It Could Happen Here Weekly 247

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call 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 (00:29):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Kevin Foster, and
for the past few months I've witnessed what I would
describe as an egregious billionaire handout going down in the
city of Portland and the state of Oregon as a whole.
You might feel nauseous thinking about your tax dollars going
to some wealthy bastard, and trust me, he is a bastard,
but what if I told you it was for basketball?

(00:49):
That probably sounds silly to many of you, but that's
the question Portlanders have been grappling with. Tom Dundon, a
Texas billionaire businessman, bought the NBA's Portland Trailblazers in April
of this year. You may or may not have heard
of Dundon. He made the rounds not too long ago
when the other sports team he owns, the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes,

(01:10):
won the Stanley Cup. Notably, he engraved his dog's name
on it to the distaste of many hockey fans. Since
Dundon took over the Blazers, he's fueled constant chatter about
the possibility of moving the team out of Portland. He's
done so by demanding the city, county, and state hand
over approximately $ 600 million in public funds to renovate the

(01:31):
Moda Center, the Blazers Stadium, which our wonderful producer Sophie
has informed me is already quite nice. Despite Forbes estimating
Dundon's net worth at around $ 2. 3 billion, he has no
plans of contributing to the renovation himself, leaving it all
to the taxpayers. There's a very dedicated Blazers community here

(01:52):
in town, So the threats of leaving rang major alarm bells,
but what has ensued is a revealing cascade of insights
into local corruption, economic desperation, and a deep misunderstanding and
or willful ignorance of sports economics. So today we're going
to talk about the economics of sports and stadiums, why

(02:12):
these investments are awful for your city to make, and
what to watch out for as the business lobby and
politicians in your town try to line the pockets of billionaires.
While they will talk a lot about Portland, I want
to be clear, a great deal of this could very
easily spread across the country as Dundon sets a new
precedent for what executives can scrape from taxpayers. On that note,

(02:35):
I'd like to do a mini dive into Tom Dundon
and some of his co-owners to give you a sense
of the types of people we're dealing with here. A
mini behind the bastards, if you will. For one, Dundon
is a known penny pincher, in other words, a piece
of shit. Some of his cost-cutting measures just since taking
over the Blazers include massive layoffs of up to 70

(02:56):
Blazers staff, leaving part-time players at home in Portland in
the middle of the playoffs, breaking playoff tradition by not
giving fans free t-shirts, ignoring players' coaching requests, and undercutting
the pay of the coach he did end up hiring.
And it gets worse. Dundon made most of his money
in the subprime auto loan industry with the company Santander

(03:19):
Consumer USA. According to Boston University finance professor Mark Williams,
as referenced in an Oregon Public Broadcasting article, Dundon was, quote,
one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many
would argue he took it to a new level, unquote.
According to the New York Times, part of how Dundon
and other Santander executives made millions was by packaging risky

(03:43):
loans for low-income people into securities that could be sold,
a la the 2008 financial crisis and what Wall Street
ghouls did with mortgages. The various malpractices, which Santander never
had to admit to in court, resulted in $ 550 million
worth of legal settlements, including in Oregon. If you're waiting

(04:05):
for some sort of karmic relief, it isn't really coming.
Dundon walked away from Santander in 2015 with $ 700 million.
He then continued to invest in subprime auto lenders while
expanding into professional sports. This man is not well-liked, even
by people who are clearly desperate to keep the Blazers here.

(04:27):
For example, in a recent city council meeting, one fan
who was in support of a public subsidy for the
Blazers called Dundon a, quote, grade-A douchebag, unquote. And in
order to buy the Blazers, Dundon had to put together
an ownership group. One lesser-reported individual in that group is
Mark Zahr, the co-president of the shadow bank Blue Owl Capital.

(04:50):
On their website, Blue Owl calls themselves a, quote, partner
to hyperscalers, unquote, in the AI data center space. And
according to Bloomberg, they also sold a warehouse to DHS
for an ICE megaprison for $ 120 million. Needless to say,
these guys don't really embody the typical Portland energy. To

(05:12):
be fair to Dundon and Czar, not that I'd really
feel the need to, they're in piss-poor company among NBA owners.
Oregon Public Broadcasting described the ownership roster in the league
as a, quote, billionaires club whose past and current members
or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly
underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments, and

(05:37):
engaging in sexual misconduct, unquote. Apparently, the former Blazers owner
Jody Allen settled lawsuits over alleged sexual harassment, and attempting
to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica
and Africa. That's pretty much par for the course for billionaires,
which is exactly why I think this issue is worth

(05:58):
paying attention to. At some point, Dundon is going to
end up in a room with all the other owners
and talk about this sweet deal he got with just
a bit of posturing and lobbying. And you don't have
to take it from me. Here's renowned sports economist J.C.
Bradbury talking about the dynamics between sports owners. This is
from a webinar hosted by a few of the Portland

(06:20):
City Councilors who actually pushed back against this deal.

Speaker 4 (06:23):
There's a great quote in Kim Belson's recent book on
the NFL in which he interviews Stephen Jones, the son
of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And he
describes the relationship as this. He said, as a competitive guy,
he describes a competitive businessman culture among sports team owners.

Speaker 5 (06:40):
He says, accumulating money is keeping score.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
Jerry may not need more money, but if he doesn't
make it, in his mind, he has failed. And I
think that's what you're seeing a lot with owners.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
They're trying to one-up it.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Up each other.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
And I think it's interesting.

Speaker 4 (06:52):
A lot of times you see owners go out and
they donate vast amounts of money to charity, but then
they go and ask for subsidies. And that seems like
a contradiction.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
And I think what people need to.

Speaker 4 (07:00):
Understand is that these owners, they're not even necessarily interested
in making money for themselves.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
They have billions of dollars.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
They're very wealthy.

Speaker 4 (07:11):
What they want to do is invite all the owners
in and say, look at what I got these suckers
to buy me. And they all high five each other.
And they laugh at politicians who back them when they
leave the room.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
The funny thing about all this for me is I
don't really care for basketball. I like to think this
helps me approach the issue from a relatively objective standpoint,
which is why I'm all the more confident in the
experts on this saying you'd have to be a fool
to support these investments. But you know what else would
be a good investment? Maybe some of the products and
services that support this podcast.

Speaker 6 (07:53):
And we're back.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
Now that we have a sense of the demons we're
dealing with, let's talk about sports economics. If I learned
anything from my degree in economics, other than how pretentious
most econ majors are, it's that the answer to many
questions is just, it depends, and there's rarely consensus on
any given issue. Sports economics, though, is one of those

(08:14):
rare cases where most people actually agree. Politicians, business leaders,
and sports team representatives will boast about the economic boon
a team is to your city. They'll talk about the jobs,
people going out to bars and restaurants, and supposed economic growth.
In reality, sports teams suffer from something called the substitution effect.

(08:36):
In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists John Siegfried and
Andrew Zimbalist explain this in detail. The vast majority of
consumers has a relatively inflexible leisure budget. If a sports
team moves to town, the money one spends taking a
family to a game typically is money that is not
spent at a local bowling alley, golf course, restaurant, or theater.

(09:00):
The net effect on spending in the metropolitan area, then,
is zero or very close to zero. While sports teams
may rearrange the spending and economic activity in an urban area,
they are not likely to add much to it. Don't
get me wrong, I'm all for defunding golf courses, but
with sports stadiums, we're really just moving money around rather

(09:20):
than growing. And funny enough, this can actually have a
negative effect on surrounding businesses because people spend more at
the game, putting money into Tom Dundon's pocket instead of
the local community. The counter-argument to this is that sports
teams bring in tourists from out of region or out
of state, leading to greater profits, but this also doesn't

(09:41):
necessarily ring true. Here's Victor Matheson, another leading sports economist,
in that same webinar with the Portland City Councilors.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
I've actually studied this extensively.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
There is exactly zero impact on hotel room stays.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
And by zero, I mean literally zero.

Speaker 7 (09:58):
Literally no.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Hotel rooms anywhere in the country get sold because people
decide to come to a city to go see the NBA.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
I'm not certain exactly which studies Matheson is referencing, but
he says they've looked into at least a dozen major
cities and hundreds of game nights, finding no effect on
hotel stays from the NBA. One example backing this up
is a 2018 study by Craig E. Depkin and E.
Frank Stevenson of Charlotte, North Carolina, which found that NBA

(10:28):
regular season games were not associated with a net increase
in hotel registrations or hotel revenues the day before, the
day of, or the day after a game. They did
find some increases for multi-day events, but the overall conclusion
of the study is that hotel tax receipts fall short
of the debt service incurred from stadium investments. On a

(10:51):
larger scale, things like the Olympics and World Cup are
a similar story, even with such a specific focus on
international travel. A February 2026 article from the Council on
Foreign Relations indicates multiple Olympic host cities in recent decades
lost billions and that the economic benefits are dubious at best.

(11:13):
Matheson suggested in a 2006 paper that these mega events
can potentially lead to a profit for a city if
they use existing infrastructure, such as the case of the
1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but this isn't always the case.
And to give a sense of the broader economic consensus,
a 2005 random sample survey of the American Economic Association

(11:37):
members found that 86% agreed or strongly agreed with the
elimination of state and local subsidies for sports franchises, versus
just 5% in opposition. A 2008 paper by Dennis Coates
and Brad R. Humphreys states, quote, the large and growing
peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas,

(12:00):
sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial
evidence of increased jobs, incomes or tax revenues for a
community associated with any of these things, unquote. Matheson himself
examined the other side of the argument on stadium subsidies
in a 2018 paper published in the Journal of Policy

(12:21):
Analysis and Management. He points out that there may be
rare cases where public subsidies make sense, but at nowhere
near the level that American taxpayers are contributing. Basically, the
percent of funding that should come from public contribution may
be simply greater than zero, but not very significant. At
the end of the day, what this really amounts to

(12:42):
is another massive handout for the wealthy, while the poor
and working class pay the price in taxes or cut services.
It's big business fucking over the little guy who often
can't afford to go to the game, or is making
a dogshit part-time wage working concessions at the stadium. And
to bring it back to Portland, the mayor has talked

(13:03):
about financing this deal with climate funds, which are already
allocated to different projects. There's a real opportunity cost to
using public funding for sports rather than on city needs,
and that absolutely needs to be factored into the equation.
One of the most basic sort of capitalist econ 101
lessons is that there's just no such thing as a

(13:25):
free lunch. This money has to come from somewhere, and
that means other programs get the short end of the stick.
Over the past few weeks, I've noticed there's this perception
that Portland is somehow unique, that losing the Blazers would
send the city into financial ruin. Apparently, this is quite common,
as J.C. Bradbury's new book is literally titled This One

(13:47):
Will Be Different, False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly
Funded Stadiums. In just a bit, I'm going to dive
into the tactics owners use to shake down cities, but
one way they've done so in Portland is by broadening
the conversation to our entire economy. I've watched city councilors
play directly into this, claiming the city's economy is heavily

(14:10):
based on perception while they make decisions that arguably worsen
that perception. It's a paradoxical position. We're struggling, so we
need to spend a bunch of money on something that
won't make us that money back. That's the level of
cognitive dissonance we're dealing with here, and it's all backed
up by the business lobby. Our previous city council system

(14:33):
penned a deal buying the Moda Center for one dollar.
Very clearly, they took on a liability, not an asset,
and left us on the hook. There's this fear of
the Moda Center becoming a derelict mass and a stain
on the city if it's not renovated. People generally seem
to agree that it needs renovations, whether for basketball or

(14:54):
for concerts, but looking at other cities who lost their
sports teams, a rotting concrete corpse is just simply not
an inevitability. An article in Blazer's Edge, a Blazers news
blog and community site owned by sports media conglomerate SB Nation,
pointed out how multiple other arenas across the U.S. have
seen record profits after losing their anchor tenant. The Desert

(15:19):
Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona lost the NHL's Arizona Coyotes
in 2022 and In the year after, according to Glendale
City Manager Kevin Phelps, the arena broke its revenue record
by nearly $ 10 million. After the Golden State Warriors left
the Oakland Arena in 2019, it had its best fiscal

(15:39):
year ever in 2023 and reduced its operating deficit by 97%
over the four years. And Key Arena, once hosting the
Seattle Supersonics, a team referenced heavily by supporters of a
Blazers subsidy, operated at a loss under the NBA team,
according to Blazer's Edge, but it turned a bigger profit

(16:00):
than ever after they left by, quote, freeing up the
stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves, unquote.
I have to emphasize, even with mountains of evidence, reporting
on this deal in Portland has felt like a truly
Sisyphusian task, with the sheer volume of misinformation being thrown
out by our own elected officials and at times the media. Surprisingly,

(16:24):
some of the broadcast outlets have had some solid articles
on this in the past few months, though I still
would have liked better at times. I have a lot
of respect for Dave Deckard, the author of the Blazers
Edge piece, because his job seems to rely on the
Blazers staying here, which he openly points out in his
own article. I have a lot less respect for legacy

(16:45):
outlets like the Oregonian, especially Bill Orem and the editorial
board who repeatedly chastise people for pushing back against this deal.
Some of what I've seen from the media has been
more akin to stenography than journalism. The journalist's resource and
organization aiming to bridge the gap between reporters and academic
research says in these sports deals journalists, quote, often report

(17:09):
figures from press releases and economic impact statements without questioning
the assumptions of those analyses, unquote. The worst part of
all this has been watching people fall for the propaganda
in public comment. Some individuals even brought their children to
speak at Portland City Council. It's painful to feel like
I couldn't keep up as a reporter, so for the

(17:31):
last quarter of this episode, I want to dive into
all of the just head-spinning madness that has gone down
in recent months in hopes of providing context that can
help constituents in other cities fight off these terrible investments.
But before we do that, here's Samantha. And we're back.

(17:58):
Many of Oregon and Portland's leaders like to wear the
badge of fiscal responsibility, yet they've done the exact opposite
of what economists suggest. Unfortunately, it just so happens that
this may be one of the worst arena deals of
all time. According to data compiled by J.C. Bradbury for
that webinar... $ 600 million is in the realm of a 60-70%

(18:22):
increase over the median public contribution for a stadium renovation
from 2025 onward. Stadiums like the Delta Center in Salt
Lake City have lower projected renovation costs than Moda, despite
needing a complete conversion from a basketball arena into an
arena that can accommodate both basketball and hockey. That is

(18:43):
a very expensive renovation, and yet they also negotiated a
30-year contract instead of the 20-year contract we have in Portland. Here,
we're on track for a fully publicly funded renovation because,
as I highlighted earlier, Tom Dundon said he didn't want
to put any money in. The Oregon State Legislature capitulated

(19:04):
almost immediately, along with our extremely unpopular governor, shelling out
about $ 365 million dollars not including interest, and the county
followed suit with approximately another $ 100 million. In this process,
the Blazers have not actually shared what they want to
use the $ 600 million for. We're riding blind because they've

(19:25):
effectively stonewalled us while simultaneously making threats that they'll leave
if we don't meet their every demand. They've justified this
by claiming they're worried we'll sue them if they leave,
leveraging language in the previous lease, which states the primary
tenant is required to maintain the arena in, quote, first-class condition.

(19:46):
Let me put that another way. Rip City Management, the
operator of the Moda Center, asked for essentially a blind
contribution of $ 600 million while simultaneously maintaining that the stadium
is already in first-class condition because they're afraid of a
lawsuit due to the contract they signed a few years ago.

(20:07):
The math does not add up. it kind of sounds
like the stadium is not actually in first-class condition, or
they're scraping taxpayers for unnecessary renovations. And all they really
had to do to enforce their agenda was dump a
couple hundred thousand dollars into lobbying, then refuse to participate
in good faith negotiations. It really should go without saying,

(20:29):
your city, state, and county should not throw out hundreds
of millions of dollars— technically more than a billion when you
consider debt and other payments— without seeing the actual details
of the renovation. It's like a fucking loot box, except
we might literally get nothing of substance back. Beyond stonewalling
and lobbying, the other tactics I'll call creative math and

(20:53):
finding a fool. Finding a fool is simply grabbing business
shills who will publicly support your propaganda campaign. In Oregon,
we're spoiled for choice, and creative math is the coal
that fuels the flames. For example, The Portland mayor, city councilors,
and county commissioners have thrown around that the region containing

(21:13):
the Moda Center produces $ 670 million in annual economic activity.
According to the website RipCityNotRipOff, a community effort opposing the
billionaire handout, about $ 290 million of this is just from players' salaries.
A lot of this money likely does not stay within Portland.

(21:34):
This concept is called leakages in that paper by Siegfried
and Simbalist. When this creative math doesn't do the trick,
sports teams apparently will often seek out impact analyses from
consulting firms. And here's a particularly animated clip of Bradbury
talking about this.

Speaker 4 (21:50):
I want to jump here. I want to talk about
these economic impact studies. We would tell you they don't exist.
Economists don't do analyses like that. These things are totally
made up garbage. And I'm not even going to be
nice anymore because I'm tired of having to deal with
this from city to city. That's not how economists do studies.
They simply just throw numbers in a barrel and roll

(22:12):
out bigger numbers. And I'll tell you how you know
this is true because most people don't know. They hear
me say that's not true. Someone else says, oh, no,
but the other side says it is true.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
And the way you know it is you say, could you.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
Show me some examples where you predicted a number and
that it came true? And they will never, ever respond
because they have never once predicted it right. And I've
been asking for years, can you show me one example?
And every time I meet with these consultants, I say,
can you show me an example where you predicted correctly?
They say, I'll get back to you. And I never
hear from them ever again. These people are just, they're shills.

(22:45):
They make a living doing this. And we need to
start calling them out for doing that.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
In Portland's case, one of the DSA city councilors, Mitch Green,
said he asked to see the data for the impact
analysis put together by consulting firm Echo Northwest. According to Green,
the person who conducted the analysis wanted to give him
the data, but the Blazers said it was under an NDA.
So we've kind of gone full circle back to stonewalling.

(23:09):
If all else fails, teams may rely on astroturfing and
boldface corruption to get a deal through. In Portland, a
group known as We Are Rip City started up, claiming
to be an independent community effort, but they have the
telltale signs of a corporate astroturfing campaign. They list hundreds
of coalition supporters on their website, from real estate groups
to local businesses to unions. But their leadership is made

(23:33):
up of business executives, and they work with the political
consulting firm March Strategies, who previously contracted with the Blazers
and is made up of former high-level Oregon government staffers.
The head of We Are Rip City is Jim Etzel,
the CEO of Sport Oregon, a non-profit promoting sports in
the region. But Sport Oregon is funded in part by

(23:54):
the city of Portland. In effect, the city has paid
to lobby itself, and it somehow gets even worse. Portland
is located in Multnomah County, which is currently set up
to contribute around $ 100 million to the arena themselves. The
chair of the Multnomah County Commission, Jessica Vega-Peterson, who is
not running for reelection this fall, hired the county's negotiator

(24:16):
for the deal. Guess who she hired? The fucking board
president of Sport Oregon, who also used to work for
the Blazers. Here's a clip from the county commission meeting
when this came out. Speaking is Commissioner Megan Moyer.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Did I miss here?

Speaker 8 (24:34):
He is on the board of Sports Oregon that is
currently lobbying us on how much we should contribute to
this deal?

Speaker 1 (24:44):
We hired a negotiator that's on the board of.

Speaker 8 (24:49):
An organization that is lobbying us on this issue?

Speaker 6 (24:54):
How is that not a wild conflict of interest?

Speaker 3 (24:59):
Oh, Megan, I feel you. Even after this revelation, Moyer
was the only one of five on the commission who
voted against their $ 101 million term sheet proposal. And trust me,
I haven't even touched on all of the craziness surrounding this,
but the underlying goal of the team seems to be
total control over the conversation. Dundon has pulled off a

(25:23):
masterclass in this. In reality, it would likely cost him millions,
if not billions more to relocate the Blazers than to
just fund the entire renovation himself. There's also debate over
whether there's even a location for them to move to
since the NBA has already floated an expansion of teams,
which rakes in huge amounts of cash for the NBA

(25:45):
owners versus relocation, an estimated $ 10 billion per new franchise,
according to industry executives and league experts consulted by The Athletic.
All of our government's negotiating leverage was thrown out like
a bag of dog shit when the Blazers stepped in
front of Oregon politicians. I've spent a lot of time
dunking on Portland City Council, but to be fair to them,

(26:08):
the state kind of screwed us from the outset. And
I guess that's kind of my message with all this.
You've really got to try to catch it early. They
will absolutely try to shove it down your throat, and
these owners know how to wage a strong propaganda campaign.
What I've really tried to emphasize in all of my
reporting is that supporting an arena subsidy, especially of this scale,

(26:29):
is just out and out choosing the upper class in
a sport over the people struggling on the streets. We
have record heat waves, wildfire smoke, people starving, and yet
we are giving money to a billionaire. The sickening irony
is not lost on me watching a Boys and Girls
Club representative testify in favor of a public subsidy and

(26:50):
Yet when I drive by the Blazer-sponsored Boys and Girls
Club in North Portland, I see the same woman sleeping
outside on the sidewalk, her bones starting to protrude from
her skin. It's not lost on me when the supposed
liberals on Portland City Council vote to give Tom Dundon
stronger rent control protections than everyday people in the city.

(27:11):
Certainly there are things that are worse than another billionaire handout.
but I don't know that I've ever been more personally
disgusted by the people who claim to represent me, at
least at the local level. The worst part is that
they pretend to care. They might even think that they
do actually care, but people have literally been yelling this
in their faces. It was impossible for them not to hear.

(27:35):
There truly is no excuse. They've sold us out, and
we'll get a sense of the full damage in December
when all the negotiations come to an end. I don't
expect these deals will become any less common across the country.
As the national economy worsens, I would not be surprised
if cultivating local economic desperation becomes a center point in

(27:56):
any NBA owner's playbook. Either way, it happened here. I
hope it doesn't happen to you. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 7 (28:17):
Hi, James. You know, talking with you goes by really quickly.
It's almost like no time has passed since we last recorded,
but it's actually been a whole week. Crazy how time flies.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, that's the magic of podcasts.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
Yep.

Speaker 7 (28:33):
In the last episode, we left off by talking about
how the U.S. took over the Guano Islands and how
it established U.S. expansion as a mission of resource extraction.
The Guano Islands were uninhabited, but this episode is all
about how the U.S. overseas expansion took over people as
well as land. So to talk about the five inhabited U.S. colonies,

(28:55):
we need to talk about the Spanish Empire. Throughout the
19th century, Spain's expansive empire shrunk considerably. Several of their
colonies were either overtaken by the U.S., as in the
case of Florida or or became independent, as in the
case of Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and others. By the

(29:16):
end of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was on
its last legs, but it did have a few remaining colonies, Cuba,
the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba, the Philippines, and
to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico had been fighting insurrectionary
wars against Spain for years by the time that 1898
rolled around. in a final bid to keep some type

(29:39):
of control over them, Spain gave Cuba and Puerto Rico autonomy,
meaning that they could form a local government. Meanwhile, Spain
entered into a truce with the Philippines with promises of
future reforms. However, their insurgencies essentially continued. This wouldn't last long.
because the U.S. government invaded the Spanish colonies a few

(30:02):
months later as part of the Spanish-American War. As I've
talked about, the end of the 19th century was marked
by the wish to expand America's influence beyond its continental borders.
It had partially done this with the purchase of Alaska
as well as the coming annexation of Hawaii, which would
happen in great part because the U.S. needed a military

(30:24):
outpost in the mid-Pacific to support operations in the Philippines
and Guam. However, it still wanted more, and Spain's weakness
presented the perfect opportunity. So throughout the years before 1898,
the government had been talking about intervening in Cuba's struggle
for independence. This was done through yellow journalism, which we

(30:46):
talked about a little bit in the last episode, but
essentially the newspapers were talking kind of directly to the
United States government and being like, we need to spread
liberty to them and freedom we need to teach them
uh how it goes and this was of course mixed
with manifest destiny and the monroe doctrine where they wanted
to quote unquote protect american hegemony uh in the new

(31:07):
world yeah.

Speaker 9 (31:08):
I'm trying to remember who said this uplive civilize and
christianize our little brown brothers.

Speaker 7 (31:15):
Um was it mckinley it.

Speaker 9 (31:17):
Seems like it would be but when i when i
search that specific thing in quotation marks i don't.

Speaker 7 (31:23):
Oh wait so William Howard Taft, the first American governor
general of the Philippines and later U.S. president, used the phrase, quote,
little brown brother in cables to McKinley. So maybe it
was there. Okay.

Speaker 9 (31:36):
Yeah, I think I may have like combined two quotations.
The paternalist racism there is fantastic. I'll drop it in
later when we're talking about something else. I wasn't sure
if it was Cuba or which country they were referring to.

Speaker 7 (31:49):
I mean, based on how Puck drew them, we could
all be the Little Brown Brothers.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
Right, yeah. That is the stereotype they're getting, cool.

Speaker 7 (31:56):
Absolutely. So, speaking of protecting U.S. business interests overseas, in
January 1898, the United States sent a warship, the USS Maine,
to Havana Harbor to safeguard American business interests there as
well as U.S. citizens. However, the USS Maine sank about

(32:16):
a month later. And while the cause was likely an
internal fire, according to recent experts, the contemporary opinion in
the United States blamed it all on Spain.

Speaker 6 (32:28):
Right.

Speaker 7 (32:28):
There was this smattering of yellow journalism that was like,
you know, they did it. Oh, yeah. The Spain did
it to us, even though they didn't really have a
way to prove that. Right. Especially not in 1898. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (32:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (32:39):
And like the whole like going to the bottom of
the ocean to look at the USS Maine was It's
a thing. There have been a series of, I guess,
underwater archaeology is what it is, but expeditions to ascertain
exactly which direction it blew out. Various ones have had
various conclusions. I think you rightly phrase it here. It

(33:01):
doesn't matter what caused the explosion. It became a fact
for the yellow press that the Spanish did.

Speaker 7 (33:09):
Absolutely. And I think it's really interesting that there's still...
And I understand that why you want to like have
a genuine conclusion, but the fact that it's still being
litigated more than, what is it, like 128, 140 years after? Yeah.
A little bit more, a little bit less, a little
bit more.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (33:27):
Is still, you know, kind of this conception of American
nation building where it couldn't be that the press got
it wrong, that the government got it wrong, and that
it became a fact in the media. And that's why
the U.S. invaded. Cuba and other Spanish colonies, right? The U.S.
kind of has to prove itself innocent in this regard.

(33:47):
So per How to Hide an Empire, the U.S. government
and the U.S. media wanted to intervene, but anti-imperialists in Congress,
imagine that, didn't want Cuba to be annexed to the
United States. So to ostensibly show that they didn't have
colonial ambitions, Congress passed the Teller Amendment that stated that

(34:08):
they would not annex Cuba. However, Congress said nothing of
Spain's other colonies. I should also say that before the U.S.
officially entered the war that year, Teddy Roosevelt, then Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, had sent ships to essentially surround
all of the colonies, not just Cuba. So they were

(34:29):
kind of pretty clearly preparing for something, you know?

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (34:34):
So the U.S. went to war in 1898, and it
won pretty handily. in large part, and this is the
stuff that a lot of American history books won't tell you,
because of the help of the independence movements that had
already been fighting in these colonies for decades. However, the U.S.
did as the U.S. does and essentially discarded these independence movements'

(34:56):
ambitions once they had helped the U.S. win the war,
showing once again that allies are not necessarily friends. I
feel like this is a lesson that has to be
taught and learned Throughout American history, right? You know? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Many, many, many such cases.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yep.

Speaker 7 (35:14):
In my opinion, nowhere is this more evident than in
the Philippines, where the liberation movement declared independence from Spain
in June of 1898, yet it went unrecognized by the U.S. Instead,
the U.S. choreographed a mock battle with Spain that eventually
led to them handing over their colony to the U.S.,
per How to Hide an Empire. The Americans' lack of

(35:36):
recognition for the Filipino independence movement would eventually lead to
the Philippine-American War, where the U.S. trampled and devastated the
Filipino insurgency that wanted independence from one conqueror, Spain originally,
and their newest conqueror, the United States. You know, ostensibly,
they came in to help these people and then essentially

(36:00):
massacred them.

Speaker 6 (36:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Little vexillogical aside.

Speaker 9 (36:04):
The star and triangle device that you see on lots
of flags has its birth in this period. I believe
it begins with José Martí and the Cuban independence movement. Obviously,
it characterizes many of these states and their independence movement.
But for a while there, that flag was the symbol

(36:25):
of fighting against imperial conquest. That's why they incorporated it
into the Catalan flag. the independent Senella has the triangle
and then the Catalonia just as a thing without any
particular political ambition doesn't have the triangle and the star.
And then you have the red triangle for like socialist independentist,

(36:45):
but like this blue triangle in flags, like it just
shows how these actions like reverberated around the world, right?
Like Spain had been the empire.

Speaker 5 (36:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (36:57):
And like I had this in, in Spanish this week,
we call it the Anus Horribilis of 1898, right? Like
the complete collapse of Spain's external possessions. And like for
a while there, people were like, huh?

Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah. Empires can fall.

Speaker 6 (37:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
We can defeat them. Unfortunately, a new one took its place. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 (37:17):
Empires can fall if a new empire slides in there
and like, yes, helps with the fighting and what doesn't
do all like, like you said, like these people have
been fighting, like, Marty was dead by the time Roosevelt arrived,
but he had already begun the independence movement.

Speaker 7 (37:32):
Uh, and actually now that you, you mentioned that about
the triangle, I didn't include it in this, uh, script, right.
But the Puerto Rican flag is actually directly based on
the Cuban flag as well. It was made in 1895,
I believe by, uh, Puerto Rican exiles in New York
who were fighting for independence from Spain. And so they
essentially adopted this Cuban design, but inverted the colors to

(37:56):
show kind of Caribbean solidarity and brotherhood. Yeah. And, you know,
it's been our flag ever since.

Speaker 5 (38:02):
Right.

Speaker 7 (38:03):
And there's a thing about the Puerto Rican flag that
I'm not going to get into too much, but like.
based on the kind of color of the blue in
the flag, uh, is the political status that you support, right?
That's kind of a, a myth, kind of a myth
that has essentially become the fact, right?

Speaker 6 (38:23):
Right.

Speaker 9 (38:24):
No, I love a little hidden flag shit, like the, uh,
The Flandrians with their flag, like if the lion has
claws or not, it denotes their status on independence. I think, yeah,
it doesn't matter if that's what it was designed for. Again,
it becomes true because everyone knows it to be true
and they're using it to signal that.

Speaker 7 (38:40):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in Puerto Rico, the light blue
is kind of the independence flag. The medium blue, which
is kind of the one that most often is used
depending on the place, is kind of the status quo,
sometimes independence flag. And then the darker blue, similar to
the dark blue used in the U.S. flag, is the
one that stands for statehood. That's cool. You shouldn't necessarily

(39:03):
take this as fact because, you know, sometimes it's hard
for people to get their hands on a specific color
blue Puerto Rican flag. But you can usually tell based
on the flag that they're waving around what they support.

Speaker 6 (39:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (39:15):
Also, actually, speaking of flags, the flag of the Northern
Mariana Islands, it goes hard. Have you seen it?

Speaker 3 (39:21):
No, I haven't.

Speaker 7 (39:22):
Oh, let me see.

Speaker 9 (39:22):
The Marshall Islands flag's fucking thick. Yes, I'm actually looking
at it right now.

Speaker 7 (39:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
A Marshallese football shirt.

Speaker 7 (39:29):
Let me send a pic real quick.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Okay, yeah, that's a sick one.

Speaker 5 (39:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (39:31):
Yeah, wow.

Speaker 7 (39:32):
There's a lot of very cool flag designs that I
witnessed while writing this script.

Speaker 9 (39:37):
Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
Yeah, that one's great.

Speaker 7 (39:39):
So speaking about the Philippine-American War and the American occupation
of the Philippines post-1898, quoting from Colonial Crucible, The four
years of counter-guerrilla warfare that followed would make accurate intelligence
an imperative, forcing a marked expansion of the military's limited capacities,
particularly in the area of operational field intelligence. During the

(40:04):
campaign in Manila, the U.S. Army, quote, created a modern
metropolitan police force that applied military intelligence and data management
to the problem of political espionage. developing covert techniques of
surveillance and penetration to fight a dirty war in the
city's slums and back alleys, end quote. And according to

(40:24):
How to Hide an Empire, American GIs tortured Filipino guerrillas
by administering the quote-unquote water cure, a torture method similar
to the waterboarding which has happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, right?

Speaker 3 (40:39):
And in Cuba, in the little US base that we
have there.

Speaker 7 (40:42):
As well, right. And you kind of see this as
part of the imperial feedback or the imperial boomerang that
colonization of the U.S. 's colonies has sent back into
the United States and how it's reverberated in future imperialist
or colonialist conquest, right? This one torture method, which is

(41:03):
very similar actually to waterboarding, has reverberated throughout American counterinsurgency history.
So here you can see how the management of empire
has instructed the U.S. 's military apparatus in quelling nationalist
movements the world over. And this is obviously something that's
come back towards the American metropole, particularly the kind of

(41:26):
counterinsurgency used in policing American military occupations, right? This is
very common because, quoting from Colonial Crucible, colonial regimes only
had finite resources for costly social controls and generally chose
to apply them to policing, prisons, and law enforcement. And

(41:46):
kind of the colonial policing apparatus has reverberated throughout every
single empire's history, right? I'm thinking of Smedley Butler taking
the policing techniques he learned in Haiti back to Philadelphia
with him. The filipino police kind of setting the scene
for some of the policing that would happen in the
united states this is like very much a thing that

(42:09):
happens the world over or um god why am i
blanking george orwell in uh india the the policing that
he did in burma sorry.

Speaker 9 (42:19):
Yeah which was part of india at the time in
the british conception.

Speaker 7 (42:23):
So orwell being a policeman there and kind of seeing
how it impacted back home and we see this the
world over, right? In terms of militarization, the military exports
that the U.S. has taken to many, many, many countries,
the world over is now reverberating back into U.S. streets.
And actually, in terms of ICE and the kind of

(42:46):
paramilitary campaign of terror that they're doing, we're seeing the
people that the U.S. displaced in other places kind of
fleeing there, trying to get a safe haven in the U.S.
and The paramilitary tactics that were used against their parents, grandparents,
or great-grandparents now being used on them, right? So the

(43:07):
cycle of abuse and violence doesn't really end, sadly.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (43:12):
So you know what won't invest resources in policing, prisons,
and law enforcement? These advertisers.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
We can't say that for sure.

Speaker 5 (43:21):
Right.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Might be the Washington State Highway Patrol again.

Speaker 7 (43:35):
And we're back. Meanwhile, in Cuba, as I mentioned previously,
anti-imperialists in Congress passed a law that meant the U.S.
couldn't annex it. However, that didn't mean there couldn't be
a military occupation, which lasted until 1902 when Cuba declared independence. However,
the Platt Amendment stipulated that the U.S. could intervene in

(43:57):
Cuban affairs, even invade if they wanted to. It also
meant that the U.S. could establish a permanent naval base there,
which is now and then called Guantanamo Bay. Actually, that
might be the one piece of American overseas empire that
I think is very present in the American consciousness. It's

(44:17):
much more so than Puerto Rico or Guam or whatever.

Speaker 9 (44:21):
Yeah, the fact that it's like a cutout from Cuba,
this country, that the whole thing of this half of
the Trump administration is hating Cuba.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
And be like, oh, psych, we also own a little
bit of that island.

Speaker 7 (44:33):
Right, exactly. And own it for more than a century
at this point as kind of a bastion of continued
control on it, right? Because they couldn't annex it completely.
But if you just take a little small piece of
it and then use it for a lot of evil things,
you know.

Speaker 9 (44:51):
Yeah, to your point about it affecting the metropole, like
so much of the worst parts of US history run
through that little naval enclave there.

Speaker 7 (45:00):
Absolutely.

Speaker 9 (45:01):
Like the worst parts of the war on terror. We're
now using it for a deportation camp, right? Like it's
where we do our deniable crimes.

Speaker 7 (45:10):
Yeah, absolutely. And that actually ties very much into a
thing that I'll give a little preview on, which is
why the U.S. Constitution doesn't really apply in the colonies.
So the U.S. would go on to occupy Cuba two
more times, from 1906 to 1909, and once more from
1917 to 1922. Even after the U.S. occupation ended, the U.S.

(45:35):
would go on to have a very good relationship with
the Batista dictatorship because of American business interests in the
Cuban archipelago. However, the Cuban Revolution of 1953 would eventually
mark the end of this relationship with the U.S. oscillating
between wanting to outright take over or destroy Cuba again,
as the current Trump administration wants to do, or to

(45:56):
just being kind of very critically wary of the government, right?
There was a point in recent American history where tensions
between the two countries, and I say tensions, but it's
really an extremely lopsided situation. kind of hate from the U.S.
's part. There was a time in recent memory where
tensions were kind of mellowing out. Then you could visit

(46:16):
Cuba without there being a major international incident under Obama.
And similar to the Philippines, Cuba became an important part
of how the U.S. would portray itself overseas. There were
several things that happened in Cuba and have happened in
Cuba that have defined the colonial empire, right? Like Guantanamo Bay,
But this time, I don't want it to be something

(46:39):
so dark. So, per Colonial Crucible, American forces occupying Cuba
worked ceaselessly to control the dreaded yellow fever in Havana
and the rest of the island. But like the public
health campaigns of other colonial powers, these efforts were not
an expression of medical beneficence. As elsewhere, public health in
Cuba served the needs of the colonizer rather than the colonized.

(47:02):
to protect commerce, maintain the labor force, safeguard troops, and
colonial administrations, and justify colonial rule. The eradication of yellow
fever in Cuba, an unprecedented success of colonial public health,
achieved for the United States nearly all of these goals.
American public health efforts in Cuba were a colonial enterprise

(47:23):
that provided economic and political benefits to important supporters of
the American imperial state, demonstrated that American imperialism could succeed
where European powers had failed and so inspired further American
colonial expansion in the region. So here you can kind
of see how even if the U.S. is doing something
like patently good, like eliminating yellow fever in the Cuban archipelago,

(47:48):
it's still because they want to further control Cuba and
its neighboring islands. So a similar hookworm eradication campaign took
place in Puerto Rico, which remains a U.S. colony to
this day. this hookworm eradication campaign would go on to
inform a similar campaign throughout the American South. However, as

(48:09):
noted by How to Hide an Empire, the Southern campaign
largely succeeded, in part because of a million-dollar philanthropic donation
from John D. Rockefeller. Meanwhile, a victim of colonial neglect,
the Puerto Rico Project received only $ 5, 000, and no matter
how many hookworm pills Puerto Ricans took, they became reinfected

(48:29):
again and again, because the government did not care to
uplift them from poverty, would have significantly reduced hookworm rates.
In comparison, the US South essentially received this mega donation,
which helped them uplift them, as well as investing in
school and several other programs that made it so this

(48:50):
hookworm infection wasn't so disastrous for the region. However, Puerto
Rico being a colony, they were like, you know, we
don't need to do as much So here we see
how colonial health campaigns can be used to benefit the
metropole at the expense of the colonies. Yes, Cubans and
Puerto Ricans got help for their illnesses. But in one case,

(49:12):
it was used to justify further colonization. And in the other,
they were used essentially as guinea pigs to help white
people of the American South. Puerto Rico was under military
rule from 1898 to 1900, and was eventually placed under
civil administration in 1900 under the Foraker Act. Puerto Ricans
would become American citizens 17 years later, just as the U.S.

(49:35):
was entering World War I. It's commonly stated as a
myth that we were made citizens exclusively to become soldiers.
And this is like half right. The thinking by the U.S.
government was that citizenship would convince Puerto Ricans to fight
any foreign aggressors that could possibly attack the archipelago, as
well as help the U.S. military project a military force

(49:58):
into the Caribbean. I should say that this is according
to the book Soldiers of the Nation by Harry Frankie Rivera.
And actually, Puerto Rico is called the Gibraltar of the
Caribbean in World War II because of its coastal defenses.
Got it.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (50:12):
However, it wouldn't be until 1949 that we were able
to choose our own governor and we became, quote, Estado
Libre Asociado or Commonwealth in 1952. I'm going to spare
the political conjecture. Truthfully, Estado Libre Asociado is kind of
a nonsense statement. It's essentially just colony with a fancier name, right?

(50:33):
There's not really any difference between Puerto Rico and Guam
in this sense, right? Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, same
as the Northern Mariana Islands, actually. But there's really no
difference legally from other colonies by being called an Estado
Libre Asociado. And speaking of political repression by the U.S. government,

(50:54):
the Puerto Rican independence movement has waxed and waned over
the years. All the while, the movement has faced pretty
brutal political repression throughout all that time, including being bombed
by the Air Force during the 1950 Hayuya uprising, one
of the few times that the U.S. has bombed its
own citizens, as well as the longest domestic surveillance program

(51:15):
in U.S. history that spanned roughly six decades and tracked
somewhere over 100,000 people, according to the book Las Carpetas
by Ramón Bosque Pérez and José Javier Colón Morera. Here,
like the Philippines, we see how the U.S. 's imperial
quelling of nationalist movements would go on to boomerang back
to the metropole. Las Carpetas, as the program is colloquially known,

(51:39):
preceded COINTELPRO, and its DNA can be found throughout the
domestic surveillance programs that we know of, and surely those
that we don't. And I want to stop here to
speak a little of the Puerto Rican status debate, because
I've seen a lot of people who don't know anything
about it acting like experts on twitter.com over the years. Shocking.

(52:00):
Puerto Rico has performed several referendums over the decades where
you vote on the status. And over the last decade,
a state has won three of them. Truth be told,
these referendums don't actually mean that much in terms of
measuring public support because they've been boycotted and many people
view them in the same way that they would a
public poll. Also, it's non-binding, which means even if whatever

(52:24):
option wins, nothing's going to happen. Congress is the only
one that could approve statehood for Puerto Rico, no matter
how much Puerto Ricans asked for it. Even so, in
the last referendum during the 2024 election, some form of independence,
meaning either full independence or compact or free association, received 41% support,

(52:45):
while statehood received 59%. So, while statehood is ostensibly the
majority choice, it's not as clear-cut as many people would
want you to believe.

Speaker 5 (52:54):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (53:12):
And now I'm sorry to say that I'm going to
summarize a lot of the history of Guam, American Samoa,
the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands to
get to how the Constitution doesn't fully apply there. But
I still want people to know some of the basic
facts about the other colonies. Guam was under military rule
for 47 years, first by the U.S., then Japan for
four years during World War II, and again by the U.S.

(53:34):
until 1950, when Truman signed the Organic Act of Guam,
giving them a civilian administration and a civilian court. Meanwhile,
the U.S. annexed American Samoa in 1900 when local chiefs
ceded Tutuila, the largest island to the U.S. This was
followed by Manoa in 1904 and Swains Island in 1905,
although it's also claimed by Tokelau, a colony of New Zealand.

(53:59):
As I said during the last episode, American Samoans are
non-citizen nationals, and they have to naturalize if they want
to become American citizens. Per the ACLU, being a non-citizen
national means that they can't be firefighters, paramedics, and public
school teachers. The U.S. Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark
for $ 25 million in 1917. The U.S. had been negotiating

(54:22):
this in one way or another since 1865, and like
Puerto Rico, USVI is an important strategic foothold in the
Caribbean for military purposes. Finally, the Northern Mariana Islands have
oscillated rulers between several empires. However, after World War II,
they became United Nations Trust Territories under American administration. It

(54:44):
became a colony of the U.S. in 1986. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia,
and Palau were also part of this trust, but they
chose to enter into compacts of free association instead of
becoming colonies. There is a common trait among all of
these colonies that I've mentioned throughout, which is being key
to military force projection by the United States in the

(55:06):
Caribbean and the Pacific. Bases in each of these colonies
are crucial to the U.S. military's logistical ability to deploy
throughout the world. Recently, a long dormant naval base in
Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Roads, was brought back to life as
part of the Trump administration's attacks on Venezuela and the
boat strikes throughout the Caribbean, as well as including the Pacific.

(55:27):
The planes that are doing the boat strikes aren't leaving
from Puerto Rico to do in the Pacific, obviously. Another
common trait that all of these colonies share is that
stuff is super expensive. in part because of the Jones Act,
a 1920 shipping law that mandates that any goods traveling
between two U.S. ports has to move on a U.S.-flagged, owned,

(55:48):
and crewed ship. People might be most familiar with this
law based on the amount of times a sitting U.S.
president has put it on pause. In fact, Trump extended
the Jones Act waiver for another 90 days just a
few days ago to assuage pressures from oil price increases.
A 2024 working paper by two Purdue University economists with

(56:09):
backing of the World Bank found that the Jones Act
imposes an annual welfare burden on Puerto Rico of $ 1. 4 billion.
Because foreign-flagged commerce ships can't stop in Puerto Rico then
go on to Florida, for example, they have to go
to Florida first, have all their stuff moved onto a
U.S.-flagged ship, then it comes here. And all of this

(56:30):
cost is passed on to the consumers. The Jones Act
also affects Hawaii and Alaska.

Speaker 9 (56:36):
Yeah, I think people who have not experienced this will
not realize the profound nature to which this, and just
being so far from the colonial core, impacts everyday life.
The way you eat is fundamentally determined. by the fact
that this shit is so expensive. I know this gets

(56:57):
particularly the case in interior Alaska, where just getting there
is in and of itself expensive, but this has a
big role to play.

Speaker 7 (57:05):
Absolutely. Actually, this isn't the script, but in terms of
Puerto Rico, part of the American industrialization of the archipelago,
as well as the way that it was backed up
by the local government, meant that we switched from a
kind of agricultural society to an industrial one. And we
went from growing a ton of our own food to
only growing about between 10% to 20% of it, which

(57:29):
back then was very good because there was a boom
time for the Puerto Rican economy. But kind of now,
it means that everything is incredibly expensive because it has
to come from all over the world, get moved onto
a US flagship in the contiguous 48 states, then come
back here. Right.

Speaker 9 (57:48):
It places you not only at a place where you're
already paying more, but also at the whim of shipping costs,
oil prices, these things that we're all seeing go up
right now.

Speaker 7 (58:01):
Absolutely. And part of those costs have been assuaged recently
because of the waivers. But there is a very big
contingent of people in Puerto Rico who are really dreading
the moment those waivers stop because things are going to
get really expensive again. And I mean, they're still expensive,
but they're going to get even more expensive, right?

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (58:22):
Yeah. So at this point, if you've been listening closely,
you'll notice that there's a pretty glaring omission in what
I've covered so far. Alaska and Hawaii, the only overseas U.S.
territories to become states, have gone almost completely unmentioned. I
purposefully left them out because they overcomplicated the whole history
and it was easier to put them at the end

(58:43):
than in the middle. So Alaska was bought from Imperial
Russia in 1856 for $ 7. 2 million, and Hawaii was annexed
in 1898 after U.S. businessmen and Marines did a bloodless
coup against the Kingdom of Hawaii and its then-queen. They
eventually became the 49th and 50th state in the middle
of the 20th century, and the kind of annexation of

(59:06):
Alaska and Hawaii is the thread that's been running throughout
these two podcast episodes.

Speaker 5 (59:10):
Right?

Speaker 7 (59:11):
In terms of Alaska, it's resource extraction. By buying Alaska,
they got access to miles and miles of pristine nature
that had in it gold, fur, and oil. In Hawaii,
they received a strategic foothold in the Pacific, which has
become extremely important over the years, particularly at the time

(59:34):
that it was annexed during the Spanish-American War, where the U.S.
military had to use it as a launchpad, essentially, for
its war in the Philippines and Guam. According to How
to Hide an Empire and an article in The Conversation
titled Why Russia Gave Up Alaska, America's Gateway to the
Arctic by William L. Igiagruk Hensley, The purchase of Alaska

(59:55):
brought with it a cornucopia of natural resources, including gold, fur,
and oil, that could be mined from this new territory
as well as nearly 400 million pristine acres of new
land with a comparably small addition to the U.S. 's
majority white racial calculus. And this is a very important thing.
The United States has never really added territories at this

(01:00:19):
point that would significantly throw off the amount of white
Anglo-Saxon people that inherit it, right? And I'm thinking of
choosing to incorporate Oklahoma instead of the indigenous state of
Sequoia because of how it would affect the amount of
white people in the United States.

Speaker 9 (01:00:37):
Yeah, and the way that it would affect the representation
in Congress too, right? Like specifically partitioning states off in
such a way that they don't tend to give people
who are not white representation.

Speaker 7 (01:00:48):
Yeah, absolutely. Meanwhile, Hawaii, with a much more multicultural population,
was a four-year issue. But the U.S. decided to make
them a state anyway because it helped them reach Pacific
markets and because it provided an important geopolitical strategic interest
during the Cold War. Hawaii was made into a state
because of the Spanish-American War, but it was annexed, not

(01:01:10):
made into a state. A declaratory note there. Right, yeah.
I'm severely flattening history here, but that's the gist of
how they became states. And, dear listener, you might be asking,
what makes them different from Puerto Rico and the rest
of the colonies? The key difference is that Alaska and
Hawaii were both, quote-unquote, incorporated territories. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, Guam,

(01:01:33):
the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American
Samoa are quote-unquote unincorporated territories. If that distinction means nothing
to you and it sounds kind of racist, welcome to
the club. This distinction was created in 1901 by a

(01:02:00):
series of racist Supreme Court decisions called the Insular Cases.
A critical part of the Insular Cases created the doctrine
of incorporation that governs non-contiguous territories, as well as created
the idea of incorporation versus unincorporation, creating the legal framework
saying that the Constitution does not fully apply to the

(01:02:23):
unincorporated territories. Downs v. Bidwell was the most important case
here because it created the term unincorporated territory to describe
Puerto Rico's legal status shortly after it had been acquired.
The case created the distinction that some territories were unincorporated
and others were incorporated, like Alaska and Hawaii, which were
integral parts of the U.S. and thus bound for statehood. However,

(01:02:47):
unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not on
that path to statehood, and they were a pertinent to
the United States, the same word the US used for
the islands it claimed under the Guano Islands Act. We were,
and this is a quote, foreign in a domestic sense.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
What an amazing legal fucking term to come up with.

Speaker 7 (01:03:09):
Right?

Speaker 5 (01:03:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:03:11):
Great.

Speaker 7 (01:03:11):
I don't know. It's like very incredible because all of
this is like a legal fiction applied.

Speaker 5 (01:03:17):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:03:18):
Like, Literally, right?

Speaker 9 (01:03:20):
Yeah, it's a bunch of people dancing around saying long
words to be like, totally not a colony, dude.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
No, absolutely not. No way. Totally different, bro. I don't
know what you're talking about.

Speaker 7 (01:03:27):
The US would never have colonies. They're just foreign in
a domestic sense. Another case, the Lima v. Bidwell, was
decided on the exact same day. It explained that Puerto
Rico belonged to the US. I'm simplifying the explanation here,
but when you mix it with Downs and other cases
over the years, you get the phrase that we know
all too well. Owned, but not part of. To drive

(01:03:49):
the point home, I want to paraphrase from Amy Kaplan's
The Anarchy of Empire. The insular cases put Puerto Rico
and other colonies in a liminal space, both inside and
outside of the boundaries of the Constitution, relegating the people
who live there to a permanent state of limbo, neither
fully citizens nor completely foreign. The insular cases cemented the

(01:04:09):
imperial mode of governance so thoroughly that many Americans would
not even consider their home country to be an empire.
These colonies remain in limbo to this day, likely never
going to be made states, yet equally as likely to
never become independent. This ideological and legal framework has extended
past the colonies, the most salient example being Guantanamo Bay,

(01:04:30):
a colonial holdover from U.S. occupation in Cuba. Per Kaplan
in her essay, Where is Guantanamo Bay?, court decisions built
on top of the insular cases recognize the base as
domestic for some purposes and foreign for others, thus facilitating the, quote,
global reach of U.S. power by creating a shadowy hybrid
legal system coextensive with the changing needs of empire. There

(01:04:55):
have been several attempts to overturn the insular cases, but
they remain case law. These cases that describe the people
of Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies as, quote, alien
races and savage tribes remain the way that the United
States views its overseas possessions. The last challenge to the
insular cases came in 2018, In a case titled Fitisamanu

(01:05:19):
versus United States, where free non-citizen nationals from American Samoa
challenged the U.S. government's denial to extend to them birthright citizenship.
A Utah federal district court, right? Not an American Samoan court.
A Utah federal district court declared that American Samoans were
citizens of the United States and deserve birthright citizenship. But

(01:05:43):
the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision citing
the Insular cases. And in this process, there is kind
of a very specific othering of people of the colonies, right?
You don't get to go to your local court and
show them, hey, I want to be a part of
this nation, which is what they wanted, right? You have

(01:06:04):
to go to Utah, to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals,
and be like, hey, I want you to recognize my
constitutional rights.

Speaker 9 (01:06:13):
That has now got me wondering, like, what circuit they're in. Like,
do they fall into a federal circuit? No, it doesn't
have a federal court, apparently.

Speaker 7 (01:06:22):
No, because part of the reason that American Samoa is
so different from the rest of the colonies, right, is
that the indigenous population there has kind of wanted to
keep them separately. And, right, there's varying opinions on this, right,
which is why we saw that challenge to the insular cases.
During that challenge, the... country or the government of american

(01:06:45):
samoa they were pro-insular cases being like hey we want
to continue for this to be case law because it
wouldn't challenge certain laws that they have in the books
that people with certain amounts of american samoan ancestry can
buy land and those without it can't buy land there yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:07:03):
Okay so they didn't want to get equal protection or
something under the equal protection clause of the constitution they
felt like it was a net positive for them.

Speaker 7 (01:07:12):
Yeah, but obviously this has changed through time, I should say, right?

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
Right, yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:07:18):
For some, it means that they can stop gentrification and
further colonization of their island, but it also means that
their people face significant challenges if they choose to travel
outside of American Samoa. which, based on how the U.S.
economy works, usually means that a significant portion of that

(01:07:41):
population has to leave in order to find employment, right?

Speaker 9 (01:07:45):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think of, like, how, like,
Marshallese people, they're not U.S. citizens, but they can travel
to the U.S. without a visa and reside and.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
Work in the U.S. without a visa.

Speaker 9 (01:07:56):
But, like, if they join the military, they can join
the U.S. military, but then if they want to access
their VA benefits, they have to go to Hawaii, like,
across like a it's a several hour flight like it's
several days on a boat right so and like obviously
not all of the uh you know the services that

(01:08:18):
they might need medically available on marjora so like they
they have to they have to take that journey just
to access the benefits that like in theory are owed
to them.

Speaker 7 (01:08:29):
Yeah, it's not exactly the same situation here in Puerto Rico,
but the VA benefits system here is not that great
compared to the contiguous United States, which in and of
itself is also not that great from what I've read
and people have told me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:08:46):
But there's only one hospital here in several clinics. So
if you live far away from the hospital, you have
to travel to that to get VA care. And that's like,
one of the many, many things where the U.S. colonies
are forgotten and left by the wayside in terms of
these things that the U.S. government should ostensibly provide for

(01:09:09):
its citizens and the people under its dominion, right?

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:09:13):
So the insular cases essentially said that people in the U.S.
colonies were owned but not part of the United States.
That meant that we had to be given American citizenship
if we got it, not the case of American Samoa,
through federal statute. This is different than people born in
the contiguous United States or Alaska and Hawaii, where they

(01:09:35):
get birthright citizenship through the Constitution. Because the Constitution doesn't
fully apply to us, we had to get it through
federal statute. This means that it would be pretty easy
to take away birthright citizenship in the colonies compared to
taking away birthright citizenship throughout the entire U.S. This is
something that Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith wants to do. Griffith

(01:09:59):
presented a law to eliminate birthright citizenship in the U.S. colonies,
saying that it was the only thing that the U.S.
could do to protect American citizenship. And because our American
citizenship is through statute, several laws throughout history in Puerto Rico,
as it was in 1917, then codified by the American
Nationality Act. He could do it if the law passed

(01:10:22):
Congress and Congress chose to eliminate birthright citizenship here. His
press release specifically cited the Insular cases as giving Congress
the power to take it away. However, to be clear,
It's very unlikely that this bill will even make it
to a vote, much less become law. But through this

(01:10:42):
kind of threat to take away birthright citizenship, we see
how the U.S. still has kind of extremely direct control
over its colonies.

Speaker 6 (01:10:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:10:53):
You know, as I hope I have evidence throughout this episode,
the American colonies, the current American colonies, not the 14 colonies, right,
have always been laboratories for the American experiment. in terms
of surveillance, in terms of military occupation. And here, with
this bill that, again, probably won't even make it to

(01:11:13):
a vote, we are seeing the Republican administration trying to
experiment with how they can take away birthright citizenship, which
they failed to do through Trump's executive order. But they
are trying to see how they can ram it through
to take it away from people. And recently... we saw

(01:11:35):
Trump sign an executive order to do a similar thing
to ostensibly address, quote unquote, birth tourism, a thing that
doesn't really matter. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:45):
In the grand scheme of things, it's an infinitesimally small
number of people.

Speaker 7 (01:11:48):
Exactly. The thing that I want to express is that
the U.S. colonies have always been laboratories of empire. What
happens here doesn't stay here. And contrary to the way
that many people think, the U.S. and other empires, to
be clear, doesn't just exert power, ideology, and movements outwards. Instead,
it is in a continuous feedback loop with its colonies

(01:12:12):
that have shaped what happens in the imperial core the
same way that it has shaped what happens in the
imperial periphery. And I want to end this episode by
talking about how Trump has signaled several times towards U.S.
territorial expansion. He has made moves or said that he

(01:12:34):
wants to annex Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, the Gaza Strip, Mexico,
and Greenland, among others. And as I mentioned in the
last episode, he's been obsessed with Greenland for a hot minute,
even reportedly saying that he wanted to trade it for
Puerto Rico, which was then ravaged by Hurricane Maria, according
to NBC. His most recent signal was posting a picture

(01:12:55):
of Venezuela with the American flag on it, essentially saying
that he wants to make it the 51st state. To
be clear, there are several other places that he could
do that in, but he is projecting this idea of
the 51st state as a way of kind of colonial capture. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:13:14):
By promising to bring liberty and freedom to Venezuelans. He
is saying, we will make you equal. even though he
has forgotten a bunch of equal rights for 4 million
people in the US colonies. And while a lot of
Trump's rhetoric about territorial expansion of the United States has
been brushed off as the mad ramblings of a despot
without any real power to do so, he did genuinely

(01:13:36):
kidnap Nicolas Maduro and has kind of made the country
into a vassal state of the US, right?

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:13:42):
And I learned that this is called a sucerain.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (01:13:45):
A sucerain is a political leader that expresses power Over
a separate sovereign entity.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
Okay. Yeah. In like an informal fashion like this?

Speaker 5 (01:13:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (01:13:58):
While the lines aren't quite clear enough right now, it's
become increasingly evident that the U.S. is exerting more than
simple influence in Venezuela, making it into a U.S. protectorate
in all but name. And to be honest with you,
in my opinion, the U.S. would never add another state
to the union, particularly one that would add 28.6 million
Latinx people to the nation's demographics. However, as I hope

(01:14:21):
I have evidence throughout the episode, the American empire has
various forms of exerting its colonial influence throughout the region
and the world, right? It doesn't necessarily have to become
a state to become owned by the United States, as
Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other colonies. Within its treatment
of its colonies and the insular cases, the U.S. has

(01:14:42):
established a separate ideological and legal framework to treat those
people and pieces of land that it wants to own
and occupy but not incorporate. Carlos from the future here.
A couple days after we recorded this episode, Trump announced
that he already considered the Strait of Hormuz quote-unquote American territory.
This was reported by several news outlets, including The Guardian,

(01:15:05):
which is where I read it originally. While it seems
pretty obvious that the U.S. government has no way of
actually establishing control over the Strait because it's on the
losing side of the war, the overture towards taking it
over is an attempt to establish a new sphere of U.S.
hegemony in the region. Imperialism is a business enterprise, and
much like the conquest of the Guano Islands and the

(01:15:26):
inhabited colonies meant access to new resources and military footholds, U.S.
control of the Strait, which again, very unlikely, would be
an incredible boon for the U.S. economy. The most comparable
thing here would be the Panama Canal. Control of the
canal helped the U.S. become a major global power because
it controlled shipping in the region. The U.S. government likely
wants to do something similar with the Strait of Hormuz,

(01:15:48):
a major maritime passage for all types of things that
make the economy move. While the threat against the Strait
is the newest in a long line of threats to
annex new territory to the U.S., we should normalize them.
Through its colonies and the insular cases, as well as
decades of colonialism and imperialism, The U.S. has built the
apparatus to expand its empire to people and places beyond
its borders. While it's unlikely, we shouldn't write it off completely,

(01:16:12):
especially as the Trump administration continues to signal that it
wants to regain domination over the Western Hemisphere and other
parts of the world.

Speaker 3 (01:16:19):
If they'd like to read more of your work, where
can they find you?

Speaker 7 (01:16:23):
Yeah, I'm at Vaquero2XL on social media. It's V-A-Q-U-X-L. E-R-O-2-X-L.
I'm a freelancer, so I've written for a bunch of places.
My most recent work has been a series of short
documentaries about different immigrant populations in Puerto Rico, the Dominican population,

(01:16:45):
the Chinese population, and the Palestinian population. The Palestinian one
came out a little less than a month ago. And
that's pretty much where you can find me. Thanks for
accompanying me on this colonial journey, James.

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):
That's what I do. But yeah, thank you for explaining that.

Speaker 9 (01:17:01):
I feel like it's really good to have these things
all wrapped up in a way people can understand like that.

Speaker 7 (01:17:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:17:21):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, seemingly the only podcast
bold enough to do what the mainstream media is too
cowardly to do and let trans people talk about ourselves,
I guess, or the unhinged issues that a bunch of
reactionary cis people have foisted upon us. And here to
talk with me today about a truly baffling and very

(01:17:47):
weird and shitty... anti-trans panic that has been launched in
the WNBA is Frankie de la Cruz, who's a sports
writer who writes at the intersection of sports and gender
and does a very good job of it in a
way that I was going to say few others do.
And then I was like, who am I thinking about
who also does this and does it this well?

Speaker 5 (01:18:09):
And like, I'm not sure I have anyone.

Speaker 6 (01:18:12):
So incredible work.

Speaker 8 (01:18:14):
I appreciate that.

Speaker 6 (01:18:16):
The other guest I have on today is Bugs Matrix, who,
if you have like been on the internet and been
anywhere near trans people, you are aware of bugs. What
I think people are less aware of is a, that
if you ever heard a trans person say, yeah, that's,
that's bugs. B B bugs was also a trans college athlete.

(01:18:40):
So both of you two, welcome to the show. And
I'm excited to get to actually talk about this WNBA,
Sophie Cunningham bullshit with, The trees. of former trans college athlete,
trans journalist, and whatever the hell I am, transgender.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
It's truly the meeting of irons.

Speaker 8 (01:18:59):
Yeah, I'm excited too. I spend most of my time
talking to cis people about this, so it's nice to
have different conversation partners.

Speaker 1 (01:19:08):
Yeah, it's it's so nice to be able to talk
with people who intrinsically know Ball.

Speaker 5 (01:19:15):
That too.

Speaker 6 (01:19:17):
Oh, God. So, OK, speaking of knowing Ball. So the
specific controversy, I don't even know what to call this
media frenzy.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
Witch hunt.

Speaker 7 (01:19:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:19:32):
Yeah. centered around a WNBA player named Sophie Cunningham, which
I guess people have heard of her now. My first
experience of this was... Seeing everyone talking about Sophie Cunningham
and being absolutely baffled because I was like, wait, isn't
she that bench player from The Fever? Why is everyone

(01:19:55):
talking about her?

Speaker 7 (01:19:56):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:19:56):
In, like, football terms, the only thing I can think
of is, like, somehow everyone in the world knows who, like,
the Broncos' long snapper is. It's like, what?

Speaker 5 (01:20:06):
Like, why does anyone know this? Like, what's happening?

Speaker 1 (01:20:10):
It's like, she's the drop chap. What's going on, dog?

Speaker 8 (01:20:14):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think The ball knowers have
kind of always known, because she's a rage baiter, she's
kind of been a professional bench warmer and rage baiter,
but the rage baiting has really come to the forefront
over the last season or two. I think she's personally
preparing for a exit of the basketball career to right-wing

(01:20:35):
grifter kind of trajectory.

Speaker 7 (01:20:37):
Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 8 (01:20:38):
And this worked out perfectly, didn't it?

Speaker 3 (01:20:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:20:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
I can't believe this is still a looper than grift.

Speaker 7 (01:20:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:20:45):
I mean.

Speaker 8 (01:20:47):
I feel like there's so many places that we can
start to talk about it, but it's so, I think,
for me as a journalist, the most frustrating part of
the entire thing is how it started, which was with
irresponsible journalism and irresponsible ESPN profile with this dropped-in quote

(01:21:08):
from her. And it has, I mean, we're on what
week of this? Three of this?

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
I think we're somewhere in week three, yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:21:14):
Yeah, it seems sort of like it's never ending. I
wish it would end.

Speaker 6 (01:21:20):
Yeah, we're going to get more into this in a second.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a player who
comes off of the bench on this team, which means
she's not a starter. And she comes off the bench
to like brick a couple of threes and then goes back.

Speaker 8 (01:21:33):
And start fights.

Speaker 6 (01:21:34):
This is like not a.

Speaker 8 (01:21:35):
Excuse me, excuse me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:37):
I'm being racist.

Speaker 7 (01:21:40):
That's true.

Speaker 6 (01:21:41):
But like, this is not like a star. And the
team that she's on, the Indiana Fever, has like several
legitimate superstars on it. And ESPN is like cutting their
highlights where the first highlight will be like her making
a basket. And it's like, well, okay, that's the only
basket she's made in like two weeks.

Speaker 5 (01:21:57):
But it's like, why?

Speaker 9 (01:21:58):
Why?

Speaker 6 (01:21:59):
God, I don't know. I'm frustrated about this, but we
should tell the actual story. And I think to tell
the story, I think we need to go back and
talk about Caitlin Clark's entrance to the league because I
think that, to some extent, is the beginning of all
of this and the beginning of kind of this bunch
of weird fascists who are now, I guess, quote-unquote WNBA fans.

Speaker 8 (01:22:25):
No, I think that's true because... You know, I think
the WNBA has this reputation as like a very progressive league.
And for the most part, that's the players that have
been progressive. The league is a corporation that has benefited
from the players, you know, actions. But there's always going
to be conservative, you know, players or people in kind

(01:22:47):
of any atmosphere. And Sophie Cunningham, if you've followed her
since her college career, has always been that. She, you know,
was known for being racist when she was at Mizzou, like,
There was the meme of her and Kalia Copper when
they were both on different teams. They really did not
get along. This is a reputation that Sophie has had
for a long time and on its own just would

(01:23:08):
have been, I think, you know, again, a random bench
player that most people didn't know. But Kaitlyn Clark coming
to the WNBA and being as high profile as she
was and the way she was framed as the next
great white straight cis hope for this league really brought
a particular kind of culture and fan with her and

(01:23:29):
so i think without caitlyn clark coming into the league
and you know maga people and right wing people seeing
her as a way to kind of gain a foothold
with this league i don't think sophie blows up in
the way that she does especially when you consider that
right She's been brought to the Fever as essentially Caitlin
Clark's enforcer because Caitlin Clark can't play defense or hold

(01:23:53):
her own on the court at all.

Speaker 6 (01:23:54):
I swear to God. It's like this team, I keep
doing cross-sports comparisons, but it's like the Fever are this
weird team where it's like they're like last year's Cowboys
where it's like a.
Weird white fan base that also pulls in a bunch
of random, like, I just kind of know about football fans. B,

(01:24:17):
elite offense. Literally cannot play defense at all.

Speaker 8 (01:24:20):
Yeah, and, like, this isn't hockey. We don't have enforcers
in women's volleyball in the same way.

Speaker 1 (01:24:25):
Right, it's not full contact like this, dog.

Speaker 3 (01:24:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:24:30):
I think it's worth kind of talking about the racial
dynamics of this because a lot of the initial hype around.
Caitlin Clark was this weird sort of like, yeah, like
what you're saying, Frankie, like this great white hope stuff.
And like her rival was like, she was like set
up against Angel Reese, who's a black player who is

(01:24:53):
very weird and interesting basketball player. But unfortunately, nobody really
cares about that because everyone, there's just this like racist
sort of panic around this whole thing to, to the
extent where like, there's like congressmen, who are talking about
starting investigations into Caitlin Clark's fouls.

Speaker 8 (01:25:11):
Yeah, and I think it's important to point out whether
you want to be super generous and put none of
this onto Caitlin and say she's an avatar for whatever
culture war the right is waging, or you want to
say she really should have been shouting this down a
long time ago, and whether she believes this or not,
she's in part responsible because she's complicit in her silence.

(01:25:33):
Whichever kind of route you want to take with that
what you can't deny is that every time she flops
or is you know takes a hard foul against a
player who is black queer masculine it gets blown up
the player on the other end of that is getting
you know death threats they're dealing with harassment and abuse

(01:25:55):
and racial slurs and this has been a pattern that
goes back to her rookie season And so there is
very much a gender component, right? A racial component to
how Caitlin Clark is being received by this fan base
and how her opponents in a predominantly Black, overwhelmingly queer
league are also being received.

Speaker 1 (01:26:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:26:16):
And circling back to what you were saying about whether
or not Caitlin Clark is, you know, either you think
either she's complicit or not in this, like that is
the base of people who have surrounded her. And that's
been the basis of the way that sports media also has,
has interacted with her because if you're sports media, you know,

(01:26:39):
there's an enormous incentive to just sort of drive out
this like racist drivel and like, you know, make clips
of like every single time she gets knocked down or something,
or every time she just like flops when someone like
is like even vaguely in her proximity.

Speaker 3 (01:26:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:26:54):
It creates this sort of feedback loop of it where
you have, on the one hand, you have these white supremacists, right,
who feed off of this stuff and want to use
this as an avenue to push their racism, but then
also that develops this symbiotic relationship with the sports media
who are like, yeah, we can make money off of
this and we're sort of like this a lot of

(01:27:17):
the time anyways.

Speaker 8 (01:27:18):
Yeah, and I've been covering the WNBA for about a
decade since it was Just lesbians and old people in
the stands. And those were the best days, I will say.
And as someone who has covered the league for that
long and been to as many games as I have,
I will obviously say not all Fever fans feel a

(01:27:39):
particular way or believe a certain thing. Of course, that's
the case. I've also seen the shift in the three
years that Caitlin Clark has been in the league of
who shows up to the Fever games. And as we
will continue to talk about, I think as we talk
about Sophie and now that kind of Sophie has become
the actual mouthpiece that Caitlin has failed to be for
these people, the people who are showing up to their

(01:28:02):
road games as well in support of Sophie and her viewpoints.
And so, of course, right, probably the majority of Fever
fans are great. And it's also true that there really
has been an influx of people who never... I can
curse here, right? Never fucked with the WNBA, right? They

(01:28:23):
didn't care about women's sports. And they have shown up
and brought a lot of the toxic mainstream culture and
things about men's sports culture that probably most of us
watch women's sports to get away from has shown up here.

Speaker 1 (01:28:39):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:28:39):
Yes.

Speaker 6 (01:28:40):
It coincides with, with Caitlin Clark, you know, coming to
the league. So I guess we should start actually talking
about Sophie Cunningham.

Speaker 1 (01:28:49):
Unfortunately.

Speaker 3 (01:28:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:28:52):
Like for better or for worse, Caitlin Clark, does want
to play basketball.

Speaker 1 (01:28:59):
Yeah like she she's here to literally play ball like
like definitely her not speaking up against like being portrayed
as this avatar is shitty and frustrating but like at
the end of the day she's here to play with
the nice little orange sphere and Sophie not so.

Speaker 6 (01:29:18):
Much Yeah, this is one of these things where it's
kind of vibes based, but I feel like the way
that it was portrayed in the media and then this
also fed into sort of like the fascist base was
that Caitlin Clark was going to come into the WNBA
and she was immediately going to be the best player
and everyone was going to have to deal with it.
And that like didn't happen because she's like, a pretty
good player, but, like... She's fine. A, even if she

(01:29:41):
was that good, it's like, okay, unfortunately for every other
great basketball player in the WNBA, you exist at the
same time as Prime Major Wilson, so, like, good luck
ever winning any award.

Speaker 7 (01:29:53):
Like, I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:29:55):
This is, like, maybe the greatest basketball player who's, like,
walked the earth in this generation.

Speaker 5 (01:29:59):
Like, good luck.

Speaker 8 (01:30:01):
It's true. And even when Caitlyn drops 30 points, she's
often giving up 30 on turnovers, so she kind of
ends up being a net neutral.

Speaker 7 (01:30:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:30:11):
And Angel Wilson, by the way, was, like, Defensive Player
of the Year and MVP. And, like, you know, it's like... She's, like,
you know, just this, like, transcendent player.

Speaker 9 (01:30:20):
But....

Speaker 6 (01:30:22):
I think there's this moment where like it becomes clear
after like a couple of years of this that like,
you know, like there's still a bunch of people who
are in the trenches being like Caitlin Clark is the
best player in the league. But like, no, it's not
clear to me if she's better than like rookie Olivia Biles.

Speaker 3 (01:30:40):
She's not.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
I don't think she is.

Speaker 8 (01:30:43):
She's not. Olivia Miles has a has an MVP case
like as a rookie that I mean, yeah, doesn't in
my opinion.

Speaker 7 (01:30:52):
I love her.

Speaker 6 (01:30:52):
I want to talk about her at the end because
I want to end up like a little bit of
just like ball good. But I think there's this moment
of like Caitlin, like I guess she like kind of
denounced it like the end of her first season.

Speaker 1 (01:31:04):
But like she felt like without going like hard in
the paint to it, like you're still leaving room.

Speaker 7 (01:31:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:31:11):
But it's like like she won't go hard in the
paint against it. But she also, you know, as you're saying,
like before the break, it's like, yeah, she wants to
play basketball.

Speaker 5 (01:31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:31:19):
And so she's not willing to go on camera and
say the things and do the things that these people want.
And I guess that's where Sophie Cunningham came in because
she will do that.

Speaker 5 (01:31:31):
She will.

Speaker 8 (01:31:32):
And I mean, I think it's also related that she
started a podcast this year, right? Like she has decided to,
she's basically using her profile as a fever bench player, AKA,
you know, Caitlin Clark's enforcer. And the exposure that has
come with that, which is more than she's ever had

(01:31:53):
in her, you know, however many seven or so seasons
in the WNBA. But to me, what's clear is that
she is setting herself up for an exit. And the
podcast is kind of the first step in that. And
maybe people didn't care what she had to say before.
But now that more people know who she is because
of who she's playing with, She is kind of starting

(01:32:16):
to step into this other— and it's very, very— we can talk
more about this, too, but it's very insidious the way
she talks about sharing her views because she's basically co-opting
social justice language when she'll say things like, people tell
you to use a platform, and then when you use it, right,
they criticize you for it or whatever it is. And

(01:32:36):
so she's kind of doing this thing where she's starting
a podcast. She's already, also, she keeps getting fined for
saying shit on her podcast about the refs and stuff.
She really just, like, mouths off. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
Wait, wait, maybe her being on a podcast is a
good thing.

Speaker 5 (01:32:52):
Yeah, right?

Speaker 8 (01:32:53):
So she has this podcast, but then at the same time,
she's projecting the, I'm using my platform for, you know,
my beliefs, right?

Speaker 6 (01:33:02):
Which is something that, like, I've heard even sort of, like,
left-wing people, like, in the space doing this, like, well,
it's just an interesting thing because the WNBA has always
been a league where, like, players do use their platforms
to do activism. And, like, and that is absolutely true. Like,
the actual first in professional sports, actually, I could be
wrong about about that because maybe there was another women's
league that did it first that I just missed, but

(01:33:24):
I'm pretty sure they were the first professional sports league
that was actually doing like anti-police brutality protests.

Speaker 8 (01:33:28):
Yes, they were. They also, they were doing that before
Colin Kaepernick took a knee.

Speaker 5 (01:33:34):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:33:34):
And then once he did kneel, actually that's how I
started following the WNBA was I was writing about player
protests and somebody told me entire WNBA teams were kneeling
on the court and it had gotten no coverage. And
I was like, oh, and that's when I actually started.
So Yeah, they were doing media blackouts to talk about
police brutality before Colin Kaepernick knelt.

Speaker 6 (01:33:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33:56):
That's fucking awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:33:58):
Yeah, they fucking rock. Like, it's good as hell.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
That's sick.

Speaker 6 (01:34:03):
But then you get media people being like, well, this
has always been a league where people use their platform
for activism.

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):
That's such a mealy-mouthed bullshit. Like, okay, sure, technically, but like.

Speaker 8 (01:34:16):
I.

Speaker 6 (01:34:16):
Guess you could call a clan rally activism. If you
really want to do that, I will be angry at you.
But like, this is like not the same thing at all.

Speaker 1 (01:34:28):
There is no difference between the Unite the Right rally
and going to help out at Food Not Bombs. If
you're stupid. If you're fucking stupid.

Speaker 5 (01:34:39):
That must be such.

Speaker 6 (01:34:40):
An amazing world to live in psychologically. Everything must be
so easy for you if you just don't understand anything.

Speaker 1 (01:34:46):
You gotta be so great to be a moron.

Speaker 8 (01:34:49):
I mean, the Turning Point USA flyer to support Sophie
Cunningham spelled her name wrong, so honestly.

Speaker 5 (01:34:56):
Of course.

Speaker 6 (01:34:58):
This is coming back to one of the things about
being on the right versus being on the left, which
is like, you know, In order to be on the left,
you do have to have standards. Like, you can't be, like,
an abuser, right? Like, you will eventually get run out
for that.

Speaker 8 (01:35:11):
Maybe.

Speaker 6 (01:35:12):
Whereas on the right, you can just do it and
it's fine. But, comma, if you get arrested, only one
of these two groups is going to be there for you.
And it sure as fuck not the people who are
going to spell your name wrong on the promotional flyer.

Speaker 1 (01:35:25):
It's so beastline. okay, but like, what has Sophie been
saying and doing? Let's just get into the meat of it.

Speaker 6 (01:35:43):
Yeah, let's talk about that.

Speaker 9 (01:35:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:35:45):
And I think this is where, as I kind of
said at the beginning, I think it's important to look
at where it started because I think this was a
failure of media from the beginning. And the reason that
it has snowballed in the way that it is is
with an incredible headline. It was basically like, love her
or hate her, like Sophie won't be ignored. And I
kind of was like, well, she was, I was ignoring
her until you Decided to run a profile.

Speaker 1 (01:36:08):
Yeah, you've decided she won't be ignored.

Speaker 6 (01:36:11):
On a baseline, like, this is such a baffling player
to run a profile of.

Speaker 8 (01:36:17):
Right, well, so the profile itself, too, is, like, such,
to me, an example of, like, shoddy journalism. Because they spend, like,
most of it where her parents are kind of bragging
about how she was a childhood bully. Then they go
on to say how she used to play on teams
with boys and beat them and that was like a
source of pride for them. And then after those things,

(01:36:41):
they kind of casually drop in Sophie saying, people think
I hate trans, end of sentence. Trans what?

Speaker 5 (01:36:48):
We don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:36:51):
But I don't. I don't. I just essentially, I believe
in love, but I think biological males should not be
in sport with girls. So again, we also have adult
men being playing, somehow playing sport with young girls. So
there was just so many places as a reporter, if
I were writing this profile, that I kind of would

(01:37:13):
have been like, huh, okay, well, can you give any
examples of, you know, grown men playing sports against girls?
Could you talk to me about why you're so proud
of having played against boys, but you think, like, there
were so many places you could have gone here, and
none of it happened.

Speaker 6 (01:37:29):
It just not there in the middle of this profile.
To be fair to ESPN, they did fire most of
their actual journalists in order to give more money to
a fucking Pat McAfee, a guy who used to be
a hunter, I think, and who now spends all of
his time having fucking Aaron Rodgers on his show to
scream about why vaccines are bad and why trans women

(01:37:50):
shouldn't be able to compete in sports. So, like, you know,
this is truly not ESPN's fault. They simply fired everyone
who could normally do journalism, and now we're left with
whatever this shit is.

Speaker 8 (01:38:02):
Another person whose opinion on trans women in sports we
should really be listening to, Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 6 (01:38:07):
Yeah, Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 7 (01:38:10):
I will listen.

Speaker 6 (01:38:10):
I will not agree with Aaron Rodgers' position on sports,
but if he can stay in the pocket for longer
than 2.3 seconds on two consecutive plays, I will listen
to him talk about women's sports. And he can't.

Speaker 7 (01:38:22):
He can't do it. He won't.

Speaker 6 (01:38:24):
Okay me being pissed at aaron rogers for hitting me
aside why did they write this that's the part i
don't understand i.

Speaker 1 (01:38:34):
Mean because there is like a larger media ecosystem that's
going to feed on just that one little nugget of
like anti-trans hate. Like it is so easy. The left
is going to get mad. The right is going to
embrace this and it's going to just fuel this culture war.
Like it's, that's going to generate so many clicks.

Speaker 3 (01:38:52):
It is.

Speaker 8 (01:38:52):
And I think, I don't know how long this profile
was in the works. Sometimes it can be, you know,
for profiles like this, it can be in the works
a very long time. Other times it's not, but I
think it's also worth mentioning that just before this profile dropped,
Sophie got into a high-profile skirmish during a game against
the Phoenix Mercury. Many people, most people, have probably seen

(01:39:14):
the kind of viral meme of her pointing, and she's
pointing at Dawana Bonner, who they're former teammates, actually, and
Alyssa Thomas. And basically, I mean, it was almost like
a full-team brawl, but there were a lot of kind
of racial undertones to the way that that went down.

Speaker 6 (01:39:33):
Racial overtones, the way it was talked about, they were
just racist shit.

Speaker 5 (01:39:38):
Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 8 (01:39:40):
And the way that meme has shown up, I think,
is really important because there's not really a way to
deny that it was racist when it's actually being used
in very, like, I've seen it at least, in very
racist or offensive or problematic ways since it happened. But
that profile drops on the heels of that really big

(01:40:01):
fight that was all over the televisions. It was being
played up and people were taking sides and saying how
great and how cool Sophie was. It was appalling, actually,
to watch. But these two things, this profile drops right
on the heels of that. And I think that that
really put more eyes on it than might have happened

(01:40:22):
otherwise as well.

Speaker 3 (01:40:23):
That makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:40:25):
So I did just pull up the profile and the
framing of this is so fucking annoying. there's a whole
section is, is she hero or heel? And then there's
just anecdotes where she's a hero here. She's a heel here.
It's like, it's, oh my God.

Speaker 6 (01:40:41):
It's written very clickbaity.

Speaker 7 (01:40:43):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
I was going to say, this is incredibly clickbait. This
is incredibly like, it's supposed to be like, she's divisive
for some reason, but we're telling you that she's divisive.

Speaker 8 (01:40:54):
And I don't think there was any reason to have
asked her about her stance on trans women in sports
because she, before this profile, we could have maybe guessed
where she stood based on some likes and retweets of
things about protecting women and girls, but nothing was overt.
She had not been overt enough that it actually, to me, again,

(01:41:15):
as the journalist writing this story, I wouldn't have asked
her about it because to me, it wasn't significant enough
in what she had said. It isn't a thing I
would have even wanted to try to have her clarify.
So it seems to me either she brought it up
or she was deliberately asked about it and given the
opportunity to make these comments.

Speaker 6 (01:41:32):
Yeah, and I guess this is an important part of
the pivot because kind of before this story, she was
just a racist. Like, that was her lane, was just.

Speaker 5 (01:41:40):
Being a racist.

Speaker 6 (01:41:43):
Let's get into her doing the transphobia pivot, which was
kind of arc two. Well, okay, I'm saying pivot here.
It's not like she's not still doing, like, racist stuff, but.

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
The transphobia, yes, they are.

Speaker 8 (01:41:56):
It's yes and, and I think actually, if we talk
about transphobia as being rooted in white supremacy, they're really
two sides of the same coin here, because at the
end of the day, what's actually happening is conversations around
who is an acceptable definition of a woman, whether it's
the black masculine women she's playing against and bullying, or

(01:42:16):
the trans women and girls that she's speaking out against.
So I'd say, eh, two sides of the same coin.

Speaker 1 (01:42:22):
I think that's a fair way to sum it up.

Speaker 6 (01:42:24):
I'm realizing now we probably should have mentioned this at
the beginning for people who have not seen her, but
like Sophie Cunningham looks like the kind of person you
would have seen on like, I don't actually know who
did the like positive propaganda for the Nazis, but like what, like,
I don't know, like, like if you're doing, if you're
doing like a dare story, like, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:42:42):
Lenny Riefenstahl would have loved her.

Speaker 5 (01:42:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:42:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:42:45):
Like Lenny Riefenstahl, like recruitment ad thing. Like she is
like the person you would put on that.

Speaker 8 (01:42:50):
Yeah, well, she's now had more gender-affirming care than most
dolls could ever dream of having, so.

Speaker 1 (01:42:56):
Oh, also that, also that. They want to be quacky
so bad, it's crazy. Like, there's something psychosexual rooted in, like,
Mar-a-Lago face, I swear to God.

Speaker 6 (01:43:10):
Yeah, so let's talk about, kind of, the arc of
Sophie Cunningham as anti-transmedia. person because she initially leans like
all the way the fuck into it.

Speaker 8 (01:43:23):
Yeah, Sophie leans into it. But what happens pretty quickly
is that right wing media picks it up, it kind
of gets news aggregated everywhere. And then she doubles down
in press conferences and starts to kind of say, I
said what I said, essentially.

Speaker 6 (01:43:39):
And I.

Speaker 8 (01:43:43):
Should have the ability to, you know, say what I believe.
And once she doubles down in the press conference, that's
when you start to see the rallies happening, anti-trans rallies
outside because the fever is on a road trip now.
And so, and every city they visit, anti-trans groups start
showing up, whether it's, you know, to promote their bill for,

(01:44:06):
you know, children having general exams to play sports or
whatever else they're there to do. But some of the
more high-profile anti-trans groups starts to show up, and that's,
I think, when it devolves.

Speaker 7 (01:44:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:44:21):
I guess we have ahead of us the branching path of,
should we talk about the devolution, or should we talk
about her brief attempt to pivot back to basketball?

Speaker 8 (01:44:30):
Well, I guess what I think is really notable is
that the group that really shows up, and I think
where there starts to be some controversy is a group
called XXXY Athletics that was started by a woman named
Jennifer Say. And I think that mainstream people do not

(01:44:50):
know who this group is. And basically their whole thing
is that they pay cis girls to protest sporting events
where they might have to compete against a trans girl.
And then that protest creates media and controversy. So they
literally are like paying people to create these controversies. And

(01:45:11):
they showed up and they paid two girls to sit
in the front row at the game against the storm
with signs thanking Sophie and a storm owner got upset
and cursed them out. And the storm owner got suspended
and the transphobes got an apology. And so this I
think is also where the WNBA now had an opportunity

(01:45:32):
to do something and they took the wrong side. And
so The thing to me that is really notable is
that the specific group and then Riley Gaines, you know,
noted fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines shows up.

Speaker 1 (01:45:44):
Oh my God.

Speaker 8 (01:45:44):
And once that happens, it's kind of, it's out of control.
But I think what sucks as someone who's been covering
this for so long is there are certain names that
when I see them, I know the playbook. I know
what's happening. I know what's coming and I'm prepared for it.
And no one in media was prepared for it. And
they have failed to identify anyone. people in XXXY shirts

(01:46:05):
in the front row of, you know, a basketball game
as wearing hate symbols. They have failed to state that, like,
trans people are being genocided by the government, and it
has turned this entire thing into, like, a we can
agree to disagree. And so I feel like that's kind
of the missing piece here, right?

Speaker 1 (01:46:25):
Yeah, no, it is just, like, an abject failure to do, like,
an iota of research on, like, who these folks are.
So following the event with the storm, Coach getting penalized
for being a normal person, the WNBA's statement pissed me
off so hard because it's like, we're having hard conversations,

(01:46:48):
thinking about a lot of things. And there has never
been a trans woman competing in the WNBA. There are
no trans athletes who are likely to be competing in
the WNBA anytime soon. This is such a hypothetical non-issue.
This shouldn't be a hard conversation to have. Just take

(01:47:12):
us stance. Even if you fuck up, take us stance.
I swear to God.

Speaker 5 (01:47:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:47:17):
And not only is it a non-issue at this point,
we have people saying, well, we can have hard conversations
and agree to disagree. And I'm like, who gave a
bunch of cis people permission to disagree about a group
that they are not part of and policies that actively
do not affect them? And the other piece that the
media doesn't do is like, okay, we can agree to

(01:47:38):
disagree or we have two different opinions. What are those opinions? Like,
one group wants human rights, basic human rights, and to
be included in society. And the other group wants, at best,
for a group of people to, like, not exist, and
at worst, to die.

Speaker 1 (01:47:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:47:52):
The fact that we're in a genocide, like, by our government,
and nobody will name that. And this is, that's so frustrating.
These are the stakes here, right?

Speaker 5 (01:48:01):
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:48:02):
This is a microcosm for all of it. And it's
just like you're saying, agree to disagree on what? What
are you disagreeing with? Let's say that the WNBA takes
the radical stance of implementing the former standards that the
International Olympic Committee, had up until fairly recently regarding trans athletes,

(01:48:24):
which necessitated like two years of hormone therapy. before a
trans woman could compete. And just on a personal stance,
I'm like, I don't like setting hard boundaries for when
trans people can exist. But that aside, having just a
baseline policy that will not impact a single player currently

(01:48:44):
involved in the WNBA, that's so bare bones. That is
the easiest thing to do because it functionally changes nothing
on the day to day.

Speaker 8 (01:48:52):
I do think the WNBA needs to be careful because
we've seen like the policy you're talking about wouldn't impact anybody.
And whether I agree that they should have a policy,
I mean, you know, I don't really think anyone should
have these policies.

Speaker 10 (01:49:07):
No, no, no.

Speaker 1 (01:49:08):
I agree. I agree with that.

Speaker 8 (01:49:09):
But I see your point. I think my concern becomes
we've seen how chromosome testing and some of these other
forms of sex testing are happening above the WNBA and
often in the, you know, the International Olympic Committee and everything.

Speaker 7 (01:49:23):
Oh my God.

Speaker 5 (01:49:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:49:25):
And often, right, that trickles down. And I think something
the WNBA needs to be very careful about and cognizant of,
the people who are most directly impacted by these sex
testing policies, there's no trans women in the WNBA and
they won't be impacted. But, you know, Black women in
particular are so often that directly impacted the population like

(01:49:45):
the league the WNBA is actually full of people who
are directly impacted by a lot of the policies that
we're talking around even though they're not trans and so
it's a very slippery slope that I like I hope
they get right in this moment because if they go
too far in the other direction it will be a
mess in like.

Speaker 1 (01:50:02):
12 ways Oh yeah, no, and I'm not actually advocating
for them to implement a policy like that. I'm just like,
for me, having any policy, just to shut up like
the couple of former NBA yahoos who are like, I'm
going to go be a woman now. And I'm like, well,
you can go shut up.

Speaker 5 (01:50:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:50:21):
Oh no, I didn't think you were advocating for that.
I think just because we can see how sex testing
is going elsewhere, I think sometimes people forget.

Speaker 1 (01:50:31):
No, I remember Caster Semenya. Like, don't worry. I, like,
absolutely do not want to see that shit happen.

Speaker 8 (01:50:40):
Yeah, and but mainstream, like, whether mainstream people or, like,
mainstream media or just, like, cis people in general, they don't, like,
there's so many nuances here, too.

Speaker 1 (01:50:49):
Yes.

Speaker 8 (01:50:49):
They get completely missed and everything gets flattened and then
it becomes more well, we'll just put this policy in
place and then, you know, people don't think about that
it's a whole different, you know, can of worms.

Speaker 1 (01:50:59):
Yeah. The fact that they had no policy before any
of this came into being, it's kind of what I
think led this to be the perfect storm.

Speaker 9 (01:51:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:51:08):
Because, like, with it being such a blank slate for grifters,
bad actors, and even just super misinformed folks who don't
really know what's going on, like, to kind of project
and or manipulate the situation, there is not a clean,
quick answer.

Speaker 8 (01:51:29):
There's not. And I will say a lot of leagues,
I think, are trying not to put policies in place
right now if they don't already have one, because if
there's no policy, there's nothing to violate. And I think
they hoped they could fly under the radar. I know
that a lot of trans advocates in this space are
actually you know, behind the scenes kind of suggesting that
as well, kind of wait, wait it out a little
bit because without a policy, you hope you don't end

(01:51:51):
up on the radar of the Trump administration or whoever else.
Obviously that has not been what happened here at all. Unfortunately.

Speaker 6 (01:51:59):
I want to talk a little bit about the weird
shit where like Ennis Cantor freedom, who's like a former
sort of NBA washout turds, like right wing, culture war
guy him and like Royce White and apparently some other

(01:52:19):
just absolute fail sons of the MNBA they're like oh
we're going to declare for the for the 2027 draft
and I think that that in some ways I think
is actually a really clarifying thing for what the question
of can trans women play women's sports is actually about.
And I think this is the thing that the media

(01:52:40):
has really not understood because, you know, some of it,
I think, is just transmisogyny, right? Like, they don't actually
really think that trans women are women. But, like, the
argument over can trans women play women's sports, if you
listen to how people like Sophie Cunningham frame it, and

(01:53:02):
this has spread everywhere, throughout even parts of the Democratic Party,
where you get people talking about, like, well, should young
girls be playing against men? And that's the actual argument here.
The stakes of this argument is not about sports. It's,
are trans women women, or are we not? And if
we're not, then it becomes sort of de facto legitimate

(01:53:23):
to impose, you know, all of the segregation policies that
they've been putting in place, all of the, you know,
and when I say they've been putting in place, I'm
not talking about even sports leagues, I'm talking about, like,
the federal government.

Speaker 7 (01:53:34):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:53:34):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:53:35):
And a bunch of state governments, the Catholic Church... you know,
in terms of gender affirming care bans, that's the actual
stakes of this is like, are we women or not?
And the moment you go, no, you're not, you're like
some other kind of thing where like, maybe we'll let
you do this eventually at some point, you start getting

(01:53:55):
people making, you know, we listen to these people being like, well,
the leagues can decide individually, like league by league, who
they think is like legitimately qualified to play. And it's like, okay,
this is an argument for segregation.

Speaker 1 (01:54:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:54:07):
Right? This is explicitly an argument that is, leagues should
be allowed to segregate players. And that's also the whole, like, oh,
why don't trans people go start their own league? It's like,
we had this.

Speaker 5 (01:54:17):
It was segregation.

Speaker 6 (01:54:18):
It's this thing that's, like, infuriating. It just doesn't click.
That's what the goal is here.

Speaker 4 (01:54:24):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:54:24):
I think what makes, like, trans women in sports such
a potent, like, rallying point, it's preying on so many
axes of Not just like putting young girls in danger,
but also like I can like there's an economic component
to because like so many people get involved in sports
as kids so that they're able to get college scholarships.

Speaker 7 (01:54:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:54:49):
And so like it's just it becomes this thing all
the way down.

Speaker 6 (01:54:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:54:53):
But, like, it's this situation where by saying that this
boy could be on the girls' team, that is implicitly
signaling this notion that this boy is going to get
all of the college scholarships. Or this trans woman who
we're framing as a boy on the girls' team because,
God forbid, they be normal for 10 seconds. And aside

(01:55:15):
from everything else, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how
much money there isn't in like women's college sports programs
or even like women's professional sports. There is not a
single trans athlete who was transitioning for that good, good money.

Speaker 8 (01:55:32):
No, it's never, never happened. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:55:34):
That is literally never happened.

Speaker 6 (01:55:37):
Like, even if you were to transition to play in
the WNBA, it's like, great, you're making you're making as
much money as like, I don't know, if you're the
best player in the league, you might be making as
much money as like a practice team guy on like
an NFL team.

Speaker 1 (01:55:51):
Well, like.

Speaker 8 (01:55:52):
If you're transitioning so that you can play women's sports,
something tells me you just needed an excuse and you
wanted to transition anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:55:59):
Also that, like, if you start, okay, actually, actually, if
you start transitioning as a bit so you can dominate
women's sports, call me. I want to have you on
my podcast.

Speaker 8 (01:56:13):
Truly commitment to the bit.

Speaker 6 (01:56:14):
It's like, obviously, like, none of the people who are
doing this are ever going to like do any kind
of even vaguely transitioning thing.

Speaker 5 (01:56:20):
No.

Speaker 6 (01:56:21):
The closest thing I've seen to this, the actress who
did She's the Man.

Speaker 8 (01:56:25):
Amanda Bynes.

Speaker 6 (01:56:27):
Yeah, like talked about it in an interview one time
that like having to like pretend to be a guy
gave her, like she didn't have the words gender dysphoria,
but if you read her describing it, it's like, oh no,
she got gender dysphoria.

Speaker 1 (01:56:37):
No, she totally talked about having gender dysphoria. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:56:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:56:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:56:42):
Yeah, like, it's very genuinely, again, like, if this is
the push that you need to start playing with your gender,
because for some reason you just really want to play
on the women's teams. Like, baby girl.

Speaker 6 (01:56:54):
DIY HRT.

Speaker 1 (01:56:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:56:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:56:58):
It's just this, like, right-wing protect-the-children fantasy that they're using
as the justification for, you know, like, this is the
wedge issue that they use to push all of the
rest of their stuff. And if you go back to, like,
the Daily Wire people who were instrumental in getting a
bunch of the anti-trans bills passed under the Biden administration,
before they kind of blew up their company trying to

(01:57:19):
make Pendragon.

Speaker 1 (01:57:21):
They're thankfully in their flop era right now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:57:24):
But back when they were doing this, you would listen
to them talk about how we need to eradicate transgenderism,
because that was the actual goal. It was never about sports.
It was about eradicating us yeah the second.

Speaker 1 (01:57:37):
They're allowed to speak yes that's when the mask comes
off and yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:57:42):
And I think the piece about the trans misogyny that
I think sometimes gets missed too is we can look
at somebody like Jennifer Say who you know runs the
XXXY athletics and she in addition to someone like Nancy
Hogshead who was an Olympic swimmer who started the women's
sports policy working group with Martina Navratilova similar kind of

(01:58:03):
group trying to not allow trans women and girls to
play sports with girls. These are people who actually made
their post-athletic kind of names as advocates against sexual abuse
in sport. They'd both been victims of adult male coaches.
This is where that really insidious, turfy kind of when

(01:58:25):
you paint trans women as men. Again, the problem is
still men, right? And so these are people who were
known as feminist advocates in the space before making the
anti-trans pivot. And I think that sometimes that piece gets
missed too in the very insidious way that framing trans

(01:58:45):
women as men is. actually can make some of these
target points of making them seem like threats appealing or
make sense to maybe feminists, quote-unquote, like Jennifer Say or
Nancy Hong said.

Speaker 6 (01:58:59):
You know, this has been a thing that's been happening
back down to, like, the original TERFs, right? Like, the original, like,
transphobic wing of the radical feminists, where, like, if you
look at how this played out during the porn wars, too,
one of the fundamental... issues with organizing as any kind
of marginalized group is that, you know, there's always going
to be people inside of your marginalized group who you

(01:59:21):
don't agree with. And there can become a point where
the incentive to, instead of trying to like fight or
directly like have conflict with the actual group that is
oppressing you, right? Where it's like, yeah, if you're doing
women's sports, the group that is oppressing you is like
the men who are abusing you, right? You can look
at this in sort of the class context, right? Where

(01:59:43):
you know, like, yeah, if you were a worker, like
you were being oppressed by the actual ruling class, which
is the capitalist class that owns the means of production.
But there becomes a point where it's easier to try
to police the behavior of your own than it is
to fight the dominant group. And this is, you know,
I'm taking this on a little bit of a tangent here,
but like, if you've ever heard the term like the lumpenproletariat,

(02:00:04):
it's just this term that I know there are going
to be some people in the audience who are very
attached to that term as like a self-referential thing. But
it's supposed to be this, like, part of the working
class that's, like, drifters and vagrants and, like, Marx goes
on this, like, really sort of, like, blood-curdling rants about, like,
organ grinders and, like, pimps and, like, runaway soldiers and, like,

(02:00:27):
all of the, like, boot shiners on the street and, like,
all of these groups of people who have nothing to
do with each other from, like, a sociological class sense. Like,
there is, like, absolutely nothing in common that, like, someone
who polishes boots on the street has in common with, like,
someone who's, like, run away from being a soldier. But
this is, like, Marx's, you know, there's this thing in
the journal Endnotes about this. This is, like, Marx's disgust,

(02:00:49):
specifically at, like, the Victorian disgust about, like, this part
of the class that he thinks is, like, lowly or whatever.
And Marx just, like, goes off on these people. And
this has been a thing for a really long time of, like,
the working class movement trying to, like, purify itself of these, like,
lumpen elements who are supposed to be, like, anarchists and, like, unpure.
And you get this in the feminist movement where, like,

(02:01:10):
in the feminist movement, like, that was us. That was
trans women. We were, like, the elements that was, like,
the easiest to, you know, you could be, like, well,
all these trans women are actually men and they're trying to, like,
infiltrate our spaces. And you can spend all of your
energy trying to purify your own movement against this other
group of people who are inside of your movement instead
of actually like fighting the outside and also you'll be

(02:01:33):
rewarded for it you're.

Speaker 8 (02:01:33):
Doing the patriarchy's work for them.

Speaker 6 (02:01:36):
Yeah and they'll pay you for it instead of fighting you.

Speaker 8 (02:01:39):
Right by pitting cis women and trans women against each
other they fight each other instead of realizing that their
struggles are tied up together and you know fight the
patriarchy together Yeah, right?

Speaker 1 (02:01:51):
Like, literally, like, trans access to healthcare is going to
help everyone else, too. It's that simple. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:01:59):
There's, like, an unbelievable number of, like, reproductive healthcare organizing, like,
are trans people.

Speaker 1 (02:02:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:02:05):
Like, it's a bunch of trans fans. And also trans fans, too. Like,
it's like, you know, these are struggles that are intimately
bound up. From an external perspective, if you can pit
these two groups against each other, and then from an
internal perspective, if you can, you know... convince one of
these groups that the reason they're being oppressed is the
other one and channel them into this path of least
resistance where you can nominally be doing what you think

(02:02:27):
is like radicalism to like free your people but is
actually just like fucking over another group of people in
service of the ruling class you can do genocides and
here we are yep yeah and here we are So

(02:02:50):
there's a couple more things I wanted to touch on.
One of which, and I think Bugs, you have an
interesting perspective on this, is that like, it didn't used
to be like this for trans athletes.

Speaker 1 (02:03:01):
It literally didn't used to be like this. So yeah, like,
I mean, I'm the very funny camp of having been
a college athlete, having competed on both the men's and
women's teams for track, albeit this would have been like,
you know, small potatoes, D3, everything. But it was such

(02:03:22):
a non-issue for me to this. So this would have
been like end terms. I'm not going to give like
firm dates, but like, you know, end of the Obama era,
beginning of the Trump era, roundabouts, like mid tens. And
I never faced any pushback to myself from either like

(02:03:43):
my teammates or anyone that I competed against. I ran
track and it I mean, it was kind of like
eye opening because I was expecting it to be like
much shittier. But like, no, like it was just people
were just normal. And I mean, I think this is
also just kind of thinking about the ways in which
like transphobia writ large has become so many people's like
pet little bigotry situation because they want to. They want

(02:04:07):
to oppress someone. And it's so, so, so easy to
go after the trans. But yeah, like I managed to
compete at a fairly high level within D3 as a
trans woman. And I like genuinely was terrified for like,

(02:04:28):
I competed in nationals and for like a week after
I was like, and then someone's going to show up
and people are going to like, I'm like, someone's going
to write.

Speaker 7 (02:04:39):
An article about this.

Speaker 1 (02:04:41):
And no one did because I mean, I really don't
want to bring like the politics of passing into this,
but like that could have also played a factor at
least when dealing with like betters. Like obviously everyone on
my team was very aware because like, Even though I was,
I was like very baby Tran running on the men's
team because it was just like, well, I want to

(02:05:03):
compete at the airbug rules. No one cares that the
trans woman is smoking the men's team because she hadn't
started hormones yet. But like, even within the context of that, like,
and again, just getting back to what we said earlier,
I do not think there is a simple or one

(02:05:24):
size fits all policy for any sort of like hormonal requirement,
because as we discussed, that is so right for abuse.
But I can speak from personal experience in saying that
after being on hormones for a period of time, the
fastest 400 I ever ran as a woman was was

(02:05:45):
slower than the slowest 400 I had ever run competitively
in track dating back to my freshman year of high school.
And so, like, if a trans woman's competing in sports,
it's probably going to be fine. We have seen this

(02:06:06):
over and over in the few instances where trans women
have been allowed to compete. Like... Leah Thomas took fifth.
Even in the moment, like I think before Riley Gaines
became Riley Gaines, like that was still a nothing moment. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:06:26):
And I think it's funny because we can argue about
this on a basis of like a human rights issue,
which I think it fundamentally is and that should be enough.
But then if you like people want to argue about
the science, The science is also on our side. Like
there's literally no evidence that there's an advantage. You talk

(02:06:47):
to any trans woman who has been an athlete before
and after transition, and she will tell you, I lost
muscle mass. I lost bone density. I lost like lung capacity.
Like I watched my times go down or my weight
go down.

Speaker 1 (02:06:59):
Yeah. And it happens pretty fast or it happened fast
for me. Like your mileage may vary, but.

Speaker 8 (02:07:05):
Well, my mileage is I started taking low dose tea.
So I'm going to make the Olympics next year. Watch out.

Speaker 5 (02:07:11):
Oh, well done.

Speaker 9 (02:07:12):
Alright, alright, alright.

Speaker 8 (02:07:13):
I'm on testosterone now, so watch out.

Speaker 6 (02:07:17):
Well, and it's one of these things where, like, you
can look at the extent to which this isn't really.

Speaker 3 (02:07:24):
Like, about.

Speaker 6 (02:07:26):
It's literally not about this. You can tell it's not
about ability because, like, I can't play women's chess.

Speaker 1 (02:07:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:07:32):
It's like, what the f * * * are we
doing here?

Speaker 1 (02:07:35):
Like, the second Magic the Gathering bans trans women from
the pro tour....

Speaker 8 (02:07:41):
Are they going to have a Pro Tour anymore?

Speaker 1 (02:07:43):
Yeah, no, the Pro Tour actually just came back. As
of this year, thank God.

Speaker 8 (02:07:49):
Yeah, but ability-wise, too, I'm like, so what? Let trans
people win things? That's also okay?

Speaker 6 (02:07:56):
Yeah, it comes down to this. Again, the fundamental question is...
is a trans woman a woman or not? And if
you're a woman, then you have all of the rights
that a woman does. And if you're not, then you don't.
That's just fundamentally what it is.

Speaker 3 (02:08:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:08:13):
And it's so frustrating that this has turned into this
sort of like, Oh, we can agree to disagree about
whether you should exist or not.

Speaker 1 (02:08:24):
That's like, well, can I agree to disagree whether you
should exist or not? Is this a two-way street? I'm
just using my platform to advocate for my beliefs.

Speaker 6 (02:08:33):
I think journalists should be banned from having health care.
I think it's actually dangerous for me as a trans
woman to exist in the same space as a journalist,
because journalists have a long tradition of... and history of
harming my people, so I think we should talk about
restricting their access to healthcare because giving journalists healthcare allows
them to reproduce transphobia.

Speaker 1 (02:08:52):
I mean, look, it got me convinced.

Speaker 7 (02:08:56):
God.

Speaker 6 (02:08:57):
Well, okay, before we wrap up, I do want to
get a little bit of joy out of this episode, which, so,
the kind of, one of the kind of concluding points
of this story, I don't know, given the fact that, like,
we now live in an administration where the richest man
on Earth gave two Nazi salutes at the inauguration, like,
Who knows, like, by the time this episode comes out,

(02:09:18):
Sophie Cunningham might have, like, fucking born a swastika or
some shit. But, like, there's a kind of capstone to
this story, which is Sophie Cunningham doing this, oh, why
are all the journalists talking about the culture wars instead
of focusing on basketball? So I want to take a
second to talk about Sophie Cunningham as a fucking basketball player.

(02:09:39):
Because I have been so angry about having to fucking
hear about this motherfucker that Like, you know what?

Speaker 7 (02:09:46):
Fuck it.

Speaker 6 (02:09:46):
I'm going to do the Julius Caesar bit. The whole
of Gaul, Julius Caesar once remarked, is divided into three parts. Likewise,
analysis of athletics is also divided into three parts, one
of which the tape grinders inhabit, the analytics nerds another,
and the old school coaches the third. The life of
the tape grinder consists of endlessly digesting and watching like

(02:10:09):
fucking 17 second clips of some athlete doing something and
trying to figure out whether or not they're good. The
analytics nerd lives in statistical annexes of unimaginable tedium from
which they emerge to tell you that this player is
either good or bad based on a bunch of unbelievably
convoluted mathematical formulas they are not capable of explaining. And
the old school coach largely consists of like old white

(02:10:31):
guys on the internet going that boy nice after they've
been fired for saying slurs in a locker room. Now,
very rarely, all three of these factions will come to
a consensus on a player. You have heard their names.
This is Aja Wilson. This is Michael Jordan. This is, like,
Peek LeBron. All three factions will unite to be like,

(02:10:52):
this player is good.

Speaker 9 (02:10:54):
Occasionally!

Speaker 6 (02:10:55):
Once in a blue moon, you will get all three
factions agreeing that a player fucking sucks.

Speaker 5 (02:11:03):
And that is Sophie Cunningham.

Speaker 6 (02:11:04):
She is statistically one of the worst players I have
ever seen. Like the regular statistics, the game before she
did her big, she did her big, we're pivoting back
to sports. She shot 0% from the field. 0%. Can
you explain what that means for a player to shoot 0%

(02:11:27):
from the field?

Speaker 8 (02:11:28):
It means they didn't make a single basket. I mean,
I love this pivot for her. It seems like being
transphobic is somehow making an already bad basketball player worse. And, like, again,
couldn't have happened to a better person, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 (02:11:42):
I was about to say I could do better than that,
but then I'm pretty good at points, so.

Speaker 3 (02:11:45):
Oh, no.

Speaker 6 (02:11:48):
Okay, speaking of I Could Do Better, can we talk
about the game that she played after she did her
We Need to Pivot Back to Basketball thing?

Speaker 10 (02:11:54):
Because.

Speaker 6 (02:11:55):
Like, this is not a good WNBA player, even when
she's not embroiled in controversy. Like, there's, oh God, who
was it?

Speaker 7 (02:12:02):
The Stephen A.

Speaker 6 (02:12:03):
Smith joke about someone getting a single single. Like, if
she averages a single single over the course of a week,
that is her doing good. This is someone who comes
off the bench, misses a bunch of three-pointers, gets somewhere
between like eight and twelve points, and then fights people.

Speaker 8 (02:12:18):
I think her career average is about eight points a game,
but She played like 28 minutes last week and scored
two points, three points, something like that.

Speaker 2 (02:12:26):
Oh, wow.

Speaker 8 (02:12:27):
Yeah, you know, really productive time on the floor.

Speaker 1 (02:12:31):
Go for her. You could put a horse on the
fucking court and it would do more.

Speaker 8 (02:12:35):
Truly, I do feel like maybe I could also at
some point throw a basket and it might go in.

Speaker 5 (02:12:42):
Statistically, it should happen.

Speaker 3 (02:12:46):
Statistically.

Speaker 5 (02:12:47):
That two-point game, she scored two points on free throws.

Speaker 1 (02:12:50):
She didn't throw a basket.

Speaker 5 (02:12:51):
She just got free throws. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (02:12:54):
Oh my god.

Speaker 6 (02:12:55):
And then she had another game, which was statistically... This
isn't really an advanced statistic. There's a basketball statistic called
plus minus, which, Frankie, you correct me if I'm explaining
this incorrectly, but it is when you are on the court,
either how many more points does your team score or
does the opponent's team score? So if you're, for example,
like a plus 10, that means when you were on

(02:13:17):
the court, your team scored plus 10 more points than
when you were off the court.

Speaker 9 (02:13:20):
Yes.

Speaker 6 (02:13:21):
She played a game where she was on the court
for 17 minutes and she had a plus minus of
negative 28.

Speaker 8 (02:13:28):
Incredible.

Speaker 5 (02:13:30):
How is it even possible to be on a court?

Speaker 8 (02:13:32):
Is it the worst game in WNBA history? It's close.

Speaker 6 (02:13:36):
It's the worst game on a win.

Speaker 1 (02:13:37):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (02:13:37):
Okay.

Speaker 8 (02:13:38):
Yes. There's a great Instagram account. I think has to
talk to WNBA stats or WNBA data. That's what it's called.

Speaker 3 (02:13:45):
Maddie.

Speaker 8 (02:13:46):
And Maddie looked at this game and it was definitely,
if not the worst game in WNBA history, very close.

Speaker 6 (02:13:53):
Yeah, I think it was like the worst ever in
a win. And I kind of emphasized enough, right? The
WNBA games are shorter than NBA games. So you have
less time to build scoring volume, right? So you kind
of have to be more efficient. To have the other
team score 28 more points when you were on the
court for 17 minutes is astronomical.

Speaker 8 (02:14:15):
They might as well be down a player. Like, why
are you even there?

Speaker 1 (02:14:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:14:18):
No, if you were literally playing four out of five,
I think you would do better. Like, that's like, it's astonishing.
This is a slightly dishonest way of putting it, but
it gets into like how colossal of a fuck up
this is.

Speaker 8 (02:14:33):
Yeah, I mean, she's never won a championship at any level.
I mean, unless you're counting high school.

Speaker 6 (02:14:38):
No, of course not.

Speaker 5 (02:14:39):
Yeah, because she's bad.

Speaker 6 (02:14:41):
And like, to put it in perspective, how bad being
minus 28 is. So Aja Wilson is by a pretty
big margin, like the highest points per game score in
the WNBA this season. She's scoring 26 points a game.
That's the best player in the league. The like, a
kind of like, I don't know, like perennial MVP, like generally,
like literally a generational player is dropping on average 26

(02:15:02):
points a game.

Speaker 5 (02:15:03):
You were minus 28.

Speaker 6 (02:15:05):
Having you on the court was like having Aja Wilson,
but better on the other team.

Speaker 2 (02:15:12):
Like....

Speaker 6 (02:15:15):
Like, and this is the f * * * ing
basketball players.

Speaker 3 (02:15:20):
I just like.

Speaker 6 (02:15:21):
This is the basketball player who's, like, maybe, like, the
second or third most famous person in the WNBA now
because of all of this bullshit?

Speaker 8 (02:15:28):
No, truly, I was at the Sun game last weekend,
and they were not playing the Fever, and there was
two people in Fever Cunningham jerseys, which is obviously now
the new MAGA hat, and I kind of just wanted
to go up and be like, why are you wearing
the jersey of, like, the worst player in the league? Like,
at least the Caitlin Clark jersey, I kind of get it, but, like,
Sophie Cunningham, really?

Speaker 1 (02:15:47):
Yeah is everything okay at home like yeah like you
need someone to check in on you babes.

Speaker 6 (02:15:53):
Like oh god as just like a source of joy
i want to close this by talking about olivia miles
who is maybe my favorite basketball player ever now who
is so cool i love her she's great she's my
height So she's like a 5'10 point guard, but like

(02:16:13):
she scores at the rim. Nothing about the way that
she plays basketball makes any sense to me. It's like
this shouldn't work and it does and it's beautiful and
I love it. And she's like, she was the best
player on the best team in the league as a rookie.

Speaker 8 (02:16:28):
She's amazing to watch. You know, I knew she would
be great in W. I think I was shocked at
how quickly her game translated. And I think it really
highlighted not to like shit on Caitlyn again, but I
think it highlighted what people kind of thought Caitlyn Clark
would look like because, you know, she's also a point
guard and they have similar, you know, great passing ability,

(02:16:51):
great court vision. Those are things that both players share.
And you're like, oh, well, there's always a transition period.
You know, you're playing against grown women. Like, you got,
you know, you're going to get your butt kicked your
first season. That's just kind of how it goes. And
then Olivia Miles steps in and it was like seamless,
like no time had passed. Courtney Williams was like happy
to be like, I'm going back to being a shooting guard.

(02:17:11):
You're leading our team as a rookie. Like you got us.
She is, I don't know how to describe what she
looks like when she plays because nothing she does seems
like it should be possible. And yet it's also just
like graceful and powerful and like smooth and just kind
of everything all at once. And She's got really great
style off the court, and I love that. Also, did

(02:17:34):
you see the nickname? Because she wears glasses off the court.
She wears, like, goggles on the court. And the nickname,
The Spectacle, which I'm now obsessed with.

Speaker 1 (02:17:43):
Oh, my God.

Speaker 6 (02:17:44):
Oh, that's so good.

Speaker 1 (02:17:45):
That's so good. No, because, I've only recently learned who
she is. It's literally a couple days before we recorded this,
and I'm like, holy fuck.

Speaker 8 (02:17:55):
Yeah, she's breaking ankles everywhere. And she could be an
MVP candidate. I think the only time we've seen a
Rookie of the Year and MVP was Candice Parker in
the same year. She could do it.

Speaker 7 (02:18:08):
I support it.

Speaker 6 (02:18:09):
Yeah, it is really truly one of those, like, I
feel so bad for her for having to be in
an MVP race with Aja Wilson. But, like, the other
thing about her that I love is, like, she also
plays defense.

Speaker 1 (02:18:20):
She does.

Speaker 6 (02:18:21):
And she, like, seems to really enjoy it. And, like,
I have this, like, indelible image of her like in
this game where she's trying to defend someone. I can't
remember who she's playing. She's trying to defend someone who's
like four inches taller than her. And she like bites
on a fake.

Speaker 5 (02:18:37):
So she's like in the air.

Speaker 6 (02:18:40):
But somehow she has like, she's like, she's like in
the air jumping and she has like her back to
the shooter. But somehow she has managed to angle this
such that even though she's, she like bit on a
fake and is jumping, she's still blocking the shot by
being in the air in front of them.

Speaker 5 (02:18:56):
And I was like, how is that even possible? Like,
How do you do that? I don't know.

Speaker 6 (02:19:05):
You owe it to yourself to go watch some of
her highlights. Go watch Olivia Miles' highlights. It was what
I was using as eye bleach after I was trying
to watch Sophie Cunningham tape, which was one of the
most miserable experiences of my life.

Speaker 8 (02:19:19):
Yeah, Olivia Miles is kind of a walking highlight reel.
She's really something to watch. I'm excited that it's just
her rookie season, too. I get a lot more of
her Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:19:31):
And she's on a really good team. She's in a
great environment. Like, everyone seems to love her. And I just,
I'm so happy for her.

Speaker 1 (02:19:38):
I'm still hooked on to this spectacle. That's so fucking good.

Speaker 8 (02:19:42):
It's so good. So good.

Speaker 2 (02:19:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:19:48):
So this has been, this has been a good happen here.
And thank you both for coming on and also for
letting me gush about one of my favorite players because
I love her.

Speaker 7 (02:19:55):
She's so great.

Speaker 8 (02:19:56):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 7 (02:19:57):
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 (02:19:57):
Literally anytime. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 6 (02:20:00):
If you would like to be found and have people
find your work, where can people find your work?

Speaker 8 (02:20:04):
I am on social media on Instagram and blue sky
at the Frankie DLC. And the, probably the best place
to follow my work is my newsletter called out of
your league where I write stuff, but I also link
out to the stuff that I write elsewhere.

Speaker 3 (02:20:20):
Really good. And we have a.

Speaker 8 (02:20:22):
Great queer women's sports discord community. Um, And yeah, it's
pretty dope.

Speaker 3 (02:20:27):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:20:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:20:28):
You can find me on blue sky. Yeah. But about
stuff and, or if you've enjoyed hearing my dulcet cackles,
I got a podcast called everything is wrestling, but I
do with my friend Ella Taylor, where we basically just
invite cool people on to info dump about their special interests.
And we try to relate it to professional wrestling. I

(02:20:50):
think at the time, this drops the most recent episode was,
will either have been the law is wrestling or Muppets
is wrestling.

Speaker 8 (02:21:01):
I'm proud of mom.

Speaker 1 (02:21:03):
Hell yeah, hell yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:21:04):
Thank you two again so much for coming on and
talking about this. And may we all live long enough
to see trans women actually in the WNBA.

Speaker 3 (02:21:13):
Honestly, yeah. That'd be sick as hell.

Speaker 1 (02:21:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:21:28):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. A
few months ago, the Department of Justice indicted 15 anti-ICE
protesters who participated in the community response to Operation Metro
Surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this year. Here's U.S. Attorney
Daniel Rosen announcing the charges in a press conference dated

(02:21:51):
June 16th, 2026.

Speaker 11 (02:21:54):
Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,
which directed the Department of Justice to prioritize politically motivated violence.
To accomplish that mission, the Deputy Attorney General stood up
Joint Task Force Vanguard to enforce a national security strategy

(02:22:15):
to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political
violence and intimidation. Today, a federal indictment was unsealed, charging
15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers
and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa

(02:22:36):
groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in
our state.

Speaker 3 (02:22:42):
As U.S.

Speaker 5 (02:22:43):
Attorney Daniel Rosen said, all 15 quote-unquote Antifa defendants were
charged with conspiracy to impede or injure an officer. According
to the DOJ, the conspiracy to impede amounted to plans
to temporarily block roadways around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building,

(02:23:07):
where ICE operations in the Twin Cities were and still
are based out of. The start of the 95-page indictment reads, quote,
The defendants were members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action,
which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota, or DAM,

(02:23:27):
an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal
law and immigration enforcement. Direct action refers to disruptive and
obstructive tactics used by participants to forcibly challenge, block, or
stop immigration raids, detentions, and deportations. DAM describes itself as
A decentralized coalition of working class people engaged in various

(02:23:49):
forms of community defense against the current federal occupation happening
within the wider metro area and against state and far-right
violence more broadly, unquote. Here's attorney Daniel Rosen again at
that press conference.

Speaker 11 (02:24:02):
The organization trains its members in the aggressive use of
shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization
against law enforcement actions.

Speaker 5 (02:24:15):
The first piece of evidence presented by Rosen in this
press conference is a Facebook post by one of the
defendants reading, it's going to get so much worse and
a nonviolent ideology and our politicians aren't going to save us.
We need to become ungovernable. We need to actively resist

(02:24:35):
any way we can to materially stop the Nazi occupation forces.
I do think it's worth noting that When President Trump
spoke at the Libertarian Convention in 2024, the wall behind
him featured giant text reading, Become Ungovernable. Now, most of

(02:24:56):
this 95-page indictment is spent detailing random conversations on Signal
and various group chats discussing First Amendment activity, planning protests,
discussing how to go about fundraising... making flyers, participating in
ICE rapid response, writing articles on Crimethink, and an anarchist

(02:25:19):
speaking tour, all of which the indictment lists as, quote,
overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. And that's how
conspiracy charges work. Not all the overt acts themselves have
to be illegal. In fact, they usually are not. They
just have to be actions taken involving multiple people to

(02:25:42):
advance some other criminal goal. In this case, quote unquote,
impeding law enforcement. And what makes this case particularly weak
is that the impeding in this case amounts to extremely
ordinary First Amendment protests. So, not only are the majority,
if not all, of the overt acts listed completely legal actions,

(02:26:06):
they were actions taken in furtherance of legally protected First
Amendment activity. Now, the indictment does list a few other
charges against specific individuals. One person is charged with allegedly
making threats based on statements made in Facebook and Instagram videos.
Two people are charged with interstate stalking based on following

(02:26:32):
vehicles leaving the Whipple building across state lines into Wisconsin.
One person is charged with allegedly assaulting a federal officer
by knocking notes out of their hand and destruction of
government property for kicking a vehicle. And lastly, another defendant
is charged with assaulting a federal officer for allegedly brake-checking

(02:26:56):
and side-swiping the officer's vehicle, causing a collision. No evidence
for these alleged assaults has been presented thus far. But
the conspiracy charge, tying the 15 defendants together, is the
most oh-so-it's-illegal-to-make-plans-with-friends-now case I've ever seen. If it wasn't clear

(02:27:18):
from the moment this indictment dropped that It only gets
more and more clear over time that this case is
not based on the strength of the evidence or threat
to public safety, but rather political targeting based on the
beliefs held by the defendants and the DOJ's ability to
paint the defendants as Antifa lunatics. separate from the majority

(02:27:41):
of peaceful, liberal anti-ice protesters, all while building a precedent
to criminalize ordinary First Amendment protest activity, including ICE rapid response.
To make it so that any protest against ICE is
qualifies as interfering or impeding ICE from carrying out its

(02:28:02):
immigration enforcement duties. And to create this precedent, the feds
located a small group of Antifa, some outside agitators, that
they believe a jury might be more likely to convict
than the dozens and dozens of cases that have failed
to move forward. In absence of any evidence of illegal

(02:28:23):
violent acts, the DOJ must rely on radical-sounding statements made
by the defendants discussing their politics to turn a jury
against them. And that's most of what the indictment contains.
It's not detailing alleged acts of violence. It's detailing conversations
about protesting. This indictment contains a lot of signal chat logs,

(02:28:47):
as well as conversations from in-person meetings, which leads one
to wonder... How exactly did DHS obtain that information? Well,
a few weeks ago, about 30 documents were released as
a part of a discovery motion filed by one of
the defendants. And these documents provide maybe the closest look

(02:29:09):
at how federal law enforcement under Trump, and specifically how
DHS and Homeland Security Investigations are investigating and surveilling not just,
quote unquote, Antifa, but anti-ICE protesters more broadly, community activist groups,
left-wing organizations and non-profits, and even labor unions. The lawyer

(02:29:29):
for the defendant in this case called this a, quote,
unprecedented campaign by DHS to spy on Minnesotans. Before I
get into some of these specific details, I want to
read the opening overview by the defense lawyer, Kevin Ryok,
discussing what Discovery has so far revealed. Quote, Undercover agents

(02:29:50):
posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools,
and union halls. These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations
with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment
right to protest ICE's lawless rampage in our state. The
agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and

(02:30:11):
internet searches and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.
Homeland Security Investigations' abuses did not stop there. HSI secretly
obtained financial records for several national labor unions and social
justice non-profits, all with zero criminal predicate to do so.

(02:30:32):
The government's presentation to the grand jury reflected this broad
and irrational investigation. With no evidence, the government alleged to
the grand jury that the conspiracy in this case extends
far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis
Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarcha,

(02:30:54):
Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit Bicycle Repair Shop,
among others. These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the
fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump administration. President
Trump and senior administration officials routinely speak of the political
left in dehumanizing terms, as deformed, scarred, and filled with ugliness,

(02:31:18):
for example. The administration has crystallized those sentiments into policies
that encourage and authorize political prosecutions like this one, most notably,
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, unquote. I'm not exaggerating that
this motion filed by the defense is maybe the greatest

(02:31:40):
motion I've ever read. The understanding by the lawyer in
this case of how the Trump administration is carrying out
state repression against protesters is incredibly politically fluent. That last
bit at the end discussing administration officials referring to the
political left as deformed, scarred, or filled with ugliness relates

(02:32:01):
to Stephen Miller's comments at Mark Rubio's left-wing terrorism summit
last month that we discussed on executive disorder. And what
he said during that conference was legitimately crazy. I didn't
get to much of what he said in our previous
episode because we were running short on time. But there's
one quote I highlighted back then when I was doing

(02:32:22):
research that I want to read now. Quote, the leftist
looks at what is beautiful and what is good and
what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.
The leftist looks at the perfect family with the perfect
life and the perfect job and perfect kids that goes
to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling
of inadequacy and jealousy and they covet. And they turn

(02:32:46):
those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress,
and to inflict pain and suffering. It's not a coincidence
that when you look at any of these violent Antifa
demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled,
to be blunt, Not one of the people that is
demonstrating looks like a normal person. They're all deformed in

(02:33:07):
some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms.
Why is that? Every one of them, through the course
of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body
and their appearance in many different ways, to the point
in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their
inner hatred.

Speaker 3 (02:33:26):
Unquote.

Speaker 5 (02:33:27):
Super fascist stuff, like incredibly fascist. And the point by
Kevin Ryok, the lawyer for one of the defendants, that
the Trump administration has turned these fascistic sentiments into enforcement
policy like MSPM 7 is a really crucial point because
these are not just personal sentiments held by Stephen Miller.

(02:33:51):
These sentiments have been distilled into mandates to investigate and
prosecute the political enemies of the Trump administration. Just four
days after Border Patrol murdered Alex Preddy, Homeland Security Investigations
opened a new investigation into anti-ICE protests in the Twin
Cities called Operation Puppet Master. As in looking for the

(02:34:16):
alleged puppet master orchestrating the spontaneous and community-led protests. Or,
I guess, as in, HSI is the puppet master, infiltrating
the protests with undercover agents puppeteered by DHS? Either way,
DHS produced a report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master,

(02:34:38):
and that report states, quote, this case is opened to
document the integration of HSI undercover agents into groups, organizations,
or other gatherings. identified by intelligence information and other sources
as potentially threatening to law enforcement personnel in the performance
of their duties. The report by HSI Special Agent Jacob

(02:35:00):
Marquise continues, quote, Since November 28, 2026, I assume he
means 2025.

Speaker 7 (02:35:08):
Great work, guys.

Speaker 5 (02:35:10):
Ongoing protests and incidents of civil unrest have occurred in
public areas throughout Minneapolis, Minnesota. During these events, violent opportunists,
or VOs, have exploited the protests as cover to attempt
breaches of federal properties and perpetuated multiple assaults against federal
officers tasked with protecting these facilities. Homeland Security Investigations of St.

(02:35:33):
Paul has identified an organized network of conspirators operating through
online and in-person who are providing material support to violent
opportunists and agitators and involved in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting,
destruction of federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers. Unquote.

(02:35:55):
This sentiment was also shared by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen
in that press conference.

Speaker 11 (02:36:01):
During Operation Metro Surge, Direct Action Minnesota infiltrated and exploited
lawful protests to more efficiently carry out its unlawful direct actions.

Speaker 5 (02:36:12):
Despite the claims made by Rosen and in this HSI
report of violent opportunists exploiting protests to perpetuate multiple assaults,
in the defense's overview of these reports and documents, the
defense lawyer notes that HSI does not actually identify any
specific violent opportunists in this report, nor does it flag

(02:36:35):
any specific incidents of rioting, destruction of property, or assaults
on federal agents or officers. To quote the lawyer for
the defense, the undercover surveillance initiated by Operation Puppet Master
did not actually investigate or unearth any such instances, but
instead encompassed all manner of privacy and constitutional violations against

(02:36:56):
organizations and individuals who opposed ICE's activities in Minnesota, unquote.
And in his press conference announcing the conspiracy charges, U.S.
Attorney Daniel Rosen was asked multiple times whether any officer's
actually got hurt, and Rosen could not identify any instance

(02:37:16):
of officer injury.

Speaker 6 (02:37:17):
We talked about coordinated attacks. What kind of injuries did
officers sustain as part of these campaigns?

Speaker 3 (02:37:24):
Can you elaborate on that?

Speaker 11 (02:37:26):
I can't elaborate on that today, and I don't believe
I used the word attacks.

Speaker 7 (02:37:29):
But if I did, I stand by it.

Speaker 5 (02:37:34):
That really sums up this whole case for me. No,
I can't provide any evidence to support the wild claims
I'm making, and I don't think I used that word,
but if I did, I stand by it. Incredible stuff.
We will look into more of the Homeland Security Investigation
case files after this at a break. Welcome back. The

(02:38:05):
HSI report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master concludes
by stating, quote, HSI St. Paul is actively conducting a
thorough financial investigation to uncover the funding sources used by
these groups and to detect any illicit transactions enabling further
criminal acts. HSI St. Paul will use the results of

(02:38:27):
this financial investigation to identify those responsible, disrupt ongoing and
future unlawful activities, and pursue prosecution of the individuals involved.
And two weeks after the launching of Operation Puppet Master,
HSI opened another investigation called Project Whipple Shield, specifically focusing

(02:38:49):
on the identification of potential funding sources, the organizational structure,
and the, quote, predicate actions behind these campaigns. To quote
that HSI report, quote, this investigation is focused on identifying
and disrupting sophisticated, organized campaigns supporting and engaging in this
behavior and to prevent such unlawful activities. Regarding this investigation,

(02:39:15):
lawyer for the defense Kevin Ryok wrote, As with Operation
Puppet Master, HSI's investigation in Project Whipple Shield extended far
beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded,
with no evidence but obvious political animus, that numerous Twin
Cities unions and non-profit organizations were involved in a widespread

(02:39:37):
conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding
certain officers or employees. And it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered
financial records generated by these organizations, despite the lack of
any clear connection between those organizations and criminal conduct, unquote.
At that press conference announcing the indictment, U.S. Attorney Daniel

(02:40:00):
Rosen said that Direct Action Minnesota is actually, quote, comprised
of members of subgroups like the Black Cat Workers Collective, unquote.
But the alleged quote-unquote subgroups extend far beyond just Black
Cat Workers Collective, as evidenced by a little diagram that

(02:40:21):
was presented to grand jurors for this indictment. This diagram
is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. In
the middle is the logo for Direct Action Minnesota, the
organization that the DOJ alleges is connected to the 15 defendants.
But surrounding the DAM logo is logos for 15 other organizations,

(02:40:44):
all with arrows pointing towards Direct Action Minnesota and text
reading council member, as if all of these organizations are
sending council members to Direct Action Minnesota to plan or
orchestrate the direct action's in response to Operation Metro Surge.

(02:41:06):
This diagram that was presented as a slide to grand
jurors is titled The Conspiracy, and the conspiring organizations are
listed as Monarcha Rapid Response Line, which is one of
the rapid response networks in the Twin Cities. The other
organizations in this diagram, going clockwise, include Minnesota 5150, the

(02:41:29):
organizers of the No Kings protests, Minnesota Ice Watch, Minnesota
Association of Professional Employees, a labor union, Minneapolis Federation of Educators,
Local 59, Left Jab, a self-defense group, The Grease Pit,
a bike shop, Democratic Socialists of America, Black Cat Workers Collective, AFL-CIO, Workers'

(02:41:51):
Solidarity Circle, Whipple Watch, Veterans for Peace, Socialist Alternative, Showing
Up for Racial Justice, SCIU 26, Red Pine Revolutionary Collective,
and Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club. HSI agent Desmond Garcia
testified to the grand jury regarding this slide, quote, This

(02:42:13):
is kind of a breakdown, like I mentioned earlier, with
members of DAM being associated with other organizations. Through the
course of the investigation, this is just a snapshot of
some of the other organizations that members are affiliated with.
that kind of comprise and make up Direct Action Minnesota, unquote.
This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen

(02:42:35):
and provides really, really useful insight into how HSI is
imagining the organizational structure of these protests, that all these
organizations are sending, quote-unquote, council members to this more secretive group,
Direct Action Minnesota, that orchestrates the most radical parts of

(02:42:57):
the anti-ICE protests. Regarding this diagram slide, the lawyer for
the defense wrote, If any individual was connected to both
DAM and any of these entities, the government considers the
entities to be conspiring. Fueled by visions of this vast
and irrational conspiracy, HSI surreptitiously obtained financial records of labor

(02:43:20):
unions and non-profit organizations as a part of a quote-unquote,
financial investigation into, quote, domestic terrorist financing, unquote. And let's
go over the financial probe aspect of this investigation. One
of the reports uncovered through Discovery revealed that HSI secretly
subpoenaed three years' worth of financial records from SEIU, one

(02:43:44):
of the biggest labor unions in the country, largely focused
on organizing the healthcare, public service, and service work sectors.
Last March, HSI agents served an administrative summons, or an
administrative subpoena, to Fedwire to obtain wire transfers involving SCIU.
The wire transfers that the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York gave over to DHS range from January 1, 2023

(02:44:07):
to March 19, 2026. To quote the HSI report, quote,
Beginning in December, HSI St. Paul began a multifaceted approach
to identify and investigate individuals engaged in acts of violence,
destruction of federal property, intimidation of federal officers and employees,
and attempts to impede federal operations. Through this investigation, HSI St.

(02:44:30):
Paul has identified a network of individuals operating online and
in person who are engaged in this behavior by either
directly participating or by providing support through fundraising, planning, and organization.
The following report of investigation provides preliminary cursory details related
to wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from

(02:44:52):
Service Employees International Union, main financial institution, the U.S. Bank
of Minneapolis, Minnesota, unquote. And what did this investigation find?

Speaker 7 (02:45:03):
Well.

Speaker 5 (02:45:04):
a quote-unquote preliminary analysis of the wire transfers, quote, revealed
that the SEIU National Union has numerous wire transactions to
and from SEIU local unions for various types of debits
and credits to include annuity payments, strike payments, strike supplies, investments,

(02:45:24):
union member dues, retiree dues, medical expenses, and pension fund expenses, unquote.
So they found nothing. They just looked through three years
of financial records from SCIU and only found regular transactions
that a union would have. They found absolutely nothing. And
this report ends with this incredible sentence, quote, this financial

(02:45:48):
investigation involving protest domestic terrorist financing continues.

Speaker 7 (02:45:55):
Sure, dude.

Speaker 5 (02:45:55):
Yeah, I'm sure it's going to continue. I'm sure it's
going to continue to find nothing. Because in the 95-page
indictment against these 15 defendants, one of the frequently recurring
topics in the overt acts and furtherance of the conspiracy
is discussing how they don't have any money, how they're
constantly trying to fundraise to help continue the anti-ICE protests.

(02:46:17):
The indictment outlines them consistently struggling to to pull together $ 5, 000.
But yeah, sure, let me make a few calls to
the SEIU real quick. I'm sure they'll just wire transfer
over the money. And the other thing is that this
three-year time span of the financial probe stretches way longer
than Operation Metro Surge and the protests surrounding ICE activists

(02:46:40):
in the Twin Cities. Because what's actually going on here,
and to the Fed's own admission, is that they're just
enacting NSPM-7. using whatever pretext they can concoct to dig
through the finances of entities and organizations that they view
as political enemies. And it wasn't just SCIU. HSI also

(02:47:01):
obtained three years' worth of bank records for the Communication
Workers of America, including donations and PAC spending. The CWA
union represents thousands of journalists and print and broadcast news
workers in the U.S. and Canada. And as a part
of this financial probe, HSI obtained records for one of
the Canadian branches of this union, the International Federation of

(02:47:22):
Professional and Technical Engineers, with the administrative summons requesting information
from the Bank of Montreal. This very same summons also
demanded three years worth of financial records from the environmental
activist organization Sunrise Movement and the Sunrise Movement Educational Fund.
And as we will discuss, HSI was also actively surveilling

(02:47:42):
Sunrise meetings in Minnesota. Now, HSI also subpoenaed financial records
from at least one other entity that we know of,
a local Minneapolis activist organization called Voices for Racial Justice.
But rather than bank records and wire transfers, HSI went
after PayPal and Venmo transactions. Voices for Racial Justice was

(02:48:03):
founded in 1993 and describes itself as the longest-running racial
justice organizing training organization in the state of Minnesota. The
DHS investigative report regarding the subpoena into the organization says
that the website for Voices of Racial Justice, quote, boasts
several articles on Ice Out and or Truth, Freedom, and

(02:48:26):
Ice Out of Minnesota. Their website also provides links to
Defend the 612, Minneapolis St. Paul Whistles, and Monarcho Rapid
Response for upcoming trainings.

Speaker 3 (02:48:38):
Unquote.

Speaker 5 (02:48:39):
That's basically the entire justification DHS gives for probing into
the donations and Venmo and PayPal records for this racial
justice organization. That their website, hosts links to other anti-ICE organizations.
Defense attorney Kevin Ryok wrote, quote, this broad coalition of

(02:49:00):
financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations done
in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate violates both
the First Amendment and these organizations' right to financial privacy.
It also reflects a sinister turn in our democracy and
when the party in power feels no compunction about peering
into the private finances of its political opponents, collecting that information,

(02:49:24):
and storing it away for further use. The lawyer also notes, quote,
among other problems, the use of the administrative summons seems
to violate the Right to Financial Privacy Act, which requires
law enforcement to provide notice to the account holder if
they are trying to obtain bank records via administrative subpoena. Here,
not only did DHS hide these inquiries from the account holders,

(02:49:47):
it told responding financial institutions, quote, you are requested not
to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite
period of time. Any such disclosure will impede the investigation
and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law, unquote.
Though the federal government would likely argue that HSI's use
of the administrative subpoenas without notice would fall under some
of the exceptions within the Right to Financial Privacy Act.

(02:50:11):
Most reporting I've seen on this batch of discovery has
focused on the financial probing of unions and activist organizations.
And yeah, that is a big deal. That is very
serious and deserves a lot of focus. But most of
the investigative reports released as a part of discovery pertain
to HSI undercover operations, surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE organizing

(02:50:36):
in the Twin Cities. And there is a lot of
interesting information in there. that explains why the 90-something page
indictment is like that, why it has transcriptions of so
many regular in-person conversations and text logs from Signal. To
quote defense lawyer Kevin Ryok, undercover HSI agents posing as

(02:50:57):
protesters or activists surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries,
union halls, schools, and restaurants. Undercover agents secretly made audio
and video recordings of those meetings, unquote. And now I
want to quote from one of the HSI reports regarding
their use of undercovers. Quote, prior to the initiation of

(02:51:21):
Operation Puppet Master, HSI deployed an undercover agent to participate
in both virtual and in-person meetings within the Twin Cities area.
The objective of these activities was to gather intelligence regarding
any organized networks of conspirators or operating online and in person,
who may be providing material support to violent opportunists and

(02:51:42):
individuals engaged in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of
federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers, unquote.
So before Operation Puppet Master even started in January, the
month prior, HSI already had an undercover digging into the
anti-ICE protests. In reports, this undercover is identified as 9843,

(02:52:06):
And he started out by attending a virtual ice watch
training on December 3rd, put on by a group called
States at the Core and a Chicago-based org called Protect
Rogers Park. A few days later, the agent, quote unquote,
acting in an undercover capacity, attended a publicly advertised in-person

(02:52:28):
legal observer training in Richfield, Minnesota. During the training, the
agent joined a rapid response network sponsored by a Minneapolis-based
community defense group called Monarcha via a QR code. On
December 13th, The Undercover attended a Sunrise Movement action training

(02:52:48):
called How to Stop Ice and Build the Revolution at
a Universalist church in Minneapolis. After this meeting, The Undercover
was added to the group's announcement chat and started messaging
one of the organizers, about how people are verifying which
hotels ICE agents were staying at. A few days later,

(02:53:09):
the undercover reviewed a website with info, toolkits, and signal
links for ICE rapid response called Defend612. com. 612 is the
Minneapolis area code. On December 22nd, the undercover participated in
a Sunrise Zoom meeting about a then-upcoming protest in front

(02:53:30):
of the Hampton Inn housing ICE agents. Per the investigative
report detailing undercover operations prior to the creation of Operation
Puppet Master, during this Sunrise Zoom meeting, the undercover agent
learned that there were, quote, multiple signal chats dedicated to
the hotel scouting and license plate gathering. The gathering is

(02:53:52):
a collaborative effort with, quote-unquote, Whipple Watch, the known agitator
group stationed outside the Whipple building. HSI undercover agent 9843
was added by the team leader for the quote-unquote action
team to this signal chat group, unquote. So beyond joining
public signal chats, it appears the main way this undercover

(02:54:15):
was able to worm his way into more private chats
regarding Whipple Watch was through attending Sunrise Movement meetings. In
the motion outlining this batch of discovery, the lawyer for
the defense noted, quote, undercover agents actively participated in organizing
and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working

(02:54:37):
to entice people into discussing or committing crimes, unquote. The
main example of this in these documents is another Sunrise
Movement meeting from late January titled Resistance Skills Training, held
at the Minneapolis Public Library. Two undercovers attended this training,
and the investigative report details about 25 people in quote-unquote

(02:55:01):
breakout sessions focused on recruiting, action, and de-escalation. The report
notes that Sunrise recommends using quote, police liaisons and protest
safety marshals. The quote-unquote action section discussed sit-ins and the
protests outside hotels, with HSI noting in the report quote,

(02:55:24):
it was made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused
on quote-unquote peaceful protests. Regardless of that, one of the
undercovers at this meeting quote-unquote privately informed someone that he
works in construction and could quote, build items that might
assist other groups with more quote-unquote direct action protests, unquote.

(02:55:48):
And the undercover also told this person at the meeting
that that going to jail quote-unquote did not bother him.
So two undercovers attended this Sunrise Movement meeting discussing peaceful
protests and noted that in the report, but still tried
to talk to attendees about quote-unquote building items to assist

(02:56:08):
in direct action protests and that they're okay with going
to jail because of it. We'll talk more about how
undercover HSI agents began their infiltration after this ad break.

(02:56:32):
Welcome back. The main undercover HSI agent who started to
infiltrate the protests in December of 2025, who's identified in
reports as undercover 9843, also operated a signal account with
the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly. And according to the defense,

(02:56:53):
this undercover, quote, routinely exchanged signal messages with people regarding
purely First Amendment protected conduct. messaging participants in the Art
Money Comms Club signal chat and stating, quote, also the
interested in the financial world. organizing piece. I like numbers
and data. And marrying that together with propaganda. So would

(02:57:15):
love to work on both sides of these groups. Unquote. Yeah,
I am sure you're interested in the financial organizing piece. Yeah,
I bet. I like numbers and data.

Speaker 7 (02:57:28):
Incredible.

Speaker 5 (02:57:29):
The interested in the financial organizing piece. Also, as a
part of Discovery, we've learned that the undercover discussed fundraising
messaging strategies and offered to draft fundraising language for Twin
Cities Direct Action and design a protest flyer. One message
with the undercover using the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly reads,

(02:57:53):
I'm sure you're swamped with the speaking tour, but do
you have a suggestion for a donation platform? I believe
open collective and the idea of asking our own banks
was discussed, unquote. According to the defense, these new discovery
documents also detail how Undercover's, quote, routinely surveilled individuals engaged

(02:58:14):
solely in First Amendment protected activity, including the Whipple watch
group that engaged in peaceful observation of ICE vehicle activity
in and out of the Whipple building. conduct that both
Judge Mendez and Chief Judge Schiltz have confirmed is not unlawful, unquote.
One of the DHS investigative reports details how agents captured

(02:58:37):
the license plate information of anti-ice protesters attending a Twin
Cities Direct Action quote-unquote art club meeting at the Prince
of Peace Lutheran Church. In the report, the undercover who
infiltrated this meeting, quote, described the meeting as democratic in
nature in the sense that everyone talked over each other, unquote.

(02:59:01):
The undercover also noted how most of the meeting discussed
fundraising and how to make social media agitprop. But while
he was attending this meeting, other HSI agents documented the
license plates of attendees. According to the defense, quote, Agents

(02:59:21):
then used this information to obtain the names of the attendees,
searched social media for pictures of these individuals, and compiled
an intel workup that included names, photos, addresses, personal information,
including family and employment information, and vehicle registration information for
each meeting attendee. None of these individuals did anything other

(02:59:41):
than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church
meeting room. Yet, now their personal information is memorialized in
a DHS dossier, unquote. The best idea why HSI decided
to zero in on the group of individuals allegedly associated
with Direct Action Minnesota, or formerly called Twin Cities Direct Action,

(03:00:04):
relates to a meeting held in early January. If you recall,
HSI undercover 9843 was added to the Whipple Watch signal
chat after attending a few Sunrise Movement meetings. And according
to investigative reports, on January 10th, an undercover agent received

(03:00:24):
a flyer in the Whipple Watch chat for an upcoming
emergency meeting on the 11th. Remember, this was three days
after the killing of Renee Good. The undercover got permission
to attend this emergency meeting and was quote-unquote vouched by
one of the defendants, Isaac Sant, identified in chats as Ike.

(03:00:47):
This emergency meeting was to share plans of an upcoming
protest on July 23rd. And the HSI report claims that
this meeting is where Twin Cities Direct Action emerged from,
as that was the name of the signal chat created
at the end of this meeting, and the Twin Cities
Direct Action logo was first used on a flyer for

(03:01:11):
this upcoming protest. On January 19th, the undercover surveilled and
attended a follow-up meeting at a local restaurant in North Minneapolis,
hosted by SEIU 26 and Socialist Alternative, to plan this
action on the 23rd, which was then identified as a
general strike. The HSI report describes this meeting as a, quote,

(03:01:35):
general discussion on the upcoming Walk Out on Ice event
being held on January 23rd.

Speaker 3 (03:01:41):
And as usual, this.

Speaker 5 (03:01:43):
Report doesn't actually allude to anything illegal being discussed in
this meeting. And this strike and march action later took
place on January 23rd and was attended by tens of
thousands of people. Planning such an action is an ordinary
protected First Amendment act. Around this point, and especially following

(03:02:03):
the killing of Alex Preddy, DHS started really ramping up
the surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities.
They started using multiple undercover agents, not just 9843, and
began surveilling and trying to infiltrate many more types of
protest beyond what was organized by Twin Cities Direct Action.

(03:02:26):
Two HSI reports detail surveillance of individuals and groups attending
protests the No Kings protests, and an anti-war protest last March.
The report on the Stop the War in Iran protest
held on March 7th specifically mentions 5150, Veterans for Peace, Sunrise,
and PSL. To quote the report, Undercover 5022 and Undercover

(03:02:50):
137 did not have extended interactions with any members of
the crowd. Many people were also not identifiable slash recognizable
due to wearing face coverings. Undercover 5022 observed that during
the event, several people appeared to be conducting event overwatch
or quote-unquote marshalling. They were wearing reflective vests, were wearing

(03:03:12):
red hats, and carried radios. They were located at the
edges of the crowd. Investigative note. While testifying to the
grand jury, Agent Garcia claimed that every single individual being
investigated has criminal predicate. Quote, One of the things that

(03:03:47):
is abundantly clear, not only in guidance, but it's just
principles as far as this investigation is, no one is
ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for
First Amendment protected activities. Every single individual that we have investigated,
there is criminal predicate to why we are investigating them.
Either statements that they have made that are criminal to

(03:04:09):
their actual participation in overt criminal acts, unquote. Now, to
quote the lawyer for the defense, of course, as the
above examples demonstrate, HSI was obtaining wide swaths of financial
data from labor unions and non-profits with zero quote-unquote criminal predicate.
Undercover agents captured dozens of First Amendment-protected conversations on surreptitious recordings,

(03:04:36):
many of which did not involve any of the defendants
or unindicted co-conspirators in this case. Agent Garcia's statement is
simply not true, unquote. And yeah, I don't know how
you can think after considering all the examples I've just
read that HSI had criminal predicate for every single organization

(03:04:58):
or person that was under investigation or surveillance. That's just
a lie. Because if they had criminal predicate, they would
be charged. there would be charges against more people. There
could be charges against some of those other 15 conspiring
organizations in that diagram shown to the grand jury. Oh,

(03:05:18):
and by the way, the DOJ lawyer who convened this
grand jury, Deputy Attorney General Brian Lynch, was also a
January 6th insurrectionist who entered a restricted zone alongside other rioters.
And as this indictment was being put together, the government
forced the court to vacate the convictions against Oath Keepers

(03:05:41):
involved in January 6th. This grand jury was literally put
together by a January 6th insurrectionist to indict protesters for
conspiracy to impede. At the exact same time, the federal
government was vacating convictions of other January 6th insurrectionists. The
last thing I want to note about this batch of

(03:06:02):
discovery is how it also details instances of counter-surveillance. In
one report, a self-described community member walks up to a
government vehicle containing HSI agents conducting surveillance, also staged to
support an undercover infiltrating an event, and the community member

(03:06:23):
asks the agents inside if they are ICE. They say
no and point to a safety vest and a helmet
in the vehicle. The community member then responds by saying, okay,
and then tells them that he'll have to run the
vehicle's plates to check. DHS investigative reports also detail people
at meetings warning that ICE could be trying to infiltrate

(03:06:46):
those very meetings and telling all the attendees to not
say anything that they wouldn't say directly to an ICE agent,
which is really good advice when that meeting is being
attended by an ICE agent and one of the funnier
investigative notes in this batch of discovery relates to an
undercover's infiltration of a self-defense workshop. Quote, Due to the

(03:07:10):
physicality of the event, undercover 5022's concealed body-worn audio recorder
erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the
end of the training. The undercover briefly left the gymnasium,
realized she no longer had the device, and returned to
the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor. During

(03:07:31):
these approximately three minutes, the undercover was not present in
the gymnasium. So... While this batch of discovery has given
us a closer look at the extent of the surveillance
of anti-ice protests and HSI's method of investigation, the government
did not hand over everything. It was supposed to as
a part of discovery. And the lawyers are requesting more documents.

(03:07:54):
This batch of discovery is missing, among other things, quote,
special reports of investigation that the government has admitted withholding,
claiming that they're unrelated to this investigation, even though they
were created and filed within it. The disclosures admit to
any investigative reports that document HSI's domestic surveillance, but were
placed in other case files. They admit documents and communications

(03:08:16):
related to the initiation and supervision of HSI's undercover operations,
and they admit downloads of the undercover phones and undercover
laptops used by undercover agents in this case to communicate
with the defendants and others, unquote. And those documents are
useful not just to us, so we know how these
investigations are being carried out, but also for the defense,

(03:08:38):
because reports of government surveillance of protesters and activists during
Metro's surge are relevant to the defendant's motion for, quote,
selective prosecution and outrageous government conduct, as they constitute additional
evidence of DHS targeting individuals based on their political beliefs
and First Amendment-protected conduct, unquote. So yeah, that is my

(03:08:59):
not-so-brief overview of this batch of discovery reports. I'll have
links to the court documents below if you want to
take a look yourself. And hopefully we'll get even more
discovery in these next few months. See you on the
other side. This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder,

(03:09:30):
our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House.
The Crumbling World and What This Means for You. I'm
Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong,
Robert Evans, and special correspondent Carlos Berrios-Pilanco, who we have
had on a few times for regular episodes. This episode,
we are covering the week of August 19th through August 26th. Robert,

(03:09:56):
do you want to start us off with our tribute?

Speaker 2 (03:09:58):
Yeah, so before we get going today, as I'm sure
everyone listening is at least broadly aware, Dolly Rebecca Parton
Dean passed away the day before we recorded this on
August 25th, 2026. Dolly Parton was more widely beloved than
pretty much anyone that was still alive in the United States.
Her death was met by immediate mourning from every side

(03:10:20):
of society. And I do mean every side. President Donald
Trump ordered all flags to fly at half staff and
issued at least as genuine a statement of respect as
he's ever put out about anyone saying this is a
true loss for millions of people. There has never been
anyone like her and never will. It's hard to argue
with that. The DSA also sent out an official in
memoriam praising Parton as a hero to the working class.

(03:10:40):
And you would find anyone hard pressed to genuinely disagree
with that statement, too. Dolly was born in a one
room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of
a dirt poor and illiterate sharecropper. She wrote more than
3000 songs in her life and had 44 career top
10 country albums, which is nuts. But I wouldn't be
talking about Dolly on this show, which does not do

(03:11:02):
obituaries as a rule, if she'd just been a rags-to-riches
entertainment industry success story. Dolly had the good luck to
become rich and famous, and she would always emphasize that
luck had a lot to do with it, even though
she worked very hard. And she grew up poor enough
that she never, ever forgot that had things been a
little different, she would have stayed dirt poor. So she
dedicated her life and her fortune to helping the least

(03:11:23):
fortunate in our society. Parton established the Dollywood Foundation to
improve education in Sevier County, Tennessee, and in participating classes,
the dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%. She founded
the Imagination Library, her best-known charity, and donated her 100
millionth free book to children in 2018. She helped build
hospitals and universities and was the single highest dollar donor

(03:11:46):
to research that created the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When getting
vaccinated became a political hot-button issue, Dolly posted a video
of herself taking the vaccine and performed a cover of
her own song, Jolene, themed after getting vaccinated. She was
also a longtime and vocal advocate for queer people. In 1990,
The Sun, a British magazine, found out that her Hollywood

(03:12:08):
chauffeur was a trans man named Jason Pirro. They interviewed him,
and he told the magazine, Dolly has been good to me.
I'm not real comfortable talking about myself. Dolly knows all
about me and is a very nice lady. Even back
in the 90s, Dolly Parton was comfortable openly supporting trans
people and the rest of the queer community. Her song Family,
released in 1991, is probably the first country music song

(03:12:29):
to use the word gay, certainly the first to use
it in like a positive sense of the word. And
she had queer and trans employees as far back as
the early 90s and talked openly about that. In 2016,
she was interviewed by Chris as a party for Pride
Source and said, I have many gays and lesbians in
my own family, she revealed to me, and then she
used a word that stuck with me for a decade now.

Speaker 6 (03:12:50):
Ours.

Speaker 2 (03:12:50):
They're ours, and they're who they are, and we know
they're wonderful and they're like us. Some relatives back in
the mountains, she admitted, still weren't quite sure what to
make of it. She also told me casually, like it
was nothing, which is exactly how she wanted it treated.
that she had transgender employees on salary in her own company,
years before most corporations would say that sentence out loud,
let alone mean it. People came to her the way
they used to come to her mama, she said, to

(03:13:12):
be told it was safe to be honest. You need
to let people know who you are, and you need
to come on out, she'd tell them. You don't need
to live your life in darkness. Parton strenuously avoided direct
political punditry when she could, but after the right-wing moral
panic over trans rights ignited in the 2020s, she spoke out,
stating her explicit and direct support for trans people. I
know how important this is to them. That's who they are,

(03:13:34):
she said. They cannot help that any more than I
can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people
know me. If there's something to be judged, that is
God's business, but we are all God's children, and how
we are is who we are. There's so much more
to who Dolly was and what she did, from reinvesting
royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of I Will Always Love
You into the black community, after refusing to license the

(03:13:55):
song to Elvis, to starring in The Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas, arguably the best film about either Texas or whorehouses.
She did it all in her life. I think the
loss of Parton hurts so keenly because of the very
thing I started with, though. The fact that her loss
has been mourned across the aisle almost regardless of political stance.
Dolly Parton was the closest thing our culture had to

(03:14:15):
a secular saint, a Joshua Norton-like figure who could have
waded into the middle of a deadly partisan riot and
parted the fighting with her presence like that baby at
the end of Children of Men. I might be going
a little bit far with that last one, but in
my research for this, I came across a recollection of
Dolly by Roger Ebert that I feel I need to share.
Roger Ebert, if you're on the younger side, was a

(03:14:35):
very famous Pulitzer-winning film critic, and this is him talking
about meetings that he and his partner Gene Siskel had
with Dolly Parton. In Dallas for the premiere of 9
to 5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the
plane home to Chicago, I confessed it to Siskel. I
had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton,
And as we spoke, I was filled with a strange
ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual.

(03:14:56):
It was healing and comforting. Jean listened and said, Roger,
I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.

Speaker 3 (03:15:02):
We looked at each other.

Speaker 2 (03:15:03):
What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt
that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer
to it in wonder. And to close off, I think
I should give us all some advice courtesy of Dolly Parton.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose
and do it with purpose. You got to know who
you are because so many people try to emulate or
copy somebody else. And that's what I got to say

(03:15:24):
about Dolly.

Speaker 5 (03:15:26):
Thank you, Robert. For some less good, I mean, how
do I say this? Um, Some people who are less
good than Dolly Parton. There are billions of them. Let's
start with some small things regarding people who are not
as good as Dolly Parton. Darlene Graham just won the
runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina.

(03:15:51):
Graham won with 52.5% of the vote, dominating in the
eastern part of the state where Trump campaigned for her
last Friday in Myrtle Beach. On Wednesday morning, the Department
of State in partnership with the Department of Treasury, has
announced the Italy-based autonomous anti-capitalist digital service provider Autistici Inventati,

(03:16:13):
or the IA Collective, is now a specially designated global
terrorist organization. To quote from Treasury, quote, Today, the U.S.
Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control took
action to counter the growing threat posed by violent far-left
terrorist groups, by sanctioning the IA Collective, an Italy-based entity

(03:16:34):
that supplies specialized digital architecture tools and services for Antifa
cells and other violent far-left extremists, including the foreign terrorist
organization Palestine Action. The IA Collective also operates the web
platform NoBlogs, which hosts many Antifa and anarchist communiques. Though notably,

(03:16:57):
the State Department has repeatedly asserted that Rose City Antifa
used the NoBlogs platform online, And that is simply not true.
What they are referring to is Rose City Counter Info,
a separate website that is not affiliated with Rose City Antifa,
which is used by local anarchists to make community bulletin

(03:17:20):
board style updates. I cannot emphasize enough that these are
totally separate groups with often very different politics. But on
both social media and official State Department press releases, These
two groups have been conflated, asserting that Rose City Antifa
used the AI collective tools to organize and incite violent

(03:17:42):
and criminal acts. Something else I want to emphasize is
that Palestine Action, the UK-based organization, is described as a
foreign terrorist organization in the Treasury Department's announcement about sanctions
regarding the AI collective. And in that same announcement, sanctions

(03:18:05):
were also imposed on Palestine Action, which the Treasury Department
accused of supporting, quote, numerous acts of terrorism. But as
of recording, Palestine Action has not been officially designated as
a foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 9 (03:18:20):
And then one thing from me, the Trump administration moved
ahead this week with its plans to rescind the 2001
roadless rule. which blocks road building in inventory roadless areas
of national forests, not in wilderness areas or national parks,
as some people have been reporting. The new rule was

(03:18:42):
proposed on August 18th with a public comment period beginning
that day. The justification that they're going for with this
is it will prevent wildfires. And I believe they're going
for like it will allow fuel mitigation to prevent wildfires.
It's worth noting that there were already provisions in the
roadless rule to allow for like thinning of small diameter timber.

(03:19:05):
What they didn't do is add budget to do that.

Speaker 1 (03:19:07):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:19:07):
So like if they were making a serious attempt to
do fire mitigation in so much as that is something
we can prevent, which I don't think it is, then
they would have added budget, but they haven't done that.
It's just worth pointing out that the construction of roads
will allow people to get into areas that were harder
for them to get into before. And the thing that
tends to start wildfires is people. So people being in

(03:19:29):
these areas will allow people to start fires in these areas.
I'm going to cover this more in depth on natural
causes in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to
flag it because the comment period will probably end soon
after I do my episode. So if you want to
comment and so much that matters anymore, I'll include a link.

Speaker 6 (03:19:48):
So in other news that has thus far wound up
not really being news, President Trump has declared, quote, economic D-Day?
in his attempt to end the war in Iran, win
the war in Iran. So in theory, economic D-Day is
supposed to be a bunch of what are called secondary sanctions.

(03:20:09):
Secondary sanctions are not just sanctions on a country, but
are sanctions on any country that does trade with the
first country, in this case, Iran. The specific focuses here
are supposed to be, quote, cryptocurrency, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Now,
the issue here is that if you are going to

(03:20:31):
do secondary sanctions against countries that trade with Iran, the
actual largest target here would be China. Now, reporters repeatedly
asked Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who is nominally the person
supposed to be running these sanctions, if he was going
to name which countries there were going to be secondary

(03:20:52):
sanctions against. Besant refused repeatedly. So these sanctions were supposed
to begin later this week, but the administration has been...
I don't know if slow-walking them is the term, but
they have refused to actually impose any. They are claiming
that they are not imposing any because they are giving

(03:21:13):
countries time to comply voluntarily. But as of Wednesday, August 26th,
there have been no actual sanctions imposed. Every conceivable joke
comparing this to D-Day has already been made. Then he actually,
by the press corps, in an unexpected bit of bravery,
there were several members of the press corps in various

(03:21:35):
press conferences asked, hey, so D-Day was a surprise and
you're announcing this. Can you explain this conflict? And he
got a bunch of non-answers.

Speaker 1 (03:21:44):
So.

Speaker 9 (03:21:45):
Maybe this is the giant inflatable set of sanctions that
they are using to draw attention from the actual set
of sanctions.

Speaker 6 (03:21:54):
James, you unfortunately know significantly more about D-Day than every
single person in this administration combined.

Speaker 8 (03:22:00):
Oh my God.

Speaker 9 (03:22:02):
It's a thing that they make you do when you're
a British man in your 30s.

Speaker 6 (03:22:08):
But if any sanctions actually come down, from this, we
will let you know.

Speaker 7 (03:22:14):
But as.

Speaker 6 (03:22:16):
Of Wednesday, August 26th, this is another failed attempt to
win the war in Iran that seems to have been
called off before it began. Speaking of tariffs... So the

(03:22:45):
other big piece of big tariff news is something that
we talked about a few weeks ago, which is the U.S.
's attempt to impose 50% tariffs on a broad swath
of Canadian goods. Ever since then, the U.S. and Canada
have been in trade negotiations over these tariffs, and these
negotiations have completely fallen apart as Canada has walked away

(03:23:07):
from the table. Now, there are a bunch of reasons
why these specific negotiations broke down completely. I'm going to
go through some of them. One of the big ones
is that one of the biggest sources of cross-border trade
between the US and Canada is the fact that in
a similar way to the US and Mexico, there is

(03:23:29):
a lot of cross-border trade revolving around US auto manufacturing, right?
And Canadian auto manufacturing, a lot of Ford, General Motors,
stuff like that. A lot of trucks are produced in Canada.
The US was negotiating reducing the tariffs on Canadian automobiles
to 15%, but they were only doing this for cars
and not trucks. And so they wanted to leave the

(03:23:50):
truck rate at 50%. And there were a whole bunch
of very, very fancy trucks that American consumers buy and
that Canada makes that would still have 50% tariffs.

Speaker 1 (03:24:01):
Sure.

Speaker 7 (03:24:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:24:04):
This is one of the things that normally when these
kind of Trade battles have happened before. Automotive stuff has
been written out of them almost immediately because it's terrible
for a bunch of American companies. But the administration was
refusing to back down on this. And, you know, the
Canadians walked out. They have wooden alcohol tariffs that are
already in effect. There are going to be more tariffs

(03:24:26):
coming on September 8th. More bafflingly, one of the big
things that Trump has been on is trying to restart
the Keystone XL pipeline.

Speaker 3 (03:24:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:24:39):
Which Carty is like, no, we're not doing this pipeline
unless we get a better trade deal. But then in
a truly startling set of proposals, the U.S. wanted to
be able to set Canadian steel tariff rates?

Speaker 7 (03:24:54):
Sure.

Speaker 6 (03:24:55):
The nominal argument here is that the U.S. is trying
to like, quote unquote, stop the import of the flood
of cheap steel from countries like China and And they
could only do this if the Canadian steel tariff rate
matched the American steel tariff rate.

Speaker 5 (03:25:10):
But the goal for this.

Speaker 7 (03:25:11):
Was for the U.S.

Speaker 6 (03:25:12):
To be able to review and set Canadian tariff rates
and make sure that they match American tariff rates on
other countries. Which, this is the kind of stuff you
do to a colony?

Speaker 5 (03:25:24):
51st state.

Speaker 7 (03:25:26):
Yeah. Can confirm. Very colonial thing to do.

Speaker 3 (03:25:31):
Shocking from America.

Speaker 1 (03:25:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:25:33):
I've never seen a country do this, try to do
this to another sovereign country like Canada.

Speaker 6 (03:25:38):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (03:25:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:25:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:25:40):
I don't think we did this to Iraq. I've never
I've never seen anything like this.

Speaker 7 (03:25:44):
It's it's bizarre.

Speaker 2 (03:25:46):
The insistence that like, yeah, we have any sort of
say in their international policy is de facto making Canada
trying to make Canada agree that they're a colony.

Speaker 5 (03:25:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:25:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:25:56):
Yeah. It's very weird the way this is being written
about in the American press, where they're like, oh, well,
this is Canadian autonomy and sovereignty has become a political issue.
And yes, obviously, there's no country on earth that would
agree to this.

Speaker 2 (03:26:11):
No.

Speaker 6 (03:26:11):
Even the staunchest American, like Saudi Arabia, would not agree
to let the U.S. dictate its tariff policy.

Speaker 5 (03:26:18):
No.

Speaker 3 (03:26:19):
It's absurd.

Speaker 6 (03:26:19):
And this has managed to accomplish the absolutely staggering feat
of uniting... Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with Doug Ford,
the right-wing premier of Ontario.

Speaker 5 (03:26:32):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 6 (03:26:33):
And also, because these people just hate winning, I don't
have another explanation for this other than racism. Canadian negotiators
claimed that the U.S. was trying to intervene in Canadian
policy about the digital promotion of French films. which is
a direct attack on Quebec.

Speaker 3 (03:26:53):
On the Quebecois.

Speaker 6 (03:26:55):
Yeah, and a bunch of very, very important legal protections
in Quebec about the French language. So they have somehow
managed to unite a political coalition of Doug Ford, the
Quebec separatist, And the ruling.

Speaker 5 (03:27:15):
Liberals, all of whom- It's pretty insane. It's unbelievable.

Speaker 6 (03:27:19):
They're just going systematically through every single conceivable political bloc
in Canada and pissing them off. So these negotiations obviously collapsed. Obviously,
the Canadians walked away. Obviously, there was almost total support
in Canadian society for doing this.

Speaker 7 (03:27:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:27:37):
Canadian nationalism is at an all-time high. This is really
just carrying over the sort of trends that we saw
in the last Canadian election where Carney saved the Liberals
from total and utter demise by feeding into this sense
of nationalism based on being under threat from Trump. And

(03:28:01):
the guy who was running for the Conservative Prime Minister
was too associated with Trump and so that really hurt them.
And it built this really big coalition in Canada to
push back against the conservatives as a way of pushing
back against Trump and really put forward the Liberal Party
as this counterforce to Trump's America and the attempted incursions

(03:28:24):
into Canadian sovereignty, which Trump is still trying to do.
And it's impressive how much Carney's been able to hold
on to that coalition while ruling. It's been over a
year now. and stuff like this shows that it's, if anything,
only gotten stronger in recent weeks during these negotiations. Pulling

(03:28:44):
together Doug Ford, the Liberal Party, and the Kebukwa into
one united bloc is like an unprecedented... a piece of
like national unity.

Speaker 2 (03:28:55):
The fact that other Canadians are backing up the Quebecois
after fucking Trump tried to make restrictions that like the
French language and can't like that.

Speaker 3 (03:29:03):
That's nuts.

Speaker 5 (03:29:04):
The fact that I'm going to be on the side
of the Quebecois as like a Midwest Canadian.

Speaker 3 (03:29:09):
It's nuts.

Speaker 5 (03:29:10):
Very impressive by Trump.

Speaker 1 (03:29:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:29:13):
And I think what's interesting about this, right, is that like,
you know, throughout Canadian history, there's been a bipartisan series
of debates that have cut across the You know, like
as cut across every political party, there have been factions
in both about whether the extent to which Canada was
going to be sort of a branch plant economy of
of the United States. And that's just over. Everyone at

(03:29:36):
this point has has, you know, sort of unified and saying, no,
we're not going to continue doing this, you know, to
sort of cap this off. One of the demands from
the Trump negotiators were that Canada would end this program.
It's been doing of this sort of this sort of
by Canadian program. where they've been doing something that the U.S.
also has been doing for ages of encouraging people and

(03:29:58):
encouraging government contracts to go to Canadian companies, which has
been intensified in response to sort of what I think inaccurately.
And I can't believe I'm saying this in regards to
Canada as American imperial aggression. And Canadians have refused to
do this. And instead, this has been intensifying attempts to
sort of do whatever is possible to try to decouple

(03:30:20):
the US and Canadian economies. Obviously, that's not something that's
particularly possible in a macro sense, just because of the
reliance on both, you know, oil exports and also the
way that the auto sector is intertwined. But this has
become economic policy in a way that would have been
unthinkable even like five years ago.

Speaker 5 (03:30:40):
In specific, like the Buy Canada campaign to push for
consumers just to buy products made either by Canadian companies
or made in Canada has been a massive success.

Speaker 7 (03:30:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:30:51):
Talking with my family in Canada about this, like this
is penetrated into all parts of the country, including like
the conservative Alberta province where my family lives, where, yeah,
this is like a big thing. It's hard to understate
how much of an impact that has had in the
country's consuming habits in the past year and a half.

Speaker 9 (03:31:12):
Yeah, Trump has the ability to do this in an
incredible number of countries, actually. He has created some fantastic alliances.
He's been great for the maple syrup business.

Speaker 5 (03:31:24):
Let's go on ad break and then return for more news.

Speaker 3 (03:31:27):
Ads for poutine and maple syrup coming up.

Speaker 5 (03:31:30):
From your mouth to Katya's.

Speaker 3 (03:31:32):
Not at the same time. Maybe at the same time now.
Maybe that's all they have.

Speaker 5 (03:31:48):
Carlos, welcome.

Speaker 7 (03:31:50):
Hello.

Speaker 5 (03:31:51):
What is your special segment for us this week on
executive disorder?

Speaker 3 (03:31:54):
There was an American colony segue that was hanging right there.
You know what?

Speaker 5 (03:32:02):
My bad.

Speaker 7 (03:32:03):
From the soon-to-be colony of the U.S., Canada, to the
current colony, Puerto Rico, on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture declared that 26 out of the 78 municipalities in
Puerto Rico were undergoing a drought disaster. Per the AP,
more than 33% of the archipelago is under extreme drought,
and another 30% is experiencing severe drought. So I should

(03:32:26):
say that this emergency declaration has been a long time coming,
and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets extended to
other municipalities. Puerto Rico has been experiencing pretty bad water
problems since forever, but they became particularly acute last year
when more than half a million people lost water because
of a broken pipe. Earlier this year, another break caused
about 300,000 people to lose water, more or less. In

(03:32:47):
my area, which is kind of outside of the metro
where it's been most affecting, we lost water for about
10 days early in the summer. And now, because of
a mixture of aging infrastructure that hasn't been fixed and
a continuing drought, it looks like that might be the
case again soon. At least we're stockpiling as much water
as we can. So to talk about the infrastructure problems

(03:33:08):
real quick, part of it is really due to how
bad the system is. We lose about 60% of the
water produced by the local water utility before it gets
to people's homes, which is... It's become normal to us,
but it's kind of crazy to say to other people,
at least in my experience when I've talked about it
with others. And quite a few of the reservoirs that
feed us water have not been dredged in years. Yeah,

(03:33:32):
and part of the reason the drought is going on
is because of the super El Nino, which has been
causing temperatures across pretty much the whole world to go up.

Speaker 1 (03:33:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:33:41):
So I also want to talk about two pretty big
investigations published by Aura Bogalo of Injustice Watch, one in
collaboration with Wired and the other in collaboration with The Intercept.
To kind of set the scene, Illinois has this thing
called the Trust Act, which generally prohibits law enforcement in
Illinois from participating in immigration enforcement. This includes not detaining
or not continuing to detain any person based solely on

(03:34:04):
whether they have an immigration detainer. They are not supposed to, quote,
assist in any capacity with an immigration agent's enforcement operation
unless required to by a judge's warrant or a federal law.
Several other states have laws like this, essentially making them
sanctuary states. However, as Bogada writes, this hasn't really stopped
local officials from collaborating with immigration enforcement. In one case,

(03:34:26):
a Riverton police officer ran the name of a 31-year-old
immigrant for a law enforcement database due to a traffic
infraction only to get a phone call from the FBI
almost immediately. The FBI agent was trying to see how
he could help ICE detain the guy, the man who
was stopped. The solution came from an outstanding state warrant
the man had out for him. The police officer technically

(03:34:48):
was not detaining him on an immigration base, but the
outcome was the same. Per Borgato's reporting, since Trump came
into office, officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois...
have collaborated with immigration officials by feeding them information. This
has led to at least 150 people being put into
the immigration system throughout Illinois, even though as a sanctuary state,

(03:35:10):
it's ostensibly not supposed to do that. In another exchange
reported by Injustice Watch, a Tinley Park officer was asked
by an ICE agent for quote-unquote lead data on a
person the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer responded
with a bunch of information about the guy, including his
address and phone number. and also told the ICE agent that, quote,
his crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently. There

(03:35:34):
are several examples of this kind of wink and nod
collaboration by local officials with immigration enforcement for a variety
of different ways, including emails or housing detained migrants at
the request of the U.S. Marshals, then releasing them into
ICE's hands. The second story published by Bogalo is much
the same, but focused on county prosecutors' role in enforcing
immigration law. Per her story, quote, state's attorney's office in

(03:35:58):
one out of every six Illinois counties acted as valuable
assets of federal immigration enforcement, sharing sensitive personal data about
the people they were prosecuting without criminal warrants, public disclosure,
or legislative oversight, and with no accounting of how often
it happened or who was affected, end quote. Some of
this came from simply answering when DHS agents came calling,

(03:36:19):
while some prosecutors volunteered information of their own volition. In
Marion County, one assistant state's attorney emailed the information of
a man in a case he was prosecuting only for
ICE to respond, quote, The same prosecutor, per Injustice Watch,
emailed the same ICE agent within 20 minutes after flagging
the first person, saying, quote, It's worth noting that per Bogado,

(03:36:46):
more than half of Illinois state attorney's offices said they
had no record of contacts with ICE. However, what I
wanted to highlight here was that even in states people
would consider, quote unquote, safe because they're sanctuary states or
sanctuary cities, the mechanism of the state continues to collaborate
with immigration enforcement under the table. We've seen this in

(03:37:06):
a bunch of places already, mainly for state, local, and
municipal police officers doing this exact same type of thing
across the country.

Speaker 9 (03:37:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:37:13):
But the prosecutor's thing, as far as I know, is
pretty new, especially at this scale that Pogado reported on. Right.
So this kind of wink and nod collaboration is likely
happening across the board in the United States. And we'll
be hearing stories like this probably for years to come.

Speaker 3 (03:37:30):
Yeah, I think like.

Speaker 9 (03:37:33):
People should be aware, I guess, I just want to
say really briefly that like sanctuary jurisdiction laws are not
necessarily doing what people think they are doing.

Speaker 5 (03:37:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:37:42):
Like cops are going to cop.

Speaker 7 (03:37:43):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 9 (03:37:44):
And you see this all the time with like when
they put into the queries they put into flock, when
people look at their flock hot list and they just
put like investigation or crime as the reason why. Like
that is what's happening there, right? When your jurisdiction tells
you that these flock cameras aren't going to be used
for immigration. When the cop just puts in investigation, you
have no idea what it's being used for, right?

Speaker 5 (03:38:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:38:07):
Absolutely. And I should also flag that a bunch of
sanctuary cities have specific ways in which they'll collaborate with
immigration enforcement. So, for example, a big thing is Operation
Stone Garden, where they... use municipal, state, and local cops
to patrol the border. And sometimes, ostensibly, it's not supposed
to be for immigration enforcement, but I'm pretty sure that

(03:38:28):
it's happened across the U.S. where it's being used to
enforce immigration.

Speaker 9 (03:38:33):
Yeah, well, like look at NDAs, right? Like that's in
theory a trespass thing. Top of it being, I guess
it's a federal trespass in that instance because it's a
military installation. For a citizen, that would be like a
trespass thing.

Speaker 3 (03:38:48):
Yeah, there are a bunch of these ways.

Speaker 9 (03:38:50):
The California Values Act has all these carve-outs in addition to,
as far as I'm aware, never having led to a prosecution.
These sanctuary city laws of a cop or a prosecutor
or sanctuary jurisdiction laws, they don't have teeth.

Speaker 6 (03:39:04):
Yeah, and insofar as sanctuary city laws did anything under
the first Trump administration, it wasn't because of the laws themselves.
It was because of the mass resistance to it.

Speaker 9 (03:39:12):
Yeah, we don't fix this with sanctuary laws. And I
think anyone who's telling you that that is the case
is either lying to you or unaware.

Speaker 7 (03:39:20):
Exactly.

Speaker 9 (03:39:21):
I want to talk a little bit about some documents
that the Deportation Data Project has obtained by Freedom of
Information Act request. And they show us some data about
ICE detentions. One of the things they show is that
ICE is focusing more and more on people with no
criminal record rather than as a claim focusing on people

(03:39:42):
with convictions. As of July, the majority of ICE arrests
were people with no convictions and no pending charges. This
comes in the same week as the Fourth Circuit. Post-Chevron
ruled that if a person's criminal conviction is vacated for
any reason, that eliminates immigration consequences coming from that conviction.
That would only be in the Fourth Circuit right now, right?

Speaker 5 (03:40:03):
It was reported today in a few outlets that that
July had the highest number of ICE arrests, almost 50,000.
That's correct.

Speaker 6 (03:40:14):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:40:14):
And it's very interesting. June saw the previous record, right?
And then July saw an even higher record. Specifically, I'm
looking at detention bookings there.

Speaker 5 (03:40:25):
Okay.

Speaker 9 (03:40:25):
So it is possible that someone could be booked in
having previously been detained once, right? Like we can't sum
all of these months together. It's unlikely, but like Flores,
the Flores settlement governs detention of minors. But I don't
think there's a prohibition on re-detention under Flores, as I
understand it. So yeah, as you said, these are the

(03:40:47):
highest numbers that we've seen in this Trump administration. The
data set I was looking at goes back to 2022,
but I would be shocked if there were pre-2022 numbers
that were higher than this. So I think it's probably
pretty safe to say these are the highest numbers ever.
It's interesting to break it down by state, which I did.
A lot of that increase came in Texas and Florida.
If you graph the number of bookings by state by month,

(03:41:09):
you see huge spikes in Texas and Florida. Texas has
always been the highest rate. It's a vast state. It
has a large migrant population. You have support from local
law enforcement. But the Florida peak was particularly notable, as
were Arizona and Georgia. California, by contrast, didn't go up
as much. And I want to get in a little bit.
I'm going to go through some more data and tell

(03:41:31):
us more about what this tells us about how ICE
is going about things now. The number of people in
detention is lower than its peak of January this year.
This is probably due to the all-time high number of
book outs from detention in July. The vast majority of
those were removals. Some of them, people who bonded out,
the vast bulk of those are going to be removals.

(03:41:51):
We can also see certain detention facilities growing in population,
notably Camp East Montana a few months ago. I reported
on the GAO report, Government Accountability Office report, which highlighted
how terrible conditions were there. As far as I know,
it's still called Montana, not Montagna. I don't know if
that's just they don't have the capacity to add accents

(03:42:13):
or if maybe they're going for something else there. Overall,
this data shows that the ice surge in July was
really huge. And it shows us a little bit about
this home and era approach, right? They're not doing what
Bovino did, which was gratuitously using violence and crowd control
and a highly visible militarized presence in blue states. They

(03:42:34):
are doing this in red states as well. And they're
doing it in a less sort of confrontational way. Not
that it's not confrontational to grab someone and tear their
family apart.

Speaker 3 (03:42:45):
Of course it is, right?

Speaker 9 (03:42:46):
But Bovino was trying to manufacture media moments. Yeah, less
of a public spectacle, I guess. Yeah, Bovino has been
about the spectacle for years, right? Like he had, in
the Biden administration, he had social media people on his
payroll in the El Centro sector and video content creators.
So like, Homan is going about this differently, but clearly

(03:43:07):
he is very effective at what he is trying to do.
And it has been harder for people to oppose, said
Pavino's like flood a city with Border Patrol guys in
plague carriers approach.

Speaker 3 (03:43:16):
DHS OIG, that's the.

Speaker 9 (03:43:18):
Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security,
has also released a report this month detailing how the
focus on deportation, so all costs, has impacted the fentanyl market.
So the report, which looked at how HSI, that's Homeland
Security Investigations, has used expensive technologies, spoiler, it hasn't, concluded that, quote,

(03:43:39):
As ICE shifted priorities towards immigration enforcement, HSI's level of
effort on fentanyl declined from fiscal year 2024 to 2025.
Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24%, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl
decreased by approximately 30%, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39%. Indeed,

(03:44:00):
there are fewer HSI agents doing fentanyl investigations now than
there were in some years under Biden. which is remarkable
when you look at how massive the budget for DHS is, right?
And how aggressively they've been recruiting people.

Speaker 5 (03:44:14):
Well, no, James, they have to infiltrate the Sunrise Movement meetings.
That's more important for national security.

Speaker 9 (03:44:21):
They're sitting in cars outside memorials to Alex Peretti taking pictures.
The report also looked at a school called Raven. The
N is lowercase, the rest is not. You could ask
me why and I wouldn't be able to tell you.
It's a group of analytical tools It stated that, quote,
from fiscal years 2022 to 2025, HSI spent more than
$ 150 million developing the Raven platform.

Speaker 3 (03:44:43):
It was not widely used.

Speaker 9 (03:44:44):
Most of the offices surveyed abandoned using it altogether and
complained that it, quote, did not work and.

Speaker 3 (03:44:50):
Quote, crashed. Hell yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:44:53):
We love to see it.

Speaker 9 (03:44:54):
Yeah, it goes into like, I think this is probably
something that we can, we're going to see more, right,
as we continue like massively inflating the budgets of these
agencies that they will just do things that end up
being like a bridge to nowhere. But their attempt at
some like highly sophisticated analytical tool platform that would generate
leads seems to have completely, well, it's failed.

Speaker 3 (03:45:15):
They're not using it anymore. That's interesting.

Speaker 5 (03:45:18):
Something I did not mention in yesterday's episode about the
ICE surveillance, in Minnesota, is DHS's use of Clearview AI
to do some analysis of suspects, which identified people with
similar names but are different human beings in the Clearview
AI reports when they were looking into anti-ice protesters.

Speaker 9 (03:45:38):
Yeah, maybe this is what led to the famous case
of Olivia Rodrigo getting detained at the border a few
years ago.

Speaker 6 (03:45:45):
It used to be humans detaining a second guy named
John Smith on the Do Not Fly list. Now it's automated. Yeah,
those people have lost their jobs and it's very sad.
But yeah, they love to use AI, right? They use
AI in their surveillance towers at the border. I'm sure
we'll see a bunch of money thrown at AI shit
that will end up going nowhere in the next two years.

Speaker 5 (03:46:07):
Yeah, and I would not be surprised if some of
the budget increases that they have received might go to
some of the things that I will discuss in the
next segment after this ad break. Alright, we are back.

(03:46:35):
Let's return to our show's namesake. because there's a big
update on Trump's March executive order to restrict mail-in voting.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court lifted one injunction blocking
parts of this executive order. But as of recording, there
is another injunction in a separate case that still remains

(03:46:55):
in place. However, these injunctions relate to different parts of
the same executive order. So the entirety of the order
is not blocked by courts, and parts of it may
now be able to go into effect possibly before the midterms.
Let's start by talking about the injunction that the Supreme

(03:47:17):
Court just lifted. A group of 23 states sued the
government over Trump's executive order on mail-in voting for infringing
on the state's authority to administer elections. a district court
agreed and blocked the executive order. But on Monday, the
conservative majority ruled 6-3 in a shadow docket, unsigned ruling,

(03:47:38):
finding that the states and the lower court lacked the
legal authority to block the executive order because no harms
have yet come as a result of the executive order. What? Basically,
it was too soon to file a challenge because the
order hadn't yet gone into effect.

Speaker 8 (03:47:59):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (03:48:00):
And the plaintiffs had yet to suffer any injury.

Speaker 9 (03:48:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:48:05):
And like, that's the whole fucking point of the shadow docket.
It's based on the idea that the applicant faces serious,
irreparable harm if the emergency order is not granted. Like
the main example of this is like if someone's facing
execution on death row, but under the logic of the
conservative justices in this court ruling, such an inmate wouldn't

(03:48:29):
have the grounds to stay their execution because they haven't
died yet. It's completely batshit. This is not how these
rulings usually work. And having this ruling on the shadow
docket itself is just like insults to injury. The majority
wrote that the state's supposed concrete injury was in fact

(03:48:51):
only a, quote, unduly long chain of inferences. So this
ruling from the Supreme Court will now allow DHS to
create and send, quote unquote, state citizenship lists to each
state 60 days ahead of upcoming federal elections, cataloging each
person in every state who DHS believes is eligible to vote. Now,

(03:49:16):
the Supreme Court does note that, quote, states are not
required to use the lists, unquote. But just the existence
of these lists and the creation of them could be
incredibly troubling. Of course, they could be used in the future.
But as James has discussed, we do not have a
single list of U.S.

Speaker 8 (03:49:36):
Citizens.

Speaker 5 (03:49:38):
And the idea that DHS might be trying to, and
in fact is now allowed to make such a list,
for a specific purpose, could have a lot of far-reaching ramifications,
even beyond elections.

Speaker 3 (03:49:50):
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:49:51):
It's also important to know that as of the Supreme
Court's new ruling, the Attorney General will now, quote, prioritize
the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and
local officials or any others who issue federal ballots to
ineligible voters. So even if states are not required to
use these citizenship lists from DHS, Trump is still effectively

(03:50:15):
compelling states to follow these lists or else they could
face prosecution.

Speaker 7 (03:50:19):
Yep.

Speaker 5 (03:50:20):
In the ruling, the conservative majority wrote that the lower
court concluded states did suffer a present injury because it
required them to, quote, begin planning now how to comply
with the order, unquote. But the Supreme Court stated that states, quote,
cannot manufacture a standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves

(03:50:43):
based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is
certainly not impending this is wild this is a wild
thing to say that states are only suffering harm because
they're trying to figure out how to comply with the
order as written and they're just doing that to themselves
as opposed to that being imposed from the president Right.

Speaker 9 (03:51:06):
So the suggestion is that they would just be like,
we'll not comply, see you in court when this comes in,
I guess.

Speaker 3 (03:51:13):
That would be how they should approach this.

Speaker 5 (03:51:16):
And that is maybe what they are going to do
going forward, because there is now a new lawsuit, which
I will discuss in a second, regarding some of these issues. Okay.
And again, the whole argument from the conservative court is
that basically no harm has yet been done, so they
can't file a challenge. However, because this is a shadow
docket ruling, the court did find that this injunction would

(03:51:40):
cause the government to likely suffer irreparable harm if the
stay isn't granted.

Speaker 6 (03:51:48):
I love our just like cartoon Calvin Ball ruling legal body.

Speaker 5 (03:51:52):
Yeah. It's one of the most cartoon rulings I've looked at.
And we've looked at a lot of cartoon rulings this year.

Speaker 3 (03:51:59):
Yeah, that's almost the only rulings we get anymore.

Speaker 7 (03:52:01):
Oh man, yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:52:04):
Now, the court does note, quote, the court's disposition of
this application does not mean that any measure taken by
the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful.
On that score, time will tell. But the order itself
does not harm the state's So the district court lacks
justification to bar the government from trying to implement it, unquote.

(03:52:29):
So they admit that in the implementation of this executive order,
it might violate the constitution, right? The government, the federal
government might violate laws, but just the order as written
can't do anything because it's just text. It can't actually
do anything. So you can't challenge it. So that's all bad,
but let's talk about kind of the other half of this.

(03:52:53):
So this ruling did not address the part of the
executive order requiring the post office to review the eligibility
of voters before sending them an absentee ballot. And there's
a separate injunction by the same lower court judge blocking
the Postal Service from implementing their proposed rule change in

(03:53:13):
accordance with Trump's executive order. This executive order directed the
Postal Service to, quote, initiate a proposed rulemaking that includes several,
quote unquote, proposed provisions, including a new requirement that outbound
absentee ballots feature a unique barcode to facilitate tracking. And
Trump told the Postal Service to not mail any ballots

(03:53:34):
to people who are not on a list of eligible U.S.
citizen voters. Now, in the Supreme Court's ruling on that
other injunction, the conservative majority wrote, quote, If the Postal
Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule. And, well, well, well,
last Friday, the Postal Service outlined and published their new

(03:53:56):
final rule. Quote, The rule introduces new mail piece preparations
requirements and data reporting standards for federal ballot mail that
must be satisfied prior to presenting outbound federal ballot mail
for acceptance into the mail stream. Unquote. So the new rule...
requires states to use standardized mail-in ballot envelope designs to

(03:54:18):
be compatible with automated processing to display a consistent election
mail logo and an intelligent mail barcode. State and local
election officials will also have to use a new federal
ballot mail portal to administer absentee ballots. And this portal
will be used for two things. This is like a

(03:54:39):
digital portal. State officials will use the portal to certify
the design of of their new envelopes in accordance with
the new requirements and must provide the name and address
of the voter as found on the outbound federal mail
ballot envelope, the issuing state and the barcode on the

(03:54:59):
outbound and return federal ballot mail envelopes prior to presenting
an outbound federal ballot mailing for acceptance. So that's the data.
states have to submit to the postal service. It is
a name, address, the barcode, and the state. That does
not go as far as what Trump's executive order wanted

(03:55:20):
the postal service to go, but this is going to
be a new step or at least a new process
to do some of the same steps that have already
been kind of been done in like an ad hoc manner.
And rather than this following a 60-day deadline as set
in Trump's executive order, the postal service's final rule contains
an optional 90-day notice for for states to tell the

(03:55:40):
Postal Service that they'll be using mail-in ballots, and a
recommended 30-day soft deadline to upload voter data into this
new portal before the Postal Service will accept any mail-in ballots.
And importantly, if states do not follow the new proposed rulemaking,
the Post Office just will not accept mail-in ballots. Quote,
the Postal Service will generally not accept outbound federal ballot

(03:56:03):
mailings unless compliance with the rule's new standards has been verified.
meaning they have to up that data into the portal
and have these new envelopes. Now, the rule does note, quote,
the Postal Service will not play any role in determining
voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots, unquote. So

(03:56:24):
they're not directly, as of how this rule is written,
they're not going to be directly reviewing citizenship lists when
they receive those ballots, but they will have the name
and the address and the state and the barcode. And
even if the Postal Service themselves will not be verifying eligibility,
that doesn't mean Trump officials won't ever use this new

(03:56:46):
centralized mail-in ballot portal database for other purposes in the future.
The published final rule says that the after the government
obtains timely relief from the lower court injunction in preparation
for the 2026 election, which has yet to happen as

(03:57:06):
of recording. But on Wednesday morning, a few hours ago,
23 states have sued over the final rule, over this
new rule, as the Supreme Court told them they could
once this rule was published. So again, this rule does
not go as far as what Trump wanted, but it
does open the door for certain things. And combined with

(03:57:29):
the DHS citizenship lists and the Attorney General being able
to prosecute people who do not essentially follow those lists
at the state level, this could be combined with aspects
of Trump's executive order to make mail-in voting more difficult
and introduce very, very, very severe penalties for states that
don't follow what the executive order is outlining.

Speaker 9 (03:57:52):
Yeah this is great this has been part of the
project for a while right like yeah attacking elections has
been the thing that has been like the cost of
entry into the Republican Party yeah since 2020.

Speaker 2 (03:58:04):
They hate the idea of people voting yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:58:06):
Like a free and fair election is something you have
to be opposed to.

Speaker 2 (03:58:09):
Like that's the most disgusting thing that a conservative can imagine.

Speaker 9 (03:58:12):
Today yeah I'm sure like If I had to guess,
we will see a lot more visible ice stuff again,
give it a couple months, you know, right before the election.

Speaker 3 (03:58:21):
That wouldn't shock me at all. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:58:23):
Quick update here. After recording, a federal judge lifted that
final injunction blocking parts of Trump's executive order. So now
the administration is fully cleared to implement aspects of that
order ahead of the midterms. That new 23-state lawsuit.

(03:58:44):
Will target the Postal Service's final rule, which can now
be implemented following the lifting of the injunction. For our
last section, let's turn to the U.S. military. Let's start
with Carlos.

Speaker 7 (03:58:59):
The oceans around the U.S. have once again become killing
fields because the U.S. military carried out two strikes against
vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean that it alleges,
without publishing any proof, were trafficking drugs. The first strike
was in the Pacific on Sunday, and it was the
first one of these strikes in roughly two months. Meanwhile,
the second was in the Caribbean on Tuesday. Per The Guardian,

(03:59:22):
this brings a total to 68 strikes with an overall
death toll of at least 227 people since the strikes
began in September of last year. These strikes come at
the same time as the U.S. announced that Colombia, Guatemala,
and Honduras agreed to allow joint military operations against criminal
groups on their soil. It's worth noting that, per The Guardian,

(03:59:42):
Guatemala denied reaching such a deal. Ecuador launched these operations
earlier in March, and right before we started recording, the
Ecuadorian police announced that it had dealt a, quote, strong
blow against organized crime through operations Factoría and Jericho with
international cooperation of the DEA and Southcom that led to
the arrest of 43 people.

Speaker 5 (04:00:03):
Robert, do you want to close this out?

Speaker 6 (04:00:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:00:06):
So as I'm going to guess everybody remembers, about six
months ago, Iranian strikes crippled a U.S. base in Bahrain
and damaged a major logistics hub. This is part of
why the Abraham Lincoln has been running short of supplies
and has been just out of a bunch of stuff
because they had to redirect and move supply. We talked
about this last week to the base in Diego Garcia.
One of the other things that happened after that base

(04:00:27):
in Bahrain was struck is that the U.S. Navy found
themselves planning a hasty evacuation for roughly 1,300 family members
of servicemen and women, as well as civilian employees of
the Department of Defense that worked at the base. If
you aren't super familiar with how the U.S. military's overseas
footprint works, we've got a shitload of bases all over
the world, and those bases all fall into two broad groups.

(04:00:49):
You've got ones that are large and safe enough for
soldiers to bring their families and to host large numbers
of full-time live-in civilian employees, and you've got bases that
are considered too close to the action for all of
that to be safe. These DOD communities of civilians are
like little chunks of suburban America transplanted to locations across
the globe. They have their own schools, bars, clubs, and
grocery stores. Most of my family grew up around the

(04:01:11):
air bases that we have on Okinawa, and even during
the Vietnam War, there was never any chance that people
living there would come into direct danger, unless, like, there
was a nuclear war, but then who gives a fuck? Iran, however,
has the ballistic missile capacity in order to strike these bases,
and this has been the case for years, for a
long time. They've been able to hit these bases in
Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East that they've
been hitting lately, but they've restrained themselves historically because in

(04:01:34):
previous iterations of this conflict, Both sides abided by certain
lines and rules. Trump threw the whole playbook out, and
it turns out that none of our facilities within missile
range of Iran were hardened and ready to be shot
at by missiles. There had not been, and it would
have been extremely expensive to do that for all these bases,
and nobody really thought it was necessary. And even when

(04:01:55):
we started a war with Iran and knew that there
was a chance they were going to start retaliating, There
was so much arrogance within the administration about both our
missile defenses and about Iran's lack of capability that I
don't think they thought it was possible that we would
get struck in any meaningful way. So the evacuation from
Bahrain was chaotic and poorly executed.

Speaker 3 (04:02:14):
Laura Corte reported.

Speaker 2 (04:02:15):
On this in an August 21st article for Stars and Stripes,
which is a newspaper owned by the Department of Defense
that is, at least on paper, editorially independent. And we'll
talk a little bit more about that later. But from
that article, quote, Early in the war, a mass text
message went out to evacuees directing them to contact the
Navy Marine Corps Relief Society, a nonprofit that aims to

(04:02:37):
assist military families during emergencies. However, when one spouse called
the phone number listed in the announcement, they were connected
with the National Bank of Canada.

Speaker 7 (04:02:44):
The spouse said.

Speaker 2 (04:02:45):
That gives you an idea of just how piss poor
the planning was. Like no one checked. I'm guessing they
probably had some AI like throw shit together for people,
but nobody was like prepared to evacuate these people. And
even once they knew they had to, Nobody took the
care to make sure that these folks got correct information.

Speaker 6 (04:03:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:03:03):
And I'm not asking you, the listener, to sympathize with
a bunch of families of servicemen and women who are, again,
participating in an illegal war against Iran. What I am
asking you to do is look at what this says
about the lack of planning and understanding of what we
were getting into when Trump and his cronies started this war.

Speaker 3 (04:03:21):
Right.

Speaker 6 (04:03:22):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:03:22):
Here's another quote from that article. Some evacuees say they
have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket
for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors
of temporary housing while their cars and furniture are stranded
in Bahrain or aboard ships unable to leave the region.
Many say the prolonged displacement has taken an emotional toll
and worry about its long term effect on their family's
financial and emotional well-being. We literally have been making this

(04:03:44):
up as we go because nothing is conceived to go
on for this length of time. Vice Admiral Kurt Renshaw,
commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said on Wednesday
at a virtual town meeting, when you've got the commander
of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command being like, well, we're
making up the evac plan and how to take care
of these people as we go because we never thought
that we would have to care about this. That's a
bad fucking sign, right?

Speaker 7 (04:04:06):
So U.S.

Speaker 2 (04:04:06):
Naval Forces Central Command are an absent. was based in Bahrain, right?
That's where their headquarters were. And we've had to move
the HQ. I think it's floating right now. But none
of the civilian staff who are critical to keeping it
going are working wherever they've got it right now. And
it's unclear where they're going to relocate to because, again,
nobody knows fucking anything because they didn't plan for any

(04:04:27):
of this. Furthering the confusion, the Washington Post recently reported
that top Pentagon officials are currently considering a massive drawdown
of U.S. military presence in the After the war ends. Now,
I find this interesting because this reporting came out the
exact same time Trump started threatening slash promising to make
the Strait of Hormuz a US territory and charge tolls,

(04:04:49):
which would obviously necessitate an expanded US presence in the region.
This report was put together by people within the Pentagon
who were kind of acting on their own recognizance. They
were not ordered to do this. So this is basically
a result of people who are somewhat smart in the
Pentagon going, We cannot maintain all these bases with the
increased level of hostility and knowing that Iran now can

(04:05:10):
and will strike them. We need to reduce our capacity
because we cannot defend all of these bases or keep
them safely operational. Whereas Trump is just blasting off and
we're going to take the straight and hold it. So
you have inside the Pentagon people saying we absolutely cannot
hold on to all of our current possessions in the
Persian Gulf. And Trump just sort of making whatever fucking
statements he wants to make. Per the Washington Post, one

(04:05:32):
of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is
whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where
America's large overseas military bases have been battered for months
by Iranian strikes. And the damage to these facilities has
prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its
presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled
that it might not rebuild bases as they were before
the conflict. Now, again, this review was not ordered by

(04:05:54):
Pete Hegseth. This is the thinking of sober and prudent
people who remain at the Pentagon, and they have to
do it on their own because they know that none
of their bosses are going to order this, right? If
it becomes immediately obvious that, oh, we actually have to
do a drawdown, they'll get the order like they did
with the evacuation of Bahrain, and they'll just be told
to figure it out suddenly. So people are trying within
the Pentagon to make sure they have a fucking plan together,

(04:06:15):
knowing that no one in charge is going to plan
things out properly. And there's a lot of funny quotes
from that article. I'm going to read another here. Before
the start of the war in February, U.S. Central Command
evacuated many of its bases, judging them too vulnerable to
Iranian missiles and drone attacks to maintain normal staffing levels.
Some of the shifts away from the major Gulf facilities
might last after the war, a person familiar with the
posture adjustment said. Iran thinks we are in the traditional places,

(04:06:38):
the person said, declining to specify the changes so as
to not put U.S. service members at risk. And we
are not. And then the article immediately goes on to.

Speaker 3 (04:06:45):
Say, six U.S.

Speaker 2 (04:06:46):
Service members were killed in a March strike on Port Shuaiba,
a military facility in Kuwait, and more than 200 U.S.
facilities have been damaged or destroyed during the conflict. I
just find that clash between, well, we moved our stuff
before the war, so Iran doesn't know where our stuff is.
They think that we're in one place and we're in
the other, and it's like, well, then they hit and
killed and wounded a bunch of guys, because actually they
had a pretty good idea of where we were.

Speaker 9 (04:07:06):
I was just thinking, as you mentioned those bases, Rob,
I don't know if you saw this article Tweet, Zeet,
maybe we're supposed to call it, by Barry McCaffrey, who
was like... Was a US general, commanded US forces, I think,
in the first war in the Persian Gulf, right?

Speaker 7 (04:07:21):
Right, right.

Speaker 9 (04:07:23):
In my judgment, the US armed forces have probably permanently
lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised
to control access to the Gulf states. US will have
to negotiate new access into Western Saudi Arabia, Israel, Southern Europe.

Speaker 3 (04:07:36):
God, that's bad. It's sometimes just so revelatory to pull
out and be like.

Speaker 7 (04:07:41):
Oh, fuck.

Speaker 3 (04:07:42):
Yeah, like a change in the global order of things.

Speaker 7 (04:07:45):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 (04:07:47):
The age of uncontested US hegemony is over, and it
was ended for absolutely no reason other than a bunch
of people hate Iran and thought they could just instantly
win a war.

Speaker 9 (04:07:57):
Yeah, like we wound up to take a haymaker and
ended up missing and falling over and hitting our head.
It's like a fighting analogy.

Speaker 2 (04:08:04):
Yeah, it is kind of funny to think that like...
The British Empire lost its largely uncontested power and wealth
in a lot of areas because there was like a
nightmarish war that cost millions and millions of people their lives.
And Britain burnt a shitload of its treasure and young
men fighting it. And there was another war not that
long later in just the day. And whereas the U.S.
was just like, I don't know, what if we just

(04:08:24):
shoot ourselves in the dick for no reason?

Speaker 5 (04:08:27):
Let's see if that works.

Speaker 7 (04:08:29):
Swing and a miss. It's great. The patterns of empire change.

Speaker 2 (04:08:33):
Yeah, and that Stripes article is just there's I'll read
one last quote from it just for an idea of
like what this is doing to the families of these people.
One spouse of an active duty sailor who requested anonymity
for fear of reprisal said the repeated displacement has traumatized
her children. The family first fled to a U.S. base
in Germany where donations from the local military community helped
them set up a temporary household. They were later told

(04:08:55):
they had to relocate again, this time to the United States.
She said her kids are developing serious behavior issues as
a result of the move and that the youngest now
barely recognizes her husband during video calls. This is all
really bad. There's a lot of ugly quotes in that article.
And again, this is a Defense Department-owned newspaper. Within hours
of that Stripes article being published, the Pentagon went after

(04:09:16):
the supposed editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They basically
wound up firing the editor in chief, the publisher and
the reporter who wrote that article, Laura Corte. The editor
who stood by Laura is Eric Slavin. And I think
that's why he lost his job because he refused to
throw her under the bus. And I do applaud them
both for doing the right thing. But that is also
noteworthy that Stripes has always had a degree of independence.

(04:09:38):
They have reported on things that the Pentagon, the DOD
didn't want them to because they're reporting on like actual
issues that like troops and their families are facing, you know,
and that's an important thing for that community to have.
And one thing this signals is that that does not
exist anymore, nor no degree of independence can be allowed
when it threatens the propaganda.

Speaker 3 (04:09:56):
Anyway, that's what I got. Good stuff.

Speaker 5 (04:09:59):
Carlos, where can people find more of your journalism online?

Speaker 7 (04:10:03):
You can find me pretty much on every social media platform.
My at is vaquero2xl. It's V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L.

Speaker 5 (04:10:13):
And on It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 7 (04:10:14):
Yeah. As well as it could happen here. That is true.
I forget that. But yes, I just spoke with James
about U.S. colonialism.

Speaker 3 (04:10:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (04:10:22):
How it started. And now it looks like it might
be ending. We'll see.

Speaker 3 (04:10:26):
We're pivoting in a different direction.

Speaker 7 (04:10:28):
Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 5 (04:10:29):
What a heartwarming story. I guess there is hope for
the future.

Speaker 3 (04:10:34):
That's what we do here at CoolZone Media.

Speaker 2 (04:10:37):
That's what we do.

Speaker 6 (04:10:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (04:10:38):
If you want to email us, you can do it.
CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. Should I list the categories of emails
I will not be responding to? Because they grow every fucking...
Just don't be weird in there. It's for tips about news.

Speaker 7 (04:10:51):
Don't be weird.

Speaker 3 (04:10:52):
Don't be weird.

Speaker 5 (04:10:54):
Don't be weird in there. I think that's enough said.

Speaker 3 (04:10:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:10:56):
This is not the place to flirt with people or...
It might be the place to tell us your conspiracy theories.
Tell us your conspiracy theories. All right, episode's done. No,
don't tell us your conspiracy theories. That's going to be horrible.

Speaker 5 (04:11:09):
Send all your conspiracy theories to at James Stout.

Speaker 9 (04:11:14):
Do you know how much I fucking work already?

Speaker 6 (04:11:16):
Anyways, put a trans girl on your couch.

Speaker 5 (04:11:19):
We reported the news.

Speaker 7 (04:11:21):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (04:11:29):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 10 (04:11:35):
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,
coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find
sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 8 (04:11:52):
Thanks for listening.

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