It Could Happen Here Weekly 79

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 got to be nothing new here for you. But
you can make your own decisions. It's it could happen here.

(00:31):
It's it's it's it's it could happen here a podcast
that it is. It's happening to you here right now.
Bad things, good things, all sorts of things, because today
we are talking about the ultimate and bad good things,
Donald Trump's indictment and very brief arrest. Garrison Davis, James Stout.

(00:57):
How are we all doing today? How we all feeling
this week?

Speaker 2 (01:02):
We did it, Joe, the mission accomplished.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Time to pack up.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, Dark Brandon has come for Trump finally, So I
figured we would wait until, you know, a few days
had gone by. There were a lot of when the
initial indictment was announced, we didn't even actually know what
all the charges were. There was a pretty long period
of time that we didn't know like what the actual

(01:27):
crime at the center of this was, but most of
that has now is now relatively clear, as are kind
of the earliest stages of the fallout to the Trump indictment.
So I feel like now is a reasonably good time
to talk about it. More may have, you know, occur
since we occurred, since we recorded this. But broadly speaking,

(01:51):
the thing that Trump got indicted by, as according to
the thirteen page court filing outlining the case against him
by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was what's called a
catch and kill scheme in which Trump and you know,
his his Trump bets, would basically bribe people to not
write bad stories about him. You know, it's a hush

(02:12):
money thing. My assumption is that basically everybody at that
level of wealth and prominence does versions of the same thing,
and these, in fact, are not crimes on their own.
You can bribe somebody not to say a bad talk
about a bad thing you did to the press. Where
things get illegal is that Trump, you know, made a

(02:33):
series of payments, primarily these one hundred and thirty one
thousand dollars in payments to Stormy Daniels, to buy her quiet,
and then he had to falsify company records or his
people falsified company records to disguise the payments as legal fees.
Bragg is arguing that not only is this a crime,

(02:54):
but it's a felony crime because he did this, He
falsified these records to these disguise these payments in order
to further additional violations of the laws. And those additional
violations of the laws, the actual like core crime here
is that disguising under New York law, disguising these kind

(03:16):
of payments in corporate records is a crime. It's typically
a misdemeanor, but it's a felony if the business records
were intended to obscure a second crime. And in this case,
the second crime appears to be the use of funds
to advance his like presidential campaign, which was in violation
of campaign finance laws. So the core crime that makes

(03:37):
the misdemeanor a felony is the fact that he was
doing this in order to advance his presidential campaign, and
thus like the payments that he was making were basically
counted as part of the limited amount of money you
can spend, you know, financing your campaign and he violated
that right. That's that's the gist of it, as I understand,
like what's actually being argued here.

Speaker 4 (03:59):
Yeah, that seems to be about the sides of it.
Just for people who aren't familiar. Brag is Alvin Bragg?

Speaker 3 (04:05):
What the yeah?

Speaker 4 (04:07):
You da Manhattan da Okay?

Speaker 5 (04:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
What's really concerning about this is that if they can
arrest Trump, that means they can arrest to any one
of us.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
All the money that I've paid for people to hush
up stories about it, including Stormy Daniels, you know. No,
it's like people, there's a lot of talk about like
is this a weak case or a strong case? None
of us are lawyers, my my, I go kind of
both ways about this. One of them is that Alvin

(04:40):
Bragg is a guy who, you know, whatever he believes
about this case, is also a prosecutor. That is a
political position. Prosecuting someone and failing to get your man
is bad for your career, and if that man is
the president who you indict for the first time in
living memory, that would be really bad for your So
my assumption is that Brag at least believes he's got

(05:04):
a really strong case otherwise he because this is a
tremendous risk for him right now. Obviously, can Trump wriggle
his way out of it, well, Trump is extremely good
at wriggling his way out of things, and he has
all of the money in the world for lawyers. So
I think it would be foolish to say it's a
slam dunk either way. People who are saying that, like,
this is a weird thing to prosecute him for, I guess,

(05:28):
but you know it does. I can see the logic
that this guy that Bragg is kind of going with,
and it's do I think this should be a felony?

Speaker 4 (05:39):
I guess.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
I don't care, as long as it does some damage
to the man and causes him some like consternation, which
is like the question, right, is this actually gonna harm him?

Speaker 4 (05:50):
But yeah, like that is the more debatable question, right,
Like it's just gonna harm them or help him.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
There's there's a lot of talk about is this a
political prosecution? And my general response to that is, well,
like nearly all prosecutions are political, right, Like, even something
that wouldn't seem like like a decision to go after
a rapist, well, most rapists are not actually ever charged
or brought through the justice system. So if you're a
prosecutor choosing to do that in a specific case, there's

(06:18):
a degree of politics factoring into your decision, even if
it's just as as simple as like, if I take
on this case and I lose it, it could harm
my ability to move forward in the ways that I
want to in my career. So the fact that now
this is political perhaps a grander sense. I have no
doubt that the fact that this is Donald fucking Trump
and everything that's happened since twenty twenty has happened that

(06:41):
he has been a party, and I have no doubt
that that all factors into this. But I just don't
see that as being like the fact that finally a
prosecutor is making sort of a political prosecution of a
man at the top of the hierarchy is not something
that concerns me terribly.

Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, I didn't think, Like, I'm more concerned that this
seems to have propelled him to the front of the
Republican race and that he's getting a bunch of donations
off it than I am about any potential consequences. Like all, Yeah,
actual indictment.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
It is certainly an interesting political move for dissentis to
back Trump on this and not not like comply with extradition,
not that it would ever get to that point, but
that is still a move that dissent is made on purpose,
which is an interesting point of a move considering a
future candidacy, and it.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Is let's talk about that a second, because obviously thirty
four felony counts sounds like a lot. That is in
fact quite a few felonies. But the at least the
coverage I'm reading is like it's basically unheard of for
someone to actually do jail time for this as a
first defense, which I don't know, whatever, it's absolutely breathtaking.

Speaker 4 (08:03):
He doesn't have a single crime on him, giving me
he's essentially a career criminal.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Well, there there are continuing like there's like the potential
for prosecution still from like that call he had with
the Secretary of State of Georgia, which we'll talk about
a little bit.

Speaker 4 (08:19):
Yeah, I think there are a few sort of more
serious there's a number of things that, Yeah, this may
not be the last Trump criminal indictment that we see.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Oh god, we can we can only hope.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
We can only hope because because.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
It only gets more funny from here, and that's the
only reason to hope.

Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yeah, well, well unless it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
I'm seeing a lot of like panic from some people,
certain certain folks in the progressive and kind of center
left media sphere who are like, this is just handed
Trump the nomination. This might have just handed Trump the election.
From what I'm looking at and from the polling I'm
looking at, I mean, I think there's a good chance
this helps I mean, I think the certainly supports the

(09:02):
argument that this will help him cinch the nomination. I
don't really think that was super in doubt before, although
he has definitely gained on Desantas since all of this,
this whole process started, there is evidence I'm looking at
a five thirty eight article right now, Trump's indictment might
be making him more popular among Republicans. But kind of

(09:24):
the point that's actually made is that the group that's
that's getting more likely to back him is his base.
Like maybe it's people who were softer on him because
he didn't back you know, the j sixth people. Maybe
some of them are just folks who kind of drifted
away because you know, it's the years in between a
presidential election and that's a natural thing. So it may
have galvanized his base. He's certainly he's raised four or

(09:47):
five million dollars.

Speaker 4 (09:49):
He's seven.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Now he's claiming seven. I mean that seems real possible.
He is saying that a significant chunk of it. I
think like twenty percent might be more than that. Now
we're like first time donations. That is what his people
are claiming. That is not I have no way of
knowing if those numbers are legitimate. What we can say

(10:11):
is that the polling that we're seeing nationally does not
back the idea that this is causing a sea change
in the likelihood of Americans to support Donald Trump. About
sixty nine percent of Americans, according to a very nice
according to an economist you Go poll, say that in general,

(10:33):
failing to report having spent campaign money on payments in
order to keep someone silent about an issue to effect
and affect the outcome of an election is a crime.
About ninety percent Biden voters back this, while about fifty
four percent of those who voted for Trump in twenty
twenty said the same, Which is interesting. Now, that doesn't
mean they also think that this is what Trump did, right,

(10:55):
They're just saying they think that that is a crime.
About fifty seven percent of Republicans according to that same
or according to a Yahoo News yugav poll, about fifty
seven percent of Republicans and Republican leaners said they would
support Trump and a head to head against Ron DeSantis,
who received thirty one percent. That's an increase in support

(11:16):
for the president by about ten percent, but DeSantis has
only gone down by like eight percent, so you can
see like he basically what's happening is that this is
causing people to flock from DeSantis to him, which is
not kind of evidence that we're seeing like a broader
national sweep. Quinnipiac University, n PR, PBS News Hour Marist

(11:40):
Pole kind of broadly supported the idea that investigations into
Trump are popular among Americans, more popular than not. At
least about fifty six percent of Americans say the investigations
into Trump are fair, about forty one percent say they're
a witch hunt. In dependants are pretty split on the issue,

(12:02):
but obviously like Democrats, wildly supportive Republicans very much against.
Most college educated adults come down on this being fair,
as do most gin Z and millennial people. Adults without
a college education, White evangelicals and those in small towns
are most likely to call it a witch hunt. An NPR,

(12:22):
PBS News Hour Marist poll shows a plurality of Americans.
Forty six percent believe Trump has done something illegal related
to those investigations. Another twenty nine percent say Trump has
done something unethical but not illegal, while only twenty three
percent say he's done nothing wrong. Overall, fifty seven percent
of Americans say that criminal charges filed against Trump should

(12:44):
disqualify him from a presidential bid. Thirty eight percent say
it should not. That would be an area where I
actually agree with the Republicans. I don't think that having
charges against you should disqualify you from running for president.
But man, I think if you are a fucking murderer,
you should be able to run for president. People have
the right to run for and vote for whoever the
fuck they want, and I think that that is a

(13:04):
strong core belief of mine. Not going to vote for Trump,
but I think the fact that he's getting charged with
a bunch of felonies should not. If he was in jail,
he should be able to run as people have in
the past.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
In my opinion, Yeah, Eugene Debs famous Trump President, and
I'm kind of more interested actually in I think the
Republican response is fairly predictable, Like all of this we
could have called that, you know, the moment they said
they were indicting him the Democrats, Like, I'm look, I
don't think the Democrats are ever going to do anything

(13:36):
useful that will really change material conditions or make things
much better for working people in this country. But the
fact that it gives them the option to pivot back
to like Orange Man bad as their only campaign, as
their only promise, as their only sort of principle, which
like they put forward as a reason to vote for them,

(13:57):
is still bad. I think like it prevents even the
mudicum of accountability that we have for all the shit
that the Democrats have done and all the shit that
they haven't done in the past what like three two,
two and a half years since the election.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
I think that's so much broader of a problem than
just dealing with this set of charges.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
I am.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
I am sympathetic to the idea if you just kind
of look at history that you can't let people do
the kind of shit Trump did and not try to
fucking go after them and not hammer the sons of bitches, right,
and this is this is not you know they went
after after the Beer Hall putch, Hitler was jailed for

(14:42):
like a year, So it doesn't mean that, like slaps
on the wrist don't necessarily have much of a protective effect.

Speaker 4 (14:50):
But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
I am so torn on this. I mean, obviously it's
really funny. I think it if this is kind of
the start of a series of prosecutions that's going to
make this guy's life hell, and that might actually even
force some consequences for him, then I think that's broadly speaking,
a good thing, as long as it doesn't like disqualify

(15:13):
him from the presidency, which I think would be a
bad precedent.

Speaker 4 (15:17):
But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
I'm broadly on team yeah, man, fuck him up, like
we know this guy would have, and in fact has
promised to if he gets into power again, use the state,
use the Justice Department, remake it in his own image,
and destroy his enemies. So I'm not against the idea that,

(15:40):
like well, the dims, I tend to agree with you
on most things, James, Like I don't believe the Democratic
Party deserves to have an easy election right now, because
they've failed. I mean, this is the week where we're
getting the announcement from Biden that he's essentially taking kind

(16:00):
of the soft answer to the GOP attack on trans
people participating in sporting events. We were also about a
week out from his most recent announcement on or maybe
actually it's been more like a couple of weeks. On
the border shit, we just had that horrible fire over
in Juarez like a week or so ago. Like, the
Biden administration has let a lot of people down in

(16:22):
a number of ways. There's you know, some of the
drilling shit that's about to start up again in Alaska
is really unsettling to me. So I agree with you.
I don't like the idea that they can make this
be an Orange Man bad election again. And I'm hopeful
that some of what we've seen, you know, particularly like
the most recent election in Chicago, you know, maybe maybe

(16:44):
there's kind of at least room at the state level
for a lot more progressive to edge out kind of
centrist dims and force some consequences that way. But I
also am worried about, you know, this authoritarian who threatened
to jail and murder a bunch of people. I care
about and like I want, I want him to spend

(17:10):
the rest of his life tangled up in that shit.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
I don't know that that's what this is going to be.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
You know, maybe they'll they'll fail miserably here, but I
don't know. I do think the kind of panic that
you're getting from some people that like this handed them
the election, I'm not seeing evidence that that's the case.
I think that maybe if this had happened in like
twenty sixteen or even twenty twenty, sure you might get
something like that. But at the point where at now,

(17:37):
I just don't think new people are coming to Trump
in numbers.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, And it very much makes sense for the liberal
state apparatus to try to defend itself from what it
sees as like an insurgent, reactionary factor, right, Like that
that is how they view Trump and Trump's political power,
so it makes sense they will use their own powers
to try to resist that from gaining control. Again, whether

(18:08):
or not you believe the state apparatus should exist at all,
or how valid you view its existence, it makes sense
what they're doing.

Speaker 4 (18:16):
Yeah, I'm not I am.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
I mean, honestly, I am surprised they committed to it
because there is in part because this is a tremendous
risk for Brag and the people around him. Right if
if this fails, which it very well might, you know,
obviously that would have could have consequences for everybody, but
you know, it could have really serious career consequences for
this guy. And I am surprised that you've you've got

(18:41):
someone willing to kind of throw the dice here, and
I'm hopeful that maybe that inspires especially since this case,
by the way, since I'm sure people are curious. No
one I've looked at who knows more about the law
than me expects this to hit trial quickly. Again, Trump
has all of the money in the world, and this
is like probably going to be a pretty winding process

(19:01):
outside of just the normal problems of like a rich
man is being accused of a series of crimes and
has many lawyers. The Secret Service has a lot to
say and when and how the actual trial part of
this commences, and that has a chance of extending it.
So my hope is that as this kind of winds on,
maybe the fact that Bragg was willing to kind of

(19:22):
take a shot in the dark here, so to speak,
inspires some of these other prosecutors who have been, you know,
poking at Trump to take a swing, and maybe with
enough swings, you know, it'll be like that guy we
had on Troy Hurtebes and his bear armor suit. You know,
you get a bunch of bikers to surround him with
two by fours and just swing.

Speaker 4 (19:43):
Until they're all broken and he's on the ground.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
It'll be like that scene from a Vengers Endgame, and
all of the George Soros DA's are just.

Speaker 4 (19:55):
Garrison, absolutely not led by George.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Sorry, I've never been angrier at you right now than
bringing up that fucking Avenger scene.

Speaker 4 (20:07):
Yeah. So, did y'all watch Trump's video response.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Oh, the one that played on all of the news
stations except for MSNBC.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
Yeah, yeah, we should talk. I actually did not watch it. Now.
I attempted to avoid that as well.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Actually, well I watched it yourself to that for us, Robert,
I sure did, and I have a summary of the
most salient parts. First off, I think that MSNBC made
the right call. They kind of summarized what was going on,
but like didn't just let him speak, you know, uninterrupted,
for it was like fifteen minutes, something like twenty minutes.

Speaker 4 (20:43):
I've interrupted, Robert, would you like to be interrupted by
some plugs for goods and services?

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Absolutely? You and buddy, Donald Trump is a master spokesman
and these are master products.

Speaker 4 (20:58):
Get your goal. We're back.

Speaker 6 (21:02):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
It's been such a glorious, glorious time. Everyone's everybody's really
feeling powerful today, mighty anyway, Trump. So, I don't know,
I watched this fucking thing. I guess my overall sentiment
would be kind of boring, right, This is not the
level of energy or the degree of kind of like

(21:27):
manic violent undercurrents that like his American Carnage speech had,
or even that like some of his more recent speeches
in front of crowds have had. I don't see. There's
so many people I've watched have takes on this who
are like and that. One of the joys of Twitter
is you'll see some guy who's I don't know, an

(21:47):
analyst at some newspaper be like, wow, Trump was really
low energy. He seems frightened. You know, I'm telling you,
this is a scared man. He's worried about these charges.
And then like someone else with almost the same CV
at a different place will be like wow, Trump seems angry.
You know, he's about to he's about to lash back.
Everybody better be ready for his counter strike. And honestly,

(22:09):
I just thought it was like kind of perfunctory. It
didn't see he certainly didn't seem low energy, but he
didn't seem like he had He didn't seem like he
had much to say other than kind of meander over
some of his some talking points that are at this
point mostly pretty lukewarm. He kind of runs through at

(22:31):
the start of this a laundry list of right wing
talking points that like the Democrats spied on his campaign
in twenty sixteen, that he was subjected to fraudulent investigations
from the Russia and Ukraine stuff to the impeachments to
the raid on mar A Lago. And then he broadens
it by talking about how the FBI and the DOJ
relentlessly pursue Republicans. And I was kind of expecting him

(22:53):
to lean more into the I am your vengeance shit
that he's been doing lately. He doesn't really as much
as I had expected him to in this Like you can,
he kind of like dips his toes into it, But
I think he's so focused on what's happening to him
that he doesn't he doesn't like push that as much
as I was kind of expecting. So this is what
comes after him like ranting about the DOJ and the

(23:16):
FBI relentlessly pursuing Republicans. He then kind of like goes
into the election fraud claimed stuff again. He gives a
bunch of lies there about the election, then about there
being like ballot stuffed and all that kind of shit.
Then he like pivots straight from that to talking about
how Twitter purportedly worked with the Biden family to hide
information about Hunter Biden. This is like debunked Twitter file shit. Yeah,

(23:39):
update on Twitter files. Matt to Beebe has just left
Twitter because post substances subseec. We do know obviously like
they did stuff like say hey, please remove this video
that shows Hunter Biden's penis, but also like that's not
number one is not supposed to be stuff that's on Twitter.
That's kind of like crossing the revenge porn line. And

(24:01):
you know, both sides made requests that things be removed.
Trump claims, and I'm not sure where he says that.
There's like like somebody calculated this, but I haven't been
able to find who made this calculation that if Twitter
hadn't intervened against him, he would have won the national
election by seventeen points. And then he's like, and that's

(24:24):
I didn't even need that many. You know, you could
have dropped that by sixteen point eight and I still
would have won, which is not true. Really again, it's
all just lies.

Speaker 4 (24:35):
It goes on.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
He compares the United States to a third world country
because of the twenty twenty election. He calls Alvin Bragg
a Soros backed prosecutor, which he does a lot. It's
not true, but brag. You know, people are using Soros
backed as like at least a lot of the Nazis
are are really leaping on that one.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
Yeah, they've gone back to Soros, Like yeah, they did
the three parentheses for a while, like the Santis mentioned
stories at least twice in his place. Yeah. Yeah, it's
a big, big one for them. I mean, I think
it is.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
It is it is a good move on their part
to frame this prosecution as election interference like that is
that is a smart move for them to get to
funnel all of this via that narrative.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, it helps keep the election fraud, all lies, lies, going.
It also helps because there's been a number of like,
you know, Chessa Buden who got booted in San Francisco
recently is one example.

Speaker 4 (25:38):
But we've seen a number of like progressive.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Prosecutors get elected by kind of dim and you know,
center left coalitions, and that allows them to kind of
connect this to one of the more successful talking points
was is the purported like horrible violence in the streets
of cities like San Francisco and whatnot, the like surgeon
crime and liberal you know, cities with liberal prosecutors. Again,

(26:02):
it's all bullshit, but it's not a bad tactic for
tying into like, well, let's make a link between this
thing Trump is claiming that's hurting him and this thing
that people see every night on like Fox News that
has been a pretty durable talking point for the right
for several years.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
Now.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Trump makes it. There's a weird line in here where
he says that like even the Rhinos and the Democrats
agree that the case against him is bad.

Speaker 4 (26:30):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
I mean, you know, I suspect he's just kind of
like looking at Twitter chaff there. He then kind of
derails a bit by talking about Afghanistan and all of
the military equipment and lives lost in the same breath,
and then from that he kind of one of the
things that comes up over and over in this is
him talking about how embarrassing this time is for our country,

(26:54):
how all of our enemies are laughing at us, et cetera.
Like that is a I mean, he's been making that
point for a long time, but it definitely it's one
of those things I think is a little bit of
a window into the man's thought process, because he clearly
thinks and perhaps I mean it must have a degree
of resonance with his base, but the idea that like

(27:16):
America has been embarrassed because he's facing charges and because
of you know, Biden's failures as he sees it over
in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Like, embarrassment is a big thing
he tries to get across in this that like, you know,
Lady Liberty's been caught with their fucking skirt up or
something like that. It's a I don't know, it's interesting

(27:37):
to me that that's such a focus for him. There's
a couple of fun lines in the part about the military.
He talks about how it's woke at the top, but
under him, it was able to defeat Isis in four weeks, which, man,
it took years, Like we know it took years.

Speaker 4 (27:50):
I was there for some of it. It was a
large part of that was not Americans at all.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
But no, no, in a large part of it was
not Americans at all. There's a weird moment where he
talks about the investigation over his call with Selenski and
then that call where he tried to force Georgia's Secretary
of State to discard votes that he's being investigated for,
where he's like, this is one of like the most
beautiful Trump moments of the whole speech, because he's like,

(28:15):
you know, that perfect call I had with Selensky, I
told you all was a perfect call. Where my call
with Georgia's secretary of state was even more perfect. It
was the best call anybody's ever had. Nobody had a
problem with it. Lots of guys were listening in and
they all thought it was great.

Speaker 4 (28:30):
It's just.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
He can be such a funny man. It's not even insane.
It's just like, I don't know, nobody else talks like that.
Nobody else describes a phone call as perfect, right, like
a normal And this is maybe there's a degree of
Trump's success you can see in this, But like, no
normal person being accused of like having attempted to interfere

(28:55):
with an election during a phone call would describe the
call as perfect. You know, a normal call politician would
refute the claims against them, would say, you know, I
never did this, I never did that. You know this
is taken out of context or whatever. Trump's just like
it was perfect. But you don't remember the last perfect
call I told you about that people thought might have
been a crime. Even more perfect. This is the most

(29:16):
perfect phone call anyone's ever had. Yeah, then we get
along derailment about the Biden, like, you know, the classified
document shit that got him rated. He talks about how
Biden's possession of classified documents was like the worst that
anyone's ever done and was criminal because he was just
the vice president. But the president's allowed to do it,

(29:36):
but everybody does it, but the way Biden did is
the worst that anybody did it. Yeah, it's like, I
don't know, it's there. It's not like it's not an
interesting Trump speech. I don't think he's like panicked or anything.
I just kind of I don't know, maybe he's just
sort of like checking off a thing on the to

(29:56):
do box. But it's not it's not one of the
it's not one for the speech books, right or for
the history books. I don't know the speech books. That's
not a that's not a thing. That's not a thing
at all. There is a really fun moment where he's
like kind of late in the speech, in between him
complaining about Letitia James, he like points to his sons
and he's like, I got two great sons, sons both

(30:18):
doing really great. And then he's like and bear, and
then as an afterthought, he's like, Baron's gonna do a
great job too, someday.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
He's tall, an amazing father talking of told did you
see that they do? Also, they faked a mugshot of
him and made him six foot five? Who faked the
mug shot? The Trump campaign faked a mug shot of
him to sell much that just added like several inches

(30:45):
to his A man with no insecurities.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Trump a legalist arc. I'm not saying there's nothing to
be concerned about in the right wing reaction here. It
is worth kind of looking at the response that has
occurred has largely been fucking nonsense circus shit. Right, At
most of the big rallies, particularly in New York that

(31:09):
have happened as a result of this, there have been
more press on the ground than anyone on either side
of things. Yeah, it's not it's just so far not
pulling people out, you know. Do I think there's a
chance of you know, isolated terrorist attacks as you know,
by people who see themselves as defending Trump or democracy

(31:33):
or whatever. Certainly not a zero percent chance. But in
terms of like things that I think are likely to
have a mass to stabilizing effect, I'm not seeing it yet.
And I think a lot of that's due just to
the fact that the Trump supporters who are kind of
have the highest potential of being convinced to do that shit,
are all scared as hell, both of the FEDS and

(31:56):
of each other. The sheer number of them that have
like turned not each other during the j sixth investigations
like has means that whenever there's talk about doing another
big series of rallies, it devolves in a lot of
these online places into like, well, you know, this is
probably being set up by the Feds. This is probably
a honeypot to trap us, which is I don't know,

(32:20):
it's not a situation. I would say you should rely
on lasting forever, but that does kind of seem to
be where we are right now.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
One other aspect of the right wing response that I
think is worth mentioning is they have is some of
some of their like propagandists and political people have made
the promise that since since now, since that now there's
been a precedent set for indicting for former presidents. Now

(32:47):
now they finally are able to go after Democratic politicians
whenever they want. And yeah, I just I just am
worried that they're going to threaten us with a good time.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah yeah, And it's it's also like it's not just
threatening us with a good time, because we have seen
in Tennessee right now they're forcing two Democratic legislators out
for their support of gun control and like you know.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
Black Democratic yeah too, black Democratic legislators.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
I'm not, you know, in line with most of the
Democratic Party on gun control. But what is happening here
is anti democratic bullshit like that is it is authoritarian.
It is completely fucking unacceptable, and people ought to be
out in this like a lot more ought to be done,
and I think probably a lot more Like I don't
this that's one of the thorny questions that actually does

(33:40):
concern me, Like what do you do in a situation
like this? What do the what kind of leverage do
the Feds even potentially have? It certainly doesn't look like
they're in the mood to do anything now, because I
think that's the kind of that's the kind of thing
we're going to see a lot more of in red
states in order that what little resistance at listen, and
that's concerning.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
They're not gonna go after someone like Obama, which frankly somebody,
somebody should for the amount of that.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there should be charges against the man.
There should be charges against Bush. Uh, you know, the doves,
there should be some charges against Clinton. Fuck it, go
after them, all right, yeah yeah, yeah, you dig up
George H. W.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
Bush put them on trial as a corpse like that one.
Pope Like, I'm on board.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
But no, they're gonna they're gonna end up going after
there's like small like minority politicians who are like yeah,
fighting for like reasonable things, you know.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
And who are doing things to actually jam up the
works of kind of the march of far right. Yeah,
authoritarian laws Red States exactly. And you know, I am
sure that as that picks up pace, they will point
out what's being done to Trumps a justification, But like
people should be aware that it's not why they're doing it.

(35:01):
They're doing it because it looks like it's going to
work for them in Tennessee. And they did it in
Tennessee for the reasons that had nothing to do with
fucking Trump.

Speaker 4 (35:08):
Yeah, right, Yeah. If you want to talk about like
what fascism makes a big part of it, is that
weaponizing of the state apparatus, right, yes, against a position
against you, whatever your escapegoat group, And like that does
concern me for people living in Red State.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Absolutely absolutely. I'm not saying there's nothing to be worried
about from the right. I'm just saying, at the moment,
when I'm looking at like the way I kind of
conceive of a threat matrix, I don't see us in
a more dangerous position as a result of Trump getting charged.
And I think an argument could be made that it's
a positive move.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
I really hope we get another nail gun guy. Oh man.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, that fucking dude who tried who tried to solo
the FBI with a nail gun.

Speaker 4 (35:53):
Maybe a net girl come in with like a jigsaw
or a.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah no, no, no, no, I think I think ladders.
I think it's it's it's time for like a ladder
mob that that's that's what I'm excited to see. Ladders
and like simple pulleys.

Speaker 4 (36:08):
It's getting pinned to a building with someone twenty feet
away with a ladder. Make a make a tributchet judge,
it's the Gorne has been thrown down.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah, let's let's let's have a continuing series of competitions
to see who can build like the most effective medieval
siege equipment. I want to see some fucking scorpions up
on the hill.

Speaker 4 (36:29):
You know I'm going to do? Is it Greek fire?
Turkish fire?

Speaker 1 (36:33):
When you put yeah, I mean that really that's a boy.
That's like the Hums debate. James, you don't.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
It's Cypress fire and we can be fine.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
I don't know where where you guys get any of
their thoughts on the Trump arraignment, indictment, arrest et No.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
It's very funny. I did enjoy seeing that guy fall
off his tour bike. That was a highlight of the
week for me.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yeah, there was a good video from the New York
Protest of a guy falling off a tall bike.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
Yeah, shout out to skateboard.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
I will, I will, let's see, I will send send
a few things to the chat. This is the signal
chat that I feel like people are worth seeing. This
is what I spent this is what I spent most
of my day doing, is sending people these memes. I
think it's important that.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
That is that is that Ruth bader Ginsburg with a
biggie crown saying, tell Donald, I want him to know
it was me, Garrison.

Speaker 4 (37:31):
Yes, that is No, you're joking. I if I if
I actually see Ruth bend again for Funck's sake, Rakai
with a pussy hat. Oh god, looks like brunches back
on the menu. Boys. That one I do appreciate.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
Yeah, there was there was a good one that was
like it was like the jailer dropping off Trump in
Epstein's cell, all all of all of all of the
lights go off, and then from the corner, a man
in a dark cloak says Brandonson's his regard.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
What a wonderful time for memes.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Well, everybody, that's our that's our episode on the Trump arrest,
we figured we should we should talk about that to
answer the question that so many people ask me, are
we closeer to having a civil war? I don't know, man,
it doesn't. It doesn't feel like this. This has moved
the needle on that at all.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
The national divorce is happening any day now, any day now,
I swear like.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
I think the thing that's worrying right now is, you know,
not just kind of the low level series of exchanges
of terror attacks and shootings and murders and stuff and
just street violence that I do think is going to
kind of continue to be a problem up through twenty
twenty four, but also just like what we've been talking
about in terms of Red states pushing for these increasingly

(39:05):
really violent laws aimed at doing direct physical harm to
small groups of people that they consider to be their
enemies for whatever reason of identity. That is, like the
increasing criminalization of groups of people in Red States, the
flight of folks from those states, the fact that you

(39:27):
are kind of seeing the country settle into two blocks
that have wildly different legal systems that are often opposed
to each other. That's a conflict that is absolutely happening.
There's no denying that it's occurring. This is not a
debatable thing, and I don't see the FEDS having any
idea of how to fix this at the moment. We'll

(39:50):
see where the elections go in twenty twenty four. The
fact that Wisconsin that their Supreme Court election went well.

Speaker 4 (39:57):
Means a lot.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
It means that that's one st where the process that
we're seeing happening in places like Florida and Tennessee. That
is a significant amount of people protected from that. And
it also means a lot for the twenty twenty four election.
But it's we are in a really rough place still.

(40:19):
I'm not like thinking we're in at the edge of
seventeen seventy six point two or whatever the fuck the
right way these day, Yeah, eighteen sixty.

Speaker 4 (40:28):
Five or whatever. Robert Evans is going to personally be
the next John Brown, Yeah, I hopefully not, But I am.

Speaker 7 (40:37):
I am.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
I think I'd be really good at a being a
terrible farmer.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
As you read, Yeah, ehh yeah, that picture of John
Brown like leading the troops will remain one of my
favorite pieces.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Oh yeah, no, no, he's got he's got a hell
of a beard in that one. Yeah, I don't know,
I think the threat, you know, contain in use. But
broadly speaking, what's happened to Trump is either good or neutral,
but certainly funny. And that's I think a good point
to end on for the day.

Speaker 8 (41:11):
Agreed, Brandon sends his regards, Okay, everything's recording.

Speaker 9 (41:30):
My cat is grooming herself.

Speaker 4 (41:32):
So when I was the time, very great, but she
just used that.

Speaker 9 (41:36):
As Okay, I mean, I'm fine with that.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
Whatever, Okay, let's do it. That's very true, is grooming herself,
and that means that this is it could happen here.
And I am James Stout and I'm joined by Sharen
units yes, and not not her cat.

Speaker 9 (41:56):
She's just she's just rowdy and I have to really
sometimes plan recording times around her schedule. And it's that's
just the way my life is now, and that's yeah,
that's the attention she deserves. None of this is important. Yeah,
you're care but it's a bit of a serious one, sadly.
So I want to talk more again about the border,
something we've spoken about a little bit and something I

(42:18):
kind of want to keep coming back to because things
haven't really got any better. In fact, they've potentially got worse.
So where I want to start is last month and
we're recording this and what the fourth of April, so
just over a week ago, I think a fire and
a detation the twenty eighth it okay, yeah, what's that?

Speaker 4 (42:36):
Three? Yeah? A week ago? A week ago today, a
fire in a detention center in Suda, Juada's killed forty
one migrants being detained. There were than two dozen other
people were seriously injured, and every single one of the
about one hundred people detained in the migrant detention center
was hurt in the fire. The reason that every single

(42:58):
person was hurt became clear and a video obtained by
Texas Public Radio and later confirmed by the government in Mexico.
It shows two people dressed as guards rush into the
camera frame. You can see people in the cells just
really pulling and kicking and beating on the bars. The
guards sort of run up to the doors, but they
don't really appear to make any effort to open them

(43:19):
or to let the people out of the cells. Instead,
they hurry away as clouds of smoke begin to fill
the corners of the cells. Gradually, the smoke fills up
the whole screen until you can't see anything else. Than
the men in the cells are left to die.

Speaker 9 (43:33):
It's horrifying.

Speaker 4 (43:34):
Yeah, it's one of the worst deaths that's available to
a human being. And the fact that people who are
already incredibly desperate and have taken huge risks to get
there and died like literally yards from the United States
border is just it's almost kind of unfathomably cruel. But

(43:55):
what is in a way crueler is this statement made
by the US Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar. He said
the tragedy illustrated the dangerous grifts in traveling north, and
he cited the loss of life in two recent smuggling
incidents in San Antonio in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
These cases, he said, are a reminder of the risks
of irregular migration. But what we're talking about here is

(44:19):
in a consequence of irregular migration, really right, because these
people weren't in the hands of criminals or coyotes or cartels,
that they were in the hands of the Mexican government
when they died. And for him to blame this on
irregular migration, I think is very indicative of the way
the bad aministration has approached migration. Policy, which is to

(44:41):
try and always obfuscate and shirk the responsibility for the
cruel things that it's doing, for the consequences of its
policies and its actions, which I want to get into more.
I don't want to linger on this fire too much
because a it's onfathomably awful and like I don't think
it I don't. I think we need to spend hours

(45:01):
and hours like going over something for people to know
that there is no situation in which the government should
burn fucking forty people alive that like it's inexcusable. We
know that, like it was. The shelter was set up
in twenty nineteen, and I want to get into why
this shelter, which seems to have been a pretty terrible

(45:24):
condition to begin with, was set up in twenty nineteen,
Why people who claim to the United States to try
and have a better life for safe for life, ended
up in a shelter in Mexico, and how we've created
a system where people keep dying at our southern border. Right,
some of this will be stuff we've covered before. If
people have listened to the other stuff I've done on
the border, if people have listened to the Butterfly Sanctuary episodes.

(45:45):
They'll be familiar with some of Biden's border policies, but
I wanted to address these.

Speaker 9 (45:49):
Did you see that they lowered the death toll from
forty to thirty eight? I guess after hospital visits, Like
that's the one part that I've read that is nice
so far as.

Speaker 4 (45:58):
That's yeah, that's good. I've seen thirty eight, thirty nine,
and forty one. It wasn't sure what the exactly, so
thirty eight is the news.

Speaker 9 (46:06):
Right now, I'm reading thirty eight after it was it
was forty and it was lowered to thirty eight.

Speaker 4 (46:11):
Okay, well two people were re animated.

Speaker 9 (46:14):
Yeah, I mean it's I mean, it's just like they're
probably a terrible condition they're having, like life changing if
not like all, like it's just terrible now.

Speaker 4 (46:25):
Yeah, And like access to care for those people, I
mean those people may have access to care, right because
what happened was high profile with the news, but like
generally access to care for people like I have seen
I've seen a person die because they don't have access
to their medicines that are very cheap or very easily available.
Like again, like we are talking feet, like I could

(46:47):
throw a tennis ball into the United States and where
it was stilling. And that's because the system treats people
like numbers, not people.

Speaker 9 (46:56):
Yeah, migration center is like a jail, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 4 (47:01):
It doesn't even Yeah, it's like an old timey fucking
Western jail with people crammed into cells with you know,
like legit bars on the walls. So shelter conditions in
Mexican detention are often very poor, and those conditions have
been exacerbated by something called Title forty two. People have
probably heard about Title forty two a lot. There's a

(47:22):
lot to say about Title forty two, but very briefly,
it's a trumpier of public health policy that invokes a
public health rule to push asylum seekers out the US
and into Mexico, regardless of whether or not they might
legally qualify for asylum. This shelter was stood up as
a consequence of something called the Migrant Protection Protocol. People
call it the Migrant Persecution Protocol because that's more accurate.

Speaker 9 (47:43):
But I was going to say, like, Wow, doing a
great job with that.

Speaker 4 (47:48):
Yeah, Like people enjoy being wrong about George or well,
but this shit is perfectly or welly in Oh yeah,
to call that policy which kills little fucking children. The
migroant protectional policy is is dark they called. It's often
called remain in Mexico as well, which is what it does.
It requires people to remain in Mexico while their asylum

(48:09):
claim is processed, despite the fact that this might not
be a safe country for them, and that this might
violate various international laws and conventions on asylum, but the
US doesn't subscribe to all of those. As we're going
to find out now. Title forty two has been through
some legal ping pong recently, right with Biden's sort of
trying to get rid of it, also defind of getting

(48:31):
caught a bunch of conservative states suing to keep it.
So it's explained a little bit of where we're at
with Title forty two right now. It's actually set to
expire on May the eleventh. The Biden administration is rolling
out plans that will continue to restrict migrant access after
May the eleventh, because they're concerned about like a large

(48:52):
influx of migrants, which I just want to point out
was always going to fucking happen when you like push
people just the other side of your fictional line in
the sand, and at some point you're going to have
to start, because at some point, Mexico is already the
third most popular country in the world for asylum, and
you can't force this all on them. So since it

(49:14):
was first implemented in twenty twenty, the government has used
Title forty two to expel migrants from the US Mexico
border nearly two point seven million times. That doesn't mean
you will see these statistics quoted constantly, credulously by people
who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about, and
it really makes me angry. That doesn't mean two point

(49:35):
seven million people, right, Because Title forty two makes people
cross more than once. It creates this kind of loop
where DHS right normally CBP or a border patrol sorry,
picks people up and dumps them back in Mexico without
processing them. And those people are now in a place
they don't know, they don't have any family, that have

(49:56):
any hope, they don't have any money, and all they
do is is kick their heels until they can find
a way to cross again, or someone to cross them again.
And sometimes people who are facilitating those crossings will offer
them unlimited crossings, so they they'll pay someone to smuggle
them across, right, and that person will say, well, you
get unlimited crossings.

Speaker 9 (50:15):
Like I didn't even realize. I didn't know it was
so like standard. They're like, Okay, this is gonna happen.
You're gonna get a limited crossing, you know what I mean.
Like there's like they're expecting it to be this like
perpetual loop.

Speaker 4 (50:28):
Yeah, I mean they a few years ago, maybe they
wouldn't have done. But another way that this is sometimes
termed a catch and release, which they're not fucking fish.
You shouldn't do that to fish either. It's not really
nice to fish.

Speaker 9 (50:39):
But it's humanizing.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
Yeah, it's extremely fucking dehumanizing, right, And what it does
and what I've seen, what I'm not it's not like
a unique insight of mine, is that it forces people
to cross in more and more dangerous areas. Like you
combine that with a wall and the fact that like
it's very well documented that the Trump administration and wanted
to maximize the amount of miles of wall that built.

(51:04):
If you remember, in one of the presidential debates, he
made a claim about a certain number of miles of
a new wall he built. Yeah, he was just speaking
out of his ass I foied it like the next day,
and they were like they provided a number of different
numbers or many of which relied heavily on repairing existing
border fence, but they just went like hammer and Tong

(51:27):
was trying to build new sections of wall to include
skipping areas where it was harder to build valleys, mountains,
that kind of thing. Right, So what this wall does
is it forces people through the areas where it's hardest
to cross, and those are the areas where it's easiest
to die. And so these people are now forced to
make risky and risky of crossings to try and avoid

(51:49):
getting caught, or to wait in Mexico where they are
at a very high risk of abduction or sexual assault,
extortion or violence. Right, And will come on to maybe
a couple of those stories later, just from people I've
talked to. The result of this policy is that border
cities in Mexico are flooded with migrants, and often with
soldiers sent there to supposedly keep the peace. Last month,

(52:10):
the Mexican National Guard and the immigration authorities raided a
hotel full of Venezuelan migrants in Hualez. Local news applets
reported that the migrants there'stly young men threw stones at
the officials and there broad ensued and eventually they called
off the raid. In another incident, authorities raided the church
and dragged off a number of Venezuelan migrants who have
been given sanctuary there. Some were beaten, and one advocate

(52:33):
said they were essentially tortured. This prompted, yeah, this is horrific, right,
like a lot of so a lot of the young
men in the it was all men in the detention
center that caught fire, and most of them were from Venezuela,
place where I've lived in Venezuela. I have a lot
of sympathy for those people.

Speaker 9 (52:52):
And yeah, she actually I found like a breakdown. I
guess if there is thirteen Hundurians, twelve Soans, twelve Venezuelans
are Colombian and an Ecuadorian, So I mean even that's crazy,
like there's so many people from all of those countries.
It's I don't know.

Speaker 4 (53:10):
Yeah, we'll see a bit later that there are certain pathways,
like for Venice Whalen people, there are some pathways that
don't exist through other people that they're not insufficient and
they're there. How do I say this unfair? But sort
of they exist. But yeah, those people from from those countries.
We see a lot of Haitian people at the border
here too, but yeah, that's a pretty common kind of

(53:35):
like border mix up, right of folks. Unfortunately, often you
won't see Haitian folks that there are sort of segregations
even within the migrant community, and often Haitian folks is
kind of segregated out, which is which.

Speaker 9 (53:47):
Is unfortunately, Like I thought the horror as well as
kind of that the population breakdown, Like wouldn't the Haitian
border crossing be like somewhere else?

Speaker 4 (53:58):
I don't think to say it's it's not dumb at all.
I don't know what the breakdown. I know there are
Haitian people in Juaes. I know there are the Cuban
folks in Juila's too, and they've kind of some of
them have stayed in Juarez and established kind of their
own communities and that's had some sort of some negative
results for antimagrant feeling and Juadas. From what I've heard,
I know there are a lot of Haitian folks in Tijuana.

(54:21):
A lot of the Haitian people come via Brazil where
they've spent time like preparing for the Olympics that were
there and building stadium and stuff. So a lot of
them tell me they've come up from Brazil. And then
obviously with like increased violence in Haiti, now you'll see
more Haitian people. Again, there's a decent Haitian community that
also is established in Tijuana and has it's that is

(54:41):
their home now, right, Like I.

Speaker 9 (54:42):
Had no idea to be honest, so now I know,
I'll accept being a little bit dumb.

Speaker 4 (54:47):
So everyone not at all, not at all. It's not
very well reported on, and I think it's honestly people
have stopped reporting on it since twenty twenty as well,
like since like Orange Man bad stop being like the
prevailing like mass media message, no one gives a fuck
about microsof anymore, Like there's a pronounced drop off when

(55:08):
a cross of people and I don't know, there are
some very good reporters, of course, you know, we've spoken
to some of them in Tijuana and in San Diego.
But yeah, you just there was a lot of parachute
reporting on migration in the Trump era, some of it
very bad, some of it by people who didn't have
the language skills to be working there and didn't understand

(55:31):
what was respectful and what wasn't and things like that.
So I have strong feelings about how the migrant caravan
in twenty eighteen was reported on, for instance. But yeah,
you'll definitely see a ton of Haitian people and that
Biden has gone exceptionally hard. I'll I'll include a link
at the bottom of like a piece I wrote for
NBC about Biden's anty Haitian bullshit but like exceptionally hard,

(55:55):
specifically against the Haitian. So so you can find a
tweet from the Haitia the United States Embassy in Haiti,
where it's just got a picture of Biden, and I
think it says, don't come I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, yeah, no,
it's wild, Like you don't see this in other countries either,
even you know they've made like they've made there's a

(56:16):
ton of special exemptions for people from Ukraine. Right, it's
hard not to see.

Speaker 9 (56:20):
That, of course, yeah, of course it's Ukraine.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
Yeah, yeah, right, because it's also.

Speaker 9 (56:26):
Great, but also you have to look at the like
why did that happen?

Speaker 4 (56:30):
Right, And if we can't like express like Russian bombs
kill kids in the m R two. Russian bombs kill
kids all over fucking Africa, and if we can't have
solidarity with them, or we can with Ukrainian people, then
it's hard for me not to see that as to
do with their skin color. Yeah, then that is bullshit,
and so yeah, Title forty two were end in May
when the COVID Public Health Emergency Order expires. Biden said

(56:54):
earlier on that he would end Title forty two. He
then faced these lawsuits from conservative states, but at the
same time that by the administration fiercely defended Title forty
two litigation brought by the ACLU and other groups challenging
the policy. Even the CDC right the CDC Center for
the Dida's Control was like, now the shit isn't necessary
and it's cool, we should stop. The government has argued

(57:15):
the public health concerns letting migrants into the country due
to continued threat of COVID nineteen outweigh the possible harms
done to migrants who return to cities like nogals Ijuana,
Like you don't even need a COVID test to fly
into this country now, I don't think right, Like if
my family come visit me, so the end of the
emergency kind of makes that a moot point, right, Like

(57:37):
you can't have a public health order to protect us
from it, which you're saying isn't a problem anymore. But
the damage that this has done will take years to rectify,
and the backlog that it's created is already being used
as an excuse to do more cruel and inhumane things
to people who are just looking for a fair crack
at life. Srean, do you know what won't build a

(57:58):
wall around itself forced people to risk their life to
get here?

Speaker 9 (58:02):
You tell me, James, what is it?

Speaker 4 (58:04):
It is these silver coins that have Ronald Reagan on them,
who probably outflanks our current immigration policy. Guy, yep, Uncle
ron Okay, we're back, Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Or maybe
it was a gold advert. I hope it was a
gold eavic so I know that everyone enjoys so so much.
Please don't message Sophie about the fucking gold things.

Speaker 9 (58:28):
We know, yeah, we know, we know, trust us, we know.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:31):
It's also it's just funny. It's funny to me that
someone is buying gold adverts, and presumably none of our
listeners are buying gold, and yet I have healthcare now.

Speaker 9 (58:40):
I mean it must be working somewhere, like you know
what I mean, why how else would they afford to
keep advertising. I don't know, someone's doing something.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
It's one guy.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
If you are that steadfast listener who buys everything we advertise,
like so much for our projects. We salute your dedication.
So Biden hasn't really come up with a distinctive immigration
policy of his own yet. Mostly he's just kind of
failed to undo the damage Trump is done created a
two TiO system in which white Ukrainians get to slip

(59:14):
the line while back and brown migrants weight terrible conditions,
And for some reason, he's gone as hard as fuck
as he can to stop patients coming here, which the
reason might be pretty obvious to some of you. Oh
and we're still building the wall, but we're calling it
a barrier now of course. Yeah, it's totally different brand,
yeah bread, Yeah, it doesn't have a little plate on

(59:35):
the top. It's a slightly different shape. You can, like,
if you scroll back far enough on my Twitter, you
can find comparison pictures of the Biden barrier and the
Trump Wall.

Speaker 9 (59:43):
But it's like literally just like a glow up, like
like a terrible horrifying glow up.

Speaker 4 (59:48):
Yes, yeah, the walls having its a little it's a
freedom wall now or something. But if you don't follow
the Butterfly Sanctuary as well, high value Twitter account sometimes
stealing automatic rifles, not stealing, i should say, but National
Guard leaving automatic rifles on our property that she takes
care of. But yeah, you can listen to our batter

(01:00:09):
Fly Sanctuary episodes for more on like the Biden barrier.
But we're more than halfway through Biden's term now, and
we're beginning to see him take aim at something resembling
a border policy on his own at the same time,
because we're more than halfway through his term, or perhaps
just because he never intended to fulfill his campaign policies
about being kind to migrants, he's tried to move towards

(01:00:30):
the center, and the center of US politics is like
somewhere to the right of Attila the Hund these days.
So he's been hit pretty hard by the Republicans on immigration,
and it's worth pointing out that he's been hit pretty
hard on largely on just shit that's made up or
misunderstandings of this. The number of interactions that border patrol

(01:00:51):
has or wilful or on wilful, I don't know, but
many of the cretiques are in pretty bad faith. But nonetheless,
like it's been an area where they've criticized him, right,
And so he's trying to move towards the quote unquote
center on that with these new policies. So he's proposed
that his administration has proposed something called a transit band,

(01:01:12):
So transit band, people might remember, And the initial kind
of proposal of this was made by Stephen Miller due
to looks like a lollipop and also like a white nationalist.

Speaker 9 (01:01:22):
That's a great.

Speaker 4 (01:01:24):
His head is too big for his neck, he's shiny. Yeah, yeah,
that's not the only thing that's wrong with him. So
this proposal would render migrants ineligible for US asylum if
they crossed a sudden border illegally after failing to ask
for humanitarian refuge in another country they traveled through, such
as Mexico. Right, So unless you somehow come straight to

(01:01:46):
the US, which you can't do because you can't get
on a flight to the US without the correct travel documents,
then you'd have to travel through another country. Right, And
they're saying that you should apply for asylum there In practice,
this would bar most Nonxican asylum seekers unless he took
advantage to one of the programs that Biden has proposed
to allow people in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela with

(01:02:08):
a US sponsor under a humanitarian parole program where they
apply from their home country and then get to credentials
to travel, so they'd stay in Cuba or whatever. This
might not be safe for some people to do in
those countries, but they have a means to get here
and it's metered I think at thirty thousand a month.

(01:02:30):
Those people from those same countries and during the same conditions,
if they came here on their own and then applied
to asylum as is, they're right under US law once
they entered the country right. And it's worth noting that
like most people coming in that wanted to apply for asylum,
so they wanted to turn them That might have changed
it law with Title forty two, but previously people were
seeking to turn themselves in right and say hey, I'm

(01:02:52):
here to apply for asylum. They can now be expelled
under this legislation.

Speaker 10 (01:02:56):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
So if they don't use this or they don't have
a US sponsor, which kind of creates. You shouldn't have
to know someone in America right to come here and
avail yourself the basic human rights.

Speaker 9 (01:03:07):
Yeah, it's just it's it's purposely like getting people out
of the group that can go in, you know what
I mean, Like it's excluding people.

Speaker 4 (01:03:14):
But yeah, just like yeah, right, thousands of people. Yeah,
and this legislation now allows them for them to be
for explanited processing and expelsion. If people do want to
apply for asylum at the Southern border, they need to
use an app which is called CBP one.

Speaker 9 (01:03:32):
That's just the craziest thing I've heard in a while.

Speaker 4 (01:03:34):
So yeah, it is.

Speaker 9 (01:03:37):
Like I'm on another planet, like what what I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:03:40):
It is incredibly powerful, like Libraine to be like, don't worry,
We've made the app. We've got you. Like it assumes
that people have the app. It's not available in all
the languages that people speaking, like of course, not like
last time I was at the border, like I had
I worked with a colleague who spoke a Romo. I
speak French his Spocationian Creole, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, right, like,

(01:04:07):
like those are people I interviewed in in an afternoon,
you know, there are dozens of languages, so the app
isn't available in those languages. The app is a giant cluster. Fuck,
it doesn't work. It crashes all the time. Like you
can find like little kids, little kids who come up
from Tijuana to go to school, who like can tell

(01:04:27):
you ten things that are wrong about this app. But
you can also find people who make six figure salaries
in Washington.

Speaker 9 (01:04:32):
You think it's great, right, regardless, it's a fucking app
on a fucking device that is like, like, I don't know,
I think it's just so.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
Lazy.

Speaker 9 (01:04:42):
It's lazy and stupid.

Speaker 4 (01:04:44):
I don't like it. Yes, it is both of those things,
and assumes people have a cell phone, which is.

Speaker 9 (01:04:48):
Yes, very elitist, Yes exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:04:50):
Yeah, like it maybe your phone could get stolen being
fucking someone can book all these train games, like there's
a million ways. It assumes you've got fucking broadband collector liberty,
you know, Wi Fi, all these things. It's yeah, it's
just insane, Like it's amazing how detached one can be
from reality and still be the person in charge. Yeah,

(01:05:11):
what if no people in charge? So migrants crossing the
border without documents can be subjected to explicited removal, as
it said, the proposed regulations indicate the migrants from Cuba, Nicaraguo,
and Venezuela, who generally cannot be deported due to strain
relations with the governments there, would face deportation to Mexico instead,

(01:05:31):
which fucking just again makes someone else's problem, right. A
dozen Senate Democrats called the proposed asylum restrictions unlawful and counterproductive.
They joined thousands of migrant advocates and organizations, including the
United Nations Refugee Agency, in employing the administration to immediately
withdraw the regulation. So there's a period of public comment,

(01:05:54):
which is what's happening at the moment. Right, So he's
found a policy which no one likes, both from the
right end from the people are allowed to live with dignity.
So that's hard to do.

Speaker 9 (01:06:06):
That's hard to do.

Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Well, you're never he's never gonna have fucking like, I
don't know what they're like tramplicants want, but like it's
some version of machine guns on top of a wall
killing little children. And you could just be a decent person,
or you could try and plicate fucking psychopathic Fox News people.
So Mexico is already the third most popular destination for

(01:06:27):
people seeking asylum in the world after United States in Germany.
In Mexico, asylum seekers have to stay in the state
where they apply, and that's resulted in large numbers people
being concentrated in uh placed like Tapatula on the southern
border with Guatemala, and that creates like an infrastructure issue there, right,
which it's also worth I'm sure people are well aware that.

(01:06:51):
I wonder why all these countries have been fucking destabilized, right,
I wonder if there was a country which helped do
that for deca their home, Like why can't they go
back home?

Speaker 9 (01:07:01):
Like?

Speaker 4 (01:07:01):
Yeah, what I mean there? Yeah, if only the clash
had written a song about its understand better. So Mexico
granted sixty one percent of asylum requests from January through
November last year, compared to forty six percent in the
USA for fiscal year twenty twenty two. That is an
increase of a low of twenty seven percent under Trump,

(01:07:22):
but it's still suggested more than half the people get
sent back right where the fact that they get sent
back to if they can't reliably go back to their
home country safely. Mexico abides by something called the Katahena Declaration,
which promises a safe haven twenty one's threatened by generalized violence,
foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or
other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. The US

(01:07:47):
currently observes a narrow definition that requires a person to
have been individually targeted. That's a distinct thing. Right for
limited reasons are spelled out in the UN Refugee Convention.
But it appears that the bad administration has plans to
retrain DHS agents, and they're currently telling them, or they
seem to be proposing to tell them. I should say,

(01:08:07):
to let migrants enter the US to pursue protection only
if they qualify under the International Convention against Torture, which
is an absurdly.

Speaker 11 (01:08:17):
High yeah, like against torture. Wow, yeah, I thought you
were going to say after all that. Yeah, it's it's
a ridiculously high bar. Like there are very real things
you could be afraid of. Like I've spoken to people
who've have escaped like forced sex work, right, who've had
members of their family killed, threats made to their own lives.

Speaker 4 (01:08:38):
None of those. Maybe the forced sex work is torture
but maybe some of those things wouldn't meet that bar.
But I think any reasonable human being, right, if you
met someone in the street and they said, hey, you know,
someone so killed my daughter and my father and my uncle,
and they said they're going to kill me, you'd say, like,
come into my house, I'll look after you. But there's
a country we're saying, fuck you, You're on your own,

(01:08:58):
And yeah, that's that's not how you be a good neighbor.
It's also on the inside of the administration. Recently has
reported that the Biden administration is considering reviving the practice
of detaining migrant families caught crossing the US Mexico border illegally.
So this is this is the thing that that all
the people were very upset about. It the normal kids

(01:09:20):
in cages thing, mm hmm. But we fucking do that
again as well. I guess they likely won't do like
separation of minders, which which is what they did before, right,
they took the kids away from their parents entertained them separately,
which is just fucking like I cannot imagine. It's still just.

Speaker 9 (01:09:40):
Yeah, it's just unspeakable trauma and like just like for
both for everybody involved. Uh, I mean like same with
the wall though, like it's just the same thing. The
same thing is happening. It's just like marketed differently. It's
just like packaged in a different way, and it's still
fucking terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:09:58):
Yeah, Like, I just I don't know what you expect
these fucking people to do, Like, and I don't know
how you how you expect someone like even if you're
purely self interested and you're just concerned about like US
security and like you know, making America great again or whatever,
Like if you lock little children up, like they're going

(01:10:18):
to fucking hate you and you can't blame them, like,
it's it's it's inhumane, it's it's what dictators do. It's
it's fucking unfathomable.

Speaker 9 (01:10:28):
But it also like drives me, like it's just insane
to think about people that are actually there in the
flesh like that that see people like the children crying
or something, and like just there's so much terrible things
going on and no one does there's not enough. I
don't know. I just I can't imagine doing that. It'll
just be like, Okay, my job is this and I'm

(01:10:50):
gonna continue.

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 9 (01:10:51):
I don't like it.

Speaker 4 (01:10:52):
I don't like it. No, I don't like it. Idea
like this, Of all the things I've reported on, and
like I've reported on some dark shit and like being
to some dangerous places, et cetera, nothing has been harder
for me to get over than little kids at the border. Like,
I have hundreds of stories about it, but I can
remember one little girl. This shit makes me want to cry.

(01:11:16):
I rememb there's one little girl who she had left
her teddy bear behind. She wanted a teddy bear, And
like this, little girls are cleaving in a fucking tent.

Speaker 7 (01:11:25):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:11:25):
This is in twenty eighteen, when when like the mid
terms were happening. So they were holding a large group
of people right next to the border, right they were
staying in a baseball stadium, and myself and some friends
had gone to help. And this little girl was just
like the sweetest little kid that she came up. She
was holding my hand and then I asked if she
wanted to go on my shoulders. She wanted to go
on my shoulders, you know. And at this point, the

(01:11:47):
way that they were getting people to leave that area
and go to another area was by cutting off their
access to water. Oh my god, so like we were
able to get some water, and we were able to
give them like as much water as we coabin credit cards.
And I asked her like what she wanted. She said
she had to leave her teddy bear behind. It just
fucking broke my heart, like without like you know, going

(01:12:11):
into too much personal trauma. Details like that shit kept
me from sleeping for weeks. Uh, and I found it
so hard to come back. It was like twenty eighteen,
around November, I guess, and like go to like a
I remember someone's having some Thanksgiving thing and just I
just wanted to fucking shout at everyone and be like
what the fuck is wrong with you? Anyway? So when
bought her.

Speaker 9 (01:12:32):
Devastating especially from a from a child, you know, like
their their experience and their perspective is just like just
I don't know, you see how rad is?

Speaker 4 (01:12:43):
Yeah, Like I know, no, children shouldn't be treated about
that full stop, Like we shouldn't be standing in the
parking lot of a fucking Tommy Hill Figure discount store
in San Diego launching tear gas a little children in
Mexico is one of the like the image wh of
like what America does to people that will stick with

(01:13:03):
me forever. It's yeah, it's.

Speaker 9 (01:13:08):
I'm glad you were down there helping, though, like, especially
according their access off to water is like the most
like one of the most inhumane things, but then against
sold very inhumane.

Speaker 4 (01:13:17):
Yeah, and that time was difficult for everyone involved. That
was also one of the most impressive. This is one
of the times when large NGOs weren't allowed to operate
because of various concerns and legal things. So the entirety
of the aid effort for those people was done through

(01:13:38):
mutual aid, right through completely ad hoc mechanisms. There were
church people, people from various migrant advocacy groups in San Diego,
people from Altolado who we've spoken to on the podcast.
That's how I met them for the first time. Number
of those people actually were surveilled by border patrol, as
we found out two years later, and had warrant on them, etc.

(01:14:00):
But everyone who came came like not because it was
their job, because it was the right thing to do,
and like, there wasn't a day I was down there
that there weren't people turning up with trucks full of stuff.
This is my friend and I. Someone managed to get
us a projector from their workplace and how they got
a projector from their workplace, I didn't care, and a

(01:14:21):
bunch of DVDs. My friend used to be an electrician.
And they moved everyone to a nightclub. It was a
nightclub and another part of Tijuana at our old nightclub,
the old and massive thousands of people were in this
big kind of opening nightclub situation. It was very strange.
They had the women and the young children in one
area that like very clearly had been a pole dance room,

(01:14:42):
so like anyway, and they had like these bars ort
of like you know, like a balcony area. So we
went up to the balcony area, and then me and
a couple of these older kids who with the migrant
group were able to get like climb across the room,
find some wires connected projector and do a little make
a little movie theater for the children. And they remember

(01:15:02):
they were watching like Beverly Hills, Chihuahua when I left,
and yeah, they were having like just.

Speaker 9 (01:15:08):
A little gestures are so important though.

Speaker 4 (01:15:11):
Like yeah, I mean, it doesn't fucking fax anything, but
if they can have two hours of watching a film
about a dog or whatever like not that, yeah exactly, yeah, yeah,
they deserve that. They deserve a lot more than that.
But yeah, it was those little nice things that made
it bearable. I guess yeah, there was. I still have

(01:15:32):
like fairly disturbing recollections of lots of things asking on
the border. So let's just do a quote from Joe Biden,
because we do do love a bit of Joe Biden.
My message is this, if you're trying to leave Coolba,
Nicaragua or Haiti have agreed to begin a journey to America,
do not do not Just shut up at the border,

(01:15:55):
stay where you are and apply legally starting today. If
you don't apply through the legal process, you will not
be eligible for this new parole program. Anyway, Joe Biden
can go fuck himself. But I think that I hope
that obviously lots of little anecdotes have helped. But we

(01:16:15):
shouldn't see these people as statistics or numbers, and we
should see them as people. So I've got a couple
of interviews I've done, and to just one as I
went back to some notes and found so I was
just going to read them out, so I won't give
their names just for their own security. But sometimes I've
used pseudonyms on the publicies. Sometimes I have used the
names when they're willing to use their names, like it's

(01:16:37):
their choice, right, but it should always be their choice.
If you're a fucking reporter and you're filming children without
their consent or their parents consent.

Speaker 9 (01:16:45):
And the rest camp they're not just a spectacle for
your story.

Speaker 4 (01:16:48):
Yeah, exactly. You can jog on and I hope someone
throws your camera in a river. So here's one. I
have three daughters, aged thirteen, ten and six. I've always
had my own business selling food, and I paid what
we would call extortion money, but with the pandemic, I
couldn't pay well. I go over three or four months.
They said that I didn't pay, they were burned down
my shop and me and my daughters would be raped

(01:17:10):
and killed. With what little I had left, I left
with my daughters. It's hard to get work here. That's
an immigrant. There are some jobs, but not the sort
that are for me. I have to try and be
an example to my kids. One day I was juggling
by the traffic lights and some guys tried to pick
me up. They said they knew where I lived and
they would hurt me and my daughters, who I didn't
work for them. They made me work in a bar.

(01:17:33):
I escaped, but that's how I broke my hand. I
didn't want to go to the US, but I need
to leave this country now for the same reason I
left my own. Well, then I'll read one more. We
came from one daughters to flee the violence. We have
come to this camp in the last few days, but
it's scary here. We don't feel safe. There are people

(01:17:53):
coming or taking photos of the children of the women.
Men of for the women here money to go with them.
They tried to get them to sleep with them. It's
a woman here filming us as well. We found out
she's a big activist for Donald Trump. This was in
twenty twenty one. Some people came to snatch a child here.
Between the group, we're working to make a security committee
to protect the children because there are people who would

(01:18:13):
take the children here. We aren't a caravan. We're just
people from all over the world who have come here
for a better future. We're asking Biden. We know it's
complicated and he has a lot to sort out, and
we have patients. We know he has to make compromises,
but please think of us here. We're in danger. Please
give us a solution.

Speaker 9 (01:18:31):
It fucking heartbreaking.

Speaker 4 (01:18:33):
Yeah, it is heartbreaking. Shit. I wish there was like
some kind of happy ending I can put on this,
or like, I don't know. There are great things you
can do with mutual a groups. There's a group that
I'm hoping to interview next week called Bordlands Relief Collective
in San Diego who do kind of a lot to
help people crossing the border. There are groups like Altolalo

(01:18:55):
you can donate to the public. Comment is still available
for the Biden to propose new restrictions, so I guess
you can come out of that if you think that
will help. I guess this is an area sometimes where
talking to politicians might help, because they make the laws
that affects people's right to kind of live with basic dignity.

(01:19:17):
But yeah, I don't have a great solution to this,
especially like if people aren't in a place where they
know people here are struggling to get by. I understand
that not everyone can afford to donate, of course. Yeah,
but yeah, this is pretty bleak. And just because it's
not like being beamed into your living rooms anymore, because
orange Man bad doesn't mean that lick it's still not

(01:19:41):
impossibly cruel.

Speaker 9 (01:19:42):
Yeah, it's I mean, just because another old guy took
over doesn't mean like the same things are already there.
It's not like they just poofed into thin air like
all the terrible things that are already happening. That's what
I don't understand, is like people just assume. I don't
know what they assume. I'm not going to amble on
like that. But it's heartbreaking, and you should donate if

(01:20:03):
you can.

Speaker 4 (01:20:04):
Uh, yeah, donate, do you stuff, shout at people, do
whatever you think. We'll make a difference, because it's pretty bad.

Speaker 12 (01:20:29):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast coming live,
not live, really not. I need to come up with
a better bit than coming to you live, but coming
coming to you from from from now Fallen apparently on
fire destroyed Chicago, so so so say the media, oracles,
soothsayers and cops who live in the city who are

(01:20:49):
now absolutely convinced that the city is going to descend
into crime and chaos, etcetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
After the cop candidate got absolutely blown the.

Speaker 12 (01:20:56):
Fuck out in the last elections, and yeah, with me
to talk about this election and a couple of other
elections that happened on the same day that were very
funny and where the worst people in the world got
absolutely destroyed. Is Ali, who is one of my friends
and is an election analyst. Yeah, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
How are you doing. I'm doing well. Thank you for
having Mima. Nice to be nice to be here. Yeah,
I'm very excited. Yeah, because this is just very funny.
It's extremely funny. I personally was really enjoying getting to
read the Twitter tea leaves. You could tell kind of
which aldermen were having meltdowns on election night.

Speaker 12 (01:21:37):
Yeah, So I guess I guess we could start with
the stuff that happened in Chicago, which is that Paul Vallas,
the butcher of the public education system, running dog of
a cops, the hero of J six people. I was
just kind of slacked in an election by Brandon Johnson,

(01:22:00):
the sort of progressive candidate who I'm very excited I
no longer have to pretend that I like particularly much.

Speaker 3 (01:22:08):
Yes, now, as as Mia, says Paul Vallas. Resident Dino
from Palos Heights, a southwest suburb of Chicago, who conveniently
bought an apartment in Chicago exactly a year before the election,
which is how long you have to live in Chicago
to be the mayor. Lost the runoff to Brandon Johnson,

(01:22:29):
a black progressive who was on the Cook County board.
About when all the results are done coming in in
a couple of weeks, it'll be about fifty two percent
for Johnson and forty eight percent for Vallus. As Mia says,
this lets to a lot of people on the left
no longer have to keep up the charade of, oh,
Johnson's the best thing that has happened to us in

(01:22:51):
slice bread. For if you are like more of a
like Democratic Party loyal progressive voter, this is a very
very good thing in your eyes.

Speaker 12 (01:23:06):
Yeah, And I think, you know, I think it's something
very interesting and kind of fitting about this, which is that, Yeah,
one of the you've talked about is that, yeah, like
Brendon Johnson is the first like progressive TM mayor Travers
had since like I mean literally since Harold Washington, who
was the first black mayor in the eighties. And it's

(01:23:27):
very interesting also because a bunch of the reforms that
Harold Washington did were specifically overturned by Paul Vallis. Yeah,
like he's the guy you did a bunch of educational
reforms that fucking sucked, that destroyed Washington stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:23:42):
It's no, it's it's really wild. How like Chicago politics
is analogous to go really out there for a second.
Is analogous to the state of Hawaii in the sense
that people never die. Have the same people are going
to be on your ballot for fifty years and you

(01:24:03):
just kind of have to suck it up and deal
with it. But every so often someone good comes along,
or at least someone better, And if you get them
into office the first time, and if you get them
to survive their first reelection campaign, then they get to
be one of the people who's on the ballot forever
and who never dies. And slowly but surely you can
make Chicago politics less shitty. But yeah, as Mia said,

(01:24:27):
this is going to be the first progressive Chicago mayoral
administration since Harold Washington. And Johnson won the same way
as Harold Washington did. On Yeah, the backbone of Johnson's coalition,
just as with Harold Washington's, was black voters. Johnson got
about eighty percent of the black vote. Because in Chicago

(01:24:49):
elections are usually more about race than anything else. But
in addition to the black vote, Johnson won with progressives
in white and non black communities of color, as well
as LGBTQ voters, and finally fulfilling the dreams of the

(01:25:12):
Here's how Bernie can still win people from twenty fifteen.
A actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters
the Chicago Board of Elections is. I don't think that
anyone would call them great, but they do produce some
nice live statistics on election day as the votes are tallied,

(01:25:38):
and voters under forty five had a turnout surge of
I think it was about twenty percent, whereas voters older
than sixty, the raw number of their votes actually went down.
And this likely does almost entirely account for Johnson's margin
of victory, that he was able to turn out young

(01:26:00):
voters and that old people just like stayed home.

Speaker 12 (01:26:04):
Yeah, I think it's also you know, we talked about
this in the episode we did about Paul Vallis, But
one of the things about the initial election was that
like the fact that Johnson made it out of the
primaries at all with a genuinely nightmarorish like age like
bracket of turnout in the first round is sort of
a miracle, but you know, it got a lot better

(01:26:26):
for him in this one, and that genuinely seems to
have like I don't know, like I know a lot
of people who spent a lot of time like canvassing
their assets off and it actually seems to have worked.
And I don't know, I mean, you know, it has
to be seen the extent to which this was about,
like the fact that Vallas is like probably would have

(01:26:51):
been the worst mayor of Chicago in like.

Speaker 3 (01:26:55):
We don't have to go we don't have to go
back that far. Daily was mayor of Chicago as recently
as twenty eleven. That's true, but I I don't know Daily.

Speaker 12 (01:27:06):
Yeah, I mean it's not like Chago has good mayors,
but I think he would have been Okay, here's I
think he would have been the most politically far right
mayor Chicago has had in a long time. Oh yeah,
Like he's just a Republican, like like a pretty like yeah,
and you know that fucking sucks, but he got Clawbard.
There's also there's a really funny result I want to

(01:27:28):
talk about, which.

Speaker 3 (01:27:29):
Is that Okay, so.

Speaker 12 (01:27:32):
The part of Chicago, the neighborhood of in Chicago where
the Cubs Stadium is is right next to Boystown, which
is the fucking gay district. And if you if you
go in and look at like, well I say, I say,
it's the gay district, like a lot a lot of it's.
It's it's it's now the rich gay part of Chicago
because I think it's got priced out.

Speaker 3 (01:27:54):
Well it kind of is. It's not Market Park is
the rich gay part of Chicago.

Speaker 4 (01:27:58):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
Okay, it's more of.

Speaker 12 (01:28:00):
A rich kay part Chicago than it was like forty
years ago, fety years ago. Yeah, but like like literally
exactly split. You can like you can like see in
the data exactly split down line, the gays voted for
Brandon Johnson and all the people and all the Cubs
fans voted for Vallas.

Speaker 3 (01:28:16):
It's so funny, it is. It is extremely funny. And
I will give a quick shout out here to the
Chicago Urbanist Twitter account who made what I personally think
is the funniest meme to have come out of the election,
which is a bunch of like stick figures and just

(01:28:38):
like black and white labeled Vallas voters running from a
like steamroller, a pink steamroller with a rainbow like wheel
being driven by a bunch of gay people, and the
steamroller is labeled boys Down.

Speaker 12 (01:28:56):
It's really good, like they I don't know, like there
is this sort of like this is sort of like
this is the coalition that well, I mean again, we
talked about it like this, this is the hair washing coalition, Like,
this is the coalition that if you're an elect electoral list,
like you need to produce something that looks like this

(01:29:17):
if you want to have any serious chance of winning.

Speaker 3 (01:29:20):
And yes, yeah, and the fact that it actually worked
is sort of Oh, it's a goddamn miracle. Yeah, this
shit never works. People have been trying to do this
for like forty fucking years and it never works. I mean,
you've been trying to do this for forty plus years.
But it's also like this is really the first election

(01:29:41):
that I can think of anywhere since Barack Obama's reelection
in twenty twelve, where like, this is the coalition that
actually puts someone in like an office that got a
lot of national attention and that mattered. That's not to
say that it like literally hasn't happened anywhere else. I'm
just saying I can't think of any off the top
of my head. But like, in twenty twelve, Barack Obama

(01:30:05):
became the first person to be elected president of the
United States with less than forty percent of the white vote,
a feat that has never since been repeated. Clinton got
less than that and lost. Trump obviously won, and Biden
won because white voters swung left in twenty twenty. So like,

(01:30:27):
this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people
fail to put together and that Brandon Johnson miraculously pulled off. Yeah,
And I think, on the.

Speaker 12 (01:30:39):
One hand, okay, this is legitimately kind of because the
result is not the thing that normally happens. It is
legitimately an interesting question as to why this happened, and
like a sort of like legitimately kind of difficult like
political science question. On the other hand, most of the
people attempting to answer it have just all my fuck God,

(01:31:01):
Like if I if I have to read another New
York Times article writing about this that's like like just
clearly cobbled together from three Wikipedia articles, Like I'm gonna
literally go insane.

Speaker 3 (01:31:11):
I think you, me and every other person in Chicago,
you know, no matter if you were a Johnson voter
or a value voter, or someone who stayed home. We
can all come together in our hatred of that five
thirty eight piece that was strong on the morning of
election day. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you're lucky, and I'm not going to tell you.

Speaker 12 (01:31:33):
If you really want to, I'll give you a very
brief summary of it, which is that five.

Speaker 3 (01:31:38):
No, no, we don't know. They did. They did. They
did a racism.

Speaker 12 (01:31:41):
They did.

Speaker 3 (01:31:42):
That's what I'll leave it at. They did a racism
and they were very wrong. They basically did the four races, white, Black, Latino,
and leftist. Yeah, which is very funny. But hopefully, I
hopeful I'll take a stab at explaining what happened, and
hopefully it's better than most people's explanation. But I think

(01:32:05):
part of it is that, as I mentioned earlier, historically
Chicago elections have been about race, and like this was
no exception. This was much more of an ideological break.
Like the ideological lines were a lot clearer in this
election than previous mayoral races. But the foundation of Brandon

(01:32:26):
Johnson's electoral victory was the eighty percent of the vote
that he got in black majority neighborhoods. Black voters in
Chicago selected the black candidate because they looked at the
white guy and said, oh, we think you're going to
be a massive dipshit. And beyond that, you have a
couple of other things working in Johnson's favor, So like one,

(01:32:51):
when it comes to the youth vote, I cannot really
believe I'm saying this because I when this was announced.
It's not that I thought it wouldn't help. It's just
that I wasn't sure that it would help enough. But
Johnson got a lot of national progressive figures to endorse him,
including Bernie Sanders, and his campaign literally flew Bernie in

(01:33:14):
for a rally on a college campus here in Chicago.
And I think that genuinely did actually get a lot
of young people to realize that there was an election
that they should pay attention to, which is well because like.

Speaker 12 (01:33:26):
Like like this happened, Like people fly in Bernie a
lot and it never matters, but it like it mattered here,
which is sort of amazing. Absolutely, like just a lot
of this election was wild. I think the other thing
that really helped Johnson was that a like Chicago is
a lot less white than it used to be, which
is not something that usually gets said in this day

(01:33:48):
and age, because Chicago is becoming white than it was
like ten fifteen years ago. But Chicago was a lot
less white.

Speaker 3 (01:33:56):
Than it was in the eighties when Harold Washington was elected,
and so like there was more of a ceiling on
Paul Vallas's vote than Harold Washington's opponents had, which meant
that Vallas had to be able to appeal to not
just white voters who reflexively were against any black candidate,

(01:34:17):
but he also had to make inroads in Hispanic Asian
as well as Black communities and trying to get the
black conservative vote, and he didn't. Vallas didn't do a
terrible job here, but he just didn't do a job
that was good enough. He actually probably won the Latino vote,
it would. It wasn't like a huge win, but it

(01:34:39):
was a win. But the problem is that turnout in
on the Southwest side of Chicago, which is where the
majority of Chicago's Mexican American residents live, was just super low,
just like really really atrociously in the tank, like to
the extent like this is the kind of turnout that

(01:35:00):
fires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers
to vote level bad turnout on the Southwest Side, So
if Hispanic turnout had been on the same level as
white and black turnout, the race probably would have been
a lot closer. Vallas also won Chinatown, which is something

(01:35:22):
that got a fair amount of attention on social media.
But Johnson was able to win the two other Asian
ethnic enclaves in Chicago, which are the Vietnamese neighborhood in
Uptown called Asian Argyle, as well as the Deci neighborhood
on the far North Side. And I don't think we

(01:35:44):
can really say how Asian voters overall voted definitively because
Asian voters in Chicago are pretty well diffused through the city.
But it's very clear that Vallas did not get the
runaway win with Asian voters that Eric Adams, for example
did in New York City.

Speaker 12 (01:36:06):
Yeah, and I specifically want to talk about Argyle for
a bit, because the fact that Johnson won Argyle is
fucking insane.

Speaker 3 (01:36:13):
Oh yeah, these are like, like, this is a community
of Vietnam War refugees, Like these people are hardline anti communists,
Like you go into these restaurants and they all have
Fox News on, so like, yeah, Johnson winning these voters
is incredible.

Speaker 12 (01:36:29):
Yeah, I mean like like one of the most famous
noodle shops, there was a guy who was at January sixth,
like this is this is a like a stereotypically unbelievably
dog shit place for Johnson. And yeah, and I want
to say this about Chinatown and this is something like
I mean you just you can know this something like
I've been tracking for a while, I mean just by

(01:36:49):
like walking through it Chinatown during the pandemic and kind
of after it, and it was having a bit before
has gotten just notably more fascist, Like oh yeah, there
is a lot of stuff there. I mean, the anti
homelessess stuff is really really really intense. They've been going
really hard on the d And that's the thing that

(01:37:10):
kind of makes sense, right, like this this is a
thing that you would kind of expect out of like yeah,
of course small business owners are going to like go
right like that's like that's that's you know, that that's
the you can you can you can find Marx writing
about this phenomenon in like eighteen forty eight, right like
this this has been a thing since the beginning of time.
But I don't know, it's gotten, it's gotten legitimately kind

(01:37:37):
of scary down there.

Speaker 3 (01:37:39):
Yeah, and like a lot of it also, I think
was you know, there's been a divergence between how the
North Side Asian enclaves like the Dusty Neighborhood and the
Vietnamese neighborhood have responded to this kind of stuff versus Chinatown,
especially on the other big social change that happened during

(01:38:03):
the pandemic, which was the twenty twenty Black Lives Matter protests.
I think from what I saw, like the reaction on
the North Side among these Asian enclaves was pretty overall
supportive of the protests, whereas down in Chinatown as well
as in McKinley Park, which is a Hispanic majority neighborhood
but has a pretty significant Asian population, those neighborhoods had

(01:38:27):
this really really big like surge of anti black racism
in response to the protests. Like there were quote unquote
neighborhood watch groups that got formed.

Speaker 4 (01:38:38):
And it was just it was bad.

Speaker 3 (01:38:41):
And you know, the Vietnamese voters on argyle, even though
they're very like you know, they have Fox News on
like I said, and they're really anti socialist ante communists,
there was a state rep. I am probably going to
butcher his name, for which I apologize, but I'm pretty
sure his name is pronounced han when who is Vietnamese himself,

(01:39:03):
and he won the seat last year in twenty twenty two,
and like he's very progressive. So there has been this
very sharp divergence in how the Asian neighborhoods in Chicago
have responded to some of the social events of the
last few years.

Speaker 12 (01:39:20):
Once again by people, the Great Nation of China has
followed into social imperialism.

Speaker 3 (01:39:28):
I think the last thing that really should be talked
about in the context of Johnson's electoral win, and when
we come back we can talk about the City Council
because that's also pretty interesting. Is that something that if
you want to watch elections, especially if you want to
watch Chicago elections, something you should understand is that the

(01:39:48):
capital m machine in Chicago is pretty much gone now
and Brandon Johnson's win pretty much seals this. And it's
not that the people are gone or that like the
you know, the logistical operations of the machine are completely dead.
But the machine has now lost two elections in a row.

(01:40:11):
Because as much as Laurie as much as Lauri Lightfoot sucked,
and she sucked so much. She also was an anti
machine candidate, like she was like capital a anti machine
when she ran. And Brandon Johnson is not anti machine
in the way that Laurie was, but he definitely was

(01:40:31):
not the candidate of like the machine. So like they
lost two elections in a row. Mike Madigan has now
been like indicted and he's probably going to prison for
a very long time.

Speaker 12 (01:40:41):
You should explain who Mike Madigan is because Okay, if
you live in Illinois, like you know who Mike Madigan is.
If you don't live in Illinois, Mike Madigan, for my
entire life, for like the lives of people who are
much older than me, has been like the most the
single most powerful political figure in all of Illinois.

Speaker 3 (01:40:57):
Like he runs everything.

Speaker 12 (01:41:00):
Yeah, like he has like an iron grip over everything
that has happened in this state for like forty years.

Speaker 3 (01:41:07):
Yes, And he finally got indicted on some federal like
charges of like I don't even remember what the charges were,
but it was very like al Capone esque of like, yeah,
we finally found something to nail you on, so we're
going to And so he got indicted last year, and
it is actually pretty impressive, Like how quickly his machine
fell apart. Yeah, like he just he didn't have an

(01:41:30):
air ready to take control. And so it's not that
like machine politics has gone from Chicago. It's more that
instead of a machine, there are now going to be
a bunch of smaller machines, which is going to make
it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have
some saying the political process, which is a good thing.

Speaker 12 (01:41:50):
Yeah, and like the the chocolate machine fucking sucks ass.
I mean, like we talked about val like I mean,
Vallas was a machine guy, right, yes, absolutely, and you know,
and it is like the thing, the the the machine
has two values and it's corruption and neoliberalism.

Speaker 3 (01:42:04):
And honestly, like not even neoliberalism so much anymore. It's
mostly just corruption.

Speaker 12 (01:42:10):
Yeah, I mean, they they've kind of I would say,
I think they've gotten less ideological over the last twenty years.
M hm, Like well, like I think the last decade
and a half. But they yeah, they really they really
fucked it, like Chicago was like the political machine, and
you know, like I mean like they're in large part
responsible for the creation of Obama's career and they've parlayed

(01:42:33):
that into losing to like the least popular mayor in
like a generation, and then losing again branded like somehow
to Brandon Johnson, and it's I don't know, they've they've
they've failed spectacularly and fuck them, they're awful.

Speaker 3 (01:42:54):
And I yeah, yes, absolutely they Yeah. Fuck these guys.

Speaker 12 (01:43:00):
They've they've robbed, they've they've rubbed the working class for
too fucking long.

Speaker 3 (01:43:04):
Yeah, no, fuck these guys, good riddance. The world will
be better when they're dead. Yeah. Do you know what
else the world would be better than? If you know? Okay,
that that was that was That was not my that
was not my best effort. I apologize.

Speaker 12 (01:43:21):
But the world's question mark. Maybe better place if you
buy these products and services question mark. I don't know
if I'm legally allowed to say that.

Speaker 3 (01:43:32):
We'll see. Anyways, here's some bads and we are back.

Speaker 12 (01:43:38):
Yeah, we should talk about what Johnson actually wants to do. Well,
do you want to get into that? Would you want
to talk about the city council first?

Speaker 3 (01:43:44):
I think they actually overlapped pretty well, So like we can,
let's let's run through what Johnson says he wants to
do and we can then talk about how much of
that might happen. So Johnson, like we were talking about,
is definitely going to be the most progressive mayor in
Chicago's history in terms of what he campaigned on. At
least this was a crime election, Like the dominant issue

(01:44:09):
was crime, and Johnson did not say the words defund
the police. In fact, he actually explicitly said that he
would not cut the police budget. But aside from like
those literal words, he very much is in line with
the progressive priorities of de emphasizing like using people with

(01:44:30):
guns to go through like six weeks of training or whatever.
So he wants to pass a bill called Treatment Not Trauma,
which is replacing cops with mental health responders for nine
to one one calls about mental health crises. He wants
to pass another bill called the Peacebook Ordinance, which would

(01:44:51):
expand restorative justice and violence intervention like projects and programs
in the city. And he also wants to pass an
ordinance to put somegnificant restrictions on police department raids and
like the police department's just actual ability to do raids altogether.
There is a very infamous contract here in Chicago called

(01:45:11):
the Shop Spotter Contract, which is this dumb software that
is supposed to be able to like tell police when
a gun goes off, and like, as far as I
can tell, doesn't And it's just like straight up doesn't work.
So Johnson wants to get rid of that. He also
wants to eliminate the Gang Database, which, if you are

(01:45:31):
from Chicago you probably know what we're talking about. Is
this very infamous list of about one hundred and twenty
thousand people, ninety five percent of whom are either black
or Latino. And they are on this list called the
Gang Database, more or less because one day some random
Chicago police officers decided to put them on the list.
It's very dumb, it's very racist, it's very blatantly unconstitutional,

(01:45:54):
and hopefully Brandon Johnson is able to get rid of it.

Speaker 12 (01:45:57):
Yeah, and these are and these are all things like
you know, as much as we can talk about the
extent to which like is you know, as most as
we can we can talk about the sort of the
complicity of like mental health responders and the police system
wherever the fuck, Like these things would all like make
a lot of people's lives better and making the police weaker,

(01:46:18):
and you know. I mean, one of the things about
this election, right is that the people who are actually
affected by crime vote for Johnson.

Speaker 3 (01:46:25):
The people who are not affected by crime at all
all voted for Vallice.

Speaker 4 (01:46:28):
Yep.

Speaker 12 (01:46:29):
And part of the reason for that is that, like, Okay,
if you're in a place like in Chicago that has
a bunch of crime, you were dealing with, like you're
dealing with the crime, you're dealing with a lot of
people getting shot, which is fucking shit. Then you're also
dealing with the CPD, who are like function most of
the time, are functionally a cartel about every like we're

(01:46:51):
kind of due for another set of like prosecutions for them,
Like roughly every like seven or eight years, there's a
massive series of IRA by the FBI or like the
fence come in and like discover that there's like a
giant there's a giant artelle operating out of the CPD.

Speaker 3 (01:47:06):
We've talked about this discover and discover in air quotes
because everyone knows, oh yeah, everyone knows.

Speaker 12 (01:47:11):
And then you know, the Chicago police in particular are
very famous for the Code of Silence, which is that
every single person, if a cop commits a crime, every
single other cop will cover for them, going right up
to the like the top of the ladder of the
police chiefs and all the way down to like dipshit
like like beat cop, and you know, and so you know,

(01:47:33):
like if you're a person who has to deal with
these people, and oh, it sucks. It fucking sucks. And
like the Chicago is kind of in many ways not
the ground zero, but like a ground zero for a
phenomenon where you have these poor neighborhoods of color. Who
you know, the people who live in these neighborhoods, they

(01:47:54):
are simultaneously over policed and under police because the police
don't bother to show up half the time when like
they're theoretically needed, right like someone gets shot, you call
nine one one, and the cops don't bother showing up
for hours if they bother showing up at all. And
at the same time, when they do show up that
you often cause more problems than they solve. Like Chicago

(01:48:17):
has really truly horrific clearance rates of violent crime. And
this is mostly because CPD just insists on maintaining this
really awful balance. You know, if you do believe in police,
you want there to be a pretty healthy balance between
beat cops and detectives. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:48:35):
Well, this Chicago Police Department, there almost are no detectives left,
Like it's almost all beat cops, and so there's not
many resources that go into actually investigating crimes that can't
be solved by someone just walking around or driving around
in a patrol car. So these neighborhoods, like you know,

(01:48:55):
you go down to the South Side or the West Side,
a lot of these A lot of the residents in
these neighborhoods would tell you, because they're not leftists, right,
so they would tell you that they want more police officers,
but they don't want more beat cops necessarily, like they
want more detectives, and they want officers who are actually
going to care about them as people. Unfortunately, the Chicago

(01:49:17):
Police Department is made up of fascists. So like, ugh,
you know, low chances on that front. But it's like
that is the problem these neighborhoods are facing, is that
like the police don't bother to care, and when they
bother to show up, they often make things worse.

Speaker 12 (01:49:34):
Yeah, and I think, you know, but I think everything
that's sort of important here, right is like you get
a lot of you know, like it's very easy for
people to be like, oh hey, look, actually these people
want more police.

Speaker 3 (01:49:44):
But it's like, you know, when you look at what
there was a somebody taken.

Speaker 12 (01:49:50):
Right before the election that was talking about voters like
what their preference is on like what their sort of
opinions on crime are. Oh yeah, yeah, I know, yeah
you're talking about I think it was like only eighteen
percent of the people who said that crime was important
to them one in war cops and almost everyone. We know.
Part of part of it was like they like one
of their big consernives was legal guns. And then the

(01:50:12):
other big conserve was just like the fact that there's
these places are really poor and there's no opportunities for.

Speaker 3 (01:50:18):
People because it's like there's there there aren't economic opportunities.
There are so many guns just on, you know, just
lying around in these communities, and obviously that's a problem
throughout the country, but it's especially bad in low income
neighborhoods in Chicago. And the other thing was mental health,

(01:50:40):
like you know, and that's one of the other things
that Johnson wants to do is he wants to reopen
the mental health clinics that got closed down by rom
or rom Emmanuel, who is a previous mayor of Chicago,
who is currently being inflicted upon the people of Japan
as the US ambassador, and you know they deserve it.

Speaker 12 (01:50:59):
This is this is this is what you get for
siding with the CIA, You fucking fucking dipshits. Man. Like,
if label Democratic Party didn't want to have to get
to deal with Rob Emanuel, they shouldn't have taken all
that CIA money.

Speaker 3 (01:51:11):
But yeah, like Johnson wants to you know, reopen these
mental health clinics. He wants to increase funding for public schools,
which have very much not gotten the funding that they
need in Chicago for the past several decades at this point.
He also wants to expand public transportation in Chicago. Like
there are a lot of proposals flying around for expanding

(01:51:32):
the train lines and bus lines and bike rid There
are also, as me and I were talking about before
we started recording, there are a lot of lead pipes
like water pipes in Chicago. Yes, and and like Chicago
is like supposed to be replacing them, it's proceeding very slowly.

(01:51:52):
Johnson wants to speed that up. There's like just very
genuinely a lot of research on the books directly linking
lead poison into a lot of social problems, and so
it's very much one of these things where it's like,
you know, if you replace the lead pipes, crime will
go down.

Speaker 12 (01:52:09):
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the
infrastructure stuff for a second, because like I okay, in
the in the last three years, Chicago's public transit system
has just been fucking imploding.

Speaker 3 (01:52:22):
Oh there are it's so bad.

Speaker 12 (01:52:23):
There are. There are reasons for this, some of which
I can talk about, some of which I can't. Like,
partially was depend Partially there's the pandemic and that like
a bunch of the people who supposedly running the system
fucking died because you know, they got forced to work
during the pandemic. But like you know, you'll like trains
just won't show up. There are buses that are basically
unusable because it's it's like you're basically sitting there trying

(01:52:46):
to roll double ones as to whether the bus will
fucking show up at all. The wait times are enormous,
Like it's a real shit show, and like it's it's
substantively way worse than it was when I was in
this and like fifteen nineteen. Yeah, it's really really bad
and it's it's atrocious.

Speaker 7 (01:53:07):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:53:08):
The other factor that's to be talked about there is that, like,
so the Chicago public transit system is not free like
most systems, Like it is funded by writer fairs. Like
it's very Yeah, it costs a lot to get on Comparatively,
it costs a lot to get on the train, are
going on a bus. And one of the kind of

(01:53:30):
like self reinforcing cycles has been playing out the last
few years is that Chicago also has a really bad
homelessness problem. And this is directly linked to the fact
that the city just does not want to give people housing.
And so what ends up happening is that a lot
of Chicago's homeless residents, especially in the colder winter months,

(01:53:51):
they end up on the trains, especially the two lines
that run twenty four hours a day. And you know,
these are people who are really you know, they're living
in really really terrible conditions, Like they don't have regular
access to clean food and water, let alone like clean
access to like like regular access to like hygienic facilities.

(01:54:12):
And so ridership really plummeted on the lines where homeless
people started to like just go on in order to
stay warm, and so you get the hit because rider
fares are now down because people don't want to deal
with being on the same train line as homeless people

(01:54:34):
who you know, frankly just don't smell that good or
have mental health problems. And the city doesn't want to
give these homeless people housing, let alone like even like
smaller things like like access to bathing facilities or healthcare
or anything like that. And so it becomes a self
reinforcement cycle of now fares are down, so there's less investment,

(01:54:56):
so more people abandon the system, and it is the
same were like this will this would get solved if
Chicago committed to giving homeless people housing, but that's just
not where the city has unfortunately been.

Speaker 12 (01:55:12):
Yeah, and I mean, you know, and what what's happening
instead is like, you know, increasing anti homeless architecture. Like
Chicago train stations fucking suck ass because they're all designs
so that's impossible to sit on anything.

Speaker 3 (01:55:25):
Oh my god, there are only two benches in each station.

Speaker 12 (01:55:27):
It sucks some man, these stations like it's so bad,
like it's just awful. Like one of the things that
Chicago has is they have these, like you know, it
gets really really culture in the winter, so they have
these like warming stations so that when it's like fucking
negative twenty out, you can be in the warming things,
but there's no They intentionally make it so there's no
benches in them, so you can't sit in them. Yeah,

(01:55:49):
it sucks, like it's it's you know, it's they have
this really just like the hatred of homeless people is
turned basically into a war against all society waged the city,
and yes, it's atrocious.

Speaker 3 (01:56:04):
The good news is that Brandon Johnson wants to pass
an ordinance called Bring Chicago Home, which would put a
tax on property transfers for like I think it's like
homes that are worth over a million dollars that and
the money from that tax would go entirely to funding

(01:56:25):
programs for the city's homeless residents all the way up
to and including permanent shelter or like permanent housing solutions.
So you know, you know, fingers crossed on that one,
because that, I think, along with the public safety measures,
is really the thing that the city needs the most.
And Johnson also on the housing front, he wants to

(01:56:49):
liberalize zoning laws, which I know is a very big
debate on the left at the moment about, you know,
how we go about approaching building more housing. Johnson very
much is on like the probe development end of things.
He wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so
that it's easier to build multi family housing and previously
like single family housing zoned areas. He does also want

(01:57:13):
to pass just cause for eviction, so like your landlord
would not be able to throw you out just because,
which is a good thing. Chicago's landlords are really shit.
They're terrible. I have seen across the born terrible.

Speaker 12 (01:57:27):
Yeah, like I God, like, I have seen ship doing
tenant organizing that is like like things that make me
like have to control my reflex to vomit just remembering them,
yes truly.

Speaker 3 (01:57:46):
But yeah. The other thing, and that's something that will
matter to you if you are living in Chicago very much,
is that Johnson wants to cap property taxes. So one
of the things that has been driving a lot of
reactuctionary politics in Chicago is that property taxes here are
linked to inflation, which means that if you are a

(01:58:07):
property owner in Chicago in the last couple of years,
your property taxes went up by like fifteen plus percent,
which understandably made a lot of people mad because you know,
if your taxes go up by that much that fast,
you at least wanted to be going to do something
good and under our previous well soon to be previous

(01:58:27):
mayor Lord Lightfoot, that absolutely was not happening. Yeah, cop
over time or some shit like Yes, So Johnson is
he campaigned on decoupling property taxes from inflation so they
would no longer just automatically go up, which would bring

(01:58:48):
a lot of financial relief to a lot of Chicago families.
And also he would basically like wants to pass a
lot of taxes focused on wealthier residents as well as
big businesses to help fund some of the programs which
brings us to the City Council. And how much of
a chance he hasn't getting this past, which is better
than you might think if you are familiar with Chicago politics.

(01:59:14):
Something that surprises people who don't live in the city
is that Chicago is not run by progressives. There has
actually pretty much never been a progressive majority on the
City Council, and there isn't there will not be a
progressive majority on the new one. That comes in with Johnson.
He is going to be presiding over a minority government

(01:59:36):
in parliamentary terms, which I think we should use more
often because I'm a nerd and I find it fun.
But basically, there are fifty members of the Chicago City Council.
They are called aldermen because we insist on having a
city council that is the size of a state legislature here,
and about twenty two of them are going to be

(01:59:58):
aligned with Johnson mo less, so he's going to be
three votes short on a lot of things. At least
from the beginning. He is going to be negotiating with
the black political establishment here in Chicago, which is one
of the smaller machines that is left in the aftermath
of Madigan's indictment. And we are going to see how
this goes. Some of those black aldermen are friendlier to

(02:00:22):
Johnson from the get go, partially because of ideology and
partially because a lot of them just like personally know
him and like him. Some of them are very against
him for similar reasons, like they either ideologically don't line
up or they just dislike him on a personal basis.

Speaker 12 (02:00:38):
Like we should talk, we should say a little bit
about Johnson's not like some kind of like political political outsider.

Speaker 3 (02:00:46):
No, He's been around. He's kind of.

Speaker 12 (02:00:50):
He has like interesting relations with the old sort of
like prep Winkle like labor machine.

Speaker 3 (02:00:57):
Yeah, he's definitely like Johnson is definitely part of a machine.
His relationship with like the old machine was very bad,
but he is definitely part of a machine that is
tied up and like the institutional labor unions that have
a lot of sway and democratic politics here, including the

(02:01:18):
Chicago Teachers Union, which, like you know, Vallas's whole stick
during the run off was that Johnson would be a
stooge for the teachers Union, and the teachers Union really
just like the teacher This is actually kind of funny
because like the Teachers' Union really just swept the board here,
not just with Johnson, but with like a lot of
the city council races where they weighed in. So if

(02:01:44):
you are a member of the Chicago Teachers Union who
does not approve of their leadership, buckle up, because the
next several years they are going they are almost certainly
going balls to the wall of like, well, if we
can get a mayor, we can get a lot of
other people too.

Speaker 12 (02:01:58):
Yeah, and we should mention here that so a lot
of the other unions in Chicago like are kind of
ah yeah, they range an ad to shit. Chicago Teachers'
Union got taken over by this group called Core, who
are like a sort of rank and file like left

(02:02:18):
e Like I think I think a good way to
understand Core is that like with the caveat that, like
teachers in Chicago really don't make that much money in
the grand scheme of things, so like income wise, this
is not line up. But these people are very much
like kind of resistance liberals on steroids. Like they're not

(02:02:41):
going to be like frontliners and a socialist revolutionary time soon,
but like they are definitely on the far left of
the Democratic Party coalition.

Speaker 3 (02:02:50):
Yeah, well, and we should like they're not like.

Speaker 12 (02:02:54):
Like they are. They are like I don't know, I
have complicated feelings on them from the sort of anegicates perspective.
They're like they're they're as good of a thing of
like union people as like you currently have. Again, we've
talked about this, this could change within and you very quickly.

(02:03:17):
But yeah, they've they've been responsible for pushing a lot
of things that are very good. Yes, and they've they've
they've turned the union into like I mean, well it's okay,
so like one thing to talk about. Like they actually
do go on strike, which is the thing that a
lot of unions struck don't like.

Speaker 3 (02:03:30):
They go on strike.

Speaker 12 (02:03:31):
They do. They do political things that are usually pretty good.
And they are an actual sort of like they're an
actual class base for things getting better.

Speaker 3 (02:03:41):
Yes they are. The Chicago Teachers Union is definitely like
a net good force in city politics and something that also,
like CTU, gets a lot of negative attention even on
a national level. And so something that surprises people who
don't live in Chicago, if they know about the Teachers
Union at all, is that the CTU is actually very
popular among the cities or residents like most like people

(02:04:06):
love the Chicago Teachers Union. Like when the teachers last
one on strike, the public was over overwhelmingly on their side,
which is why they won. And c TOU also like
their twenty nineteen strike against Lory Liefoot was very much
like the inspiration that touched off a lot of the

(02:04:26):
teacher strikes that happened in red states over the next
several months, Like they very much kind of led the
way in some in some areas, like so they are
like like Mia, I have complicated feelings about the CTU,
but overall they're a good thing for city politics and

(02:04:48):
like they make Chicago a more progressive place.

Speaker 12 (02:04:50):
Yeah, and this has been true for like a while too,
like like to the extent that when like I think
back in twenty twelve, Core was like, like, oh sweet,
what did you But back back when Court sort of
first taking home was first doing their strikes, like even
the CTU people were surprised about the extent to which
like when they went out, like the streets turned into
a party, Like people actually really do like them.

Speaker 3 (02:05:11):
Like I mean the cops don't but like fuck them, Like.

Speaker 5 (02:05:16):
People know the.

Speaker 3 (02:05:17):
Cops don't like them, and to see to use credit,
most Chicago teachers dislike the cops.

Speaker 12 (02:05:22):
Yeah, they've they've been they've been trying to get cops
out of schools, which is good because yes, cops and
schools are especially in Chicago, it's really bad.

Speaker 3 (02:05:34):
The last thing I think we should mention about the
City Council before we move on to some of the
other elections we need to talk about is one of
the things that gets criticized about the left as an
electoral force in places like New York or Los Angeles,
especially those two places, is that's very dominated by white people.
And I do want to provide the context for those

(02:05:57):
of you who are not from the Chicago area, Like,
that's not true. In Chicago. The progressive movement and the left,
like the leftist movement, on an electoral level in Chicago
is very much driven by people of color. And you
saw this in the City Council election results. Almost every
single seat that progressives flipped on the City Council was

(02:06:19):
in a black or brown ward, and even the two wards,
like the two white majority wards where they flip seats,
the new aldermen or Alder women in both cases are
people of color. So, like, this is just like context
for those of you who are not from Chicago. This
is not a case of like white leftist gone wild.

(02:06:43):
Like this very much is a rainbow coalition, not just
in the sense that Brandon Johnson won the election off
of rainbow coalition, but in the sense of the electoral
left in Chicago is very very much a rainbow coalition
and has been very effective because of that.

Speaker 12 (02:06:59):
Yeah, and it's very funny too, because you see people
like those sort of right wiggers in Chicago, like constantly
screening about like Lake Front liberals, and you look at
like the actual base of like the policy shit, it's like, okay,
like this is this is this is simply not what
was actually happening here.

Speaker 3 (02:07:17):
Yes, the honest like the thing about like race and
its relationship with progressive politics in Chicago is that the
most progressive neighborhoods Chicago, based on their voting patterns, are
almost always the most racially integrated. And that's not to
say that like all of the racially integrated neighborhoods are progressive,

(02:07:40):
because that's not true. There are some pretty integrated neighborhoods
on the Southwest Side that are like very conservative because
a bunch of cops live there. But most of the
racially integrated neighborhoods of Chicago are also the most progressive neighborhoods,
and that like really just flies in the face of

(02:08:03):
the whole like white lake Front liberal narrative and is
something to pay more attention to.

Speaker 12 (02:08:10):
Okay, again, it cannot be emphasized enough. Brandon Johnson, the
progressive candidate is black. He's running against a white guy.
There was a very large attempt to paint like Brandon
Johnson is like an out of touch, like white liberal,
which is really funny. Yeah, I think like they just

(02:08:31):
have I don't know. I mean, it's just the sort
of like ideological bankruptcy of like like the sort of
like capitalist establishment is like they have nothing right they're
they're like the only thing they have left is like
calling a black guy white.

Speaker 3 (02:08:46):
It's just like shut the fuck up, like he believes
the shit anymore. Like And on that note, it might
be time for some ads.

Speaker 12 (02:08:56):
Yeah we are, we are back from our I hope
you have enjoyed the destruction of the entire world.

Speaker 3 (02:09:04):
Yeah, okay, so there.

Speaker 12 (02:09:05):
We have talked about Chicago for a long time because
you're both fum Chicago. It's very funny and it's very interesting.
But oh actually, okay, I'm realizing this. There's one more
thing I do. The two more things I do specifically
want to mention about Brandon Johnson than I forgot earlier.

Speaker 3 (02:09:18):
One is that he.

Speaker 12 (02:09:22):
You know, it's genuinely unclear to me whether this is
a real ideological belief he has or whether this is
the thing that he said to not get called Natie
semi because it was electorally expedient, but he released a
really really shitty statement on like what got investment and
sanctions of Israel.

Speaker 3 (02:09:40):
That was like Herbert, Oh, yeah, it was terrible.

Speaker 12 (02:09:45):
It was really terrible.

Speaker 3 (02:09:46):
But Like, based on what I saw from the aftermath
of that, I'm inclined to believe that this was more
something he was told to say. And the reason for
that is because the reaction that got with the crowd
he was in front of was like he was speaking
with a Jewish organization. Like the reaction was very like okay, dude,

(02:10:07):
but that's not what we asked you about. Like it
was a response to a question about like, oh, you know,
how do you handle anti Semitism? And I think there
are just unfortunately a lot of really dipshit consultants in
the Democratic Party who hear the words anti Semitism and
think you have to talk about Israel, which is really

(02:10:28):
truly an ironically anti semitic of them to think, like, yeah,
I think he was probably told to say that I'm
not going to go out on a limon. I guess
what his actual beliefs on Israel Houstine are, but I'm
pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb.

Speaker 12 (02:10:46):
Yeah, but like I like the but the actual consequich
is like he was equitting, like he was quitting the
SNETI Semitism. He like, go, you should try to go
find the clip somewhere because it's genuine, winey, bizarre and shit.
And this is this is the part of the episode
where I want to remind people that like when when

(02:11:09):
when these kinds of people get into power, it is
not as good as people think it's going to be.

Speaker 3 (02:11:16):
Like another thing.

Speaker 12 (02:11:16):
He very like he almost immediately like right after he
got elected, started trying to convince Biden to have the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which would be a fucking
shit show. Yeah, this is me from the future here.
Two days after we recorded this, the Democratic Party announced
that the twenty twenty four Democratic National Convention will indeed
be held in Chicago. So yeah, it's gonna suck. That

(02:11:40):
effort predates him, like that's in the world. Like he
definitely immediately came out and said like, yes, I'm in
support of this, yeah, which is like some people don't
understand why. Okay, So, like the thing that happens when
when when national convention comes to your city is that
your city is occupied by the cops and then like
wherever the convention is happening based we turned into a
war zone because anyone who comes out to trying to

(02:12:02):
protest them just gets like the ship beaten out of them.

Speaker 3 (02:12:05):
Yes, and there's also usually a lot of anti homeless
policies they get rolled down in advance. We actually, we
would would this is It's not as.

Speaker 12 (02:12:16):
Bad as the stuff we talked about with Lula in
terms of the World Cup, but it's a similar kind
of thing that you get with these kinds of candidates
where they do these sort of like giant they do
these sort of like mega project developmentalism shit because they
want the status that comes from it, and the result
is stuff that sucks and that you know, nominally like

(02:12:37):
like at least in theory, like contradicts the rest of
his platform, right like this this is going to be
a thing that brings a lot of cops into the
fucking city he's in theory supposed to be trying to
have policing done by like people who are cops. That's
gonna suck if it works.

Speaker 3 (02:12:54):
Yes, And that is that is your reminder for if
you do live in Chicago, like me and I that
just because Brandon Johnson got elected does not mean that
you could to sit home. Like if you are involved
or invested in Chicago progressive politics, just because you have
a progressive mayor doesn't mean you get to sit back
and relax. You have to do a lot of work
to hold these people's feet to the fire.

Speaker 12 (02:13:16):
Yeah, Like you're like, you're you're gonna end up fighting
these people and it's gonna suck, and you're going to
have to do it.

Speaker 3 (02:13:22):
Like if you if you believe.

Speaker 12 (02:13:24):
In the things that you that you claim to believe to,
when are not sort of just acting out of like
you know, either you're not just purely acting on a
sort of candidate loyalty you were you were going to
have to fight people that you helped get elected, and
you're going to have.

Speaker 3 (02:13:39):
To pay for that. Start the five stages of grief.

Speaker 12 (02:13:43):
Now, okay, move moving, moving moving on from that ship, moving.

Speaker 3 (02:13:47):
On, we need to talk about Wisconsin. The other big
election that happened on Tuesday night was an election that
flipped the Supreme Court of the State of wiscon And
from a conservative majority, and not just like lowercase C conservative,
but like batshit and sane Christian nationalists conservative from a

(02:14:08):
majority of those people to a liberal majority. That is
hopefully going to make life better for the people of Wisconsin.
So for those of you who are not paying attention
to this, which is likely even more than the people
who were not paying attention to Chicago, because state Supreme
Court races, most people if you tell them about those,

(02:14:30):
react with that's a thing. Yeah, and I mean to
be fair.

Speaker 12 (02:14:34):
To be fair, this is probably the most nationally prominent
state street court election of my lifetime. That means that
maybe four people know about it instead of one.

Speaker 7 (02:14:44):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (02:14:45):
So on Tuesday night, Janet Protis Saywit, who was the
Democratic aligned candidate, beat the Republican aligned candidate Daniel Kelly,
who was himself a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme
Court eleven points, which is a really big deal because
Wisconsin voted for Joe Biden by zero point six points.

(02:15:07):
So this is very much like landslide level territory for
wiscon for Wisconsin Democrats, it was very much a perfect storm.
Like the areas of the state that have been trending
towards Republicans experienced massive reversion back towards Producewits and the
areas of the state that have historically been a Republican

(02:15:27):
also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the
single reason it happened, is because of the Dobbs ruling
that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought American gender dynamics
back by a solid seventy five years. Pro to Saywits
successfully turned the campaign into a referendum on abortion rights,

(02:15:52):
which is why she won by the margin she did.
There was huge turnout in Madison, Milwaukee and college campuses.
There were multiple college campuses, I think where there were
more votes cast in this state Supreme Court election than
there were in the midterms last November. So this really

(02:16:15):
was like every single thing that possibly could have gone
right electorally for the Democrats in Wisconsin did obviously with
very very like grim background context of the overturning of Row,
but a good sign for the future of the abortion
rights movement that you know, people voters did not forget

(02:16:38):
about Dobbs after the midterms, like this is still an
active force in national politics that is pushing people to
the left.

Speaker 12 (02:16:45):
Yeah, and I want to specific we talk about this
for a little bit too, because, like I think the
media has kind of has really I think fallen down
on the fucking job here, which is that like these
people are like because there's like all all the people
in the fucking media class are either like themselves are

(02:17:07):
like hardline anti abortion rules or there people who this
doesn't affect and you know, so they just stop giving
a ship after like a couple of months because it's
like whatever, who cares.

Speaker 13 (02:17:17):
But like.

Speaker 12 (02:17:19):
This is a if you are living under this, like
this is this is like you can't fucking ignore this, no,
like it is it is a it is an immense
engine of death and human suffering that you know, it's
it's it's this is the US, right we live under
a normally like we live under a lot of immense
sort of engines of death and human suffering.

Speaker 3 (02:17:40):
But this is this is a kind of engine that
just sweeps through.

Speaker 12 (02:17:47):
It sweeps across the sort of note what you think
of as like the quote unquote like like traditional.

Speaker 3 (02:17:53):
Sort of.

Speaker 12 (02:17:55):
Like I don't know, you like class liizes the right thing,
But this is the thing that kind of sweeps across
the urban world divide in a lot of ways, like
it sweeps au across a lot of the certain normal
political divisions because the Republicans have been like there there
there lying on abortion has been hijacked by what I say, hijack, right,

(02:18:18):
this is what this is, what this is what these
people always wanted, but it's it's been it's being set
by a bunch of just deranged Christian nationalists whose opinion
reflect maybe tour like thirty percent of the country max.

Speaker 3 (02:18:30):
Not even that. Like the like the ruling of the
judge down in Texas on I'm going to mess up
how to pronounce this, and I apologize, But if a
priss stone, which is like a pill that, among other things,
can induce abortions, Uh, there was like a Republican judge
down in northern Texas who attempted, who like, attempted to

(02:18:56):
overturn the FDA's approval of the drug. The FDA proved
this drug in the nineties, and his ruling very much
was insane, like on top of just like the superficial
insanity of trying to do this. His reasoning was that,
you know, this man wrote a ruling saying that the

(02:19:19):
Constitution guarantees fetal personhood, which is a which we you
know would result in a complete and total ban on
abortion nationwide under all circumstances, and that's a viewpoint that
is shared by less than ten percent of Americans. So like,
it's just, you know, the Republican Party has gone off
the cliff after they went off the cliff here. Yeah,

(02:19:42):
And you know, I don't know, I think this whole
I think.

Speaker 12 (02:19:49):
There's a lot of ways in which this entire sort
of election, the lection dynamics of this are really grim
because the Democrats are the people who let the shit
fucking happen, right like for years and years and years
in years, they just you know, they used abortion as
an electoral thing and then did fucking nothing to actually
make sure that abortion would be that you know, would
be saved, and they finally lost it. And now it's like,

(02:20:10):
you know, it's the thing that's like, it's it's it's
it's the electoral issue that's coming to bail them out
of their like.

Speaker 3 (02:20:17):
Electoral woes, and that fucking sucks in a lot of ways.
But it also means, I.

Speaker 12 (02:20:22):
Don't know, like it's it's it's it's beating some of
the worst people in the fucking world. If we want
to actually make sure that people have the ability to
have safe abortions on demand, we are going to have
to do a lot of fighting that is not just
showing up to these elections.

Speaker 3 (02:20:40):
Yes, absolutely, but it is yeah, no, like like Mia said,
it is really just like heinous that so many of
the Democratic Party big wigs who presided over the fifty
years of Republicans saying they were going to do this
and not taking Republicans seriously, are never going to feel

(02:21:01):
accountable for this. Yeah, and I don't think I need
to be you needs to be putting out with this too.

Speaker 12 (02:21:05):
Was like the Republicans the entire time, we're in every
single way they possibly could like outlawing abortion without literally
outlawing it, and people just stood that like the party
which is like we don't give a shit, like we're
not We're not going to like actually like fight this
except for occasionally to run a losing candidate, right, like.

Speaker 3 (02:21:25):
I don't know, Yeah, no, it's it's insane, And like
there are there are people in the Democratic Party who
were trying to raise the alarm. Those people were generally ignored.
But the you know, now that abortion rights are gone
on a national level, we are seeing this electoral backlash

(02:21:47):
and it is having the impact of like you know,
Republicans have been unable to effectively make the national conversation
about inflation, or about crime, or about trans athletes, which
is also a losing issue for them, but god knows,
they keep trying, but they have been unable to make

(02:22:09):
the national conversation about those topics because voters are now
looking at them like, but you're the freaks that took
our abortion rights away? What's wrong with you? And in
terms of Wisconsin, pro to say, which being on the
Wisconsin Supreme Court is almost certainly she doesn't take office

(02:22:31):
until August, which is a really weird amount of time
for her to have to wait, Like I don't know
why Wisconsin is like that, but it is. But once
she is in office, Wisconsin should have restored abortion access,
I would say almost immediately, basically, like as soon as

(02:22:53):
someone can file a lawsuit over it, because right now,
abortion is currently illegal in Wisconsin under a law from
eighteen forty nine that the only exception to the law
is to save the life of the mother, which, like.

Speaker 4 (02:23:10):
I think.

Speaker 3 (02:23:12):
People who are not personally impacted by the possibility of
pregnancy or the possibility of childbirth, I think really don't
emotionally internalize what the language around some of these exceptions means,
and it's like, if you are hearing the words like
the only exception is life of the mother, that's really

(02:23:33):
terrifying because it means like if you're going to be
permanently injured as someone who's pregnant, but you're not literally
going to die. Abortion is not an option for you.
If the fetus that you are carrying, you know, whether
you wanted an abortion or not, if that fetus has
some kind of fatal defect, that is going to mean

(02:23:55):
that your baby dies within hours or days after being
born and is going to be and pain the whole time.
Abortion is not an option for you. If you are
pregnant because of sexual violence or because of incest, abortion
is not an option for you. And it's it's like,
you know, I am a cisgender man, so like I

(02:24:17):
can't personally understand, but like I can only guess how
terrifying of a reality that is. And the you know,
the only good news out of this is that once
prodi Saywans is in office, that law is probably going
to go away as quickly as possible, which is a

(02:24:40):
much needed victory for the people of Wisconsin and hopefully
is you know, carries the momentum forward for like post
twenty twenty four, hopefully we have a democratic trifecta again
that can legislate abortion rights nationally and take it out
of the ability to take away the ability for courts.

Speaker 5 (02:24:58):
To strike it down.

Speaker 3 (02:25:02):
There are some other ramifications for the state of Wisconsin
that should also be mentioned. For those of you who
live in Wisconsin. If I say the words public sector
union law, you know what I'm talking about, the very

(02:25:24):
infamous law that was passed by Scott Walker back in
twenty ten, twenty eleven. I think that really restricted the
collective bargaining rights of public sector unions, and like this
sparked a recall campaign against Walker, which failed and proto
Sawitz has said on record she said it in a

(02:25:44):
campaign appearance because this race really just discarded all pretensions
of like judicial impartiality. But she said in a campaign
appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law.
So that law is probably going away, or hopefully we'll
be going away. Wisconsin also has very gerrymandered state legislative

(02:26:06):
maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down.
Same thing with its congressional maps, which means that Democrats
can probably count on two more seats in the House
post twenty twenty four, and also on a basic like
do we live in a democracy or not?

Speaker 4 (02:26:25):
Level?

Speaker 3 (02:26:26):
In twenty twenty, when the Trump campaign was filing all
of its really idiotic lawsuits alleging voter fraud, the Supreme
Court of Wisconsin was the court that came the closest
to taking those allegations seriously. They voted by one vote

(02:26:47):
to dismiss the case because one of the conservatives broke
ranks and he has been hounded by the far right
in Wisconsin ever since. Wisconsin was one vote away from
just three throwing out the popular election results, like the
popular vote results, so there, you know, pro to say
what's winning is literally an insurance policy for continuing to

(02:27:10):
have the state of Wisconsin be a democracy. Yeah, which
is good, Like I don't know that.

Speaker 12 (02:27:18):
Having a state that is effectively ruled by a dictatorship
that was about to attempt to install like a dictator's
president is good, Like I don't know. This is my
lib take on this is in fact not good when
a bunch of people are ruled by just an open dictatorship.

Speaker 3 (02:27:43):
So, which is essentially what Wisconsin you know, has been
barring Tony eversus Whens as governor in twenty eighteen and
twenty twenty two, like until he was in office, like
Scott Walker presided over a single party dictatorship and wassconsin
and so like, you know, which is part of also

(02:28:04):
why pro to States was able to win by the
margins that she did, because you know, Wisconsin is a
swing state. It is reliably going to be close to
fifty to fifty, but especially on social issues, it has
a liberal majority, and a lot of people paid attention
to this race and they saw correctly the opportunity to

(02:28:26):
dismantle the dictatorship that effectively has had control of Wisconsin
for the last decade plus.

Speaker 12 (02:28:35):
Yeah, and I mean, you know, the other thing, like
part of what we're what's happening here is that if
conservatives are actually allowed to do uncontested rule in a
place that's even like kind of not just like a
one hundred percent like conservative district, the results that they, like,

(02:28:56):
the actual policies they put in place are fucking horrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:29:00):
Bad, it's like obviously bad, but like you get, I mean,
you get you get stuff like what happened in Tennessee
in the last week where they you know, the state
legislature expelled Democratic lawmakers for like engaging in the mildest
of protests against like an open carry bill, and you know,

(02:29:23):
just in a real cherry on top moment, the Tennessee
State Legislature only expelled the black legislators who protested, and
the white legislator who joined them survived her expulsion vote,
because you know, we don't want to be like the
days of the Republican Party not wanting to be two

(02:29:45):
on the nose about the racism are long gone. But yes, so,
But overall, good things happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and
some some of the really terrible things that were put
into law in that state in the last decade are

(02:30:05):
hopefully about to go away. Yeah, there were some other places,
mostly in the Midwest because once again the coastal regions
of the country let us down. But there were some
other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday.
Saint Louis, Missouri, has had a progressive city council, and

(02:30:28):
there was a very strong kind of law and order
challenge to that progressive majority based in the city's white majority.
Wards and after Tuesday night, it's pretty clear that progressives
will continue to have a majority on the city council.
In Kansas City, on the other end of the state
of Missouri, we are probably going to get the most

(02:30:49):
progressive city council that the city has ever had. The
main left wing group got all of its candidates through
to the general election which is on June twentieth, and
the main right wing tough on crime group seems like
it's going to be capped at winning two seats. So
you know, once again, the Midwest is the engine of

(02:31:11):
American progressivism and the West coast can suck it. Yeah,
there is one more piece of good news, which is
that in Illinois there was a set of far right
groups that ran a bunch of school board candidates on
the like anti critical race theory, anti queer, anti trans platforms,

(02:31:35):
and actually I'll just say the names of the groups
because people should know. These groups are Awake Illinois, Moms
for Liberty, and the seventeen seventy six Project. Basically, these
groups are you know, if you went to the South
in the nineteen seventies, you had the Klan and then
you had the White Citizens Council, which was the supposedly

(02:31:58):
more respectable face of white nationalism in the South in
the sixties and seventies, and groups like Moms or Liberty
and Awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups
like the Proud Boys and very you know, fittingly with
the analogy here, these groups are primarily run and staffed

(02:32:18):
by conservative women, just like white citizens councils were down
South about fifty years ago, and thankfully, these candidates almost
all went down in flames. I think there is a
school board election in me and I's hometown, which is
very notoriously conservative for people in the area, and even

(02:32:41):
in that in our hometown, they've lost. And like these
losses extended into downstate Illinois too, and like there's a
small city called Quincy in western Illinois where it's like,
this is a place that votes Republican routinely by like
thirty points, like a sixty five percent majority, and these

(02:33:05):
far right school board candidates lost in Quincy, Illinois. So
thankfully people saw through the bullshit and were like, actually,
you people are weirdos, and we're not going to hand
you power.

Speaker 12 (02:33:16):
Yeah. Another thing that was very funny is Carbondale, which
is like a very like this is like, I like,
this is this is this is a Carbondale is a
southern Illinois ass town is like not quite as far
south tacnically speaking as you can.

Speaker 3 (02:33:30):
Go in Illinois, but like it's close.

Speaker 12 (02:33:33):
Yeah, I unlike did their first transperson to serve in
a city council anywhere in Illinois. So like they're they're
getting cloudborated fucking Carbondale, like they had a really fucking
just destroyed. And I'm very happy about this because you know,
a lot of kids are going to grow up in

(02:33:57):
schools that are way less shitty than they were. Like
even when I was there were like God help, the
generation before us was just like sve and like would
have killed like me and most of the people.

Speaker 3 (02:34:12):
I know, like yeah, yeah, no, the schools that me
and I grew up in were not a great place
to be queerer trans of any variety. But I mean
this is also going to help because of I have.
I still don't know what the Biden administration was thinking
about this, but like the new like rule that they're

(02:34:35):
rolling out around trans participation in K through twelve sports
through the Department of Education. This got a lot of
attention on Twitter in the last couple of days because
I'm going to be as charitable as I can here
to all of the people involved. But there was a

(02:35:01):
panic on in progressive circles on social media, especially queer
in trans circles, because the Washington Post decided to frame
this rule in like the most like hyperbolic way possible.
And this is not me saying that the rule is good,
because the rule could definitely still be bad. But the

(02:35:22):
Biden administration is essentially, from what I can tell, trying
to include trans kids in Title nine protections. The proposed
wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs
to be improved, But the outcome here can be good
in the sense that it would ban blanket prohibitions on

(02:35:46):
trans kids in K through twelve sports, and it would
require exceptions to like It would require like any exceptions
to pretty much be like, you know, you have to
prove that there is a danger to like fair competition here,
which is the standard that Title nine uses for sports
for cisgender men and or cisgender boys and cisgender girls.

(02:36:09):
So like can be good? Will you know if you
are invested in this. The public comment period on that
rule is about to open. It's definitely a place where
you should speak up and say, like, hey, the wording
of this is a little shit, Like, let's be clearer
here that the presumption should be that trans kids should
be allowed to participate in on teams that align with

(02:36:32):
the gender they identify as. And thankfully, because a lot
of these dipshit school board candidates lost, hopefully some of
these school boards will be taking the right side of
history here.

Speaker 5 (02:36:46):
Yeah, go go go.

Speaker 12 (02:36:48):
Okay, So I'm slightly more angry about this than than
you are, because I.

Speaker 3 (02:36:55):
Don't know.

Speaker 12 (02:36:55):
I think there's a pretty glaring hole in this that
let's asphob just be like, well obviously.

Speaker 3 (02:37:02):
Like yeah, I guess yeah. I think the affording is
vague and it should be made a lot less vague.
I think it's bad. I don't know.

Speaker 12 (02:37:11):
I I I think I think that the backlash to
the backlash about that went too far, and now there's
a bunch of people insisting that this is in fact
a really good rule and like no, like if if
it's if it's if it's executed as is, it is
going to let a lot of people do a lot
of friend phobic ship.

Speaker 3 (02:37:26):
Yes, as is it is bad. If they change the
wording of it. It can be better. Yeah, so go
yell at Biden until he makes it less shit.

Speaker 12 (02:37:37):
Absolutely, you have to do this. Yeah, if you see him,
if you see him walking down the street, yell at him.
If you see him in a restaurant, yell at him.

Speaker 3 (02:37:48):
Yes, yeah, very very genuinely, like a It's always a
good idea to yell at the Biden administration about anything,
but be especially go yell at them about this. This
can be done multiple ways. You can and reach out
to your congressional representatives and tell them that you want
the rule already made better. You can go there should

(02:38:09):
be soon a direct form you can fill out on
the Department of Education website where you can provide your
own personal opinion on the rule. But basically, go yell
at the Biden administration and tell them to insert language
into the rule that makes very clear that the legal
presumption that must be overcome should be that trans kids

(02:38:33):
get to compete on the teams of the gender they
identify with.

Speaker 12 (02:38:38):
Yeah. So yeah, having now yelled about that for a bit, yeah,
we should, I think start wrapping up the last sort
of bits of electoral news.

Speaker 3 (02:38:49):
Yes, okay, so the last thing I think we should
talk about is probably Denver, Denver for those of you
who do not know me and I, which is probably
almost I would hope almost everyone who listens to this,
I will die on the hill that Denver is a

(02:39:10):
West Coast city, is not physically on the ocean, but
the vibes rancid, and like the rest of the West Coast,
Denver let us down. On Tuesday night, the mayor's election
is going to a runoff between two candidates who both
have pretty awful platforms on homelessness, and there is one

(02:39:34):
that is worse. So if you are looking for the
candidates to hold your nose and vote for, right now,
you know see how it goes. But right now I
would say that is Mike Johnson, not because he has
anything good to say, he doesn't, but because his opponent,
Kelly Brow says that she would have homeless people arrested
if they refuse to leave camps in public parks. So

(02:39:58):
she just fucking blows and she should be, you know,
never be allowed anywhere in your power. The other bit
of Denver news I think we should talk about is
there was a housing referendum where the proposal was to
turn an old golf course that is not currently being

(02:40:18):
used into a housing development that would have I think
twenty five percent affordable units, and it would part of
it would also be turned into a park. And truly,
what I thought was the dumbest thing that happened on
Tuesday night. The proposal lost, and the Denver branch of

(02:40:41):
DSA was campaigning against this housing development on the premise
that building more housing is bad if someone profits off
of it. And I definitely understand that. Listen, Like profiting
off of housing is bad. We also need more housing,
and Denver especially desperately needs more housing. And somehow we

(02:41:07):
got this incredibly stupid coalition of nimbi's and like green
space environmentalists and the Denver DSA that all came together
to stop the housing development. And Miah, I'm sure you
probably think a little differently about this than I do,
but I saw this and I was like, what the hell, man?

Speaker 12 (02:41:27):
I mean? Okay, So here's why I know very little
about this. My take is that if you have the
opportunity to destroy a golf course and you vote, know
you are like, as long as you're not literally building
a prison camp like reactionary dogs the bourgeoisie destroy every
golf course.

Speaker 3 (02:41:45):
Always a good you know, that's actually that's pretty good.
That's that's a pretty good line. I should start saying
it to more people. Destroy every golf course you can.
But yeah, no, this it was I think the most
frustrating thing that I saw happen on Tuesday night, and
I think it is one of those questions that the

(02:42:05):
Left is going to have to deal with in the
next couple of years. Is like, all right, we have
a lot of cities that desperately need a lot more housing.
So how do we get it done, if you, you know,
without just turning it over to the real estate lobby,
because obviously that would also be really shitty. But the
answer cannot be don't build more housing.

Speaker 12 (02:42:28):
Yeah, I mean, the thing I will say about this
also is that another answer is, like, you know, we've
recovered this on the show to like the other part
of this. If you don't want a city that's just
like absolutely horrific, you need to have a strong tennis movement,
and you need to you need to have a tennis
movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control

(02:42:48):
and move towards like actively like fighting to seize buildings
from like from developers, and that's the thing that's happening,
that there are places where people are doing this.

Speaker 3 (02:43:00):
It can be done.

Speaker 12 (02:43:02):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (02:43:07):
Yeah, like that, I don't know, like I feel like,
I don't know. I'm not going to go into my.

Speaker 12 (02:43:13):
Entire thing on the sort of bimbi debate other than
saying that, like, increasing the power of tenants will give
you a bet, will give you the best options.

Speaker 3 (02:43:26):
Yes, very very much. Tenant unions are good. Yelling at
the Biden administration is good, Destroying golf courses is good,
and abortion rights are good.

Speaker 12 (02:43:37):
Yeah, and go fight for these things and things that
aren't elections, because every once in a while, an election
will give your result, which is the worst person on
earth has been replaced by a slightly better person. And
you know, I do like to not be ruled by
the worst person on earth. But the ideal political situation

(02:43:58):
is the one we're not. We're like people cease to
rule over us.

Speaker 3 (02:44:03):
So yes, no, you gotta you gotta do the non
electoral work alongside the electoral work. You can't just be
relying on elections to make things better. You got to
be pushing for it all the time.

Speaker 12 (02:44:17):
Yeah, well, I say, yeah, I am much softer on
electoral work.

Speaker 3 (02:44:22):
Oh yeah, no, no, Mia would rather MEA would rather
than everyone doing electoral work start doing better things with
their time and her eyes. Yeah, but if if you are.

Speaker 12 (02:44:32):
Going to be a person who does electoral stuff like
it doesn't it doesn't matter what electoral victories you win,
if you are just not doing anything that isn't electoral,
because the actual sort of political the actual composition of
political power in the city, and the sort of the
city's class composition, the balance of forces between sort of

(02:44:53):
like yeah, I mean things like between unions and employers,
right like directly between workers and.

Speaker 3 (02:44:57):
Between the employers.

Speaker 12 (02:44:59):
There are lots of lots and lots of things that
are very very important even if you are an electoralist,
that are mostly decided outside of almost almost entirely decided
outside of the ballot box. And if you don't take
that into account and you try to just run like
the most well engineered political campaign, you're going to end
up like the two thousand years.

Speaker 3 (02:45:18):
Going to get sixteen Democrats. Democrats. Yeah, yeah, now everything
that Mia just said, and yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:45:28):
Yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the longest amount of time
I will ever be caught talking about an election that
doesn't involve a coup.

Speaker 3 (02:45:37):
Yeah, this happened here. Yeah, thanks thanks again for having me.

Speaker 12 (02:45:42):
Yeah, thanks for coming on and all of you go
happen to someone.

Speaker 4 (02:46:01):
My chicken has just come to me. You you don't
catch them.

Speaker 10 (02:46:05):
Them?

Speaker 4 (02:46:06):
Yeah, it's love, not coercion. That is how you catch
a chicken, which is not what this podcast is about,
is it, Robert, No, it's not. No un fortunate. We're
doing the Catching Chickens episode next week. But today we
are joined by three guests. We have Ava, Mo and

(02:46:28):
Wode and they're going to be talking to us about
solidarity with anarchist prisoners and how you can do that
and why you should do that and why people have
been doing that for a long time. So would you
guys like to introduce yourselves and just tell us your
names and any relevant affiliations in your pronouns.

Speaker 14 (02:46:45):
I'm Ava she Her. I've been working with June eleventh
for about a handful of years now and been doing
prisoners support for almost ten years now.

Speaker 13 (02:46:55):
I'm more a melterz crow and everyone calls me Mo.
My pronouns are they or Mo, and I'm an attorney
and I do a lot of work with political prisoners,
people facing politically motivated prosecutions, and incarcerated people who need
gender affirming care.

Speaker 4 (02:47:12):
Excellent, Yeah, it's very important stuff.

Speaker 7 (02:47:14):
Hey, my name is wod you see him pronouns. I've
been involved in prisoner support for twenty five plus years,
enjoying anarchists related activities for longer than that.

Speaker 4 (02:47:25):
So I think if we start off with perhaps explaining
what June eleventh is and sort of the history of it,
why this is a day that people can show the
solidarity with anarchist prisoners, that would be great, and just
what if you want to talk about that.

Speaker 14 (02:47:40):
Yeah, So June eleventh started as a day of solidarity
with Jeff Wors when he was serving like a twenty
two year sentence for torching some SUVs. But eventually he
was able to get his sentence shortened and he got out.
And at that point, Marius May and Eric McDavid were

(02:48:02):
in prison with twenty year sentences for eco sabotage activity
or in Eric's case, being entrapped for such and so
it eventually changed to be about Marius and Eric after
Jeff was released, and then Eric McDavid also got out
of prison, and since then it expanded to all long

(02:48:24):
term anarchist prisoners.

Speaker 4 (02:48:25):
I wonder, like, obviously we're in like eight point ouns.
People have a few months before June eleventh, and they
might be interested in doing this. They might not know
any people directly they're incarcerated, or they might not have
had an experience with that sort of in their close circles.
So if we start with like how people can show
solidarity like to incarcerated people, I think that would be great.

(02:48:49):
So are there like things that people can do How
can they do that, like so that people I guess
people who are incarcerated can hear them or hear from them.

Speaker 7 (02:48:59):
Yeah, I mean read letters is kind of the classic
go to. There's also ways to communicate digitally or over
the phone with people locked up. You know, putting money
on someone's books goes a long way. Everything is extremely
overpriced in prison and and monopolized by the corporations that
provide that those services. But I mean, if if you're

(02:49:21):
looking for people, you have stuff in coming with they're
particularly political things kind of carrying on the struggle and
including their name in those activities as part of that.
And and if you are in communication with them, talking
to them about those things. Getting their input and helping
them feel included in those struggles goes possibly the longest way.

Speaker 13 (02:49:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:49:46):
I think that's such an important point because, like when
you're talking about someone, for example, who's been like entrapped
by by the FEDS or whatever law enforcement agency was
responsible for it, like you're you're talking about a a
strategic pattern that the state uses to clamp down on resistance,
and the efficacy of that strategy is entirely determined by

(02:50:11):
their ability to kind of break people and to break
movements by both making people suspicious of each other and
by you know, locking up and damaging the people who
are kind of most prone to action. And I think
doing stuff like this like not only helps kind of
heal those the distrust that is inherently planted by the

(02:50:35):
state when they do stuff like this, but also helps
the people who are kind of most targeted and who
have suffered the most for the cause not feel like
they're swinging in the wind, you know.

Speaker 14 (02:50:47):
Yeah, I think it helps mitigate the fear of repression
and arrests and especially things like terrorism enhancements. When people
know that they're not going to be alone when they're
in prison, even if it is for decades, like there's
going to be people supporting them and writing them and
fundraising for them and like including them in their projects
like the entire time.

Speaker 7 (02:51:08):
Yeah, I would say too that meantime a movement or
something becomes more effective, they become the focus of the
state tends to sharpen on them.

Speaker 3 (02:51:19):
And and.

Speaker 7 (02:51:21):
A lot of the prisoners that have been supported around
the junior levels they have solidarity, were involved in environmental
analytes activities that were particularly effective and particularly destructive in
a positive sense, particularly like the alf and eof actions
of the nineties. But on this very intense repression in

(02:51:44):
the early two thousands that came to be called the
Green Scare.

Speaker 14 (02:51:47):
Yeah, kind of our our theme for this year is
that that repression like doesn't work. All these like movements
and struggles and activities continue even despite that kind of repression.
There's still activity in defense of the earth and animals
and land defense, and there's still really militant queer self defense,

(02:52:08):
and there's still a lot of like a ton of
activity against police and against racist police violence and murder,
and like as much of those as much as those
things are repressed, like, it doesn't stop them, and they
just keep getting stronger.

Speaker 13 (02:52:21):
I think the only thing I would add to that
is one of the most important things about doing political
prisoner support or prisoner support in general, is that the
state really does work to criminalize politically motivated behavior and
politically motivated beliefs, which functions pretty effectively to distract from

(02:52:43):
the central message of social movements, whatever social movement it
may be. And providing prisoner support and continuing to keep
people who are in prison apprized of those struggles, continuing
to engage in those struggles can really function to refocus
on that central message, even despite the fact that state

(02:53:08):
repression is a very effective drain on movement resources and
a very effective distraction from movement messaging.

Speaker 4 (02:53:17):
That is super important. Like if we look at like
the movement for Black Lives or the George Floyd uprising,
how we want to kind of phrase it, like the
speed and like severity with which the state kind of
cracked down on that and attempts to infiltrate it, attempted
to create suspicion, attempted to create fear was Like I

(02:53:38):
think most people listening might be familiar with that, even
if they're not familiar with the Green Scare or like
previous incidents. And it's not just like I know we
have people listening in other countries. This is not just
a America thing, right, Like British cops literally fucking married
people in the like in the early two thousands. It's

(02:53:59):
part of their undercover a situation. And one of them
also went to clown school, which is funny. That is
a charming story. Yeah, well, thank you not to refer to.

Speaker 13 (02:54:11):
The police academy that way.

Speaker 4 (02:54:16):
Yeah, I guess they all went to clown school in
the sense. Yeah, so yeah, we'll do We'll do a
long promised clown block episode one day.

Speaker 12 (02:54:25):
No.

Speaker 4 (02:54:25):
I know you have some insight into Mariu's case as
his lawyer, right, so could you explain a little bit
about about that case if people can understand how a
politically motivated prosecution works in the exupposed justice system that
we have.

Speaker 13 (02:54:44):
So, just to clarify, I represent Marius now and I
do advocacy for him. Well, he is confined. I was
not his criminal defense attorney. So Marius was active in
the very late nineties in early two thousands, and the
investigations that were going on at that time in the

(02:55:07):
state repression that was focused on the movements against environmental
degradation was deep and concerted and went on for many,
many years. And that's sort of what we refer to
as the green scare, right, the criminalizing of environmental movements.

(02:55:30):
And I talk about criminalized behavior and criminalized identity a lot,
so I'm actually just going to take a second and.

Speaker 4 (02:55:36):
Explain what I mean by that, yes, please, So.

Speaker 13 (02:55:40):
The criminalization of identity refers to where law enforcement and
the state are monitoring, targeting identity rather than unlawful conduct.
And the criminalization of belief. Similarly, it refers to the

(02:56:02):
state targeting people on the basis of their beliefs rather
than on the basis of unlawful conduct. So movements, social movements.
There's a very long and well documented history of social
movements being criminalized by the state, even in the absence
of any unlawful behavior. So the movements against environmental degradation

(02:56:29):
were heavily policed, targeted, infiltrated, and many federal grand juries
and setups and entrapments and successful prosecutions stemmed from that
criminalizing of environmental movements, and Marius's case was among those. Basically,

(02:56:53):
the state managed to turn Marius's former partner into an
asset and effectively charged him, prosecuted him for several acts
of politically motivated destruction of property, all of which were
calculated not to harm human beings. He pled guilty and

(02:57:19):
was sentenced in two thousand and nine. Had the offenses
to which he pled guilty not been perceived as politically motivated,
he would have probably gotten about seven years because the
prosecution argued that his behavior was politically motivated, which I

(02:57:41):
mean I think is true. He was hit with a
terrorism enhancement which increased the severity of his punishment on
the basis of house serious an offender he was then

(02:58:02):
deemed to be. The prosecution asked for twenty years. The
judge imposed twenty two. So here's an example of how
beliefs are criminalized. At his sentencing, the judge and the
prosecution both invoked and referred to what I think most

(02:58:25):
of us would view as really unremarkable political behavior in
ways that really cast it as very sinister. And so
Marius's contact with people who were on his support committee,
who were engaged in various kinds of civil disobedience about

(02:58:49):
which Marius likely knew nothing was cast as Marius being
in continued contact with people engaged in crimes as a
violation or would have been a violation of his bond conditions.
And on the basis of that claim that Marius was
violating his bond conditions by being in touch with these

(02:59:11):
people who again were engaged in what I think most
of us would see as completely unremarkable civil disobedience constitutionally
protected political behavior. This was one of the bases on
which the judge imposed this sentence that was even longer
than the prosecution had asked for. And there's a number

(02:59:34):
of other examples of this kind of criminalization of routine
political behavior, one of which is very significant, which is
that when Marius finally went to prison, he started a
reading group, and based on the content of the books
that they were reading, he was transferred from a lower

(02:59:54):
security facility pretty close to his family, to facility, and
not just a facility, but a particular wing of a facility,
which was the administrative segregation unit at FMC Carswell in Texas,
which was much much farther from his family and was
involved all kinds of extremely stringent conditions that I would

(03:00:17):
argue were First Amendment violations, So you know, we see
not only the really intense surveillance and targeting of social movements,
but the really disproportionate punishments and sort of retaliatory behaviors

(03:00:38):
all the way down, all the way from investigation to
through to incarceration and conditions of confinement.

Speaker 4 (03:00:46):
That's trotious obviously, So I wonder like when he received those, like,
maybe perhaps you should first explain what a terrorism enhancement
is in case people aren't familiar.

Speaker 13 (03:00:57):
It is what's called a sentencing in hand, and it allows,
it authorizes, or in some cases requires a judge to
impose a harsher sentence for a behavior that's intended to
I don't remember what the exact language is, but it's
it imposes a harsher sentence for unlawful acts that are

(03:01:20):
intended to intimidate or coerce the public or public institutions.

Speaker 4 (03:01:27):
Okay, so that's what increased like nitty triple that sentence
in that case. Yeah, and with that specifically, like because
he'd express anarchist ideas or just because it was like
his actions were in sort of further into that liberation
front kind of goals.

Speaker 13 (03:01:46):
I think it was explicitly because it was an ELF
associated action.

Speaker 1 (03:01:52):
Yeah, right, yeah, it was part of this crackdown on
environmental movements. It's similar to what we're saying in Atlanta
right now, like right down to the terrorism enhancements.

Speaker 13 (03:02:04):
What we're seeing in Atlanta right now is actually a
little bit more astonishing just in terms of first of all,
we're not really seeing it necessarily a terrorism enhancement. There
is a statute that criminalizes what they are calling domestic terrorism.
It operates similarly, right, there's a predicate act and then
if it's politically motivated, you know, so you could, for example,

(03:02:26):
potentially have something like politically motivated trespass right or politically
motivated graffiti, and they could charge it as domestic terrorism.
The enhancement is a sentencing mechanism, but it certainly is
not new. What we're seeing in Atlanta, I would say,

(03:02:47):
is it is remarkable, but it is a continuation of
the same kind of targeted policing, efforts to chill social
mod movements, efforts to disrupt social movements, to isolate people
to fractionate movements. It's the same kind of thing that

(03:03:10):
we have seen really since the beginning of policing in
this country, and.

Speaker 4 (03:03:16):
That makes a lot of sense when you consider like
the role of the police within the state and the
goals of some of these social movements, right, which we're
pretty to have to explain that in detail for people
to understand what's going on. So like with these people
facing you mentioned a couple of the other people who
would face political persecutions and were incarcerated and then had

(03:03:39):
their sentences reduced, and maybe we could explain like how
that was able to happen, right, because that's obviously like
a desirable outcome.

Speaker 14 (03:03:48):
I don't know the like the legal things that happened
for that, but it was like.

Speaker 9 (03:03:54):
It was like in the coret room kind of a solution.

Speaker 1 (03:03:56):
Okay, Yeah, I'm curious, just kind of engener role since
you've all had more contact with these folks who are
incarcerated and have been kind of the victims of this
state violence when they talk about like what is kind
of meaningful to them in terms of outside connections, in
terms of like, you know what we're talking about here,

(03:04:19):
what kind of stuff do they bring up is like
having a positive impact on their mental health, on their
kind of ability to endure they're what they're going through.

Speaker 14 (03:04:28):
First, I would say that communication is a big thing,
like being able to talk to people, to write with people,
and you know, a long term like regular correspondence is great.
But even just like little messages of solidarity can be
really meaningful. Material support is always huge, Like that's going
to make somebody sound a little bit better if they

(03:04:49):
can get stuff off a commissary, you know, buy enough stamps,
all those things. But the thing that I hear a
lot is like people want to see the projects and
the struggles that they're involved in continue. So if that's
like defense of the earth, if that's against the police
or or whatever it is, like people like to see

(03:05:10):
that because it's you know, it's not just about their
own case, but yeah, about those movements that they come
from and or somebody's you know, radicalized inside these things
that they have committed to and been written from participating
in a huge way, not entirely, but you know, people
like to see to see that continue and see see victories,

(03:05:34):
see like creative attempts and things like that.

Speaker 4 (03:05:37):
That makes a lot of sense, I think, so for
people like I know, like I'll sort that right to
incarcerate to people for the various things. And it can
be quite difficult to like to work out the process
of doing that, and it can be especially difficult. It
was especially difficult during during like the worst of the
COVID kind of lockdowns and search and like you couldn't.

(03:06:00):
I was trying to write to a guy in one
federal in tear hote and they wouldn't let the person
email me because they claimed that the keyboard was like
a high touch surface and this yeah, right, like and
which people were getting COVID in this facility all the time.
But how would folks go about, like, let's say they

(03:06:21):
wanted to to write to Marius and just say, like,
you know, we wanted to express the solidarity and say
sucks that this is happening to you or whatever. How
would they go about doing that.

Speaker 9 (03:06:31):
There's a couple of.

Speaker 13 (03:06:32):
Things that are specific with Marius that I will want
to tell you, but you can go to if you
google inmate locator bop, you can search Marius's name or
the name of any other prisoner and you'll basically end
up with it'll show you their information, including where they

(03:06:54):
are confined, and you can usually click on the name
of the facility and it will take you to the
website for that facility and show you how to send
mail to the prisoner. There's also if you go to
NYCABC dot WordPress dot com or any of the other

(03:07:15):
Anarchist Black Cross websites. NYC ABC is my home chapter,
so that's the one I'm familiar with. But if you
go to the Anarchist Black Cross websites, there are zines
and I think a whole list that is pretty well
updated of all of the anarchists political prisoners and instructions

(03:07:36):
on how to write to them. One of the things
that is on those websites that I would highly encourage
you to take seriously our instructions about how to responsibly
write to people who are under increased monitoring and surveillance
while they are being confined. Because retaliation against prisoners, even

(03:08:02):
for things that the prisoners themselves have not done, is
very commonplace. And so if somebody while we very much
want to make sure we keep in touch with people
and give them news of the outside world, including news
about their social movements, one thing that can happen is
that those letters simply will not be delivered. And another

(03:08:25):
thing that might happen is that the prisoner themselves may
face disciplinary consequences, formally or informally just as a result
of having been the intended recipient of that news. So
you know, I would say, as I often say, discretion
is the better part of valor.

Speaker 4 (03:08:45):
In this instance, I think you have to have.

Speaker 1 (03:08:49):
A kind of a first do no harm attitude about this,
where like, at the end of the day, regardless of
like your anger or your desire to talk about, you know,
certain things, your primary concern here has to be not
making things worse for somebody who's already in a terrible situation.

Speaker 13 (03:09:09):
Yes, and I would also like to point out that
prisoner mail is monitored, and so among other things, you
might be making things worse for yourself, so I would
be cautious and circumspect about what you write to people
whose mail is being read. The other thing is with

(03:09:30):
respect to Marius in particular. Unfortunately, in order to get
mail to him, you still have to dead name him.
And if you want to hear more about that particular
set of struggles, I'm happy to talk about it. But
suffice it to say for now that if you go
to support Mariusmason dot org, there should be some instructions

(03:09:52):
about how to write to him, and I'll make sure
that the support group puts up clear instructions, but unfortunately
you do have to put his dead name on that
envelope or it will.

Speaker 5 (03:10:02):
Not get to him.

Speaker 4 (03:10:03):
It's extremely frustrating, but yeah, it could be really annoying,
sespecially if you're trying to look for somebody. I'm using
the locator and it has a gender note fire and
it's not the correct gender notifier, and yeah, that can
be difficult, but like, yeah, it's an effort worth making, right,
and it really can help someone who's going through a

(03:10:24):
difficult time.

Speaker 13 (03:10:25):
Yeah, and people do have really specific interests apart from
movement work as well. And you know Marius paints. He
sent me this incredible He sent me a number of
paintings over the years. I have one actually that I
think I shared with you earlier Sacho and Vanzetti that
he made. He sent me a really great portrait of

(03:10:48):
Jimmy Page once. He also recently sent me a beautiful
scarf that he had knitted or crocheted. I guess people
have hobbies, people have interests, and they're happy to talk about.

Speaker 3 (03:11:01):
Those things as well.

Speaker 4 (03:11:03):
Yeah, that's what makes us like a whole person, right,
And I think having a little bit of that helps
you to keep that little part of yourself in what
could be a difficult place. So yeah, hope people can
send crochet letters. I'm sure we have some keen croche listeners.
This is probably the part of the podcast where we
stop and make ourselves amenable to capitalism by doing an

(03:11:23):
ad break. I wonder what can people do on June eleventh,
right right? Obviously, like people should keep on this ongoing correspondence.
I think that's really important. And I would speaking to
someone from their Leonard Peltier free lended peltya group the
other day, and I know a lot of people write
to lend A Peltier and like, I know that that's
a great source of like strength for him, especially as

(03:11:45):
he's like aging in prison. I was wondering what people
could do on June eleventh to sort of further discourse,
spread the word take actions to solidarity kind of things
to people.

Speaker 7 (03:11:56):
Do Juna elevens activities. You know, actions and solidarity really
run the gambit. You know, It's been very popular to
have like a barbecue or a benefit show things to
raise money, and then there's actions that more have more
in common with why some of these people were incarcerated. Uh,

(03:12:18):
and like if you check the website June eleven dot org.
There's a list of previous actions that people have taken
and the whole uh gambit of activities that you know,
people have participated in. I know, with the revitalization of
of this as like an international base of solidarity, there

(03:12:42):
was an interest in trying to think outside the box more.
You know, it's it's difficult to like, no one's going
to reinvent the wheel, or you know, maybe they that's
as much as they're doing. But but there is a
variety different activities. In last year's theme was sort of
like doing something different than you might normally do, just

(03:13:03):
diversify what is happening.

Speaker 14 (03:13:05):
One of my dreams for John eleventh is for it
to be an opportunity for you know, our movement prisoners
to be integrated into other things. So it's you know,
it doesn't have to just be oh, this is like
the prisoner support to activity, or like we're just going
to write letters. But you know, people do things like
art shows like mo mentioned like a lot of people paint,

(03:13:26):
a lot of people write poetry, and to integrate that
into like maybe already have like you know, a community
around poetry readings, or something like that, and just to
bring that into into whatever like little corner of the
world or whatever kind of activities that were already involved
in for these things to like reference each other, right

(03:13:46):
like we reference our prisoners and they can reference these
things that are happening outside that are like integrating them.

Speaker 13 (03:13:53):
One of the things that since I've been involved, a
lot of times we try to illicit or solicit statements
from the people we represent. I have been to a
number of really wonderful June eleventh activities that have included
an art show, a number of punk shows in various

(03:14:16):
people's basements. And I think as just an individual, I mean,
first of all, I think it's a great opportunity to
do community building, to do letter writing. But I think
it's also something that even if you are, you know,
relatively isolated, you know, you can just make a commitment today,

(03:14:37):
I'm gonna send five bucks to somebody's commissary.

Speaker 4 (03:14:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:14:43):
I think.

Speaker 13 (03:14:44):
I was looking back at one of Marius's previous June
eleventh statements and one of the things he referred to
was a civil rights attorney that he'd worked with was asked,
you know, what does the movement need most and he responded,
everything is everything, meaning you know, anything, any advocacy that

(03:15:09):
you do in one area will redound to the benefit
of all of the rest of us and all of
the other areas.

Speaker 4 (03:15:15):
And I have found that to be.

Speaker 13 (03:15:17):
True, and I have found that specifically to be true
even in terms of the legal effects of doing advocacy
for Marius has had really huge benefits for other trans
folks who are in prison who I've represented, and then
doing advocacy for those folks has had really incredible benefits

(03:15:40):
for Marius. So I mean, I think it is materially
the case that you know, you struggle where you are,
you do what you can on June eleventh or any
other day.

Speaker 3 (03:15:52):
And you know, you move the needle.

Speaker 1 (03:15:54):
Yeah, and it's very well see absolutely, you.

Speaker 14 (03:15:58):
Know, Dune eleventh the specific for people who have long sentences,
and that's really about like the increased risk of just
kind of like falling to the back burner as there's
new like waves of struggle and you know, new emergencies
and crises all the time. This is an opportunity to
like really take a moment, to to really focus on

(03:16:20):
that memory. And so I hope with June eleventh we
can like kind of build bridges like generationally, you know,
like I wasn't really around with Marius, you know, during
the Green Scare and Marius got arrested, and it's something
that I learned about and got involved in later. And
I hope that, you know, with new people that we

(03:16:41):
meet and new people who like we share projects with,
we can tell them about our prisoners. And also you
know where I happened to live. There's occasional I meet
somebody who used to know Marius from you know, twenty
years ago, and so kind of in both directions like
into the past and into into the future, like, yeah,

(03:17:02):
just trying to spread awareness about these people.

Speaker 1 (03:17:04):
Yeah, I think's yeah, I think it's it's so important
to look at this as part of a long struggle.
And that's you know what you and Moyer are both
talking about in terms of it's it's building connections. It's
it's kind of this like the sedimentary layer, uh, that
that creates the actual foundation for for positive change. And

(03:17:29):
you know, we have there's this kind of Hollywood brain
thing I think we all have where where we get
bent out of shape when when change doesn't kind of
come and in the form of these kind of calamitous
moments and and kind of culminations of struggles and stuff.
But it's it's, you know, the the process of winning

(03:17:51):
is the process of like part of it is the
process of showing up for the people who are uh casualties,
you know, who are being.

Speaker 4 (03:18:01):
Who are being.

Speaker 1 (03:18:04):
Who are suffering the most for it, And part of
it is kind of the way in which that allows
you to kind of build networks of solidarity that are
the necessary foundation for continuing the struggle.

Speaker 13 (03:18:17):
Absolutely, I would say that in the years that I've
been doing this work, one of the most important parts
of it is being really consistent in showing up for
the people who are being horrendously punished, because that's the
only way that everybody understands that they will be taken

(03:18:37):
care of. Right. But speaking of winning, I do have
an update if you have a second on another June
eleventh prisoner, Eric King. Yeah, from my beloved colleague Sandy Freeman,
who represented him successfully recently and got a not guilty

(03:19:01):
verdict for him after he was charged with assaulting a
corrections officer, which is, I mean, if you know anything
about federal indictments, a magnificent coup. So Eric currently has
a Clan Act conspiracy in Bivens lawsuit pending against more

(03:19:25):
than forty state defendants. His team is trying to achieve
release from the ADX by a writ of habeas corpus.
He's not currently getting access to communications, visits, or programming,
but he is still strong and resilient, and his recent

(03:19:49):
victories are an object lesson in the fact that we
really can fight back and win. Please donate to his
support fund and please uplift what is happening, because this
is the future for anti fascists in the Bureau of Prisons. Nevertheless,
we do continue to struggle and sometimes even to win,

(03:20:12):
and I think our stories of triumph are not frequently
enough told, and so one thing that we could do
this June eleventh is try to gather all of those
stories and make sure that those stories do get told.

Speaker 4 (03:20:27):
I think it's really important, like you said, to see
these little victories and like not to see it as
distinct from a broader struggle, Like if we want to
do anarchism and build ways of taking care of each
other outside of the state, then we need to take
care of people who are victimized by the state, And
like this is part of doing that, we're proving we
can do it by doing it right. And like Robert said,

(03:20:49):
like we're not going to storm the Winter Palace necessarily. Yeah,
we can build up our in different ways, and this
is a way of doing that. I'm thinking of like
more international like cases. I know, for instance that where
I come from, the British government fucking loves to put
people who volunteered to fight for the YPG in prison
or their parents if they send them money for food,

(03:21:11):
which yes, great country, But I know that like all
over the world in Spain and Catalonia where I've lived,
like this is a thing too. So are there any
other like international cases that you want to sort of
draw attention to?

Speaker 7 (03:21:25):
Currently right now, Alfredo Caspito in Italy is has been
on hunger strike since October against the particularly isolating and
particularly repressive forty one, the prison what he calls a
non life in there so a prison that was primarily
used against Masia bosses. But you know, in the classic

(03:21:47):
state misinterpreting anarchism has considered Alfredo a leader and particularly
and so locked him away without access to almost any
means of communication, and uh, and so he's he's had
a lot of health problems as a result of this.
You know, he was originally locked in for shooting a

(03:22:10):
nuclear executive in the knee, uh, after some particular couss
remarks from him following the Fukushima disaster. And that nuclear
company has ties with like the you know, the larger
war machine, the manufacturing of of weapons for war and uh,

(03:22:33):
you know he's he's caught other charges while being in
prison for previously alleged activities, including just being an anarchist
essentially kind of what you talked about, the straight criminalizing
political sensibilities. You know, Italy has been doing that. Chile
has been doing that previously against people like Monica Caballero

(03:22:54):
and Francisco Solar, who have been in and out of
prison for years now in a curly facing more charges
for allegedly sending bombs to police training facilities and such
down in Chile and in your own England. Toby shown

(03:23:15):
is someone who got out recently after being receiving terrorists
charges for allegedly being involved in the anarchist website called
three two five and financing terrorism through like accepting donations
for their work and things like that. But he did
not get convicted of that he usually got convicted of

(03:23:36):
some minor drug charges and so he's been released to
kind of a halfway house now, but they continue to
try to mess with his terms of release because of
his politics, because he's an anarchist and unrepentant, they continue
to try to mess with him.

Speaker 4 (03:23:54):
Essentially.

Speaker 14 (03:23:55):
On the website j eleven dot org, there's a page
where information about a lot of prisoners, both in the
US and internationally. You know a little bit about them.
Most of them has their address. If there's a support
site with more information that's linked to it as well.

Speaker 4 (03:24:11):
Okay, that's a good paid place foreople to look. Anything
else you guys wanted to get to to discuss issues
for incosce rated anarchists people, I guess other ways to
support incost rate to people.

Speaker 13 (03:24:24):
Yes, I would like to remind your listeners that all
prosecutions are political, and that people who are locked away
in you know, the cages that are the federal facilities
and the state and local and county facilities are all
dealing with the same kinds of isolation and deprivations, and

(03:24:46):
a lot of them have even less support than some
of our long term anarchist political prisoners.

Speaker 4 (03:24:55):
And so you know, I.

Speaker 13 (03:24:58):
Understand this is a program about June eleventh, and of
course I want to uplift June eleventh, But I would
also like to suggest that to whatever extent you can
get involved in just prisoner support. I think that more
support for more prisoners is always a good thing.

Speaker 7 (03:25:18):
Yeah, be in the streets in whatever, by whatever means.
Fighting the society that makes prison and necessity is the
longer game, right, Yeah.

Speaker 14 (03:25:31):
You know, related to what Ma was saying, I wanted
to mention another long termanicist prisoner, Michael Kimball, who is
in Alabama, and just thinking about like how supporting him
has resonated to like so many other people in prison
in Alabama, Like the way that he has been able

(03:25:52):
through the support of you know, some of his friends
on the outside, then support like so many other queer
people that he's with in Alabama and been able to
like collectively organize and like share radical history, Like you know,
they have a have a role in it too, and
our support for them can like resonate far beyond just
an individual.

Speaker 5 (03:26:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:26:12):
I think that's a great point.

Speaker 14 (03:26:14):
Yeah, And other things to mention, we are we have
a fundraising goal for Marius this year twenty five hundred dollars.
We're trying to get some bookstores on board to you know,
have some June eleven stickers donate a little bit of money,
so go to your local bookstore and potshop, red Space,
et cetera.

Speaker 4 (03:26:32):
Nice. Is there any any other like resources you guys
wanted to plug? Social media is or anything that people
can follow to find out.

Speaker 13 (03:26:40):
You can follow Marius's support on Twitter at at support Marius.
There's also an instagram that I think is at support
Marius Mason. I would also like to plug the concept
of not talking to cops.

Speaker 7 (03:26:58):
Smart June eleven. Also some social media presence. There's really
only regularly active on the master don account and it's
just at June one to one at June eleven.

Speaker 4 (03:27:11):
Yeah, that was fantastic. Thank you very much. Guys, really
appreciate your time. Hello podcast fans, it's just me today,

(03:27:33):
It's just James and we're doing another episode about the border.
I'm joined today by Emmett and David from the Borderlands
Relief Collective and we're going to talk a little bit
about people doing mutual aid on the border, the situation
on the border, and for those of you who live
a long way away from it, and a sort of
pretty shitty thing that border patrol did to some supplies

(03:27:57):
which were left out on the border earlier this month.
So yeah, David, if you'd like to sort of introduce
yourselves and expend a little bit about the roles you play,
that would be great either.

Speaker 10 (03:28:07):
I'm happy to be here. My name is Emmett.

Speaker 6 (03:28:09):
I am splitting my time between being a geochemist at
Descriptions Station Oceanography in a PhD student and trying to
reconcile what it means to be living in this border
lands and being a part of a community that is
partially criminalized depending on who you are, where you come from,

(03:28:29):
and also what it means for you to seek safety
and freedom in your life. So I work in several
organizing spaces trying to shut down different detention centers as
well as supporting folks just make ends meet in San
Diego and also supporting people keeping their lives and staying

(03:28:55):
alive in this extreme border border lands that we on.

Speaker 5 (03:29:01):
Hey, my name is David. My job I work as
a surgeon. I've been living in San Diego for about
ten years and I've been doing humanitarian volunteer work in
the Borderlands, which we call doing water drops for something

(03:29:24):
like six years, got started with Border Angels and also
did volunteer work with Order Kindness highly recommend that organization,
and more recently have been doing water drops in a

(03:29:47):
mountainous area between San Diego and TJ with friends and
we just recently found a name for our group and
it's Orderlands Relief Collective.

Speaker 13 (03:30:04):
Great.

Speaker 4 (03:30:05):
Yeah, And I think maybe I think if people think
of San Diego, they think of like the zoo and
maybe SeaWorld and the beach, you know, that kind of shit.
So like, can you explain what it's like. I've spent
a lot of time in the area where you guys
do water drops. Can you explain what it's like and
why it's such a difficult area to pass through for

(03:30:26):
people who are trying to move north.

Speaker 5 (03:30:29):
Well, yeah, San Diego. As you said, people think of
the beach. But actually I think someone told me that
San Diego County has some of the most diverse kind
of ecosystems of any county in the so called USA.
We have high mountains where it snows when it gets

(03:30:52):
called out. We have low deserts where routinely exceeds one
hundred degrees fahrenheit in the summertime, I mean one hundred
and twenty degrees fahrenheit in the summertime. And as far
as the geography of migration, it really goes back to

(03:31:16):
you know, it's a direct consequence of federal border policy.
I think many people will be familiar with the term
prevention through deterrence, which is sometimes elaborated as prevention of
migration through environmental deterrence, and the whole concept is going

(03:31:38):
way back to Clinton administration. The areas of the border
near cities like San Diego were increasingly militarized with high
border fence, intense patrol by armed officers, and increasingly recently
electronic surveys, with the idea of relying on the extremely

(03:32:05):
harsh terrain of the deserts and mountains to form a
kind of a natural But they quickly found out within
within you know, basically the first year or so of
that federal policy that numbers of people crossing the border
did not decrease. However, deaths skyrocketed. And that's something we understood,

(03:32:33):
you know, people in Washington, d C. Understood many many
years ago. But the policy persists. So the bottom line
is people who are crossing the border from Mexico to
the USA often resort to crossing in the most remote
and dangerous areas of the border. So the area that

(03:32:56):
we're going to be talking about, this mountainous region between
San Diego and Tijuana. Literally folks are going up and
over the tallest mountain in the area, literally up and
over the mountain, extremely arduous walk. When we do these

(03:33:19):
water drops, we're well rested. We hike all day and
we come home exhausted, and we look at our Gaya
apps and find that we've only hiked a very small
portion of the actual total journey, and we're always humbled
by just the resilience and determination of people who do

(03:33:43):
this crossing.

Speaker 4 (03:33:44):
Yeah, another thing I think people don't realize is that
the amount of physical just difficulty that people have to
enjoy coming here is immense. And of course, the reason
that people are willing to take those risk is because
it's not like they come from a place of safety,
right and it's not it's not that, you know, the
reason they're willing to take risks is because it's a risk.

(03:34:08):
Being where they were is a risk. I think a
lot of people will maybe have become more engaged with
border policy during the Trump heira certainly like the legacy
media narrative focused on the border very briefly, Like maybe
it peaked around the midterms in twenty eighteen, I think,
and then people have lost a lot of interest since then.
So for those of us who live on the border,

(03:34:30):
it's remarkable how little has changed. I think maybe it's
not particularly remarkable because I don't think we're really expected to,
but like, can you explain what if anything has changed
since twenty twenty one and how things have sort of
remained the same in many ways?

Speaker 10 (03:34:50):
Yeah, I think it's a really good question, and it
brings up a lot of.

Speaker 6 (03:34:55):
The political nature or kind of skewed ideaity based conversations that.

Speaker 10 (03:35:02):
Exist in migration.

Speaker 6 (03:35:05):
And obviously there's a lot of rhetoric that is quite
hyperbolic around.

Speaker 10 (03:35:11):
The so called morality of people who are.

Speaker 6 (03:35:16):
Migrants in general, and then kind of categorizing certain people
as worthy or not worthy of entrance into the so
called nation, and kind of furthermore, what does it mean
for people to believe any of those narratives and then
support them at a federal political level, And as you're saying,

(03:35:38):
during Trump era, there was a lot of conversation in
response to very very hateful rhetoric from Trump and administration
targeted at certain people, but not from a deep place
of really understanding or characterizing the conversation in general, or
speaking by the fact that in San Diego or in

(03:36:00):
California at large, more than half of the farm workers
who kind of create this city that we are or
the state that we are, and support the very backbone
of the fact that we're all still having our hearts
beat our migrants, and that our economy at large, as
well as just the fabric of our nation is based

(03:36:22):
on migrants in immigration. So for us to pick and
choose what that looks like is not only missing the
majority of the point, but is using as a talking piece,
is really as a talking piece for certain identities to
feel vindicated to spend money and support certain for profit
corporations like for example, cour Civic, one of the largest

(03:36:43):
prison corporations prison corporations.

Speaker 10 (03:36:46):
In the country.

Speaker 6 (03:36:47):
I've got one point nine billion dollars the previous year
from the federal government, and therefore, like you think about
the connection between these enterprises and stories about immigration are
quite linked. So I don't have all the statistics in
front of me about how the specific number of crossings
has changed or the population has changed.

Speaker 10 (03:37:10):
But on the whole, nothing has really changed as far
as the need goes.

Speaker 6 (03:37:16):
So, thinking about four years ago, what were the specific
crises that were occurring that were causing people to seek
seek safety United States?

Speaker 10 (03:37:24):
Maybe some specific positions of change and others have arisen.

Speaker 6 (03:37:28):
And as more and more people are come to United
States fleeing from climate related disasters as well as ongoing stability,
it's not as if the US has engaged in any
real project to support people to begin with or understand
the underlying causes. So from that standpoint, nothing meaningfully has

(03:37:51):
happened from either administration to really understand or create policies
that would support anyone seeking safety or from making decisions
that are quote unquote aligned with US best interests. It's
never been a part of the conversation. It's more to
basically capitalize off of people in their suffering, whether wuther

(03:38:13):
that be to the you know, to be a storyline
that US is is helping people, or is a savior
of others, or is trying to crack down on armed
bandits or or criminals who are cross crossing this borderland.

Speaker 4 (03:38:31):
I think it is worth like the cusific examples really
interesting because Biden made a big thing of like talking
about shutting down like quote unquote private prisons, but it's
still very much like funding the same things when they're
not for people who are citizens of this country or.

Speaker 6 (03:38:49):
Yeah, and for those of those who aren't fully reversed
in kind of the basic relationship between private prisons and immigration,
there are is a relationship that between customs and Border
protection and different prison corporations to basically put people who

(03:39:10):
are apprehended who are not initially deported under Title forty
two in detention while their cases are ongoing and investigated
or asylum or a refugee status. And so these prisons
make a profit and can basically demand a certain.

Speaker 10 (03:39:32):
Money amount of money from the government.

Speaker 6 (03:39:34):
Per person who is within one of their facilities, and
there's also a minimum that they will continually get money
from the government regardless of whether the beds are filled,
but they have an incentive to keep beds filled. So
there is an economic relationship between these corporations and the
government to basically put more people in detention. So that's

(03:39:56):
a huge underpinning of this whole conversation is who is
getting money and how does it kind of further the
certain aims of corporations, but also agencies that basically get
a larger amount of federal funding through apprehension of people.

Speaker 7 (03:40:12):
Right.

Speaker 4 (03:40:13):
Yeah, like Biden has funded DHS more than Trump did,
and like DHS's budget does Department of homelown security, of
which Customs and Border Protection is a part and border
patrol is a part of Customs and Border protection. It's
a giant pyramid of people putting people in prison, and
it's also worth like reinforcing I think for people that

(03:40:33):
these people have done nothing wrong at the point which
they are incarcerated, right, Like they have a bayed or
relevant laws and are in conditions which we've decided are
not befitting prisoners in the United States, but are okay
for these people. Not that anyone should be incarcerated, but yeah,
there's still a two tier system. So can you explain

(03:40:55):
a little bit about your efforts to do mutual aid
and to like do a little bit of kindness on
the border and make things a little bit better out
there for people who are coming north.

Speaker 5 (03:41:08):
Yeah, what we do again just is in collaboration with
other organizations that have been around a long time, a
lot longer than we have Border Angels, Order Kindness in California,
UH No more deaths in Arizona, many other organizations, and

(03:41:31):
it really, you know, boils down to we don't want
people to die on you know, the trails UH crossing
through the borderlands, and that actually informs where we drop Unfortunately,
you know, all of our our recent new routes that

(03:41:51):
we supply there directly because we know that people have
died UH in those locations or required rescue. We work
in very close relationship with other volunteer organizations that focus
on search and rescue and search and recovery, search and

(03:42:15):
recovery meaning recovering human remains of people who have died.
So there's a number of outstanding organizations that operate in California, Arizona, Texas.
These include Eagles of the Desert, Armadillos, many other organizations.
Most of these are actually made up of volunteers who

(03:42:39):
are first generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico, and so when
people die or require rescue, we do find out from
our friends and comrades in these SAR organizations and we
build water drop roots directly around that knowledge. So yeah,

(03:43:04):
it really boils down to, yeah, we don't want more
people to die making making this, uh, this journey. And
so as far as what kind of supplies we leave,
it's what we think may make a difference. We leave
bottles of water, energy, drinks like electrolyte, gatorade and so on.

(03:43:26):
Cans of food with pop tops, all kinds of cans
of fruit, beans, you know, chili, you know, whatever we
think people may need. Of course, we tailor it based
on the time of year. In the mountains, in the
winter gets freezing cold, lots and lots of rain, so
we've been leaving waterproof ponchos, warm clothing. And the summer,

(03:43:50):
of course, it gets scorching hot. In the desert. People
die of hyperthermia. They literally cook to death. That's where
electrolytes come in here and the sun hats, bandanas, baseball hats,
first aid kits. We we leave kids full of medical supplies. Uh,

(03:44:11):
and more recently, you know, just observing the kind of
used items that we find on the trail. Uh, kids stuff, diapers, pacifiers, Uh,
you know, we leave you know, tampons, you know that
kind of stuff. Uh, containers of infant formula. So it's

(03:44:35):
a it's a it's kind of an iterative process, just
leaving what we think people need and yeah, that's that's
kind of what we do.

Speaker 4 (03:44:45):
And just so folks are super clear, this is all
like an initiative among you and your comrades, right, right,
then you're not supported by any like government entity. That's
the government entity is kind of doing quite the opposite
of what you're doing.

Speaker 5 (03:44:57):
Yeah. Correct, We are all volunteers in the sense that
nobody is paid. We don't have any formal affiliations with
any other NGOs, much less governmental organizations.

Speaker 4 (03:45:11):
Right, So maybe people are wondering. They might have been
familiar with the court case in Arizona, or they might
not be, like if what you're doing is considered to
be like legal humanitarian aid or not you comfortable talking
about that.

Speaker 6 (03:45:25):
Yeah, So I think that's definitely a gray area that
we find ourselves really occupying. And I think that's a
bit of this kind of propaganda machine. Is what does
it mean to engage with somebody who is seeking safety
and fleeing for their lives. There's a certain place where

(03:45:46):
that's how it to be a wonderful thing. If you're
Catholic charities and are providing beds, And for example, I
wanted to make that distinction.

Speaker 10 (03:45:56):
Between several kind of charity organizations who.

Speaker 6 (03:45:59):
Do receive federal money to be engaged in this conversation
versus grass fruits, mutual aid networks, and communities who are
doing this because it feels like it's part of their
communities mission, their families mission, or it means it's part
of them being true to themselves and true to what
feels just in.

Speaker 10 (03:46:20):
The very confusing world.

Speaker 6 (03:46:21):
So what we're doing is very explicitly leaving humanitarian aids
supplies that are potentially life saving in areas where we
know people need them. We are not having any specific
or hands on or person to person engagement with anybody.
So they're in Arizona, Nomas Motes became part of a

(03:46:45):
conversation about providing critical medical support, and that was a
court case that really tested the limits of what it
means to be in this great area and what was
really important and the nuances in that conversation were what
constitutes aiding in a betting or so called aiding in

(03:47:05):
a bedding of legal immigration, which is basically again a
very large gray area between are you, are you enticing
people to cross? Are you being paid as a smuggler
to cross? Are you doing something which is encouraging people
to cross? None of which was activity that was engaged

(03:47:26):
with the most modes or us, but in their case
specifically providing medical aid across the boundary, and they were
raided their their their their camp and their impromptu field
uh tents where they were providing life saving medical support
where it was raided.

Speaker 10 (03:47:46):
And the kind of the finer points of that were that.

Speaker 6 (03:47:51):
The outset being that the First Amendment protects humans in
their religious freedom to practice whatever that furthers their religious
beliefs in a faith, and a very large point of
their work was their affiliation and dedication to preserving human life, which,
as we can imagine for many folks listening to this

(03:48:14):
or in general, that is very core to their belief system.
And so there are very clear protections in the First
Amendment of preserving people's right to practice their religion. So
that was a case that kind of established a lot
of what we're working under is these basic protections to

(03:48:36):
be humanitarian aid workers following basic belief systems. What we're
doing specifically is leaving supplies, so leaving supplies. The most
egregious thing you can basically say about that is that
we're littering, or that we're abandoning property. And so again

(03:48:59):
Nomas Martes, and in this, in this larger conversation, was
established in the court that leaving humanitarian aid supplies that
were with the intent of saving lives is not litter.

Speaker 10 (03:49:11):
So that was also a very big point.

Speaker 6 (03:49:13):
Which is saying, no, we are not just kind of
going walking down the street and throwing out your bottle
in the back of your truck.

Speaker 10 (03:49:19):
This is specifically with the intent of saving lives.

Speaker 6 (03:49:22):
And the third place is that we are abandoning something
in this in this area that would be constituted abandoned property.

Speaker 10 (03:49:31):
And as we'll speak.

Speaker 6 (03:49:31):
About maybere in the future, our supplies are consumed quite rapidly,
and there is a statute in this in this state
of it is it abandoned property has to be it
has to be left for more than ten days to
be considered abandoned property. So even if we are leaving
things in these regions, it is not considered abandoned property

(03:49:52):
it's been less than ten days. So basically I guess
just to say that nothing we're doing is illegal from
any standpoint, and also the case in Arizona kind of
helped make a distinguishing, make some distinctions between whether our
activity is is also frowned upon in public land, which

(03:50:16):
it is not, because it is constituting humanitarian aid in
a place that is desperately needed.

Speaker 4 (03:50:20):
Right. And I think if folks go out to like
I mean, most people aren't going out to the Valley
of the Moon or what have you, but like, if
you want to look for abandoned stuff there, it's not
hard to find. And it's not you guys doing that
like shooting barrels or whatever that Like someone was shooting
a barrel last time I was out there. Let's talk
about how quickly those supplies are consumed, because I think

(03:50:42):
again that will be like news to some people, right,
Like you guys are out there every week, and like
how much stuff you're dropping and how quick does it go?

Speaker 5 (03:50:51):
Yeah, to tell you the truth, we're still we're still
of finding out ourselves because every time we think we
know the answer, we're surprised by how fast it's being consumed.
The bottom line is it's being consumed as fast as
we can leave this supply. So emmine and I and
many other of the members of our organization, Borderlands Relief Collective,

(03:51:16):
we also are active in border kindness and in the
past with border Angels, and so we're used to a
certain rhythm of doing a water drop, circling back usually
a month later, and we're happy if maybe half of
the supplies have been consumed, that's a good day. When
we started doing water drops in this mountainous region, first

(03:51:40):
of all, we were just blown away by the evidence
of heavy foot travel. I mean, these are even though
you'll never find a hiker, a recreational hiker on these trails,
they look like established trails. They're worn in trails. And
when we started doing these water drops, there's just a

(03:52:01):
river of discarded water bottles, clothing, food wrappers, and just
things that we have never seen before, that that amount
of human activity, literally on the top of a mountain
where you never would think why would someone cross over

(03:52:22):
a top of a mountain to get from point eight
to point B. So, like I said, we're still learning
what the proper interval is. Some of these locations that
we drop, we come back a week later and they're
pretty much one hundred percent consumed. So yeah, we really

(03:52:42):
it's become apparent. We have been having a lot of
discussions that we're very eager in trying to expand our
number of volunteers because the more we do this in
this mountainous region, the more we learn how pressing need is.
So we're having a hard time just supplying essentially one

(03:53:06):
path that goes up and over the mountain, and we
know that this is just one of many paths that
are used by people in this region. So really we're
finding one hundred percent consumption every week or two at
most of our drop spots.

Speaker 4 (03:53:26):
Yeah, so if people did want to we could just
get out in here. Now, if people did want to
help you and they're in the region, would they be
able to serve where they could reach out?

Speaker 5 (03:53:36):
Yeah? Sure. We just like I said, we just came
up with our name after a fun communal decision making process,
and we just a couple of days ago did our
first post on social media. So if anybody's on Instagram,
just search for Borderlands Relief Collective and click on you know,

(03:53:57):
the email and send us a d get in touch.
If you're anywhere near the San Diego we'd love to
talk to you, and I definitely would like to expand
the number of volunteers.

Speaker 4 (03:54:11):
So you spoke a little bit about like that, we
spoke about this Arizona case right where people got raided.
I know, you guys have also had some less than
stellar interactions with CBP Border Patrol specifically, and as they
get really mad if I call it customs of Border
Patrol because it is custom border protection. So you guys

(03:54:33):
had a thing I live it last month. Now in March,
do you want to explain a little bit about what
happened to the insitant?

Speaker 6 (03:54:40):
First of all, Yeah, So as part of our so
I think, as we already talked about, we go out
every weekend.

Speaker 10 (03:54:47):
And that's again we're all busy laves.

Speaker 6 (03:54:51):
Davia's literally a surgeon, and we're basically trying to find
a time that we can.

Speaker 10 (03:54:57):
Get people together to go out there.

Speaker 6 (03:54:59):
So we picked the weekend and we have a you know,
changing number of people who are able to be out
there with us. So, as one of our normal water
drop weekends, a route that starts basically at a road
that that has been along the ridge of O Tai Mountain.
We start hiking down on the south side towards towards

(03:55:21):
the towards the border, and I've established multiple routes along
that path, and this one particularly is so slow going.

Speaker 10 (03:55:33):
You only go a couple of miles and it takes.

Speaker 6 (03:55:35):
You most of your Saturday because of how steep it is,
the how thick though the brush is, and also kind of,
as they were saying earlier, even in the middle of
day daytime, with hiking boots, it's really treacherous. And we've
we spend a lot of time making sure that we're
safe in the process of of going to ourselves. So

(03:55:59):
as we we left our first drop and then a
second and went down to our final drop and turned
back and started going back up the mountain, and we
came to our second drop site, and as we arrived
we found something that was kind.

Speaker 10 (03:56:17):
Of really hard to process at first for us, which
was that.

Speaker 6 (03:56:22):
Every single item that we had purposefully put inside of
a crate and we had counted and we had a
left as we do, was scattered and littered across the ground.
We had left more than twenty liters of water, and

(03:56:43):
every single bottle of water was opened and dumped out
and thrown indiscriminately around this site. We had left again
something like twenty hands of food beans, tuna, condensed milk, fruit,

(03:57:03):
and every single can had been opened and had been
its contents thrown around the area. We had left bags
of socks and hats and those were covered in beans
and fruit and again thrown into bushes.

Speaker 10 (03:57:20):
They can not be used. We had handwarmers.

Speaker 6 (03:57:24):
Because it's very cold and handwarmers are essential to kind
of just keep mobility. And every single one was diligently opened,
as if someone had really enjoyed taking time opening it
and thrusting into the dirt. And that was something that
was like so painful and just confusing, very demoralizing, as

(03:57:47):
you can imagine after just hiking that far, but more
so it's felt so deliberate and hurtful.

Speaker 10 (03:57:54):
And initially were of course wondering what had happened. We've
done this for.

Speaker 6 (03:57:59):
Several years years and never had we seen something like
this before. And it became very apparent that someone had
deliberately destroyed our crate. Even the crate itself. This milk
carton was smashed in half. The bottom of it was
torn out, and that is something that's very hard to achieve.

(03:58:20):
Milk cartons are not very light, thin plastic. This was
someone had actively put a lot of force into smashing
a milk cart so that nothing was left behind.

Speaker 10 (03:58:33):
We on the way down.

Speaker 6 (03:58:35):
One thing that I didn't say a second ago was
that we had seen an agent on the trail, which
was unique for us because normally they're just in their
cars with binoculars looking from the road. So we had
seen someone near the trail but lost track of them earlier,
and we had kind of put it out of our minds.
So after it happened, we had kind of put two

(03:58:56):
together and were wondering if this agent had followed us
down the trail to the site, and then while we
had left, stayed behind and destroyed the goods.

Speaker 10 (03:59:06):
It seemed like the beans were still drying and the fruit.

Speaker 6 (03:59:10):
Was still drying in the sunlight, so it hadn't have
been too too far from the time that we had
dropped initially. And this is at a moment that there
was five of us and trying to figure out what
it meant for us to deal with this.

Speaker 10 (03:59:24):
Several two of us.

Speaker 6 (03:59:25):
Including myself, raised ahead to try to get interact with
whoever has up the trail, knowing that they couldn't have
been too far away, not with any specific plan other
than just ask.

Speaker 10 (03:59:37):
Them what did they do and why did they do that?

Speaker 6 (03:59:41):
Just in the sense of outrage, that the sense of
just like moral corruption that someone would destroy this in
a time that the CBP as well as we know
that people are losing their lives because of lack of
access to these very goods that were destroyed.

Speaker 10 (04:00:00):
Yeah, so we race raced back as fast as we could.

Speaker 6 (04:00:02):
It was about a forty five minute hiked back up,
and we were really breathless and almost as the kind
of wind of feeling sick to our stomachs because we
were both outraged and also hikes faster than we should have.

Speaker 10 (04:00:13):
And just as we'd gotten back to our cars, kind
of giving up hope.

Speaker 6 (04:00:15):
That we'd interactt with them, we saw two agents in
their cars kind of pull away, uh, and we flagged
them down and got in front of them and kind
of motion for them to come back so we could
speak to them. And I'm not saying we're the most
savvy people, but we basically ran up to them and said,
did you destroy these are our supplies, to which they

(04:00:38):
acknowledged that they did. And only afterwards were we able
to get our wits together to start recording them.

Speaker 10 (04:00:44):
And as both here in the audio.

Speaker 6 (04:00:47):
They acknowledged the fact that they knew where our site was,
and they acknowledged the fact that they regularly destroy goods,
and for us, the entire interaction was just so sickening
first of it. After a while there was five of
them with their guns and they're large guns out as
well as their basic intention to use intimidation, their sheer numbers,

(04:01:12):
as well as this kind of perverse authority they have
as the soul of agents in charge of this public land,
this is wilderness and BLM land, which they have no
authority over us, yet use this sense of just power
and ability to cause harm to minimize anybody else being able.

Speaker 10 (04:01:32):
To advocate for themselves.

Speaker 6 (04:01:34):
So we tried to stop them from doing that, and
it kept asking them did you destroy our water?

Speaker 10 (04:01:39):
And why did you do that? And is that within
your job description?

Speaker 6 (04:01:42):
Because there was something very clear to them to us
that they didn't even know what their legality was. They
kept trying to deflect it the conversations saying, oh, migrants
are leaving trash all the time, and referring to people
as illegal aliens with this kind of larger Rhetorica is
saying that like they're they're trashing the mountain side like
it's it's their fault. And as we repeatedly asked them,

(04:02:05):
did you destroy our water? And they repeatedly said, well
have you seen have you seen what they do and
then kind of also saying well, yeah, we we try
to clean things up, we try to pick them up.
But but but that specific site was too far, so
we just left it. We just destroyed it and left it.
Which as on the on the piggybacking on their conversation

(04:02:25):
about this trash and that we're littering and they're accusing
us of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, they basically have
nothing left to say about what their actions meant and
without their their purview, their mandate of their jobs, and
it was an act you could tell they were uncomfortable
with because they were not within their job description. And

(04:02:47):
we asked for their supervisor. They said they're going to
on the phone supervisor. The supervisor never materialized, and we
can only assume that they had a conversation with somebody,
uh in a superior saying back down, what you're doing
is is not correct and don't engage further. And since
then we've had a conversation with with their superiors and

(04:03:09):
with with CVP offices to the effect of saying that
this was not within their job description, and this they
did not condone this activity.

Speaker 10 (04:03:17):
So kind of looking into that further, they were very.

Speaker 6 (04:03:21):
Much acting as individuals, but individuals within a culture of
abuse and within a culture of of sabotaging humans access
to life saving supplies. And that was nothing new to them,
that they that they had nothing. They had never encountered
somebody trying to oppose them for doing that.

Speaker 7 (04:03:58):
Mere water and all that was that yours, that water,
it was at yours too.

Speaker 10 (04:04:06):
So it is your property exactly and.

Speaker 12 (04:04:08):
You and you slashed it.

Speaker 10 (04:04:10):
And I'm wondering why you're just that your property be high.
You did not your prop by you were going on
a hip while we were on a fad slash.

Speaker 2 (04:04:18):
So you guys.

Speaker 9 (04:04:21):
In your job description to slash water and open cans.

Speaker 13 (04:04:24):
And damn wood all over the profect plant and live
in this area.

Speaker 10 (04:04:28):
To abandon property.

Speaker 4 (04:04:30):
And to your mind, it's a long hike.

Speaker 1 (04:04:33):
How I would I do that?

Speaker 10 (04:04:34):
Get?

Speaker 9 (04:04:35):
You know, I'm like serious, It's okay for you to
recap you have converstion and.

Speaker 4 (04:04:40):
Patrol within twenty five miles of quarter.

Speaker 3 (04:04:42):
Had one hundred to do what and and look for
pot probably.

Speaker 4 (04:04:46):
Bandon property, the property legal person and what do you
do with it? What would you destroy it?

Speaker 5 (04:04:54):
We try to clean it up, because they.

Speaker 9 (04:04:56):
Know that that's cleaning it up.

Speaker 10 (04:04:58):
That's one of the things that not cleaning about it.

Speaker 12 (04:05:01):
And you know we're trying to clean it up.

Speaker 9 (04:05:03):
That was too far from us. We decided to just
trash the whole area.

Speaker 4 (04:05:08):
Like when they're funded and equipped and transported and armed
by the state, and like, it's not the same as individuals,
just because we've seen that in Arizona, right, like people
who are militias or what have you going out and
sabotaging life saving supplies as well. But it's still a
little different when you know, we have to pay taxes
for them to go destroy water caches.

Speaker 6 (04:05:30):
And these are people who regularly, as we've seen on
multiple occasions, use helicopters to try to flush people out
of under a tree that they fly within thirty feet
of the ground and use the force of the roadors
to force people out and upper hillside to waiting cars.
So their use of money and the use of force

(04:05:53):
is definitely central to the tactics.

Speaker 4 (04:05:56):
Yeah, yeah, or he'se helicopters to fire to I guess
into Mexico and it did a few years ago. But yeah,
it's certainly, And that intimidation is like if I think
people again who don't live here might not be familiar
with it. Like I've been out in down by the
border with KUMIAI people doing religious ceremony and had bortat
guys dressed like you know, like Navy seals hanging out

(04:06:18):
with air fifteens and plate carriers. Well, people like burn
stage and prey. It's yeah, I mean the militarization if
you somehow can't conceive the care of people dying in
the desert, the militarization of the border still affects everyone
here and it makes our lives left safe. There's a
crime crime thinks logan that I always like to like

(04:06:40):
use in these things, which is the border doesn't protect you,
it controls you, which I think is kind of apt
for this. So now that they've trashed your supplies, right
and you found ot they weren't supposed to, I'm interested
like how going forward, does that mean that you can't
use that rout, you can't drop stuff there? Anymore because
you're worried about happening again, or because you're worried about

(04:07:01):
them hanging out there to intercept people who are using
your like supply cash.

Speaker 5 (04:07:08):
On the contrary, we've learned from the examples of other
people who have been doing this work. Em had already
mentioned Nomas Mertes no more deaths in Arizona, Doctor Scott Warren.
We've learned so much from their example where you know,
they were hauled into federal court.

Speaker 4 (04:07:30):
And one uh.

Speaker 5 (04:07:32):
And so we've learned from from their examples of how
to how to do this as well as within here
in California. The history of border angels so back a
few years ago, Border Patrol was slashing gallons of water
in the deserts of eastern San Diego County as well

(04:07:55):
as Imperial County. On one particular day, the border in
those volunteers found about fifty gallons of water slashed in
the most violent way, and they knew it was Border patrol.
And so the way border angels responded was number one,
to change their tactics to start dropping supplies a deeper

(04:08:21):
in the back country where the border patrol agents. You know,
it's rare to find a BP agent that's motivated enough
to really hike, hike for too far away from their
air conditioned vehicles in the summertime. So number one, they
were going farther away from the roads and highways to

(04:08:43):
the actual routes that people are are walking. Number Two,
they punched back hard in public using social media. Back
then it was Facebook. You know this is going to
be you know, right when Instagram was getting but just
you know, getting the word out. And Border Angels is

(04:09:04):
an organization that's been around for decades. They have a
big following, the word spread and just like many bullies,
you know, they kind of back down if you get
in their face sometimes. So that was our experience with
this practice of Border patrols slashing gallons in the desert

(04:09:24):
with Border Angels. So when this this crime occurred on
March eighteenth in the mountains, we knew we could not
back down. So we met back a few days later.
That's when, as Emmett mentioned, we witnessed Border Patrol helicopter
for about an hour flying about. You know, it seemed like,

(04:09:47):
you know, ten fifteen feet off the ground, really really low,
using the rotor wash to flush of flush human beings
out of the brush as if they were hunting animals.
And then we were back, you know, the next seven
days later, after they destroyed the supplies, we went back
with a good group number one to clean up this

(04:10:09):
shameful mess these two border patrol goons left. We cleaned
up all of all of that stuff, and we left
probably what three times the amount of original supplies, and
on our milk rates, we actually left laminated signs that
addressed one by one all of the accusations that these

(04:10:32):
border patrol agents tried to make against us. So the
signs say, do not destroy, do not remove. This is
not garbage, we are not littering, and this is not
abandoned property. Is these are humanitarian aid supplies protected by

(04:10:56):
federal case law, the nineteen ninety four Protection of Religious
Freedom Act, and so on and so forth. So we
put those signs just prominently on the milk rates, uh,
you know, just to send a message that no, we're
not going to back down. We are going to leave supplies.

Speaker 4 (04:11:17):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (04:11:17):
It is within our rights and it is in support
of human rights to do this. So of course we
have to be strategic about this. I mean, there is
the danger, you know, we're always going back to the
same place. You know, we're kind of you know, blowing
up the spot as it were. You know, we're bringing
heat to a route that's that's needed by people making

(04:11:38):
a crossing, and so we are we are mindful of that,
you know, we don't we We try to go to
different places on different weekends, uh, and not try to
bring too much attention to these paths.

Speaker 4 (04:11:52):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I wonder
like if people are I was just thinking for people
to visualize the area if they are place, so I
could look up on like googless so they could see
like where this kind of stuff is happening. If you comfortable,
you don't have to give like an exact location obviously.

Speaker 5 (04:12:09):
But yeah, actually, I mean, speaking of Google Earth, you
mentioned a valley of the Moon. I mean, Google Earth
is impressive enough. Anybody can just use Google Earth and
zoom in all the way and just follow along the
border and you'll find thousands of footpaths. So yeah, it
doesn't take yeah, like much detective work to actually visually

(04:12:35):
see these footpaths. But yeah, it's real steep terrain. As
Emmett mentioned, the last couple times we've gone back to
this spot, where the two agents destroyed the supplies. Emmett
has actually brought a mountain climbing rope just to make
certain sections easier where we're kind of repelling down this

(04:12:56):
dry waterfall, so really really steep, very loose trails, very
easy to break an ankle, and it just in that context,
it really it really hits you. We see so many
shoes and boots along the path and just have to

(04:13:18):
kind of just pause and think, well, this person lost
their shoe, if the if they're the sole of their
boot melted off in their hours away from the nearest road,
what does it mean? How did they complete the journey?
Did they complete their journey? So yeah, a little bit

(04:13:40):
hard to describe, but I guess any yeah, anybody who's
I guess kind of familiar with with the southern California steep,
steep mountains, loose terrain kind of get the picture.

Speaker 4 (04:13:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can make out value the main
there's plenty of pictures of the very intimidating boarder fence
that they have there, like three foot I and rusty.
Is there anything else that you guys wanted to address
that you feel like maybe people don't the people should
know about the board that they don't about the work
you do that maybe is misunderstood.

Speaker 10 (04:14:16):
Yeah, I guess I want to maybe bring up.

Speaker 6 (04:14:21):
Some of what it I think is hard to convey
to people who aren't there and I know aren't connected
to a community who is suffering because of this, or
who aren't maybe thinking along the lines of what it

(04:14:44):
means to be a human in this space and actually
be risking your life and coming up against helicopters and
a federally backed militia who is actively seeking to harm you.
None of us in our group are claiming any anything

(04:15:05):
more than just witnessing what it means to be out there.
But I guess what's been true for me and in
kind of my conversations with my community as over the
last couple of years, just trying to share this. There
is so much pain that is being inflicted upon this landscape,

(04:15:28):
and there is so much harm that is.

Speaker 10 (04:15:31):
Actively supported by our nation.

Speaker 6 (04:15:35):
While people are in some of the most intimate and
painful moments of their lives.

Speaker 10 (04:15:43):
Leaving your home, whether it be in.

Speaker 6 (04:15:47):
Another continent where you need to take a flight a
flight over to make this crossing, or whether it be
hiking through Central America starting in South America for months
before reaching this moment, or leaving your your your family,
in your in.

Speaker 10 (04:16:02):
Your community closer to the to the to the border.

Speaker 6 (04:16:05):
This these are moments that anyone who is alive could
feel the pain of and the misery of having to
abandoned all that you know and put yourself at the
mercy of of the desert. And CBPS overly aggressive and

(04:16:26):
and and had harmful tactics. So beyond all of the
cases and the politics, I just I I oftentimes, as
we're walking, just try to put myself in the position
of someone who is who is making these decisions. And
as Dave was saying, we're coming across people's clothing, food, underwear,

(04:16:47):
places they've slept, and the amount of the poignancy of
human desire to be safe, to to come to a
place where they feel like their lives can be.

Speaker 10 (04:17:02):
Protected, or that that choice.

Speaker 6 (04:17:05):
Is worthwhile is something that is so lost in the numbers,
in the amount of people who die or what happens
after it. And so for us, I think making it
not about your political beliefs or the asylum process, but
just the actual choices people are are half having to
make very human decisions that is something that is kind

(04:17:29):
of haunts us, and the feeling that all we can
do is leave water in a place that it might
make the difference between someone in that position surviving or not.
And furthermore, just living in a community where you know,
from the top of the mountain we can see downtown

(04:17:49):
San Diego and all of the luxury of this military town,
all of the universities and all of this opportunity that
we enjoy, and just a couple miles away, the lack
of access to just water. The feeling how similar humans
are to each other in our basic needs and how

(04:18:10):
that's being taken from people is really is really harmful,
And particularly as you were saying, these are areas held
sacred by the Kumii people and have been places of
migration for at least ten thousand years. These are places
that were difficult to travel and that people did for
similar reasons to survive, to be safe, and there is

(04:18:32):
a legacy of oyas of clay pots buried in the
sand for travelers that has been ongoing for thousands of years.
And for our current administration and government to create this
wall in this place of so much pain is just

(04:18:52):
testament to just the insanity of our desire to protect
border against something else, actually the borders against something that
we feel is harmful to us. Meanwhile, this migration is
fundamentally how we survive and how we respond to these
moments of change in humanity, and criminalizing that and closing

(04:19:13):
hard with that is just barbaric.

Speaker 5 (04:19:15):
I'll let you collect your thoughts and you can come
back and make that statement, because I think you do
it very eloquently, But I want to jump on there
and just kind of echo and elaborate on what you said. Yeah,
we find lots and lots of physical items, but we
also meet people on the trails, and that's a new thing.

Speaker 2 (04:19:35):
You know.

Speaker 5 (04:19:35):
I've been doing these water drops for some time now.
But you know, when you say what has changed under Biden,
not much. There's more people crossing the border than ever.
There are more people dying than ever. As far as
as a volunteer who spends most weekends out in the borderlands,

(04:19:56):
the only thing I noticed is they stopped building Trump's
thirty foot high fence and they started pouring all that
money into electronic surveillance, where every single month we see
more towers popping up all along the border with all
kinds of very very fancy, military grade surveillance equipment and

(04:20:18):
as well as aerial surveillance. Lots of airplanes, helicopters. I'm
not sure if they're using drones, but we certainly there's
a lot of aerial surveillance. But what we see as
far as the human dimension is in the old days,
you know, we see footprints, We see shoe covers, you know,

(04:20:38):
which people wear on their feet to hide their footprints
from border patrol. We see the empty water bottles and
discarded clothing. But now we're encountering people pretty much every
time we do a water drop because the number of
people crossing is so high. People are crossing in the daytime,

(04:20:59):
whereas in the past usually they would cross at night.
So wouldn't you say, emmittt like pretty much it's it's
pretty much every time we go out, at least one
of our volunteers, if not the whole group, sees or
even interacts with a migrant on the paths. And you know,

(04:21:22):
and of course we respect, we respect their autonomy, their privacy.
We don't engage with them if they don't want to
engage with us. But the thing that I'll never forget
is about a month ago, we were out in this
exact same area, supplying the same path, and it was
a rainy day, cold, we were wearing our gortex insulated clothing.

(04:21:48):
We'd done a water drop. While we were doing the
water drop, we can see on the next mountain peak
Border Patrol helicopter landing to pick up somebody who required rescue.
And this is a case that we had been getting
updates all night with Armadillos, one of the search groups,
and thankfully this person was found alive and Border Patrol

(04:22:14):
was so called rescuing him another word for arresting him.
And after we witnessed that, we hiked back to our vehicles,
and just as we were getting to the trailhead, the
exact same location where on March eighteenth, Emmett and other

(04:22:35):
volunteers had this interaction with the two Border Patrol agents
who destroyed the humanitarian aid supplies, the exact same parking spot.
We pop out and start walking toward our vehicles and
it starts snowing, and two individuals come out of the
mist and approach us and start talking to us in

(04:22:56):
Spanish and talking to the these two people, these two men,
one one young, one middle aged in the course of
the conversation. You know, sorry, I kind of choke up
when I talk about this stuff.

Speaker 4 (04:23:12):
Yes it's okay, but yeah.

Speaker 5 (04:23:15):
So this is the younger of the two. I was
sixteen years old and the older dude was his father.
We encountered them as it was snowing, so of course,
first thing we did is got them in our vehicles.
One of our volunteers, avid hiker, had his backpacking stove

(04:23:36):
with him and cooked up some tea and some you know,
gave them food and you know, let them warm up.
We gave them literally the you know Gorte's winter coats
offer backs to warm up and once you know, the
dad was shivering violently, really really showing signs of clinical hypothermia.

(04:23:59):
And talking to the younger man, who was in better
physical shape, he was explaining that the two of them
were hiking through the mountains because his mother was already
living in the USA. They were trying to reunite with
her and they had been in this mountainous region for

(04:24:20):
the past two days. And looking at them, they're wearing hoodies,
you know, like you know, sweatshirts, sweatpants and sneakers in
this and anybody who lives down here in southern California.
You know, we've had a very unusual winter, lots and
lots of rain, so it had been raining heavily over

(04:24:44):
the past two days and nighttime temperatures in the thirties,
and these two men had been out there for two
days soaked to the bone, and that's why they approached us,
because they were in trouble and were asking for help.
So after they warmed up, we discussed the options. Of course,

(04:25:07):
you know, we we we respect their autonomy. You know,
they have the option to try to continue going on
their way with with supplies or if they felt it
was unsafe to do so we were ready to help them.
The heartbreaking thing is, you know they did ask us

(04:25:27):
could we let them ride in our vehicles off the mountain,
and we had to explain that, you know, we're we're
pretty much guaranteed to encounter Order patrol agents on that
road and that really it's not something that we could
do because you know that that that you know, we

(04:25:47):
we could be arrested and charged, you know, for federal
felony crimes. But we said, look, you know, if you
really feel you can't continue, we will help you. Contact
you know, call nine to one one that we explained
that's that's one hundred percent going to result in border
patrol coming because as folks may know, you know, you know,

(04:26:10):
in the USA along the border, you know, emergency medical response,
search and rescue is unfortunately considered in the domain of
law enforcement. So if you are a US citizen, or
if you are someone from another country that happened to
come here and have a visa or just be considered

(04:26:31):
the good type of foreigner, you know, you're going to
have a very impressive response with sheriffs, Sheriff's Department, search
and rescue, volunteer organizations. If there's any hint that you
may be a so called undocumented person, you immediately get
sent to border patrol and you have you know, boor

(04:26:51):
Star respond the Border Patrols Search and Rescue group, which
is a far cry from the civilian search and rescue folks.
So we explain to them if we call nine one one,
you're going to be apprehended, You're going to be arrested
by border patrol. And after thinking about it and discussing,
they said, yeah, we you know, we cannot continue where

(04:27:14):
you know, this is too dangerous. So we did call
nine one one, and border patrol did come and frisked
them and cuff them and uh, yeah, yeah I did
arrest them. And yeah, that's not not the only time
too often we have witnessed human beings being arrested by

(04:27:38):
border patrol.

Speaker 4 (04:27:40):
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think I think
it's really important to give like put like faces and
names to these things, rather than the border patrol will
constantly talk about a million whatever encounters, right, they like
to fucking inflate the numbers. It's often the same people,
but it each one of those is a tragedy every

(04:28:02):
time someone has to make a choice between risking their
life in one place or risking their life coming to
another place just so their kids can have a crack
at growing up safely, or so they can be safe,
so they can experience like one tenth of the things
that we take for granted every day, Like, that's an
incredible human tragedy. And yeah, they happen every single day,

(04:28:23):
every hour of every day at our border because of
the things that our government does there. And yeah, it's
important to feel that stuff because I think that's it
should provoke in all of us a very strong reaction
it's pretty messed up that it's almost universal bipartisan agreement
that it's fine and okay by people who have never

(04:28:44):
been hearing and don't understand.

Speaker 5 (04:28:47):
One other thing I want to add and and emt
you may have other things. One thing I wanted to
really center is something we've referenced several times. Cumye you
know this is this is Cumiate Land. These are the
indigenous people who have lived here since the beginning of time.

(04:29:09):
The archaeological record goes back ten thousand years, but we
know people have been here since the beginning of human time. Really,
and look at the map, the so called border cuts
in half traditional Cuma territory. When we do these water

(04:29:31):
drops out in the desert or in the mountains, you know,
these these paths that that people are using to migrate
are often or in many many cases traditional Cumi paths.
And we see evidence of that every time we, you know,
do a water drop, especially out out in the desert

(04:29:54):
area where it's a rare water drop, that we will
not find pottery sharp lying lying in the sand, or
come across rock shelters, uh, some with pictographs and uh
the you know, it's just uh, you know, very poignant
juxtaposition of of Kumai cultural artifacts with modern day you know,

(04:30:19):
shoe covers, discarded water bottles, and of course many people
who do migrate are indigenous uh them themselves. So yeah, personally,
you know, I view all of these border issues through
the lens of history culture, with with the core truth

(04:30:42):
that this is indigenous land, this is Cumi land, and
it has always been and uh, the modern so called
border is a very recent, uh political creation, you know that,
you know, mid nineteeth century. You know, before that this

(04:31:02):
was Mexico and now now where we call it the USA.
But this is all recent and from my perspective, unless
you are a Kumie, I really don't know how anybody
could can really get on their high horse and really
speak with any authority about who belongs here, who belongs here,

(04:31:24):
who doesn't belong here, Because the rest of us, we
are all guests on Kumie ied land. That includes every
single border patrol agent. And that's that's something I always
like to remember.

Speaker 4 (04:31:38):
Yeah. Yeah, the border is very much like colonialism in action,
and it see even we're going to have some Cumi folks,
hopefully in the next couple of weeks to talk about
the desecration of Kumii Burial site by the border wall,
which is an ongoing thing, Like I haven't stopped when
the just I can't tell stories about it like I
could in twenty twenty, because you know, Orange Man Bad
isn't a thing anymore. But yeah, they're all across the border, right,

(04:32:02):
not just here that the Yaki, the all across the
border is native. The whole of the circle the United
States is Native land, and it's not Indigenous folks out
there trying to kill people in the desert. Is there
anything that you wanted to add?

Speaker 10 (04:32:19):
Yeah, I just want to say this.

Speaker 6 (04:32:20):
Well, I don't know we're able forever, so we'll start
rambling a second. But I guess I really want to say,
and this is coming from a very skewed white males perspective,
but I just feel like so much of these power
structures that we're engaged with, and us as a nasan
trying to find our identity, it's so hypocritical, particularly in

(04:32:43):
this moment where the climate and social instability is at
its height. I mean in my lifetime and I think
in many of our lifetimes, we see this is a
really precarious moment. It just feels so so hypocritical to
police people's sovereign tees to find safety and to be
in safety. You know, we we have all of these

(04:33:06):
ideals in our country around respecting each other's freedoms, and
also as we are importing and exporting so many goods
and also so much culture and so fundamentally intertwined with
the lives of people from all over the world. For
us to say what is wrong and what is right

(04:33:27):
in this moment, and for us to have this this
moral authority to to put people in prison just for
for for seeking safety for many years, and of course
I have many people I know and live with who
have been in in who we're in attention for for
several years, for seeking that the amount of just how

(04:33:49):
twisted it is that we are comfortable spending our lives
as Americans never considering or never really critically engaging.

Speaker 5 (04:34:00):
With this active.

Speaker 6 (04:34:04):
Pursuit, these actions to to limit people's ability to survive.
It feels like it really needs to be centered in
this conversation. And again this is coming from my skewed perspective,
but I just I really want to make the point clear.

Speaker 10 (04:34:22):
This is not about this is not about these these
lofty ideals of what a country could be or who
and who is not justified or useful.

Speaker 6 (04:34:33):
In our country, we make these arbitrary assessments of what's
justified or what's legal and not legal, and very often
those are just continuing the legacy of exploitation of black
and brown people, the exploitation of landscapes, the expectation of labor,
the exploitation of people whose voices are not heard, and politically,

(04:34:58):
economically and continuing a conversation of an O time Masage center,
the people who are attained are are are cleaning their
own cells, and they're their their their labor is actually
being exploited as well. You can't distinguish the fact that
there is the history of policing in our country, in
the history of prisons is specifically a project to continue

(04:35:21):
white supremacy. And you can see particularly the differential policing
of immigration currently and the differential way that certain people
from certain countries are or are not valid UH to
UH to enter this country and and at.

Speaker 10 (04:35:39):
The very least.

Speaker 6 (04:35:42):
Be treated with respect and dignity in their process. And
that's what we see CBP every single day, violating people's
basic access to human dignity and acts to life, which
are protected by all nations in writing and very often
not in practice.

Speaker 4 (04:36:01):
Yeah yeah, and as well said like it's a very
basic human thing. It doesn't need to be like shrouded
in constitutional law. And like you also said, the capital
flows very freely across across the border, but people aren't
allowed to and yeah, it's pretty messed up. Guys. Where
can people if they want to support, if they want
to just send a kind word? Where can people find

(04:36:23):
you on the internet?

Speaker 5 (04:36:27):
Another best way probably is on Instagram. We have an
account Borderlands Relief Collective reach out to us and I
do want to give a shout out to our sister organizations,
border Kindness. Their water Drop program, led by Jacqueline and James,

(04:36:49):
has been doing tremendous work for years. Border Angels, which
is kind of the parent organization of water Drop volunteer
group in California, are our comrades who do search and
rescue as well as recovery of those who have died,

(04:37:11):
including Armadillos and Aggi las Egos of the Desert. Very
very proud to be in this community of people who
are trying to help people in the borderlands.

Speaker 4 (04:37:25):
Yeah, yeah, Thank you very much, guys, it's pretty great.

Speaker 1 (04:37:31):
Hey. We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 9 (04:37:37):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.