):
We are trying to make universal.

Speaker 11 (01:28:48):
Childcare free, right, like public education as it currently exists
is functionally socialists.

Speaker 8 (01:28:54):
Right.

Speaker 11 (01:28:54):
It's the government providing free education and childcare for millions
of children, and for some reason, it arbitrarily starts at
five years old. We're saying, what if we had that
but a little bit sooner. So we try to center
our demands on these really material ideas. One because it

(01:29:16):
enables not only leftists of all different stripes, but all
sorts of people to come in and identify with these
ideas because they know it would help their lives.

Speaker 13 (01:29:27):
But also because.

Speaker 11 (01:29:28):
Winning these things will take a very long time. So
my day to day is not so much concerned with
or the economy should look like in one hundred years,
but what we can achieve in the next five, ten,
twenty years. And you know, even if I'm not a communist,
but if I were, we're not going to be a

(01:29:49):
communists in ten years, right, So what matters is actually
making people's lives better now and using the government to
do that, which you know American politicians socialists and not
have done for many decades before.

Speaker 10 (01:30:05):
You were talking about like DSA is organizing to like
see what the country could be like in like five
to ten years. And I think something that people might
not be aware of is the past work that New
York City DSA has done the past five to ten years.

Speaker 8 (01:30:20):
Right.

Speaker 10 (01:30:20):
I think people certainly saw were drawn to DSA around
the election of Zoran And you know, maybe this most
recent like slate win, but this is this has been
kind of a long term project of like building power
and experimenting with electoral strategy and canvassing and like this
this specific path to victory. So could you speak a
little bit how NYCDSA has achieved like this winning streak,

(01:30:45):
especially like in the past year, and like the build
up to that winning streak.

Speaker 11 (01:30:49):
Definitely, New York City DSA really got serious in twenty sixteen,
both because many people were inspired by Bernie Sanders and
then many people were horrified by the ultimate victory of
Donald Trump in that presidential election. In twenty seventeen, we

(01:31:11):
took on our first electoral races in the modern era.
There was two city council races. We lost both of those,
but we did learn a lot and we gained a
new members around Donnie via one of those races. But
something we learned is that we could certainly run field campaigns,
and by field I mean canvassing and door knocking, But

(01:31:34):
we also saw that hey actually a lot of the
skills that are required in other parts of the campaign, communications,
political maneuvering, fundraising.

Speaker 12 (01:31:44):
And budgeting.

Speaker 11 (01:31:46):
These are also things we think that our members can do,
and we really tested that out in twenty eighteen. We
endorsed AOC that year. But in some ways the bigger
chapter project was Houli, our state Senate race, where we
had members not only on staff but also basically helping

(01:32:07):
in the volunteer capacity almost every aspect of that race.

Speaker 13 (01:32:11):
And we won.

Speaker 11 (01:32:12):
So from there we learned that we could teach ourselves
and begin to replicate the skills of not only canvassing,
but all these other skills that the political class and
the consulting class in particular want to believe that they
have a monopoly on that they're so hard to understand

(01:32:32):
that you simply must pay them tens of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 12 (01:32:37):
So we have built out from there.

Speaker 11 (01:32:39):
We have now sixteen Socialist in office at the state
legislature level, not only in New York City but also
in mid Hudson Valley and in Buffalo, and we have
four city council members and now three Congress members.

Speaker 13 (01:32:56):
Some of those came posts.

Speaker 12 (01:32:58):
Eron, but most of them caname pre Zoran.

Speaker 11 (01:33:01):
And it was just really nose to the grindstone kind
of work, knocking on a lot of doors or replicating skills,
fundraising from small dollar donors. And we lost some of
our races. I think we've probably lost a little less
than half of the races we'd won, but we took
some big swings about strategic swings. So these kind of

(01:33:23):
skills developed over time and really formed the foundation and
the backbone of Zoran's campaign. So for many Durans seemed
to come out of nowhere. But his first campaign event,
his field launch in December of twenty twenty four, when
no one had really heard of him as a series candidate,

(01:33:46):
had five hundred people at it, which I would guess
is bigger than any other candidate had at any point
in the race. And that's because DSA members knew him,
were really excited about what this meant, and also knew
exactly what kind of work would be required to make
this race successful, and it was work of basically building

(01:34:09):
out huge infrastructure and knocking on millions of doors so
that we could talk to voters.

Speaker 10 (01:34:15):
Yeah, one of the most impressive things is this sort
of like like parallel campaign structure that DSA has has
developed that you don't need to go through the regular
channels of like consultants, sort of like inside baseball of politics.
And I got people do often get very confused about
like what the word like party means, right, because party
in you know, Europe in something very different than what
it means in the US. But in terms of running

(01:34:37):
in primaries, the DSA often has to go up against
the party infrastructure of the Democratic Party establishment itself. And
the fact that DSA has been able to, especially in
the past two years, like out organize the local political
establishment has been like one of the most impressive feats.
And like I've been able to see this in person.

(01:34:59):
I'm in Brooklyn in the you know, the past two months,
I had multiple DSA canvassers come to my door. I
received a truly absurd amount of Mayer's. There was you know,
people canvassing on the sidewalk, you know, all the time
you know, same thing, same thing in Ridgewood and Queens.
A lot of canvassers there, especially going into the mayoral race.
Something that's stuck in my mind a lot is I

(01:35:19):
used to live in Atlanta. Some like friends of friends,
people I didn't know, but people I kind of loosely
knew of were paid to do canvassing for the twenty
twenty four presidential election for the Democratic Party. They were
basically just operating kind of like a scam, like they
did not actually do any of the work. They basically
sat in like a parking lot and scrolled on their phone.
And something that makes the DSA's form of canvasing so

(01:35:41):
different is that the people who are actually involved in
it actually care about the political project, right, They're actually
like invested in these candidates, invested in, you know, putting
forward this like working class politics and are not just
getting a paycheck from the DNC. And that changes the
way that they do canvassing on the ground. I know
this this is something that you refer to, is like
the DSA difference. Could you guys briefly touch on like

(01:36:03):
what the DSA difference like represents?

Speaker 11 (01:36:05):
Yeah, it really for me starts from the endorsement process,
which is very long and white rigorous, but also extremely democratic,
and because of that, people really feel bought in to
the races that we endorse. I mean, if you come
to an endorsement forum, it's said over and over again,

(01:36:30):
if you would not personally be interested in canvassing for
this candidate, do not vote to endorse them. And that's
a kind of an easy standard we try to share
with members on top of a lot of strategy and
data consideration, and there's a lot of things that go
into it, but for as that like will you go
to this? If not, how can we expect others to

(01:36:53):
that initial buy in, That initial ownership that members have
over what races we've run and why really extends then
into the entirety of the campaign. So our campaigns do
have staff, and of course larger campaigns have more staff,

(01:37:13):
but we also have a practice of really elevating volunteers
who show capacity and interest to be more engaged in strategy.
So canvassers are also strategic actors.

Speaker 13 (01:37:28):
That's sort of the first.

Speaker 12 (01:37:29):
Rung of engagement.

Speaker 11 (01:37:31):
I mean, canvassing could just be like, oh, go out
and do this, but we really actively seek to create
a feedback loop between canvassing and other parts of a campaign.
So not only is canvassing data of course very critical
and tracking ID progress and things like that, but we
also teach our field leads to lead canvases, to solicit feedback,

(01:37:57):
and to systematize that feedback. What do you hearing on
the doors? Did you meet anyone interesting? Should we follow
up with that person? And I've seen in real time
our messaging overall change because of feedback that canvassors are
getting on the doors. From the next rung, if a
canvasser is really great and excited, we often encourage them

(01:38:19):
to become a field lead.

Speaker 13 (01:38:20):
These are pretty.

Speaker 11 (01:38:22):
Intensive and high responsibility jobs. So these people manage logistics,
they run trainings, they move materials around if there are
problems or questions that come up during a canvas or after.
They're the first point of contact for these volunteers. They're

(01:38:42):
really quite skilled leaders, and we try to create as
many of these people as possible, And that's kind of
the next rung of engagement from there. It sort of
varies from campaign to a campaign, but on most of
the campaigns that I've seen, you have robust volunteer teams

(01:39:04):
around all of these functional areas. There's a fundraising team
who are trying to execute not only comms and digital strategy,
but also peer to fear fundraising and house parties. There
is a communications team who, yes, we're closely with staff often,
but is drafting and helping produce a level of content

(01:39:25):
that you know, if you're a state assembly race and
you have two staffers, it's pretty hard to produce as
much content as you might want.

Speaker 10 (01:39:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:39:34):
There's research who are helping do oppoh and helping figure
out what stories we might be able to place in
the press. So these areas that can be pretty opaque
in some ways and are not often a visible part
of the political process, we really try to open up
and invite people into and then we talk openly about

(01:39:56):
that in our debriefs and also in our endorsement inforums themselves.

Speaker 10 (01:40:01):
And I guess something else said people might not be
fully aware of that. There's cause there's kind of like
two ways of like fielding candidates. Candidates can be DSA endorsed,
and then you can have DSA members who then run
for office and for the people who are more kind
of like outside of the organization but seek seek a
DSA endorsement. If they secure it, they then get access

(01:40:22):
right to this, to this, this whole like on the
ground like organizing network and that, and that could be
very appealing, But there's certain things that endorsement is like
contingent on in terms of like platform. As you said,
it's a pretty it's a pretty intensive process actually to
get a DSA endorsement. After the series of victories New

(01:40:50):
or DSA has has had the past few months, has
that affected the size of the membership in like any
like notable ways? Is like is that grown the man
up on the ground volunteers like that? What the next
campaigns are? Oh?

Speaker 11 (01:41:02):
Absolutely, I mean, of course we are subject to like
macro political trends. Right, we see large jumps when there's
a presidential election, like we saw it in twenty sixteen.
I saw it again in twenty twenty and in twenty
four But you know, not every campaign results in a

(01:41:24):
huge membership boost. I think they do all result in
a large capacity boost because even if we're not gaining
new people numerically, we're expanding the skill set of people
who are there. But last year, certainly we gained a
lot of a lot of members between the time that
Zaron announced his campaign in the fall of twenty twenty four,

(01:41:48):
and now we've almost tripled in size in New York City,
and between the primary elections this year, so June twenty
third and today, so about a month, we have gained
over a thousand members.

Speaker 13 (01:42:04):
So we are obviously.

Speaker 11 (01:42:07):
Helped along by like high profile wins too that the
media is really interested in covering, and then we get
kind of more eyeballs on our ideas and more interest
in the project overall. So there are some some wins
that results in a lot of members, but every win
I think expands capacity, and even losses expand capacity because

(01:42:29):
we're teaching people these skills and we're able to better
replicate ourselves for future cycles.

Speaker 10 (01:42:37):
I'm sure, as most people are aware, we are right
in the middle of like a huge debate right now
over the future of the Democratic Party. And you know,
this debate is being waged onlines, being waged in the newspaper,
it's on TV news TV, and most importantly right in
the in the primaries right and then eventually the general elections.
You know, it seems like every week The Atlantic has

(01:42:58):
a new article out about how scary the Democratic Socialists
are as I mentioned. I think today they put out
a brand new article about like the secret like Trotskyism
of DSA.

Speaker 11 (01:43:11):
I saw that, which I mean, all these articles suggest
to me that they neither understand DSA nor do they
understand the history or ideology they're comparing us too.

Speaker 10 (01:43:23):
Yeah, but it's been really interesting, especially after the winds
in New York and Colorado and Pennsylvania, hopefully in Wisconsin.
But this past month we've seen more and more like
establishment democrats join people like President Trump and Fox News
in effectively declaring war on the DSA and like the
left wing of the party. And you know, there's this

(01:43:46):
idea that you see in The Atlantic Washington Post that
you know, communists and socialists are taking over the Democratic Party.
But I think for a chunk of the people listening
to this show, their concerns are probably more of the
oppositet running as a Democrat. These Democratic Socialist candidates risk
being captured and like brought into the very party establishment

(01:44:07):
that they're trying to oppose. I guess i'd like you
to speak on what is the nature of the DSA's
relationship to the Democratic Party.

Speaker 11 (01:44:15):
Yeah, I mean the thing about the Democratic Party that
I think a lot of media and political pundits miss
is that there's no one to have a relationship with,
right Like the Democratic Party is three boys in a suit,
like there's no one to talk to. That's why they
can't act like a party does in Europe. I mean,

(01:44:36):
of course there are electoral and ballot reasons for that
as well, But the Democratic Party does not really organize
either voters who are Democrats, right Like, no one has
ever attempted to organize me as a Democrat because I
am a registered Democrat. Nor is there really a serious

(01:44:57):
effort to organize Democratic elected officials as a block and
move in the same direction like that infrastructure simply doesn't exist.
So I feel like the risk of being captured is
only a risk in so far as DSA does not

(01:45:18):
try to keep our own people organized and acting as
a block, which is very much central to our project.
And in New York City, for example, we have weekly
meetings with both our state legislators and our city council members,
and now we have regular meetings with administration officials as

(01:45:39):
well in the mayoral administration that try to keep us
all on the same page when we have a big
project that we're moving on together. Like tax the rich
was this last legislative session, we do really active organizing
in those meetings, like Okay, have you talked to your
colleague about this bill?

Speaker 13 (01:46:00):
Will they move?

Speaker 11 (01:46:01):
Do we need to pressure them someway from the outside,
or do you think you'll get somewhere in internal conversations.
So to me, I don't feel worried about being captured
by the Democrats because the Democrats don't have the infrastructure
to capture people. The people who can capture you are

(01:46:22):
like moneyed interests, right, big corporations, and sure sometimes they
act through the Democratic Party, but for us that's such
a clear red line that they don't feel super concerned
about it. The more complicated questions are not so much
of capture, but of when do we compromise right? Sure,

(01:46:42):
we could be a block of people who vote know
on every budget, right, every state budget, every city budget
is politically compromised.

Speaker 12 (01:46:51):
It's not enough.

Speaker 11 (01:46:52):
They never tax the rich enough, they never fund public
services enough.

Speaker 12 (01:46:58):
It's never good.

Speaker 11 (01:47:00):
But if we always say no, then can we.

Speaker 12 (01:47:02):
Get any any wins?

Speaker 11 (01:47:04):
What kind of wins are the you know, the non
reformist reforms we might be looking for and deciding that
collectively doesn't mean our choice is always correct, but I
think it's much more likely to be correct than if
we let even someone who's that committed Democratic Socialist kind
of go out on their own and try to make

(01:47:26):
those decisions by themselves. The collectiveness and the connection to DSA,
I think is the biggest barrier to the capture that
people are worried about. Whereas if we just say no
to everything, if we ran as third party, I think, well,
if we've been as third party, I don't think we'd
ever win. But if we just say no to everything

(01:47:49):
and our orientation is as like a morally upstanding group that.

Speaker 12 (01:47:54):
Doesn't achieve anything, I think we lose.

Speaker 11 (01:47:57):
Our credibility, not only in the eyes of like the
political class and of other politicians, but in the eyes
of voters. Right now, we can look at a voter
have a conversation on a door about how we are.

Speaker 12 (01:48:11):
A different type of.

Speaker 11 (01:48:12):
Politician because look at what Saran has already done. Saran
FROs your rent. Yeah, we are the group behind Zoran.
Don't you want more people like him? And if Soran
hadn't frosen the rent, that would be a much harder
conversation to have.

Speaker 10 (01:48:26):
No it is really easy to point to the like
the delivering of goods and be like, yeah, this is
what we are about, and this is actually you know,
improving the lives of workers, and like that is what matters.
What else is this whole project for? I can understand that,
you know, people are concerned with like the idea of
like holding politicians accountable, right, holding politicans accountable to this

(01:48:48):
you know, working class platform that they're running on, that
they were elected to represent that the organizing put them
into office to fulfill. But I think one of the
biggest ways to do that is through a mass membership
organization like DSA, because not only does it provide you know,
campaign infrastructure which could help them get re elected if
they stick to this vision, but it also provides this

(01:49:11):
sort of like like like social bond, this internal process
to stay being tethered together while they are serving or
occupying a seat of power. And once you're occupying a
seat of power, there is obviously constraints on that power
and there's going to be contradictions that arise, and I
think a lot of people, especially online, view those contradictions
as like a bad thing. That's like a reason to

(01:49:32):
not engage in this project. Alternatively, I think those contradictions
are actually very often a good thing. Like this that
is a sign that history is in progress, that we
are actually moving forward and we're going to seek to
resolve those like over time, and dealing with those contradictions
is good in this sense that we have to deal
with them. We actually we are at a point in

(01:49:53):
our strategy where this is something to be dealt with
as opposed to not engaging in this sort of strategy
like at all. Right, And the power that politician has
that is running on a working class platform, Their power
comes from the working class, and the DSA is the
manifestation of that, and DSA can be an anchor. But
I think there also is these like questions of like
this like long term vision, right, or if ds candidates

(01:50:14):
are just going to have to like administer capitalism in
a more equitable way, or if there really is like
this the kind of bigger vision to increase the power
of the working class towards some sort of you know,
ultimate class struggle for socialism. And I guess, like is
that like balance in their heads between this sort of
like equitable administration and like this ultimate class struggle.

Speaker 13 (01:50:35):
Yeah, it certainly is.

Speaker 11 (01:50:37):
I mean thinking about how we actually permanently change power
structures and not just kind of mitigate harm. I think
is one of the things that separates a socialist from progressive. Sure,
some ideas that I'm really excited about that I would
point to that that.

Speaker 12 (01:50:57):
Do some of this.

Speaker 11 (01:50:58):
This didn't pass, but I think something like the pro
Act absolutely would that expand and makes it easier for
workers to organize themselves and empowers unions is part of
that structure and central to what democratic socialists want to do.
In fact, right now, Actually in New York City, there

(01:51:20):
is a bill held by City Council Member Tiffany Caban,
who's a DSA member and a City Socialist in office,
called the Delivery Protection Act that would functionally make it
extremely difficult for Amazon to consider last mild delivery workers
as individual contractors and force them to be employees of Amazon,

(01:51:45):
which one makes sense, like it's crazy that all these
people in Amazon trucks that you see all the time
are contractors when functionally they're not. Everything that they have
to do is controlled by Amazon, and doing that we're
partnering with the teamsters on it because doing it would
make those workers unionizable. Yes, and that's a huge workforce

(01:52:09):
in your city. So that's kind of the labor example.
Another piece that I'm really excited about. So yes, Ron
throws the rents. That's an extension of government power in
the market. But one thing that is really promising is
that the administration is exploring how to legally recognize and

(01:52:31):
empower tenant unions in a way that you know, workers'
unions are recognized, so that tenant unions actually have bargaining
rights with a landlord. And we don't have all the
answers for how that would look, but that's I think
another example of a type of reform, a type of

(01:52:51):
policy that is explicitly socialist and is actually trying to
permanently change the power relationship between tenants and landlords, just
as joining a worker's union changes the power relationship between
a worker and a supervisor.

Speaker 13 (01:53:10):
So I'm not saying we have the.

Speaker 11 (01:53:12):
Perfect answers across all policy areas, and certainly there are
policy areas that socialists will will advocate for and get
behind that I would consider more progressive because our country
and society is a very harsh environment for many people,
and mitigating harm is in fact something good to do.

Speaker 10 (01:53:36):
Yeah, but it.

Speaker 12 (01:53:36):
Cannot be the sole thing we do.

Speaker 11 (01:53:39):
And backing these types of non reformance reforms ideas that
change power structures is central to our work.

Speaker 10 (01:53:48):
Yeah, I think this sort of tension between this sort
of more like social democratic administration of capitalism and like
just pushing for you know, like the revolution or something
is of false economy, and oftentimes it can resemble the
This is bad referencing Twitter, but there's this old tweet

(01:54:10):
that's like, don't siege Leningrad, take it immediately, Like, don't
build work in class power, just do the revolution. But
if you look at like where the labor movement in
the US is right now, we are so behind where
the movement was in the twenties and thirties that allowed
workers to extract the New Deal. We have a long

(01:54:31):
way to go to be able to really threaten capital
in a serious way. And these minor social democratic policies,
rather than being a release valve, could in fact provide
workers more autonomy and the extra time needed to organize
and keep building power. Like Another thing from Zoron's rent
reforms is that the administration is advancing a new rule

(01:54:54):
that landlords could only request proof of income or a
credit check, but not both in apartment applications, and like,
that would be huge for people, right, And there's there's
ways to do small stuff like that well also, you know,
in a bigger sense, trying to just increase the amount
that our society is socialist. Right, that's through public ownership

(01:55:16):
of utilities and key industries, commodifying necessities of life like
housing or food, and democratizing the workplace. I've been yelling
about the Protect the Right to Organize Act in my
personal life a lot lately. I've been kind of just
like evangelizing about the pro Act because that that is
something that like, if that, if that gets past, that
would be one of the biggest boosts to working class

(01:55:37):
power that we've seen in probably decades.

Speaker 11 (01:55:39):
Yeah, and I mean having Clara val Does is a
labor organizer, like that was her first organizing experience, and yeah,
there's no one like that in Congress right now, you know.

Speaker 13 (01:55:50):
So I don't know that.

Speaker 11 (01:55:53):
Her first move will be the Proact, but it's certainly
top of mind for her.

Speaker 10 (01:55:58):
That kind of relates to one of the las quests
I want to get to. But first, let's do one
last ad break. Okay, we are back. How does the
DSA actually communicate with and relate to a broader working

(01:56:21):
class base, like like a broader working class like coalition, right,
Because this is the politics that DSA is about, and
this is the class that DSA is trying to like uplift.
What exactly is like the nature of the relationship between
DSA and the working class.

Speaker 11 (01:56:36):
DSA is striving to be a multi racial working class organization.

Speaker 13 (01:56:43):
I would say that right.

Speaker 11 (01:56:44):
Now, the majority of not entirety of our membership, not
only in New York City but also nationally are our
working class. We embrace it pretty broad definition of that,
because the only way you get class solidarity is by
you know, refraining from nitpicking who is middle class, who's

(01:57:06):
working class, who's working for and like separating the interests
of those groups and recognizing that basically anyone who relies
on their own labor in order to live is working
class and they have a lot more in common than
the people who live off of their own wealth, and
that we should be united in basically finding the interests

(01:57:30):
of the uber wealthy who run our lives and run
our economy. So I would say we're already a working
class organization, but we want to become one much bigger
and also more diverse, more people in different types of industry,
more people from across different demographics. It's trending that way

(01:57:52):
over the last.

Speaker 12 (01:57:53):
Couple of years.

Speaker 13 (01:57:54):
But we need to get more of.

Speaker 11 (01:57:57):
The people who vote for our candidates to also take
the plunge into becoming a member and into actively organizing
to better their own conditions.

Speaker 13 (01:58:08):
So I'm excited about.

Speaker 11 (01:58:09):
How things are heading in that direction. It's also true
that becoming all to racial working class organization in the
US is notoriously difficult. You know, a country that's divided
violently not only by class divisions, but also by racial ones.
So we have an uphill battle. But I think we're

(01:58:31):
moving in the right direction, and voting trends showed that too.
Like Claire Valdez one a majority of Hispanic election districts
in her area do I lead to one of majority
of Black election districts in her district. So I think
we're seeing that these ideas have more and more mass
appeal as voters are looking especially as establishment democrats who

(01:58:55):
are really just continuously failing to stand up the Trump
and more people are saying maybe we need to try
something different. What's the socialism all about?

Speaker 10 (01:59:07):
There was an article in your Times by the time
you were listening to this, like a few weeks ago,
looking at like the voting data from the last June primary,
and it showed like the divisions in voter behavior between
like DSA candidates and either progressive or establishment candidates was
not largely divided by race, but rather by age. Yes,
And I think that is another significant factor in this.

Speaker 11 (01:59:28):
And we're also I notably holding on to millennial voters.
I mean, trends show that, unlike previous generations, millennials tend
to stay fairly left as they age, in part perhaps
because millennials aren't really gaining well as we age.

Speaker 10 (01:59:50):
The capital system has nothing to offer though, Yeah, so yeah,
why why would you make like the fiscal conservative turn
to close out a A few weeks before the June primary,
Canary Mission started getting very scared of the dssay. They
put out this big, this big post on you know,

(02:00:10):
the the slate candidates. But once something that I found
to be more interesting rather than just like, you know,
talking about who these candidates are, they focused a lot
on like the organizational structure of New York d Essay
and how quote New York is the testing ground. The
machine is already being built. The machine doesn't stop unquote,
which sounds kind of cool.

Speaker 12 (02:00:32):
Yeah, right, they made they made it sound like.

Speaker 10 (02:00:34):
Cool if you ignore all of the like horrible evil
parts of the Canary mission right up, they kind of
make New York d Essay sound pretty cool. How you know?
It has all these members almost like one hundred thousand volunteers,
all these field leads that coordinates with candidates once they
get into office and maintains that connection, helps them, helps
them stay accountable.

Speaker 11 (02:00:53):
It's funny too they treat it like a big secret,
like they're revealing something when like I literally just told
you the same, right, Like it's not a secret.

Speaker 10 (02:01:03):
But you know, considering stuff like this and the dsa momentum'
seeing across the country and the reaction is getting from
the GOP, the president and the Democratic Party establishment, what
can organizers and you know, chapters around the country learn
from New York City dsay's electoral strategy or like, what's
what's something that I think New York DSAY is doing

(02:01:24):
that that you would like more people to kind of
understand or you'd like you'd like people to like, you know,
learn from or like take take something away from what
we've seen in these past few campaigns.

Speaker 11 (02:01:34):
Yeah, one thing, especially after Zoran one that I noticed
is a lot of people were really focused on his
charisma and his communications strategy, which Zoran is certainly charismatic,
and his communication strategy was really strong and very intentional.

Speaker 13 (02:01:57):
But to me, his community cation strategy would have.

Speaker 11 (02:02:02):
Not gone anywhere if one he hadn't been saying something
real that people resonated with. I mean, people are not
totally fooled by an empty charismatic vessel. I mean, otherwise
Jack Slosberg would have won in New Year twelve I think.
But also there was an extremely robust field strategy that

(02:02:25):
meant when someone saw a video wasn't inspired or interested,
they could immediately find something to do to act on
that feeling. And often they could find something to do
basically within a mile and within a week of where
they lived, in what day.

Speaker 13 (02:02:42):
It was the.

Speaker 11 (02:02:44):
Core of this run campaign was not communication that was
fueled and building up that structure and that muscle can
take a lot of time. You know, it's hard to
jump from zero to a mayoral race, but it is
possible if you build out the kind of deep ownership

(02:03:04):
from like an endorsement process, and also a culture of
not only valuing volunteers but really like depending on volunteers. Like,
the campaign doesn't work if volunteers are expendable, if volunteers
are treated as like an ancilliary.

Speaker 12 (02:03:23):
Nice to have.

Speaker 11 (02:03:25):
It only works if volunteers are both treated and truly
are essential.

Speaker 12 (02:03:32):
And that kind of creates a culture.

Speaker 11 (02:03:35):
Where people are valued, where they become friends, where they
keep coming back, or they talk to their friends and
family about the campaign.

Speaker 12 (02:03:43):
Or things spread out from there.

Speaker 11 (02:03:45):
So what I would say both to DSA organizers in
other parts of the country, but also just general organizers
who are interested in replicating some of the success, I
think culture sure is really key centering people who are
not staff, who are not the politicians, making sure that

(02:04:08):
the experience of the campaign is actually built around the
experience of a canvasser and.

Speaker 12 (02:04:14):
Moving up from there.

Speaker 11 (02:04:15):
And that's how you get a campaign that is not
only accountable to the people who are building it, but
that's really fun and positive and grounded and people in
place and not just in like kind of ideas and
videos and things like that.

Speaker 10 (02:04:34):
So yeah, yeah, No, there's a real material aspect. It's
not this just like idealistic kind of abstract thing that
you're participating in or you believe in. It's a real,
like material process. It's a real engagement. One of the
funniest things I've seen recently is that there was a
Wall Street Journal article where they sent one of their
hit piece writers to attend all these DSA events, and

(02:04:55):
the write up is essentially, uh, yeah, I had a
great time at all these events. Everyone was really nice.

Speaker 13 (02:05:02):
I saw that.

Speaker 11 (02:05:03):
Yeah, there was like one of our one of our
incoming assembly members, Yappasar du Bac, was like given a
shout out because he like remembered someone's name, and I'm like, yeah,
I don't know organizers remember people's face. That's that's a
central part of our work.

Speaker 10 (02:05:22):
Where can do people learn more about DSA or New
York DSA online or by any other means?

Speaker 11 (02:05:31):
So, yes, if you're in New York City or even
near New York City, you can go to Socialists Dot NYC.

Speaker 12 (02:05:41):
There you can see how I joined DSA.

Speaker 11 (02:05:44):
You can look at our events calendar, which is robust.

Speaker 12 (02:05:48):
We're at a point.

Speaker 11 (02:05:49):
Where we have basically at least three events every single
day that cover a wide range of geographies across the city,
but also interests. There's a run club event on Friday,
if that's of interest to people.

Speaker 12 (02:06:05):
If you're not in New York City, there is almost
certainly a chapter where you live.

Speaker 11 (02:06:10):
You can go to DSAUSA dot org to join, but
also to find your chapter, find out about national work
that's going on, especially as it relates to like the
ongoing imperialist wars we have that's often held by National DSA.
So definitely encourage everyone to check those things out.

Speaker 10 (02:06:33):
Thank you Grace for coming on.

Speaker 12 (02:06:35):
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 5 (02:06:49):
Bradley Whitford.

Speaker 10 (02:06:51):
This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
joined by James Stout and Robert Evans.

Speaker 8 (02:07:03):
Surfie's also here.

Speaker 10 (02:07:04):
Sophie is also here. Allegedly we were talking West Wing
before this.

Speaker 8 (02:07:09):
And Sophie has been excommunicated.

Speaker 10 (02:07:12):
Sophie said something that Robert will not let us repeat.

Speaker 2 (02:07:15):
Yeah, we legally can't repeat it. You'd all go to
prison and we would be right to send you there.

Speaker 10 (02:07:20):
West Wing is in the TV show.

Speaker 4 (02:07:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:07:22):
In this episode, we're covering the week of July twenty
second to July twenty ninth, James some small things to start.

Speaker 8 (02:07:29):
Yeah. So today, on the day that we are recording,
which is the twenty ninth of July, the United States
and Saudi forces conducting strikes inside Iraq at what they
are calling Iran backed terrorists. Comes after Iraqi National Security
advisor earlier this week suggested that Ukraine was responsible for
strikes inside Iraq, which is a thing that isn't true.

(02:07:52):
Iran again attempted to target US bases in Jordan today,
but at the time of recording, the US military reporting
that smissiles were all intercepted. Iranian strikes from Kurdistan have continued,
and Reuter's is reporting that Iran is soon to receive
Chinese shoulder fired manpads. It's man portable air defense system.

(02:08:15):
Women can use them too, probably not in Iran, but
these are part of what Royce is saying is a
recently signed deal between the two states. China course denying it,
but that would be very interesting, right considering that it
was a shoulder launched manpads that shut down the jet
that triggered the massive SISA mission a few months ago.

Speaker 2 (02:08:36):
Yeah, it's always funny when something comes around like this
in the history of like military colonialist adventures overseas. You know,
it wasn't that so long ago that we were sending
man pads into Afghanistan and the Soviets were going, Oh no,
all of our helicopters.

Speaker 8 (02:08:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:08:50):
Yeah, and yeah, it's just beautiful how cyclical nature is.

Speaker 8 (02:08:53):
Yeah, here we are finally. I want to talk about
the TPS Temporary protect States of Fa Haitian people. So
a few weeks ago on a Supreme Court special we
spoke about the court case that effectively ended this protected
status right and it is set to expire this week.
We know that this will impact as many as three
hundred and fifty thousand people are going with a number

(02:09:16):
from Haitian Bridge Alliance. There a lot of these people
that are going back. Is no an option, it's not
in any way going to be safe for them, or
they just don't simply have a place to go back to. There.
Many of these people will have US citizen children who
therefore will not lose CPS right, but it did. It's
unclear what exactly, or I mean, I think the administration,
she probably doesn't give a shit what happens to their children.

(02:09:38):
I'm going to keep reporting on this or already rumors
of ice rates targeting Haitian people. I'm going to try
and get some folks on from HbA or one of
the other avocacy organizations. But I'm going to wait a
little bit, just to see how things play out in
a couple of days. But I'm afraid whatever happens won't
be great.

Speaker 10 (02:09:54):
The House approved the one point one five trillion dollar
twenty twenty seven National Defense authors Sation Act, then a
two hundred and sixteen to two hundred and twelve vote,
largely on party lines, though six Democrats voted in support.
The version of the bill that passed includes Section two nineteen,
which expands cooperation between the US and Israeli militaries, specifically

(02:10:17):
the co development of military technology and joint training and
information sharing to deploy jointly develops technology. The budget contains
seven hundred and fifty million for these US Israel joint programs.
The bills currently stalled in the Senate. Core documents revealed
that last October, the Trump administration canceled nearly eight billion

(02:10:38):
dollars of clean energy grants by explicitly targeting states whose
Electoral College votes once to Kamala Harris in twenty twenty four,
or who have two senators who caucus with the Democrats
that is Georgia, and lawyers for the part of Energy
just explicitly lake this out in court doc saying that's

(02:10:59):
how these grants were selected, was on these political lines.

Speaker 8 (02:11:03):
Yeah, incredible.

Speaker 10 (02:11:05):
Last Friday saw the White House Press Correspondence Dinner Take two.
President Trump delivered a rambling monologue with what we're supposed
to be jokes to very tepid reactions from a largely
friendly audience. Once again, Trump joked about running for president.
In twenty twenty eight, wolf Blitzer presented an award to

(02:11:26):
the Wall Street Journal and their reporters for their reporting
on the Trump signed Epstein birthday card, sparking a ten
billion dollar defamation suit from the President. As wolf Blitzer
presented the award, Trump laughed from his seat on stage
before shaking hands with all the winners. The dinner, which
ostensibly is to celebrate the free press in the First Amendment,

(02:11:50):
took place the same week that the Trump administration subpoened
New York Times journalists, their spouses, and one of their
moms following Times reporting on the security capability of the
Katari gifted Air Force one. The DOJ withdrew those subpoenas
last Thursday after pressure from a federal judge, but that
was not the only instance of press freedom coming under

(02:12:11):
attack from the government justice last week. On July twenty second,
the nonprofit newsroom Breakthrough News reported that they received a
congressional subpoena from the Republican controlled Houseways and Means Committee
demanding quote internal communications, financial records, and more. A letter
to the outlet from the House committee said they were

(02:12:32):
quote unquote disturbed by the outlet's connection to quote Chinese
Communist Party linked organizations unquote, and that the committee was
investigating connections between quote unquote tax exempt groups and foreign nations.
This was, of course, following the State Department's left wing
terrorism summit that we covered last week, and parallel to

(02:12:53):
Mark Rubio's crusade against Cuba and what he sees as
Cuba aligned left wing organisms. The People's Forum, a PSL
linked left wing anti imperialist protest organization and community space
in New York City which was named in Rubio's Cuba report,
was also subpoenaed by the House Committee. The People's Forum

(02:13:15):
was one of the organizers of the humanitarian aid trip
to Cuba earlier this year.

Speaker 2 (02:13:21):
I've got a fun thing to talk about, all right,
let's do it. What's fun. There's an article in The
Guardian that just came out July twenty eighth that is
about this new company based out of Austin called Campus
Guardian Angel, which is taking lessons from the Ukrainian War
and applying them to US public schools, specifically in Ukraine.
They've seen a lot of luck in stopping breaches of

(02:13:41):
areas of like the front of trenches and stuff using
waves of small drones.

Speaker 10 (02:13:46):
Oh, I've seen this video. I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 8 (02:13:50):
I haven't hit me with it. Come on, I want
to see this.

Speaker 2 (02:13:54):
These are waves of drones that can launch mace and
pepper balls and have like they've got glass breakers so
they can fly through windows.

Speaker 10 (02:14:02):
They would have fucking sent a drone swarm to stop
a school shooter, yeah, as they wanted to do.

Speaker 3 (02:14:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:14:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:14:08):
The thing is with a drone swarm, it can't be
a coward, which has historically been an issue for the cops.

Speaker 2 (02:14:12):
Right, it is true, this could work better. The problem
is that in terms of actually stopping school shooters, this
actually might be a lot more effective than calling the cops.
I'm not going to say I don't think it's possible
that this could work. Yeah, but everything about the press
around this says tells me this company is also building
itself as a way that, like school administrators can use
drones to fuck up kids who mispay Sure, no, I

(02:14:34):
can see that being it. That's that's kind of the
what I'm expecting, right.

Speaker 8 (02:14:39):
Yeah, yeah, you're going to get maced by a drone.

Speaker 2 (02:14:41):
I want to read a quote from the article here.
They could be flown from thousands of miles away and
support two way communication through an embedded speakerphone, allowing the
company's response team to engage verbally with a threat or
communicate to teachers in school staff campus. Guardian Angels website
stated this allows our team and our op center to
communicate to law enforcement officers verbally with messages such as
follow me and I'll take you to the suspect, or
open the door and we'll go in and clear the room, and.

Speaker 4 (02:15:03):
I'll tell you what you see.

Speaker 2 (02:15:04):
And it's the whole thing about going after the suspect
that I'm like, I can see this also just these
drones being swarmed after some kids smoking pot or or
somebody on earth like a suspicious looking backpack to some
shitty AI like visual identification system that because you can't
have a guy on the cameras at all times.

Speaker 10 (02:15:22):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:15:23):
I don't think this is going to wind up saving
as many lives as it is causing drone related assaults
in public schools, but I guess we'll see.

Speaker 8 (02:15:30):
Fascinating.

Speaker 4 (02:15:31):
The video is great.

Speaker 8 (02:15:33):
Yeah, I want to see the video, can I You should?

Speaker 10 (02:15:35):
You should look up the video.

Speaker 8 (02:15:37):
Campus Guardian Angel. That's got a lie for Campus Guardian Angel.

Speaker 1 (02:15:40):
There you go.

Speaker 8 (02:15:40):
And when someone I hear that phrase, the first thing
that comes to my mind is pedophile. Yeah that's what
I That's what I'm thinking when I hear something. Okay,
watch video the first active shooter suppression service. I'm sure
that's true. All right, here we go, got a couple
of cops.

Speaker 2 (02:15:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:15:57):
Still it's still blurry. I still can't quite it's still well,
it's having a long thing. Okay, here we are, here,
we are okay.

Speaker 2 (02:16:02):
Yeah, This does make me think about what if the
latency is bad between the camera and the drone operator
flying an armed drone through a public school.

Speaker 8 (02:16:09):
Okay, we're here, we're watching a bunch of news clips.
Board man is giving a talk.

Speaker 2 (02:16:15):
That's the Navy seal who runs the company.

Speaker 8 (02:16:18):
Okay, I see, okay, Wow, the drones are moving down
the corridor. Fuck me, they're sitting some little boxes. There's
a cop. Cop has a gun. Oh, there's someone in
a balaclava. He's surrendering to the drones. He's down surrendering
the Droughts' on the.

Speaker 2 (02:16:36):
Ed from front footage of like Russian soldiers surrendering the drones.

Speaker 8 (02:16:40):
They don't Yeah, these guys. Okay, there's this guy's playing
a shooter. He has a BB gun. A couple of
drones have got him cornered. He's not shooting at.

Speaker 2 (02:16:49):
Them, though, Cowards, cowards.

Speaker 8 (02:16:50):
Okay, he's someone from Seminole County Public Schools. So the
drones live in a little box and it opens, and
I like that they've done blue lighting. It's like a
white box with blue lighting. Like it's very game. A
little drone carrier, Yeah, a little little drone box. Here
he comes he's breached through the window. Whoa, they're sucking
up a dummy. That's the cliff look at it. Go
they've missed. They've missed a few times. I noticed if

(02:17:11):
you look closely. Yeah, way off, he's fucking way off.
All right, I'm not I don't trust these drones about this.
They're like, what if there was a child nearby?

Speaker 14 (02:17:20):
No, literally, that was my first thought was like, this
just makes it easier for cops to shoot people accidentally.

Speaker 8 (02:17:26):
Or an AI drone to shoot someone by accident. They're
going after the same dude again. He's running away. Oh,
he's cornered, he's gone to ground. He's surrendering.

Speaker 14 (02:17:35):
Wait, it's probably guys that couldn't pass the cop exam.

Speaker 5 (02:17:40):
Yeah, the ones flying the drones.

Speaker 8 (02:17:43):
Yeah, in this POV, it looks like someone's manually firing
because the drone has like a crosshairs in its video.
Now I'm seeing the drones POV. They're coming out their
little box. That's the Navy seal in through the window
and he's surrendering as this shooter again, he's surrendering. They
haven't really engaged with the hypothetical what if the shooter
doesn't surrender to the groan all there's flying laps around him.

Speaker 2 (02:18:04):
Whoa, they took out the whole dummy.

Speaker 8 (02:18:06):
The whole dummy fell over. Okay, yeah, that's the clip
wild stuff. Well, Nick, they can strobe them as well.
I guess. Wow, there's a lot of cops in tactical gear.
None of them have gone in. They've sent the drone
in instead.

Speaker 4 (02:18:17):
Yeah, that seems realistic.

Speaker 8 (02:18:19):
Okay, Yeah, the guys like baffled by the number of
targets and just live down surrenders. This is great. I
can't see this being used to harass teenagers for doing
things that every teenager does.

Speaker 2 (02:18:31):
So I wanted to talk a little bit about an
article that just came out very recently in the New
York Times about a metadata center in Louisiana. Now, obviously
I've talked about data centers a few times in the
fairly recent past. I did a dedicated article on the
fight against all of the different kind of grassroots activism
campaigns against new data center construction. One of the ones

(02:18:52):
that is not really in any danger of being canceled
through local protest is a massive Facebook data center in
Richland Parish. It was originally had to be like a
ten billion dollar data center and has now ballooned to
like a fifty billion dollar project. Facebook was not originally
planning to construct in Louisiana. They were taking bids back
during the Biden administration. I don't think the state was
really on the map, but officials, particularly in the very

(02:19:15):
poor county of Richland Parish, had a problem, which is
that they at least fourteen hundred, four hundred and forty
acres to Toyota to build a factory, but Toyota had
decided not to around two thousand and six. I think
in part because the factory was proven to be unensurable
because it's a floodplain. So basically they were like, we're
not going to spend billions of dollars in a factory

(02:19:35):
we literally can't ensure in a place that's famous for
having infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes. Yeah, So Richland Paris had
a problem. The area was already economically depressed, and Energy,
which is a Louisiana state power company, also had an issue,
which is that they were not making enough money. So
their CEO, Philip May, decided he wanted to put Louisiana

(02:19:56):
through as a dark horse contender for this massive fucking
Meta dat center, and they wound up winning, and they
basically wound up winning through promising to be corrupt on
behalf of Meta.

Speaker 8 (02:20:05):
Right, there was a bill.

Speaker 2 (02:20:06):
Being pushed at the start of twenty twenty four because,
like the thing they offered Meta a bunch of incentives,
and the only thing they couldn't offer them was like
a tax break on the different kind of materials you
buy when you're building a data center, and everywhere else
that Meta was considering had already offered those. So in
April of twenty twenty four, Richard Nelson, the state Revenue Secretary,
was kind of helping to shepherd through a bill that

(02:20:28):
was a tax rebate for fiber optic equipment, and they
just wound up changing it two months to a massive
tax rebate for data center equipment.

Speaker 8 (02:20:36):
Amazing, super fucking corrupt.

Speaker 2 (02:20:38):
But also here's the thing, nobody in Richland Paris really
cares because these people are incredibly fucking poor and Facebook
is bribing basically the entire county. There's some sort of
local law they have that if there's like an overfunding
in county tax revenue, then like teachers get a bunch
of money. And so because of how much money Facebook
is pumped in. A bunch of teachers in the parish
got like a fifty thousand dollars bone, And that's like

(02:21:01):
the lowest level of what is effectively like legal bribery
going on at every level of life in the parish.
So there's no chance really that anyone is going to
protest or stop the construction of this. People are enthusiastic
because Meta has turned a fire hose of money on
one of the poorest counties in the United States. The
problem is that, as I've said, the project is really
obviously fucking doomed. Again, it's uninsurable because it's in a

(02:21:24):
fucking floodplaine, And the actual text of the arrangement that
Meta inc basically gives them the ability to bounce and
leave the project within like four or five years, leaving
Energy and a bunch of other Louisiana interests on the
hook for this entire massive project if say, a hurricane
comes through and renders the entire side inoperable. So it

(02:21:44):
seems like this kind of thing that's going to cause
a massive problem and like destroy the local economy at
some point.

Speaker 8 (02:21:50):
But there's so much.

Speaker 2 (02:21:51):
Money being slalommed out to people right now that I
don't think anything's going to stop that. So I guess
we hope that the obvious thing doesn't happen, but I
kind of think it's going to anyway.

Speaker 8 (02:22:02):
Louisiana Nice. Let's talk about the public charge rule. So
the Drive administration has announced that it will do away
on September eighteenth with the DHS rule on public charge determination.
That rule came into effect in twenty twenty two, so
in the Biden administration, they're not making a new rule

(02:22:23):
at this time. They're taking away the old rule. So
what we will have to go off now is a
text in the Immigration Nationality Act, and presumably they will
issue some guidance soon. Right, whatever guidance, the issue is
likely to be more restrictive than what we had in
twenty twenty two rule. Right, they did publish a public
notice about this last year, so we knew that this

(02:22:44):
was coming, that they had planned to rescind this rule.
And we should talk about what public charge is. We
can go back to the nineteen ninety nine guidance and
that's what was clarified in twenty twenty two. For a definition.
That guidance says that someone who is likely to be
quote primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated
by either the receipt of public cash assistance for income

(02:23:05):
maintenance or institutionalization for long term care at government expense,
can be inadmissible to the United States or ineligible for
permanent residency. This doesn't apply to some permanent residency applications
like sijas, especially immigrant juvenile green card applications, tou visas, assylies,
or refugees. Some other categories, including those in the Finance

(02:23:28):
Against Women Act. Public charge has generally been understood to
mean cash benefits, right, so SSSI or TANF would be
the ones that like be generally understood to be that
if somebody received those DHS, I guess it would be
USCIS could find that they would be inadmissible. Somebody who
is found inadmissible for this reason previously could post a

(02:23:52):
bond and still be admitted. Right Just to the bond
is basically saying I'm not going to be like a
burden on the United States State. Right. Yeah, we're not
exactly clear what they're going to do next, but we
can look at the DHS pressor for some clues, which
says quote aligning immigration with law and congressional intent that

(02:24:12):
aliens of the United States be self reliant and not
dependent on taxpayer funded government benefits. This could be really bad, right.
There are a lot of different benefits people take advantage of.
To include free school meals, to include things like a snap,
to include wick, right, to include rent controlled housing, even

(02:24:35):
right like they could draw this. I think what they're
probably going to move towards is a sort of looking
at the whole case thing, as opposed to a looking
for specific things in the past. Another thing that we
should understand is that this is forward facing, right. It's
not just have they use this, it's are they likely to?
An extremely broad interpretation of this could be very bad

(02:24:59):
for people definitely looking to adjust their status. Right. So
this is something we will keep an eye on. It's
not ending yet. I just want to reinforce that it's
on September the eighteenth. For people who are in these proceedings.
This is something you should discuss with your immigration lawyer
if that it pertains to you. I will include links
to all the government press releases and the Federal Register

(02:25:20):
pieces about this. If you want to read it yourself.
Should take a break.

Speaker 10 (02:25:23):
Yeah, I think so, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (02:25:38):
I want to talk about Texas, and normally that's not
a hopeful thing when I say I'm going to talk
about Texas. In fact, about eighty percent of the time
when I come on to talk about Texas, it's because
either someone in Texas committed some sort of horrible violent crime,
or everyone's getting excited about an election and I need
to tell them not to because it's Texas. This time,

(02:25:58):
I'm here to tell you there's an election in Texas.
You might want to get excited about the election between
kin Paxton and taller Ico. Fuck what's his first name?
I want to say, Tommy or James Tallerica. The election
between Kim Paxton. I can't thinking about that fucking grifter.
I can't stop every time I hear his name. But no,
James Tallerico is not a grifter. James Tallerico might be

(02:26:22):
a US Senator in the very near future because Kin
Paxton is not doing too well. And if you aren't Texan,
the name Kim Paxton may not immediately conjure, dread and discussed,
but it should. I would be hard pressed to name
a more scandal ridden, corrupt, and evil elected leader in
the United States, and that includes Donald Trump. Before we
get into Paxton's latest race for a US Senate seat,
I want to tell you a little bit more about

(02:26:43):
Ken Friend of the Pod, Ken Paxton K Pax, as
we call him. I don't think anyone actually saw the
movie k Pax, so that's not really a joke that's
going to land.

Speaker 8 (02:26:52):
But I didn't know that was a movie. It was
a movie, James.

Speaker 2 (02:26:55):
In two thousand and eight, when Paxton was a new
Texas house member for McKinney, where my mom used to teach,
the AP reported that he and another state representative had
been accused by ethics watchdog Fred Lewis of greasing the
skids to settle a contract with WatchGuard, a company that
made in car video systems that record video directly to
DVD for like The Cops and Stuff. Paxton and Byron
Cook to state representatives were both found to have disclosed

(02:27:18):
ownership in WatchGuard, but in Paxton's case, he didn't disclose
his ownership until well after his two thousand and eight
personal financial statement was filed. Shortly after the deal was made.
WatchGuard net earnings increased year over year by two hundred
and fifty percent, and Paxton and Cook sold their shares
of the company for an undisclosed amount, but a lot
of money. Paxton denies any knowledge of the company's state

(02:27:38):
contracts and claimed he did nothing shady. However, per the
barbed Wire Quote, Paxton claimed he had no knowledge of
the company state contracts at the time, which he would
have been required to disclose with the Texas Ethics Commission
under state law. However, Associated Press reporter that Watchguard's website
boasted that the company was held by an influential shareholder
group that includes three state representatives. Perfect you hate it
when you're dry snitched on by the company that bribed

(02:28:01):
you now. According to The Wall Street Journal, after coming
under Screwtiny, Paxton shifted his investments, including those in WatchGuard,
into a blind trust. A blind trust is an account
managed by a third party trustee without the beneficiary's knowledge
to prevent a conflict of interest. However, the Journal uncovered
text betweens Paxton and the trustee, who was a friend
of his, concerning stock trades in twenty twenty, a violation

(02:28:23):
of the blind nature of the agreement. Passion received two
point two million dollars from his investment.

Speaker 10 (02:28:28):
So that's more like a sea through trust.

Speaker 4 (02:28:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:28:30):
Yeah, it's more of a see through trust, not so blind.
It's more just here, you're committing a series of crimes.
So he's going to get charged with securities fraud for this,
and that case is going to wind on for a while,
but not long, you know, kind of actually in the
middle of this whole process of corruption. In twenty thirteen,
when he's a state senator, he's entering the courthouse, like

(02:28:51):
the state courthouse. Yeah, and a lawyer who'd just been
ahead of him in lying at like the metal detector
leaves behind a thousand dollars mont Blanc pen in the
metal detector trade, and Kim Paxton steals it, and he's
a video stealing it, Like the Dallas Morning News gets
access to the video and publishes it. It's really funny.

Speaker 8 (02:29:14):
What a series of events.

Speaker 11 (02:29:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:29:16):
In like twenty fourteen, Ken runs for and wins Attorney
General of the State of Texas, and his opponent in
the campaign, Justin Nelson, runs video ads using the footage.

Speaker 10 (02:29:26):
It is really funny to have top Cough be like,
funny the most corrupt criminal in Texas politics, Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:29:33):
Most and look really dedicated to it.

Speaker 2 (02:29:34):
You know, the big busiest criminal too.

Speaker 8 (02:29:37):
Just seeing an opportunity and taking it without a second
thought is really beautiful.

Speaker 1 (02:29:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:29:43):
Now, despite this, Paxton was still narrowly elected, thanks in
part to spending twice as much as his opponent on
the campaign.

Speaker 11 (02:29:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:29:50):
In twenty twenty two, Paxton faced a primary challenge from
George P. Bush, one of the C list Bushes, a
nephew of the most recent former President Bush.

Speaker 8 (02:29:58):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (02:29:59):
This would prove to be one of Paxson's easier victories,
even though he had been charged with and was still
under investigation for security He's fraud, as well as at
this point a separate federal investigation for alleged corruption in
favor of an Austin real estate developer. I'm going to
quote now from an AP article by Thomas Beaumont.

Speaker 4 (02:30:16):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:30:17):
Paxton responded by portraying himself as a Trump era Republican
and Bush is the heir to a privileged political legacy.

Speaker 4 (02:30:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:30:23):
Pro Paxson organizations spent more than twenty million dollars, about
twice as much as Bush and his allies. The race
went into a runoff, in which Paxson defeated Bush by
thirty four percentage points, So just a pansing yeah, on
behalf of George P. Bush then one of the worst
ass kickings in Texas state political history. It's beautiful stuff.

Speaker 10 (02:30:41):
Yeah, I mean this is a very very clear sort
of like Neo con versus the New like mega Republican
party matchup in which the Neo cons have just no
no ground to stand on.

Speaker 2 (02:30:50):
Well, and it's it's also just like purely on like
the shallowest basis of like what sounds good to a dummy.
George W. Bush W is a nickname that's trustworthy.

Speaker 8 (02:31:00):
George P. Bush, P Bush.

Speaker 2 (02:31:03):
Bush anywhere just a bad idea.

Speaker 8 (02:31:07):
I do think twenty years of war in the Middle
East have maybe maybe like dropped the value of George X.

Speaker 2 (02:31:13):
Bush stalkers George Bush anywhere in the.

Speaker 8 (02:31:18):
Thirty If we're doing George Bushes, I guess.

Speaker 5 (02:31:20):
Guys, we're talking about Texas.

Speaker 10 (02:31:23):
I mean even there, Yeah, even in Texas.

Speaker 8 (02:31:26):
A whole lot of people from Texas died in uh
was we didn't need to have actually.

Speaker 2 (02:31:31):
I mean, even when Texans were voting for him, people
had a tendency to say the man was all hat,
no cattle. So I'm not super surprised about this, But anyway,
Paxton beats Bush handily in the primary, and then he
runs against Democrat Rochelle Garza in the general, and Garza
entered the campaign with a three hundred page opposition research
bio on Paxton, but also faced a really difficult quandary,

(02:31:53):
which is, like, what can you say about Ken that
voters haven't already heard and evidently decided they don't care about?

Speaker 4 (02:32:00):
Right?

Speaker 13 (02:32:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (02:32:01):
Yeah, This is like the same thing with Trump. Right,
It's is like, yeah, how do you attest Yes, all
of this stuff that's fucked up that we all know about?
Yeah that like is it worth just retreading all this
all the same stuff?

Speaker 11 (02:32:12):
No?

Speaker 8 (02:32:12):
And it just wasn't right.

Speaker 2 (02:32:14):
She loses too, not by as badly as George B. Bush, obviously,
and Paxton continues to cling to office and scandal.

Speaker 4 (02:32:21):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:32:22):
In the years after his victory, his wife divorced him,
citing the Bible. He was impeached by the state House,
but then acquitted by the Senate. His fraud case ended
in twenty twenty four with a judgment that he paid
three hundred thousand dollars in restitution, but through it all
he maintained enough Republican support to squeak by.

Speaker 10 (02:32:39):
I mean because he's been very powerful as the attorney
general of that state. It has done a lot to
help the Republicans in that state. And like a lot
of yes, really ugly stuff has been done at the
behest of and the help of Paxton.

Speaker 2 (02:32:51):
Yeah, he's wielded his power, and I'm leaving a lot
of that out. I don't mean this as a comprehensive
look at his past. We're kind of doing the greatest hits.
I'm gonna have to do a bt be on the fucker.
Oh yeah, k Bax deserves it.

Speaker 13 (02:33:03):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:33:03):
In that ap article, Thomas Beaumont interviewed two Paxton supporters,
David and Nancy Lapp, who are retired conservatives from Woolworf
Texas or Wolff Texas, and quote from that article, they
described him as a conservative warrior who has been a
victim of persecution. He's had a share of scandals, and
almost all of them have, so it's not necessarily disqualifying anymore,
said David lap seventy six. He's a flawed person, no

(02:33:25):
doubt about it, but he fights for traditional American values.

Speaker 6 (02:33:27):
Oh man.

Speaker 2 (02:33:28):
He added that nowadays, as long as you're not in jail,
that'll elect you, which is very true.

Speaker 8 (02:33:34):
Yeah, yeah, that's not a wrong statement.

Speaker 2 (02:33:36):
But also you'll elect him David. Yeah, yay, you're making
a choice now. There is much more to the tale
of Ken Baxton's scum and villainy, and this isn't an
episode of BTV, so I'm gonna save us some time
and just discuss arguably his worst and most famous call
as at Dirney. General Kin was elected after promising to

(02:33:56):
be tough on crime and attacking his predecessors and opponents
for being week on crime. And then in twenty twenty five,
a Waco attorney named Adam Hoffman went on trial for
sexually abusing his son's best friend during multiple sleepovers from
the age of six or seven up to age ten. Jesus,
the victim, initially told a forensic interviewer he believed Hoffman
had ejaculated over thirteen hundred times in his presence. Hawfen

(02:34:18):
denied the allegant although they did like a siemens, they
looked for semen and didn't find any, so like, I
don't know, but also get a clean stuff who knows.
Hoffman denied the allegations and called the boy a liar.
The jury wound up deadlocks, the judge ordered them to
keep deliberating, and long story shirt, it becomes a mistrial
because the victim did not want to testify a second time.

(02:34:38):
Paxton's prosecutor struck a plea deal with Hoffman, So Hoffman,
please guilty. But the plea deal includes no jail time
or registry for as a sex offender for Hoffman. So
that's pretty fucked up. And obviously it's Paxton's people doing this,
but Paxton's the attorney general, so this really grosses a
lot of people out in the case becomes a major

(02:34:58):
avenue attack when he goes a primary challenge by John
Cornan earlier this year in the Senate race.

Speaker 10 (02:35:04):
Right yeah, he challenges corn Indi, incumbent for Senate.

Speaker 2 (02:35:07):
The attention around this caused critics of Paxton to look
into other cases. Per the textas Tribune quote. For instance,
attack adds from Corn's allies highlight the case of a
man originally charged with child sex trafficking who received a
deal for a probation sentence, and Judge Royce Sparkman brought
up another case in open court last month, noting Paxton
had also taken over a murder for higher case that
he oversaw, which resulted in a misdemeanor plea and a

(02:35:30):
four day jail sentence. And of course Paxton still beat Cornan,
So you could be forgiven for being like, what could
take fucking this guy out right? Yes, points what could matter?
And I'll be honest, I was really hesitant to have
any hope about this race until extremely recently, But within
the last few days a bunch of new polling has
come out that makes this look not just competitive but winnable.

(02:35:54):
The most striking example of evidence, you know, in favor
of that would be a recent Texas Public Opinion Research
poll that showed Tallerrico leading Packston forty five percent to
forty after multiple other polls had consistently shown a nail
bider of a race. Now, TPOR is officially a non
partisan research group, but it is run by a Democratic strategist,
so there's reason to suspect some favoritism here. The Texas

(02:36:16):
Tribune and a separate article had this to say about
the survey quote. The group's surveyed one thousand, forty eight
likely voters between July fifteenth and July seventeenth, and as
a margin of era of plus or minus three point
four percentage points. Of those poll respondents, fifty three percent
voted for Donald Trump and forty two percent voted for
Kamala Harrison twenty twenty four, making the sample only slightly
bluer than the twenty twenty four electorate, which favored Trump

(02:36:37):
by a fourteen point margin. In Texas, Trump carried Texas
by five point six percentage points in twenty twenty, two
years after the last midterm held there during his presidency,
and a recent New York Times SIENA poll from June
found an overall tie in the race forty seven to
forty seven percent, with Tallarico winning about five percent of Republicans.

Speaker 8 (02:36:55):
The most significant.

Speaker 2 (02:36:56):
Data from this recent batch of polling that has to
be hopeful, though, is that Tallerrika seems to be doing
really well among non college educated voters, which is traditionally
like the strongest group for Paxton. That's the group that
has carried him over the line consistently, and from that
same article quote, perhaps the biggest outlier was Taller Rico's
lead among non college educated voters, who favored the Democrat

(02:37:17):
by nine percentage points forty five percent to thirty six percent.
He led by one percentage point among those with at
least a bachelor's degree. I don't want to suggest that
the other races in Texas are going to go this well, right,
Ted Cruz is currently about eighteen points ahead of his opponent,
Colin Alred right now among non college educated Texans in

(02:37:38):
twenty twenty four. And yeah, like so, I don't have
a lot of faith that this is going to extend
past tall Rico versus Paxton, But there is evidence that,
like Paxton's longevity with the specific group that's carried him
past the line is at its end, Like maybe there's
just too much scandal for him to stand up next
to someone who seems as like relatively squeaky and nice
as tall Rico. Now, there's other things to credit Tallarico's

(02:38:01):
successful One of them is that he's doing a lot
better than Paxton in terms of like money. Right now,
as of their most recent disclosures, Tallarrico's campaign is about
twenty one million dollars on hand. Paxton has less than eight.
And if you remember every other election I've got, or
every other campaign of packins I've run through here, he
usually had like a two to one advantage in funding
over his opponents. So the fact that that's kind of
falling apart for him too, suggests this might be a

(02:38:23):
really winnable race. Now there are some reasons to doubt
that too. Most polls I've seen show a number of
undecided Republicans large enough to close the gap or a
tie between the two candidates led by Paxton. And if
that group all breaks for Kin, and historically they're likely to,
things could be really close or wind up in favor
of Paxton.

Speaker 4 (02:38:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:38:43):
One of the polls found about fourteen percent of voters
of all political stripes are unsure of their picks, and
among undecided voters, it looks like Paxton has the most
room to grow. About nineteen percent of that block that
they leaned towards the Republican compared to ten percent to
lean towards taller Rico. But most of them were just
totally on the fence, or at least that's what they said.
So a lot is going to depend on how those
people break. I'm not saying this is definitely going to

(02:39:04):
go tell Rico's way, but if you're talking about, like
what is a race where maybe the Democratic Party might
want to actually invest money in. I'd say here, this
thing seems winnable, and I don't say that about Texas
races often.

Speaker 10 (02:39:18):
It is a very particular matchup. Yeah, Paxston has a
lot of unique vulnerabilities. Teller Coosa's doing very well in
pulls for Latino voters, up like forty five points ahead
of Paxton, and that will be very crucial, especially considering ice,
like that's going to be a big factor in this race. Yeah,
there was an ice killing in Texas just a few
weeks ago. Certainly a lot of funding could come to

(02:39:41):
Paxton towards the end of the race. Sure, the campaign
finest ratio could change dramatically over time. But I do
wonder if the sort of strategy from the GOP right now,
which is like paint paint Tallerico very early on, is
it's like you know, woe gender ideology made will kind

(02:40:01):
of run a little bit hollow now that Trump is
in charge and Republicans control all branches of government and
the sort of like economic issues that can not be
blamed on like woke liberals sending you know, money to
sex changes in prison. It's going to be an interesting race,
very close, another close race next Tuesday. The Michigan Senate

(02:40:24):
primary with Ice Israel in My Dreams Hailey Stevens versus
Doctor Abdual Health site. They had their last debate on Monday, Elsie.
It continually hit Stevens for her corporate funding sixty million
dollars outside spending forty six million dollars of a PAC funding,

(02:40:45):
and the moderator was really going after Stevens for this too,
asking if if all this APAC funding will result in
Stevens quote unquote doing their bidding, referring to a pack
and with the pro Israel lobby. That interesting, and she
also lied about receiving funding from the local utility company
during the debate, So early voting for that's already started.

(02:41:08):
The primaries next Tuesday will cover that on next executive disorder.
Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governatorial race also had a
debate on Tuesday. Had not seen that yet, but she
is really pulling ahead in polls right now, but that
primary is still a few weeks away. But to stay
on the topic of evil Republicans. On July twenty, first

(02:41:31):
Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed domestic violence allegations against Republican representatives
Max Miller and Corey Mills, saying quote, well, the keyword
there is allegation, and then said that the House Ethics
Committee would shake things out of those two reps. Max
Miller of Ohio is facing re election in the midst

(02:41:53):
of escalating legal issues, including restraining orders, a defamation case,
and a custody battle. Maximiller ex wife, Emily Morano of
the America First Policy Institute and daughter of Ohio Senator
Bernie Morano, has accused Max Miller of abusing her and
their daughter while investigating suspected child abuse. Mirano told Bay

(02:42:16):
Village police that Miller yelled and held a gun to
her head after she turned on the lights to change
their baby's diaper Jesus. According to a police report, Morano
told police but another domestic balance incident from earlier this
year where during a custody exchange, Miller quote grabbed and
threw her against the wall, which resulted in an obvious

(02:42:37):
grab mark on her upper arm and bruising to her
stomach and side where she hit the wall unquote. This
legend incident also was in front of their daughter, and
the police report later states that Rono's daughter told her
quote Daddy kill you. Morano and Miller were married in
twenty twenty two, and Morano filed for divorce in August

(02:42:59):
twenty four after telling Miller that she wants a divorce.
In June of twenty four, Rono alleged that he threw hot,
steaming water at her. In a recorded phone call, Miller
admits to what he refers to as the water incident
after his wife said on the call that he abused
her and quote poured steaming hot water on her neck.

(02:43:22):
On the call, Miller said that the quote unquote water
incident wasn't done with quote unquote intent to hurt his wife.
Morano told police she moved out of the house because
she was quote unquote scared of him.

Speaker 4 (02:43:34):
Now.

Speaker 10 (02:43:35):
All of these allegations came to light earlier this year
after Morano discovered her two year old daughter's collar bone
was broken after the child came back from Miller's house
this past February. This prompted a cascade of investigations and
back and forth court filings, which eventually made their way
into news reporting. A Bay Village police report investigating suspected

(02:43:56):
child abuse stated that a child protections specialist found that
the two year old's broken collarbone was accompanied by a
bruise that quote appears to be in a handprint and
appears to have been inflicted. According to another police report
obtained by mother Jones, Rono recounted her daughter saying, quote,

(02:44:17):
Daddy's house is scary. Miller, of course, denies all claims
of abuse or domestic violence, and has theorized that the
broken collarbone was possibly caused by a seat belt.

Speaker 8 (02:44:29):
Why is a kid wearing a seat belt? Shouldn't they
be in a car seat when they're two?

Speaker 10 (02:44:33):
Yes, this was part of the investigation because Miller said
this okay, and he had to show police that he
had properly installed a car seat. Right after news outlets
reported on the spousal and child abuse allegations, Miller filed
the deformation suit against his ex wife, and this is

(02:44:54):
not the first time Miller has used a deformation suit
to shut down allegations of abuse. In twenty twenty one,
Stephanie Grisham, a former White has Press secretary in Trump's
first term, wrote in The Washington Post that her unnamed
boyfriend from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty quote unquote got
physical with her, that their relationship quote unquote turned abusive,
and that her ex boyfriend had quote anger issues and

(02:45:17):
a violent streak. These claims were later included in a book,
but earlier that year, Politico reported that Max Miller quote
pushed Grisham against a wall and slapped her in the
face at his Washington apartment after she accused him of
cheating on her unquote. Max Miller psued Grisham for quote
libelous and defamatory false statements made about him, but he

(02:45:40):
dismissed the case in twenty twenty three after agreeing to
a settlement, though Grisham is now suing Miller for breaking
the settlement's nda by publicly claiming that Grisham fabricated in
abuse allegations against him while defending himself against new allegations
of abuse by his ex wife. Max Miller's abuse allegation,
it's been a sort of open secret in Washington for

(02:46:02):
a while. When George Santos was dealing with his whole
thing a few years ago on the house floor, he
referred to Max Miller as a woman beater. H I
talked about how he didn't want the publican party to
just turn into repeating media attacks against each other. As
he was being kicked out of Congress. Wild he is

(02:46:23):
running for re election in Ohio. Yeah, and Miller has
maintained support from Republicans in Congress, and it's been backed
by the President for years. Let's go on a break
and then discuss some more news.

Speaker 8 (02:46:51):
All right, we are back, and I want to update
people on the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund versus Rubio
case we spoke about a few weeks ago. So I've
reached out to Public Citizen about this and they haven't
got back to me. I'd love to do an interview
with them, have worked with them before and some access
to med stuff, So hopefully someone from Public Citizen will
listen and reply. But we have learned a lot from

(02:47:13):
the new filings in this case. One of the things
we learned that was the people were required by ICE
to meet Iranian government officials, the very people they had
fled to the USA to be safe and protected from.
It seems that the person who met them was introduced
as a consul, but around obviously doesn't have a consulate
in the United States, right, they have the Iranian Interest
Section which is in the Pakistani embassy. This person had

(02:47:37):
information about their cases in other cases, they were told
they had to take calls from the Iranian interest section
and they wouldn't be allowed to return to their housing
pard until they spoke to them on the phone. In
one of these calls, the Iranian officials that they had
a transcript of the person's credible fear interview. That is wild, right.
So the credible fear interview is when people explain why

(02:48:00):
they fear going back to where they have fled, I
what it is that they think the Iranian state in
this case is going to do to them. So what
the credible fear interview will will have detailed for these
people would have been their participation in jinaar Amini protests.
I saw that in several of the testimonies. I've also
spoken to dozens of Iranian migrants who participated in those protests,

(02:48:22):
were arrested, released and realized that they were going to
be arrested again and fled or fled before they arrested.
Or their participation in the Christian faith. You see that
in a lot of the testimonies. In this case, if
they're Innian government, have them write down they are Christians.
They were distributing bibles, they were evangelizing like it is
absolutely not safe for these people to go back. Some

(02:48:42):
of these meetings that the Paito have occurred right here
in San Diego, the O time Meca Attention Center facility.
People were bought to the Iranian government official and the
official then sat down with them and tried to persuade
them to return to Iran. The official had a list
of names of people who they were going to meet
and they read it out, so even some people who
weren't there, their names were read out. So it was

(02:49:04):
like the officials either selected these people or were told
by I studies people were One of the people named
the individuals mister Meherbadi, and he threatened that they would
be sent to quote Africa. So this is the United
States doing either its chain refoulment or it's sending people
to third countries deportation.

Speaker 4 (02:49:24):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:49:25):
We also see a lot about the current state of
the asylum system in these declarations. One person attests that
she has been and will be tortured in Iran. The
judge responds to her that everyone gets tortured in Iran.
In their interview with the quote unquote console, one person
said they were told by the consul even in the
US if you are political, the same things can happen

(02:49:48):
to you, which is very clearly a threat. Right. The
regime agent also knew when her husband was being deported
and to where, so he had that information before he
met this woman. In another case, someone testified, then ICE
agents said I will force you. This is my job,
and this was with reference to signing self deportation papers.

(02:50:08):
They cuffed the woman and then quote, he literally forced
my fingerprint by forcing my finger to a stamp and
then on a paper, no matter how much I tried
to take back my finger, which is pretty wild. It's
not the first time. I should add that we've heard
allegations of them doing exactly this. So many of the
people in this document are women who have stories exactly

(02:50:30):
like the Iranian women I met the Darien Gap. Many
of them also say they took that route. They went
from a run to either Venezuela or Brazil and then
traveled north from there. They also give details of their
attention conditions, which are predictably appalling, right, with one writing
quote water here smells very bad and we are always itchy.

(02:50:51):
We all have red dots on our skin that have
also gone away on my body after I started antibiotics
and then skipping a bit. The dental care here is
unbelievably dangerous. Any happening with teeth, and they only extract.
The doctors here have already extracted three of my teeth
and have told me they will extract another three more
when my antibiotics were over. I have always taken care

(02:51:13):
of my teeth. They also talk about the I was
just quote from one of the one of their statements here.
This disclosure and that I'm adding this of asylum information
to the Iranian government. Returning to the quote here has
materially increased the likelihood that I will be tained, interrogated,
or tortured or killed if I ever returned to Iran.

(02:51:34):
Another said, when I saw him talking about the Ranian consul,
I was disgusted with the US government by forcing us
to meet with agents of the regime, which I told
my pod manager. Many of these people have been in
detention for more than a year. It seems like most
of these people entered in twenty twenty five. A member
of staff at the Iranian Interest Section also called the

(02:51:55):
Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and informed them the United
States State Department had approached the Interest Section to ask
for help getting rid of Iranian detainees. That's a quote
that last getting rid of The Iranian officials said they
met monthly with ICE to select individuals for deportation, and

(02:52:15):
the ICE provided their asylum applications to the Iranians. At
these meetings, they said they met with someone of Indian
descent with Georgetown degree, who is described as the General
Director of the Middle East Section. The meetings stopped when
the war with Iran began, but apparently they still delivered documents,
or at least a were delivering document in March. This

(02:52:38):
core from the Iranian Interest Section to the ILDF is wild.
It involves this Iranian official recounting, for instance, that on
the first deportation flight September of last year, two people
cut their wrists with razors, presumably attempting to end their
lives rather than go back to Iran. It also details
how in many cases, the United States can't that the

(02:53:00):
people's travel documents together because if they fly vire a
third country to Iran, right there's no direct flights between
the US in Iran, and so these flights end up
not being as full as the United States no doubt hopes.
He also says that the clothing and state of the
detainees was so poor that the Iranian government official purchased

(02:53:21):
some clothing from Costco with his own money. He also
said that at no point did the United States ask
Iran to guarantee their well being in Iran. The official
kind of posits himself as like intervening on behalf of
the Iranian people to make sure they're treated correctly. Right,
which is how generally one would expect the consular administration

(02:53:44):
of a state to intervene on behalf that it's in.
This though, is different because these people are fleeing the
very government that he represents. Right. I will keep covering this.
I will also link to the court listener page where
you can read these testimonies. They're all handwritten. They can
be a little harder to read so some times, but
there's some really shocking and upsetting stuff in there.

Speaker 10 (02:54:04):
For me, if you've talked about this already, and maybe
this will help us for some listeners too, Like how
does this relate to the asylum laws that the United
States has? Like have they been denied asylum in so
called immigration courts? And this is the process for removal?
And how is that actually like decided because like these
people seem to have, like in the testimon as you're reading,
very credible fears to the point where they're attempt to

(02:54:26):
like harming themselves to avoid going back to this state.

Speaker 8 (02:54:30):
Yeah, so it seems like most of these people entered
after Trump came in with his Day one effectively like
southern border crossing asylum ban, right, and so they are
having to fight their cases from detention, which is what
they are doing. In some cases, they are already appealing
because the government has found that they don't have a
credible fear or that they're otherwise not eligible for asylum.

(02:54:53):
The reason the ILDF knows about these people is that
that is what it is doing as a nonprofit group,
is helping them fight fight their case. Is sure, it
shows a pretty fucking bleak situation. Like people do still
get asylum. I hear about it occasionally, you know, I
hear from friends in the community who do court accompaniments
that they occasionally have a success still, But with the

(02:55:14):
way that the Trump administration is purging the ranks of
immigration quote unquote judges, that's getting less and less likely. So,
like these people are in that system, many of them
are either in ever spiraling delays, right, because we have
few and few of these judges because they're getting purged.
More judges are coming on board now, or they're already

(02:55:35):
appealing or going through the CAT process Convention against Torture process.

Speaker 4 (02:55:39):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:55:39):
These are the sort of asylum claims that are like
in the bullseye of what an asylum claim is. Right,
all of these people in there, I didn't want to
read them out because I don't think there's any reason
to traumatize people. Nearly all of them detail torture. Most
of the women detail sexual abuse. They talk about the
horrific things they went through on the way here to Like,
this is like friend and center of what you would

(02:56:02):
think a textbook asylum case would be normally. And there
are exemptions for some Christian minorities or religious minorities from
Iran who largely Christian people ran some of these visa bands.
But these people didn't come that way. Whether they didn't
come by applying for a visa, they came across a
southern border. Like, it's very possible that one of the
people in this case is somebody I met in the
darying gap, that the timing would line up It's been

(02:56:24):
really fucking upsetting for me reading these things.

Speaker 10 (02:56:27):
Thank you for that context. Earlier this episode, we talked
about attacks on the First Amendment as a part of
the Trump admins cracked down on the left. But before
we close, I want to go over a novel case
of state repression against an Atlanta based activist. This is
a first of its kind case focusing on an extreme
privacy feature of graphene os, an open source operating system

(02:56:51):
for Android phones. This feature is known as a dress password,
a special code that, when inputed into a phone's locked
pass word screen, triggers a wipe of certain data on
the phone. Last November, a federal grand jury indicted an
Atlanta activist for allegedly wiping the data on his phone
after being detained at the airport upon re entering the

(02:57:13):
country in January of twenty twenty five. US attorneys to
say this was in violation of Title eighteen USC. Section
two two three two A, that is the destruction or
removal of property to prevent seizure. The short, single paragraph
indictment reads that the defendant quote did knowingly destroy, damage, waste,

(02:57:35):
disposed of, and otherwise take any action to delete the
digital contents of a Google Pixel cellulair phone for the
purpose of preventing and impairing the government's lawful authority to
take said property into its custody and control before and
during the search for and seizure of property by customs,
said Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team Supervisory Officer JC.

(02:57:59):
That's the name of the officer. Last week, this case
had its first hearing, which was focused on a motion
filed by the defense to suppress evidence and statements for
violations of the fourth, fifth, and sixth Amendments. According to
the motion, the FBI Atlanta Joined Terrorism Task Force coordinated

(02:58:20):
with CPB to question and search US citizen Samuel Tunic
as he was returning to the United States from the
Dominican Republic because of his associations with the Defend the
Atlanta Forest Movement or Stop Coop City, which we have
covered on this show. Basically, after arriving at the airport,
CPB put Tunic in secondary inspection where their Tactical Terrorism

(02:58:46):
Response Team QUOTE proceeded to question mister Tunic, search mister
Tunic's body and all his belongings, and insisted that he
provide the password for his phone. Despite mister Tunic's request
to speak with his lawyer and not engage in a
further questioning, The officers insisted they could question mister Tunic
and search his phone to determine whether he had child porn.

(02:59:09):
Evidently this was a pretext for a phishing expedition into
mister Tunick's connections with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement unquote.
A journalist Timothy Pratt reported in the Guardian that during
last week's hearing, it was revealed that, unbeknownst to Samuel Tunnick,
federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watch list,

(02:59:30):
and that a Homeland Security agent circulated an email three
hours before Tunk arrived back in Atlanta containing his name
and photo and indicated he was being investigated for quote
unquote suspected terrorism activities. I think it is important to
mention that Samuel Tunic to this point has not been
charged with terrorism and does not face any charges directly

(02:59:52):
related to protest activity for Defend the Atlanta Forest or
Stop Coop City. According to the defense's motion, Tunic early
and repeatedly during questioning so that he would not speak
without his lawyer, but the officer has ignored these requests
and never mirandized Tunic. The motion states that the officers
told him quote, because you're refusing to talk, which is

(03:00:15):
you're right, we have the authority to go through your
phone to see what we're looking for. After officers demanded
his phone password a second time, Tunic asked again why
he wasn't allowed to call his lawyer, and the officers responded, quote,
when it comes to immigration and customs, right, it's a
whole different ballgame, and we have search authority. We don't

(03:00:36):
need a warrant.

Speaker 8 (03:00:37):
Unquote. I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
If this is something you are concerned about, then you
should seek out legal counsel. I'm just going to give
you my percenterstanding of it. This is a civil situation.
Well it's also a criminal situation for him now, but
like when you're entering the border, these are civil proceedings
and so that that's why you're Germany not mirandized. Depends

(03:01:00):
ending on where you enter the United States and what
circuit you are in, they can inspect your telephone. My
Idenmert understanding is should you refuse to unlock that telephone,
you can expect to leave without your telephone. The general
way that they do this is for them to put
the phone on airplane mode and then search it because

(03:01:23):
they are searching the device that is entering United States,
not the remote cloud stuff that is not on the device, right,
Because they are inspecting a thing that is crossing the border, right,
and that is within their purview in most circuits in
the United States right now as federal immigration officers. And

(03:01:43):
then the other thing I would add, at some point,
I think we're going to see a Supreme Court case
about it, and this might be the one, right.

Speaker 10 (03:01:51):
That's very possible.

Speaker 8 (03:01:52):
Yeah, orbit there'll be other elements to this case, right, Like,
as you said, who destroyed the data that was on
the phone is something that's very much legally clear to me. Right,
did Graphene destroy the data? Did the BP agents when
they entered that pass code destroy the data? Right? Or
did the person destroy the data?

Speaker 4 (03:02:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (03:02:09):
This this case is a whole bunch of legal gray areas.
This is the first time we've seen a case about
a dressed password the exact way this introgation went and
introduces a lot of questions on when exactly this regular
border patrol questioning turned into an actual interrogation based on
allegations of a crime right with this mention of child

(03:02:30):
sexual abast material and all those things could possibly trigger
different legal statutes in various court cases. Now, the motion
says that officers explained to Tunic that he would have
to give over access to his phone quote, whether it
was done with his cooperation or not. Eventually, mister Tunic

(03:02:50):
provided a password to his cell phone and e reader.
According to the government, when the CPB officers entered the
password on his cell phone quote, the screen went blank,
flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart. After this,
another officer entered the room to conduct a pat down,
which Tonic did not consent to, but they did anyway.

(03:03:11):
Then a DHS agent arrived with three other individuals to
conduct another interview, which Tunic did not consent to and
pointed to his attorney's card to quote from the motion
again quote. The agent explained that he was seizing mister
Tunic's electronic devices and that they would be returned to
mister Tonck after thirty days. Notably, the DHS agent explained
that mister Tonick was quote not under arrest, but once

(03:03:34):
these gentlemen are done with you pursuant to your entry
into the country, you're free to leave unquote. So this
motion dispress evidence argued that the border questioning became quote
unquote custodial in nature when mister Tunic was not able
to leave, was never informed of his rights and was
denied access to his lawyer, and so any quote, evidence

(03:03:57):
obtained from his phone or lack thereof, should be suppressed
as fruits of unlawfully obtained evidence. The specific statute that
he's been charged with eighteen Usc. Two two three two
refers to quote the government's lawful authority to take such property.
So this motion is arguing that the exact way this
properties was taken was not lawful. Yeah, to quote from

(03:04:19):
the motion again, I think we'll expound on this quote.
CBB officers introduced themselves to mister Tunick and explained that
they were looking for people who are pedophiles. Officers justified
their questioning and demands to search mister Tutuck's phone by
stating that they had to confirm whether he possessed child porn.
The government's reports do not indicate any suspicion whatsoever that

(03:04:42):
mister Tunick was in possession of child porn, but rather
that their purpose in detaining mister Tunick and scizing his
belongings was to investigate his ties with the Defend the
Atlanta Forest movement. To an unmorandized statement, the alleged wiping
or encryption of the contents of his phone by providing
agents with the specific power word is testimonial in nature.
Mister Tonk had not been charged with committing a crime

(03:05:06):
in connection with the Defend the Lanta Force movement, but
law enforcements seem we took advantage of the relaxed constitutional
protections at the border to try to dig up evidence unquote.
And the motion states that circuit cords have contradictory rulings
if this sort of search is permitted, if you can
search someone's phone at the border, not to actually intercept

(03:05:29):
digital contraband, but to fish for evidence in an unrelated
criminal investigation. Now, something that may come up if this
goes to trial is technically using Graphene's stress password does
not delete all of the data on the phone, but
rather the phone loses the ability to access its encrypted data.

(03:05:51):
Graphinos wrote on x the Everything app quote our dress
pin slash password leaves all the encrypted data on the
device intact, it only wipes key in the hardware key
stores the secure element and encryption metadata. It's a near instant,
and then it powers off the device to wipe ram unquote.
So basically it wipes what the phone needs to decrypt

(03:06:13):
its contents and read the data. Though Graphene followed up
on Twitter, quote, we doubt that's legally different from wiping
data unquote, So this technicality may or may not actually
matter to the court. But this might not be a
sort of get out of jail loophole that I see
some people online presenting it as. Graphinos further explained that

(03:06:36):
the duress password wipe should be legal not because of
this quote unquote tech loophole, but because the defendant quote
wasn't being investigated for any actual crime, wasn't under arrest,
wasn't reta his rights before being interrogated, it wasn't under oath,
et cetera, adding that it's quote near impossible that they
get anything of value if the phone was in before
first unlock with a strong passphrase plus second factor finger

(03:07:00):
print unlock set up unquote. Whether or not this stress
password was used, it is very unlikely that federal authorities
would have been able to break into a phone running
the Graphine operating system. That means that the device has
been fully turned off and has not been unlocked since
being turned back on. Similarly, it is very hard to

(03:07:21):
break into an iPhone running iOS's lockdown mode with a
complex alphanumeric password before first unlock. The combination of all
those things can make it really hard to break in.

Speaker 8 (03:07:34):
We saw that, right Reese with a reporter from get Who,
one of the broadsheets whose phone was using lockdown, though
they've said they couldn't open right. Yeah, I guess I
will just say that, Like, if people want to know
more about border searches and telephones, I would suggest going
to Electronic Frontier Foundation's page eff dot org. They have

(03:07:56):
a great deal of information and you can find a
lot there. It's currently the Southern District of New York,
which is the one that requires a warrant, but there
are various other degrees that we don't have the time,
nor is this a place for us to go over.
So yeah, eff Rolway is a good source for the ship.

Speaker 10 (03:08:13):
Yeah, but like James said, this is a case that
could become Supreme Court precedent over time. This is invoking
a bunch of legal gray areas. The motion here to
express evidence probably won't be decided on until it be October,
so this is going to go on for quite a while.
This is another new frontier in digital privacy and how

(03:08:34):
that relates to the law, which the Supreme Court has
taken up a lot of cases on recently. So this
could become a very influential case going forward. So I
wanted to go over some of these details now, and
we will certainly be covering this in the future as
this as this case progresses.

Speaker 8 (03:08:49):
Yeah, the outlook hasn't been great so far, I would
say with this, like the US versus Belmonte Caddoso was
the most recent case that was I think this week
or last week. Again, not the place to go into this,
but I will include a link in the source notes
if you want to read about some of the case law.

Speaker 10 (03:09:09):
I think that does it for us today.

Speaker 8 (03:09:14):
Sake, and it could happen here.

Speaker 4 (03:09:16):
Oh good.

Speaker 8 (03:09:16):
Yeah, if you would like to email us, it's cool
Zone tips at proton dot me.

Speaker 10 (03:09:23):
I'll include the legal fundraiser for Samtochnic's case below.

Speaker 8 (03:09:29):
We reported the news.

Speaker 6 (03:09:30):
The news reported, We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:09:39):
Hey, we'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 15 (03:09:45):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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